Often people all over the world find daily life to be overwhelming. Not always necessarily bad or miserable, but it can be a lot to handle at times with having a work-life balance. For some, adding depression on top of those daily tasks can make those everyday things much harder. 

As an outsider looking at someone who may have depression, you may not understand how depression affects everyday life. Here are just a few examples of how impactful depression can be each day.

Mental/Emotional

Taking care of yourself and your depression levels stems from your mental state.
Having depression can make the person experiencing it feel down, sad or anxious a lot more than they would without depression. 

Those heightened emotions make it hard to have the motivation or have the discipline to do everyday tasks. 

One day you could be going about your day and feeling pretty good, then the next day brushing your teeth or even getting out of bed may feel impossible. 

The emotional drain that is felt each day impacts each day on an extreme level. It can make you more emotional, whether that be sadder, more upset and angry or irritable. 

Those heightened emotions don’t help with the difficulty of accomplishing everyday tasks or situations.

The exhaustion that your mind feels while going through depression and the mental strain that comes with the heightened or lowered emotions makes each day a feat to get through. 

In a way, that can make you stronger. If you get yourself to do those harder tasks each day, it can prove to yourself that you can get through things you find difficult as such, and can get through the depression you’re feeling. 

Depression is a mental game but it also just as much of a physical strain. 

Physical

As we talked about above, depression can cause you to have irregular emotions, and having those emotions be irregular on a daily basis can make your body change in many physical ways. 

For many people who experience depression daily, they often see a loss in weight. This can be for a few different reasons. 

1. When you don’t feel motivated to take care of yourself with everyday tasks, this can cause you to change your eating patterns. Therefore making you lose or gain weight. 
2. Lack of daily motivation can cause your once daily tasks, like moving around or working out, to lessen, therefore making your weight change once more and in some cases, cause your muscle mass to change. 
3. If there is a trauma that caused the depression, your body may have a change in its nervous system, therefore changing the way your body regulates food or the lack thereof food. This can sometimes result in pain in the stomach or head, also making food undesirable and unwanted.

As an outsider looking at the situation, you may also notice that those who have depression affect their daily life have a harder time regulating their sleep patterns. 

The changes that are made daily to the sleep patterns of those with depression can be drastic. Those heightened emotions can cause sleep to not ever come or to be overly present. 

These irregulated daily emotions and mental health changes cause depression to be more present and noticeable, especially to those who have not seen it before. 

Those key components that are affected are:

• Relationships with friends and family
• Work ethic
• Community appearances
• School work
• Self well-being

The daily life of someone who is living with depression is very different from someone who is the opposite and is not experiencing the effects of depression each day. 

Being there for those who have it affects everyday as well as knowing how to help those individuals has the ability to drastically change how those people view life and how they are able to cope with those thoughts and emotions that overtake them daily.