Ask HN: Depression, Loss of Motivation, Feeling Lost. Please Help

I am a college student. I I have been feeling paralyzed and am not able to do anything at all for the past couple of weeks/months. I dug up some old posts from HN to read stuff to find helpful information. Most of the relevant advice pertained to

- change your diet / cut out sugar / healthy stuff

- exercise / releases endorphins / makes you feel better

- go to a doctor / shrink / and talk stuff out.

- get enough sleep

I have made changes to my diet, sleeping more regularly, and exercising every once in a while, on the whole I am a healthy individual. I do also want to add that though I don't think I am burned out, because I have hardly put any effort into anything that I have been doing/done. I was a top 1percentile student in high school, and had a pretty good social life, though I did put in more time to studying stuff then. I am smart enough to get through classes and stuff with little effort at college, but I don't know what the deal with me is. I am unable to concentrate, I can't seem to find motivation to do work, I literally stare the screen for longer than 30 minutes and do nothing. I am in my third year, and well now I have no connection with my peers anymore because they seem to engaged in the partying / drinking phase of life, and though I did have that phase, I can't stand that anymore. I would like to say that I have matured more than my peers, but I am not sure that is entirely true, because if it were, I would have more stuff figured out. I have been holed up by my self pretty much, and well I don't seem to understand what is wrong with me / what i need to do to fix this ? is this just a phase of life ? please help me out, i really don't know what i am asking for, but if you know something that you think could help me, or any personal experiences in the same realm, please let me know. thanks.

A couple of things:

1. I was in a similar state, and found out I had hyperthyroidism. Thyroid now removed, I'm much better, but there are many other such conditions that can be causing things that you might not have all the tools yourself to work out, so check with a doctor or your school's nurse at the very least.

2. Caffeine screws most people I know up. It's very fun and useful, and I don't recognize myself without it because I drank soda from a very early age, but this all could be contributing.

3. A lot of what you describe isn't too terribly bad, honestly, I mean, you need downtime, you are in college which is a hell of a lot of work.

4. The net makes you think you're terribly non-productive. Every single awesome throw-away link is some 10,000 man hours at the very least. I think we're all, in the tech world at least, trying to cope with this to varying degrees.

5. I highly recommend a counselor. Having a mostly unbiased third party is an amazing asset.

6. My big problem is not so much that I don't want to go out, just that I don't want to change what I'm doing, or I don't want to transition to the next thing. I highly recommend forcing yourself to get over that hump, and to go out and meet new people. Ask them questions. You'll hate it because they don't read the same feeds as you do, but you'll absolutely love it because if you hadn't done it, you would've never had had such a great time discovering what those people are all about. At the very least it is a great distraction, but often, people are a lot cooler than you may think.

Best of luck! You can do it!!!

Sleeping is good, getting a counselor is not bad either.

I've been through rough times in the last year myself. Since a couple of months I am back on track again (or so it seems) and I've come to realize that my situation was/is far from rare. I've met people all over the place (once I was able to talk about it) who have been through nearly exactly the same thing.

Do you feel a diffuse stress at times? Diffuse meaning that you're not able to pinpoint where the stress originates from but at the same time the stress feels familiar because you've had the exact same feeling before.

Expanding a bit on this: you're in college so you have a full health plan sitting right there. Use it! Go to a regular doctor to see if there's anything bio going on with you, then get a referral for having the blues after that. You want to make sure it's not some internal thing causing you to go Old Dog and curl up and die under the house. Could be a lot of things, but know that at college age they are all very common.

Depression can be anger that cannot be expressed because it's denied since too long and 'forgotten', outside help with a professional may be very helpful