Wildebeest are much more nervous and attuned to threat than lions. One aspect of feeling low in status is a fear, even an expectation, of being punished. The resulting feelings can filter through to lowered self-esteem. If you feel depressed, you may not think you are low in status, but your physiology and psychology behave as though you are. 6,7 Conversely, cortisol (the ‘stress hormone’) is heightened in depressed people (as well as fleeing wildebeest!). Accordingly, circulating testosterone has been found to be lower in men who are depressed, and many women as well. When we are depressed and/or anxious, we tend to feel low in status. 4 Higher status in turn correlates with all kinds of mental and physical health benefits.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that higher testosterone levels in men (and I suspect this would apply to women, too) are correlated with higher status. 2 In human men, it’s something of a similar story: testosterone is correlated with competitiveness and confidence. It turns out this is because darker manes reflect higher testosterone levels, which in turn confer better strength and fighting ability. Depression and a diminished sense of selfĭid you know that lionesses much prefer brunettes over blondes when it comes to mane colour? Let’s delve a little deeper into the relationship between depression and sense of status. Depressed people are ‘feeling down’ and often ‘put themselves down’. Prepositions such as ‘down’ or ‘up’ tend to imply status, and the word ‘down’ is littered throughout the language we use to talk about depression. This is an aspect of depression I don’t think we often talk about, but we need only look at the language depressed people tend to use to see it in action. My personal view is that this propensity among depressed people to view the past in negative ways likely ties in with the way they view themselves and their relationships in the present – that is, their perceived sense of status. We may all view the past in ways that happen to suit us (I was devastatingly handsome 30 years ago!), but depressed people have been found to view the past in particular ways. Hindsight bias is the specific tendency to see past events as having been predictable, or inevitable.Īnd of course you don’t need to be depressed to experience hindsight bias. Selective recall or thinking bias isn’t, of course, uncommon in depression, but it can be valuable to relate it specifically to how the past is viewed. If we come to genuinely feel we have unremittingly failed, then we may start trying to simply avoid threat rather than pursue opportunity. 1 This makes it harder for them to benefit from opportunities in the future. So how we view the past, what we amplify and what we minimize, will impact at least some of our decisions and perceptions.įor example, it’s been found that depressed and anxious people tend to focus on what they believe they did wrong in the past at the expense of all they did right. Many of our decisions are based on past experiences. These are the sentiments if not the actual words of many depressed people. “What’s the point in trying? I’ve always failed at everything.” ”Psychotherapy is sought not primarily for enlightenment about the unchangeable past but because of dissatisfaction with the present and a desire to better the future.”