From "De-pressed" to "Deep Rest": Re-thinking the Weight of Being

I've been thinking a lot about the language we use for mental health. We talk about "fighting" depression or "battling" anxiety, casting ourselves in a constant, exhausting war against our own minds. But I stumbled on a perspective that reframes the entire experience in a way that resonates deeply with me.

The idea comes from a speaker named Jeff Foster, who suggests we look at the word "depression" itself. We experience it as a heavy, crushing weight, a feeling of being pressed down. This is the "de-pressed" state. It's the exhaustion that comes from trying to hold up a story of who we are—the successful professional, the good partner, the stable friend, the story of our past failures and future anxieties. Holding all of this together, every single day, is a crushing burden.

What if, Foster asks, this feeling isn't an illness but an invitation? What if the exhaustion is our body and mind finally refusing to hold up the false story anymore?

He makes a simple, profound linguistic switch: "de-pressed" becomes "deep rest."

What if that feeling of collapse is a call to "deep rest"? A call to stop pretending, to stop holding up the impossible weight of "me," and to simply rest in who we actually are beneath that story?

He uses the metaphor of the ocean and its waves. We spend our lives identifying with the waves—the chaotic thoughts, the fleeting emotions, the surges of panic or sadness. We believe we are the wave, and so we are terrified of it crashing or disappearing. But this perspective invites us to see ourselves as the entire ocean. The ocean isn't afraid of its own waves; it is the waves, and it is also the still, silent depth beneath them. The waves can be chaotic, but the ocean's fundamental nature is vast, spacious, and at rest.

This isn't just a poetic idea. It's reflected in modern psychology. Therapies like ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) are built on this very principle. They call it "cognitive defusion"—the act of separating from our thoughts. Instead of being the thought "I am a failure," we learn to observe it: "I am having the thought that I am a failure." This small shift in language creates space. We move from being the wave, tossed around by it, to being the ocean that holds it.

This isn't about "curing" depression in a medical sense, and it's not to dismiss the very real chemical and physiological components. (As I've written about in "Brain Chemistry", those are very real). Rather, it's a psychological and spiritual reframing. It sees the experience as a misunderstood signal—a call to let the story we're trying so hard to maintain finally fall apart, so we can discover the vast, restful awareness that was underneath it all along.

So what does this "deep rest" imply in a practical sense? It's not just sleeping or binging a show. That's often just numbness or escape, a continuation of the "collapse." This is a more active, conscious kind of rest.

For me, I think it means permission. Permission to stop "fighting" the feelings. When the feeling of heaviness or sadness appears, the practice isn't to analyze it, fix it, or force it away. The practice is to... just let it be there. To notice it, acknowledge it ("Ah, the sadness is here"), and allow it to exist without immediately declaring it an enemy. It's the simple, but incredibly difficult, act of allowing.

It's also a physiological act. Our nervous system has an emergency "shutdown" or "freeze" state—this is the collapse of depression. It's not true rest; it's an emergency brake. True "deep rest" is a different state entirely—it's the feeling of safety. So, the practical act is to find tiny moments of genuine safety. Feeling my feet on the floor. Noticing my breath, without trying to change it. Putting a hand on my chest and just feeling the warmth. It's about sending a signal to the body that the war is over, even for just a second.

It's an unfinished idea, as all of these are. But it feels like a more compassionate and integrated way to look at our struggles. It's not a "fight" (anxiety) or a "collapse" (numbness), but a profound, if painful, invitation to find a third way: to finally, deeply, rest.