Why some people 'love' their shell

Karan's habit of getting into his shell had some secrets..

Karan had long been an introvert, but when he got depressed, he would get into his shell and cut off from the rest of the world. He would not answer calls, messages nor return them. Though it caused a lot of inconvenience and alarms to his family and friends, and at times to Karan himself, he continued to do so.

Millions of people like Karan get depressed and withdraw from others, events and activities. Some researchers seem to have found the purpose of depression and it's an interesting one. When someone gets depressed, they essentially engage in two loops. Both these loops start with a depressed mood. In the first loop, a low mood triggers avoidance of activities that once used to be pleasurable. When they avoid such activities, most of their day is filled with 'Rumination time' or 'Pity party'. This worsens their mood, besides, nothing 'fun' has happened through the day.

When Karan avoided fun activities, he thought the activity won't be fun anyway, and he was partly true. Partly because the things he used to enjoy weren't as much fun now. Psychologists call it Anhedonia. The half truth is that his mind predicted they won't be fun at all. Karan's therapist set up an experiment to find out on a 0-10 scale how much fun a particular activity (eg. going for a 5 min walk) would be, and Karan realised he grossly underestimated the pleasure such small tasks can give him, and learnt how he maintained this loop, and eventually depression.

The second loop was avoiding work or doing things that could be helpful, plus engaging in things that aren't helpful. Karan typically would procrastinate work, avoid going to the gym, paying bills, skipped meals, medicines etc. This worsened his practical problems and he would feel overwhelmed as things piled up on each other. The therapist helped break this loop as well. Here, he used to overestimate the difficulty of a task, underestimate the sense of accomplishment and his ability to do it. He would also engage in a black and white thinking that the task must be fully done in one go, or else there's no point even starting it. He also waited for a magic moment of energy level, motivation, usefulness of the task, urgency of it, focused on the fact that he can get away without doing it, convinced himself it wont make a difference anyway, and predicted he won't succeed so no point trying.

When he realised most of his negative thoughts had some truth in them (eg. I am not in the mood, the weather isn't right now, I can do it later, its a tough task etc.) but weren't helping him break the loop, Karan started talking back to his thoughts and created new thoughts helped him break the vicious cycle of inertia, getting into his own shell and feeling depressed (eg. I can do it even when Im not in the mood, the weather doesn't have to be perfect, I can do it later but doing it now will give me buffer time, it's a tough task but I can and I rather put up with the discomfort etc.).

He didn't love to be in his shell. He pushed himself into it due to hopelessness, helplessness, inertia and a series of negative thoughts. Everyone has their own unique style of negative thoughts that push them to their shell. And yes, to some, the shell IS comfortable, more than the harsh reality.

Inset: A shell like piece of art at the Corning Glass Museum. Photograph by Dr. Shishir Palsapure