Dr. Lisa Miller: Depression's Hidden Message - The Science of Spiritual Awakening | EP 838

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11How can someone who feels the weight of the world, anxiety, depression, ADHD, any of these symptoms, how can they start to transform those symptoms or those feelings or that emotional weight into peace and awakened brain? So, Liz, half the United States and half of most of the post-industrial world is depressed. Really? We have unprecedented supply of food. We have unprecedented quality of medical care. We are a very well-provided-for society and still our inner life hurts. It hurts. And depression isn't just feeling sad. Depression can be an edginess. A lot of times people are grumpy or hostile.

1:00Depression can be the sense of dread creeping up on us and anxiety like the boogeyman inside. Depression can be not wanting to eat, lying in bed, not having our game on at all. So depression is not just sadness, it's really powering down. And for a very long time, there was most of the 20th century, people would say, depression, well, we can see that it has biological correlates. We can see that there's correlates in the brain. depression, that's a medical illness, always and only, uniformly. But over here, you know, there's these people who are religious or they're spiritual and religious. That might be nice for them, but the view in the 20th century in much of mental health was that that's somehow a band-aid or a crutch.

1:48Religion or spirituality. It's somehow a crutch. That is now the outdated, but it was very prevalent for a long time, point of view. What we now know from science is that just as depression has neurocorrelates, our spiritual awareness has neurocorrelates. We can track in the brain the circuits undergirding a transcendent relationship. And that's true no matter what religion you may be or if you're any religion at all. So whether I'm Hindu or Catholic or Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and spiritual but not religious, the same circuits run as I perceive a deep, sacred, transcendent relationship.

2:29I can say I feel a oneness with life. I can feel that nature is my sanctuary. I can say that God or Jesus or Hashem or Allah walks with me. However I understand the transcendent relationship, I'm using my awakened brain. There is one awakened brain. 7.2 billion people on Earth have the same awakened brain. But why do we suppress our awakened brain? So very often, depression is not always a medical illness. In fact, as we look, two-thirds of the time, depression is not a medical illness. You can track its biological correlates as you can track the spiritual correlates. But that doesn't make it an illness.

3:13When you're lifting weights, you can track the biological correlates. That doesn't make it an illness. It's a strength, right? Well, it turns out that depression is actually a hunger for spiritual awakening at least two-thirds of the time. Why is this happening to me? Why did she leave me? Why did I lose my money? I just feel horrible. Yesterday, everything was fine. that hunger, just like we're hungry for food, we're thirsty, is the body, the mind, the soul. It's all one body, mind and soul screaming for an expanded awareness. Life as I'm living it, life as I'm seeing it has gotten too small.

3:51And just as I grow in height or weight or maturity or my eyes change as I get older, our spiritual life changes. All of us. How has your spiritual life evolved from your youth to where you are now, specifically after studying the science of spirituality? So when I was maybe about 19, I fell in love for the first time. I mean, Louis, flat in love. I couldn't believe it. I'd never been in love before, and he was perfect. He looked like a sculpture in a museum. Ah, there we are. Very nice. He thought I was so interesting. I thought he was so interesting. and he said, I love you. I said, you love me?

4:34I love you. And that was after three months. After five months, he broke up with me. Wow, devastating. Devastated. And I couldn't understand it. I really couldn't understand it at 19. You know, I thought, well, wait a minute. You said one thing. I felt it, you felt it, and then you end it. How could that be? Yeah. Right? So is love not real? Is love impermanent? and we'll call this poor guy Jason. Is Jason real? Like, do we change? Can we not count on each other? What do we count? Was he lying to me? You know, why would this happen to me? All these things. So I think he was telling the truth and he thought he was telling the truth.

5:13He changed. And it gave me a shocking, really it was sort of a drowning sense of impermanence. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. The things I want so much in life love is impermanent. And that sent me at 19 into a downward spiral and a search. Wait a minute. Okay. Is love permanent? Are people permanent? What are we really about? And I became more and more concerned about the existential nature of life at 19. And it was very depressing. I started getting more and more upset, more and more depressed, sleepless, anxious. I'd stay up and sort of look out the window and wonder. So I thought, you know, I really have to go to a therapist.

5:54And at 19, I went to a therapist, and the therapist said, you know, what brings you here? And I said, well, I don't, you know, all my life I felt connected to God, and I felt connected to this deeper presence in life. And lately, I just don't feel it. And I, you know, was in love, and love ended, and I just don't know, you know, what's real. What's the point of all this? What's the point of all this? And the therapist said, hmm, was your father there for you when you were little? And I thought, you know what? My dad actually was there for me when I was little. This isn't about that. This isn't a story about my early childhood.

6:30This is a story about a hunt for what's true. And at least I had the gut instinct to say new therapist, which is what you should always do if you don't feel at home with your therapist. The therapist number two, from a psychodynamic to a cognitive therapist who works on your thoughts. And there we were, and I said, you know, I just don't know, you know, if there's meaning in life, if there's any value in life. And these, at the time, were viewed as nothing but symptoms, secondary symptoms to a deeper medical depression that a cognitive therapist thinks you can fix by changing your thoughts. And so I said, well, I just don't know if life has worth.

7:11I don't know what's real. And she said, hmm, you don't know if life has worth. Do you have low self-esteem? I said I'm embarrassed to admit I feel just fine about myself. I don't know if life has meaning. It wasn't about myself. And this went on and on. Because at that point, there had yet to be a science that showed that there is in emerging adulthood a hunt for what's true. Huh. And it is not easy.

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8:40Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.