I Don’t Experience One Common Effect of Depression

And I’m really, really lucky.

Depression has been a major facet of my life for over 20 years, so I’m pretty familiar with how it affects me. I deal with a lot of symptoms and effects from my depression, such as suicidal thoughts, a sense of low self-worth, and a general lack of energy and motivation.

These all affect me in a variety of ways: I tend to have a lot of negative self-talk and thought distortions that affect how I view myself and how I think others view me. Some days, I don’t have the drive to get anything done other than just sitting around the house and playing video games. I have wasted whole days like this — tapping on my phone or staring at my computer while accomplishing very little of value.

Spending all day lounging around while not accomplishing anything is a fairly common effect of depression, and a lot of people experience it. However, there is an odd quirk to how my depression manifests this effect: I cannot stand to stay in bed all day.

For me, the idea of spending the entire day in bed is so unappealing that I would rather do almost anything else, and that motivation is so universal to me that even at my lowest points, I will still get out of bed and get dressed. The only times when I have been unable to get out of bed are when I have been physically ill and needed to sleep off the sick.

That doesn’t mean that I will accomplish anything once I’m out of bed. There have been days where getting out of bed is the most productive thing I was able to manage. It’s just that, for whatever reason, staying in bed all day is something that is far, far worse to me than any symptom of depression. I don’t know why this is the case, I just know that I have some sort of drive to get out of bed in the morning.

This manifests in odd ways, both when I am depressed and when I’m not. Yes, being depressed and still getting out of bed can be a bit odd, but that drive to not spend the day in bed translates to weekends and holidays too. Even when my mood is pretty good, I still have a strong urge to not be in bed even if I have the time and ability to do so.

Waking up a bit early on a lazy Sunday for me doesn’t mean that I get to spend a few nice hours in bed relaxing. No, for me it means that I wake up and am immediately ready to get out of bed and go about my day. Even if the most eventful thing I have planned on that day is being sprawled out on the couch watching YouTube, I still have the urge to get out of bed.

This trait doesn’t always play the best with my partner, who is often happy to relax in bed with me on a weekend morning. There are days where I wake up before she does, spend as much time as I can manage laying in bed and doing stuff on my phone, and then just get up and get going anyway. Sometimes she wakes up to find me getting ready to go downstairs and start the day, which is a bit awkward when I’ve been ready to go for an hour and she still wants to spend some time waking up and relaxing.

As with many of my odd traits, I have no idea where this came from. Is it a carryover trait from the manic side of my bipolar, where I always feel the need to be doing something even when I’m depressed? Did it come from when I was in my 20s and would regularly tell myself that “I can’t let my illness keep me from living a normal life” and other stuff like that? Was it simply that I spent years waking up at 4:00 a.m. by launching myself out of bed to turn off a loud alarm across the room and now just reflexively feel the need to be out of bed once awake?

Who knows? It helps me in some ways — being physically out of bed makes me at least appear functional, even when I’m not. However, it can be a bit screwy when it comes to household sleeping habits since how and when we feed the cats depends on a few factors related to when my partner and I both wake up.

I’ve just always felt a bit odd about it, since one of the common features of depression is not being able to get out of bed, and, for whatever reason, I can’t relate. Goodness knows I experience a ton of the other signs and symptoms — just because I can get out of bed doesn’t mean I feel good about, well, anything. Still, I’ve always thought it was at least a little interesting that of all the depression quirks, this is the one that I don’t exhibit.

At any rate, depression still sucks, and while I’m still not a big fan of experiencing it, at least I’ve got something going for me, I guess. Better than nothing, anyway.

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