People who are feeling low rarely describe it the way you might expect. They don’t always say they’re sad. More often I hear: “I just feel flat.” “I can’t be bothered with anything anymore.” “What’s the point?” “I don’t even know why I feel like this.”

That last one matters most to me. Because in my experience, there is always a why. Low mood isn’t random, and it isn’t a character flaw. It’s a message. And once you understand what the message is, you can start to do something about it.

In this blog I want to share two ways of looking at depression that completely changed how I understand it, both from my own hypnotherapy training and from many years working in mental health before that.

You are not alone in this

Depression is far more common than most people realise. Office for National Statistics data from April 2025 found that 18% of adults in Great Britain, just under one in five, were experiencing moderate to severe depressive symptoms. Before the pandemic, that figure was around 10%.

It’s highest among young adults: 26% of 16 to 29 year olds reported moderate to severe symptoms, compared with 20% of 30 to 49 year olds and 8% of those aged 70 and over. And the most recent national survey of mental health and wellbeing in England found that one in five people aged 16 and over had experienced symptoms of a common mental health problem, such as depression or anxiety, in the past week.

So if you’re reading this and recognising yourself, please know this: you’re not broken, you’re not weak, and you’re certainly not the only one.

First, a different way to think about feelings

One of my hypnotherapy teachers, Calvin Banyan, wrote a book called The Secret Language of Feelings. It’s built on thousands of hours of work with hypnotherapy clients, and its central idea is simple but powerful: there are no bad feelings.

Every feeling, including the ones we label as “negative”, is energy and motivation. Each one is asking for something specific. It wants you to notice it, and it wants you to satisfy it. When you do, the feeling has done its job and it can settle.

Banyan describes feelings in three layers.

Layer one: primary feelings

These are the feelings most of us recognise: sadness, loneliness, fear, anger, guilt, boredom and stress. Each carries its own message. Loneliness, for example, is asking for connection. Sadness is often about something we’ve lost. Guilt is telling us we’ve done something that doesn’t sit right with our values and may need putting right.

Fear is an interesting one, because it tends to show up in three different forms:

• “Something bad is going to happen.” The classic worry about the future.
• “There’s something wrong with me.” Banyan calls this defective fear. It’s the quiet belief of not being good enough, and I see it constantly in my practice.
• “I don’t have control and I need it.” Fear about power and control over our own lives.

Layer two: frustration

Here’s where it gets interesting. When a primary feeling isn’t satisfied, it doesn’t just disappear. Instead, a secondary feeling arrives: frustration.

Frustration has a very specific message. It is saying: “This isn’t working.” Whatever you’re doing to deal with the original feeling isn’t meeting the need underneath it.

Often, what we’re doing is distracting ourselves. Reaching for food, a drink, a cigarette, the phone, working late, keeping busy. These things take the edge off for a while, but they leave the original feeling unsatisfied. So the frustration keeps building.

Layer three: depression

If frustration keeps building and nothing changes, Banyan describes a third layer kicking in: depression. He likens it to a built-in safety valve on a pressure cooker. When the pressure gets too much, depression steps in and its message is simply:

“Just give up.”

Stop pushing. Stop trying. Back off.

So, put together, it might look something like this. I’m scared (primary feeling). I try to deal with it and it isn’t working, so now I’m scared and frustrated (secondary). I keep going round in circles and eventually my mind tells me there’s no point trying any more (tertiary).

When you see depression this way, it stops being a mysterious fog that descended out of nowhere. It becomes the end of a chain. And a chain can be followed back to where it started.

That’s why, when someone comes to see me feeling low, I’m not only interested in the flatness. I want to know what’s underneath it. What was the original feeling? What was it asking for? And what got in the way?

Second: three common roots of depression

My most recent training was with Marisa Peer, and her work offers another really useful lens. She describes three common causes that sit underneath depression. You’ll probably notice how neatly they fit with Banyan’s layers.

1. “I haven’t met my heart’s desire”

This is the feeling that life hasn’t turned out the way you hoped. The career you meant to have. The relationship you imagined. The person you thought you’d be by now. I see this a lot with older clients who look back and feel they haven’t achieved what they wanted. But I also see it in high-achieving people who have ticked every box and still feel empty, because the boxes were never really theirs.

In Banyan’s terms, this is often a primary feeling like sadness or fear that has been ignored for years, until frustration and then flatness took over.

2. Negative, self-critical thinking

Our thoughts drive our feelings. And thoughts repeated often enough become beliefs. If the voice in your head says “I’m useless”, “I always mess things up”, “nobody really likes me” a hundred times a day, your mind accepts it as fact and your feelings follow.

Here’s something I often say to clients: have you ever met a negative, self-critical baby? Babies aren’t born thinking they’re not good enough. They cry when they need something and they expect to get it. Self-criticism is learned, usually very early, from the things we heard, the things that happened to us, and the meanings we made of them as children. And anything that was learned can be updated.

