When you are down and experiencing heightened emotions such as sadness, hopelessness, the feeling of loss and more, you may struggle to understand if what you’re feeling is grief or depression. 

There are a good amount of differences between the two that may help to put your mind at ease just a little bit.

Depression

As we have covered before, depression is a state of being where the person feels lonely, helpless, vulnerable, sad and unmotivated all the time. It is a deep hole that is very hard to get out of and you often don’t realize that you’re in it until it is in full swing. 

Depression makes you feel sad, yes… but there are other factors to it. Doing everyday tasks such as showering, eating meals or even brushing your teeth can seem like the weight of the world crashing down on you and can be extremely hard to accomplish. 

Another factor is that depression often is a reflection of oneself. The way you see yourself can be altered and smothered with each day. It could be how you see yourself in the mirror, a reflection of guilt based on food you eat or it could be not feeling worthy of congratulations when you have an accomplishment. 

Grief

Grief is a feeling of extremely deep sorrow and sadness often based on death or loss.

It is a collection of feelings and emotions over time as you heal from the change of losing someone or something. 

A common list that people think of are the five stages of grief:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

While these stages are hard and exhausting to live with, these emotions don’t often last an extremely long time. Whereas depression can last from months to years. 

A big point to understand with grief is that those intense emotions are focused mainly on the thing or person that was lost, not focused on yourself. They are the feelings of missing that person, realizing they are gone and then coming to terms with that new reality and finding a new way of life with that loss. 

With some people, grief can cause daily tasks to feel unbearable, but this gets easier with time and this challenge often doesn’t last long periods of time. 

While depression and grief may seem the same or almost identical, there are quite a few differences with the two emotions. 

One deals with the feelings within and about yourself vs. the other which deals with the feeling of loss and finding a new way of life. 

If you have recently lost someone and think you are depressed only, it may actually be grief that you’re getting through. 

If you are feeling lost and alone and thinking about yourself and what you look like, feel like or don’t feel worthy, this may be a sign that you are experiencing depression.  Really knowing what is going on in your own life and what major events are happening may help you to find out what you’re feeling and allow you to get the help and healing you need.