What It Is

At its core, depression is the brain’s shutdown mechanism. When life feels too overwhelming, too painful, or too pointless to engage with, the mind, in its backwards wisdom, pulls the emotional plug. You lose interest, energy, motivation, and pleasure — not because you’ve suddenly become weak, but because the brain is trying, in its own clumsy way, to protect you from further disappointment. It’s like an emotional circuit-breaker flipping off, hoping that by going numb, you’ll stop getting hurt.

In evolutionary terms, a little withdrawal made sense. If you’re wounded, conserve energy. If resources are scarce, don’t waste effort chasing what you can’t catch. The problem arises when this protective reflex refuses to switch back on, leaving you stuck in a grey fog long after the threat has passed.

How The Nincompoop Mind Exaggerates It

Here’s where the familiar Nincompoop machinery kicks into full gear.

First, habitual thinking gets stuck in a loop: “Nothing works, so why try?” Every day becomes a repetition of failure rehearsals. Then projection gets involved: “Others probably see me as useless too.” Cognitive dissonance twists your failures into personal identity: “I fail because I’m broken, not because circumstances are hard.” Confirmation bias joins the party, scanning for every past mistake and misstep to validate the hopelessness.

Even lazy thinking contributes — making any effort feel like too much work. Getting out of bed? Herculean. Answering a message? Overwhelming. The brain becomes utterly convinced that doing nothing is safer than risking the shame of doing something poorly. Energy conservation turns pathological.

Tribalism can sneak in too — not as group loyalty, but as isolation: “They wouldn’t understand anyway. I’m not like them.” You pull away from others, not out of malice, but because your Nincompoop mind is running the numbers and wrongly concluding that solitude is protection.

What It Feels Like

From the inside, depression doesn’t feel like sadness most of the time — it feels like nothing. A flat, heavy emptiness. The things that used to bring joy now feel irrelevant. You don’t necessarily cry — you just don’t see the point in much of anything.

There’s often guilt attached too, which only feeds the spiral. You know you “should” be doing better, but you can’t. The harder you push, the heavier everything becomes. It feels like trying to swim through syrup with bricks tied to your ankles.

Worse still, the mind starts narrating its own failure as fact: “I’ve always been like this. I’ll always be like this.” Small wins are dismissed, setbacks are magnified, and hope starts to feel naïve — something other people are allowed, but not you.

And all the while, others may look at you and wonder why you can’t just “cheer up.” If only it were that easy.

What It Could Look Like If Understood Properly

Depression is your mind trying to avoid further emotional injury by shutting you down pre-emptively. The Nincompoop approach doesn’t pretend you can just “snap out of it.” Instead, it recognises that you’re dealing with a survival system stuck in overprotection mode.

Rather than fighting the shutdown, the task is to gently start nudging the dials back down. Small, almost trivial actions — eating, moving, connecting — help challenge the Nincompoop mind’s narrative that nothing matters. You won’t reason your way out of it; your brain is too busy rewriting evidence to support its case. But small behaviours can start feeding it new information.

Humour — dry, dark, British humour if necessary — helps too. Not because it makes things better, but because it provides brief moments where you can see your mind’s absurd storytelling for what it is.

You’re running a system designed to conserve energy and protect you — but one that’s got the sensitivity settings turned far too high. Recognising this won’t cure the fog, but it may prevent you from believing every miserable story your brain tries to sell you while you’re in it.