Research backs up how powerful this thinking style is. The psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent much of her career studying rumination, the habit of going over and over the same negative thoughts, and found it both makes low mood more likely and keeps it going for longer.

3. Loss of connection

Human beings are wired for connection. We need to feel we belong, that we matter to someone, that we’re seen. When those connections fade, through bereavement, moving away, a relationship ending, retirement, or simply drifting apart, low mood very often follows.

The difficult part is that depression then tends to make us withdraw even further. We cancel plans, stop answering messages, avoid people. That deepens the disconnection, and the cycle continues.

The research here is striking. A study from University College London, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, followed more than 4,000 adults aged over 50 in England for 12 years. The researchers estimated that loneliness accounted for around 18% of depression in that age group. Importantly, what mattered most wasn’t how many people someone had around them, but whether they felt lonely. It’s the quality and meaning of our connections, not the number, that counts.

Why the “why” matters so much

If you’ve read my earlier blog on why understanding the ‘why’ speeds up change, you’ll know this is close to my heart. Most approaches to low mood focus on managing the symptoms: getting through the day, distracting yourself, pushing through. Those things have their place. But if the original feeling is still there, still unmet, it will keep sending its message.

When we find the root, whether that’s an old belief of not being enough, a long-buried loss, a life that’s drifted away from what you really want, or a loneliness nobody noticed, we have something real to work with.

How I work with clients who are feeling low

Before training as a hypnotherapist, I worked in mental health for many years. My hypnotherapy training gave me a refreshing and hopeful way of looking at feelings, one that sees them as useful messengers rather than problems to be suppressed.

Hypnotherapy works with the subconscious mind, which is where our feelings, habits and deep-rooted beliefs live. That’s why it can reach things that talking alone sometimes can’t. In my sessions, we work on:

• Finding the why: uncovering what the low mood is really about and where it began.
• Updating old beliefs: letting go of outdated ideas you picked up about yourself, the world and the future, often long before you were old enough to question them.
• Changing the inner voice: replacing habitual self-criticism with a kinder, more supportive way of talking to yourself.
• Resolving old experiences: helping to release past events that may still be playing out in the way you feel today.
• Building self-esteem and confidence: feeling good enough no matter what, believing in yourself, and trusting that you can achieve what you set your mind to.
• Body confidence: feeling more at ease in your own skin.
• Making real changes: small, practical steps towards the health, happiness and connection you actually want.

Research into hypnosis for low mood is still growing, but it is encouraging. A 2019 meta-analysis published in the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, which brought together 13 trials, found that people who received hypnosis-based approaches showed greater improvement in their mood than those in comparison groups. I always work alongside, never instead of, the care you receive from your GP or other health professionals.

Three things you can try today

You don’t need to wait for a session to start listening to your feelings. Banyan’s approach can be boiled down to three simple steps, and you can try them right now.

1. Name the feeling. Underneath the flatness, what’s really there? Is it sadness, loneliness, fear, anger, guilt? Be as specific as you can.
2. Find the cause. What is that feeling about? What is it asking for? If it’s fear, which kind: something bad happening, something wrong with me, or not having control?
3. Satisfy it. What’s one small action that would actually meet that need, rather than distract from it? If it’s loneliness, that might be one message to a friend. If it’s the sense of an unmet dream, it might be ten minutes writing down what you really want.

And one more: notice your inner voice. Would you speak to someone you love the way you speak to yourself? If not, what would you say to them instead?

Your feelings are on your side

If you take one thing away from this blog, I hope it’s this: your feelings aren’t your enemy, even the heavy ones. Depression can feel like the end of the road, but it’s often a sign that something important has been waiting a long time to be heard.

You weren’t born believing you weren’t good enough. You learned it. And what was learned can be changed.

If you’d like to explore what might be underneath the way you’ve been feeling, I offer a free initial consultation where we can talk things through with no pressure at all. Get in touch here.

Karyn

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Sources

• Office for National Statistics (May 2025). Public opinions and social trends, Great Britain: 2 to 27 April 2025.
• House of Commons Library (2026). Mental health statistics: prevalence, services and funding in England.
• Banyan, C. D. The Secret Language of Feelings: A Rational Approach to Emotional Mastery. Abbot Publishing House.
• Lee, S. L., et al. (2021). The association between loneliness and depressive symptoms among adults aged 50 years and older: a 12-year population-based cohort study. The Lancet Psychiatry.
• Milling, L. S., et al. (2019). A meta-analysis of hypnotic interventions for depression symptoms. American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 61(3), 227–243.
• Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400–424.

Chester-le-Street, confidence, depression, Durham, feelings, hypnotherapy, loneliness, low mood, mental health, self-esteem