Depression: a dark cloud of despair that descends, often without warning, on tens of millions of people across the world each year. A devastating malady whose rates, despite “magic bullets” like Prozac and other antidepressants, have soared to an all-time high. In this groundbreaking book, neuroscientist Kelly Lambert, who herself experienced the terrible grip of depression, asks: What if there were a way to conquer this awful illness—and even to prevent it in the first place—by altering the brain’s response to stress without debilitating and ineffective drugs? The answers she details here offer a bounty of good news for depression sufferers and the people who love them.
Lambert’s theory suggests that important clues to the mysteries of depression have been in our hands all along. Drawing on innovative research (with rats, whose brains are similar to those of humans), Lambert identifies a circuit in the human brain—connecting movement, feeling and cognition—that is responsible for emotional emptiness, negative thinking, and other symptoms of depression. She reveals how stimulating this “effort-driven reward circuit” with hands-on physical activities that yield tangible rewards builds resilience against the disorder. Involving the hands is especially effective, since so much of the brain is devoted to hand movement.
Lambert shows how when you knit a sweater or plant a garden, when you prepare a meal or simply repair a lamp, you are bathing your brain in feel-good chemicals and creating a kind of mental vitamin. Our grandparents and great grandparents, who had to work hard for basic resources, developed more resilience against depression; even those who suffered great hardships had much lower rates of this mood disorder. But with today’s overly-mechanized lifestyle we have forgotten that our brains crave the well-being that comes from meaningful effort.
Based on the latest scientific advances and filled with moving stories, Lifting Depression offers a compassionate and commonsense way of preventing and treating one of the modern era’s most vexing diseases.
- The first book to provide compelling scientific evidence that engaging a particular brain circuit can alter the stress response that leads to depression
- Features specific hands-on stress-busters and mood-lifters
- Showcases Lambert’s unique research comparing “trust fund rats” (who exert no effort to get rewards) with hard-working “trained-to-succeed” rats
