After years of investigating interactions between brain functions and depressive responses in rats, as well as reviewing the reams of fascinating research conducted around the world by neuroscience colleagues, I have identified important clues in the ongoing investigation of depression. What I’ve discovered is that there’s a critical link between the symptoms of depression and key areas of the brain involved with motivation, pleasure, movement, and thought. Because these brain areas regularly communicate back and forth, they are considered a circuit, one of many in our brains. (In electronics, a circuit is defined as a complete path through which an electric current can flow, and the process is somewhat similar in the brain.) In fact, the rich interactions along this particular brain circuit, which I call the effort-driven rewards circuit, provide us with surprising insights into how depression is both activated and alleviated.
Keeping the effort-driven rewards circuit well engaged helps you interact effectively and efficiently with challenges in the environment around you or in your emotional life. What revs up the crucial effort-driven rewards circuit—the fuel, if you will—is generated by doing certain types of physical activities, especially ones that involve your hands. It’s important that these actions produce a result you can see, feel, and touch, such as knitting a sweater or tending a garden. Such actions and their associated thoughts, plans, and ultimate results change the physiology and chemical makeup of the effort-driven rewards circuit, activating it in an energized way. I call the emotional sense of well-being that results effort-driven rewards.
My research shows that in our drive to do less physical work to acquire what we want and need, we’ve lost something vital to our mental well-being—an innate resistance to depression. In fact, as I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, there are many ways in which our contemporary lifestyle may actually promote depression and aggravate the tangled web of emotions once it sets in.
In upcoming chapters, I will describe how effort-driven rewards may help to build resilience against the onset of depression. Taking an antidepressant medication changes your brain’s chemistry, but it has no meaningful relation to anything that’s currently going on in your life. Effort-driven rewards and other real-world interactive experiences generate much more intense and pervasive reactions in your brain than the neurochemical alterations produced by a single pill.
The result? You begin to feel more control over your environment and more connected to the world around you. This reduces stress and anxiety and, most important, builds resilience against the onset of depression.
