Everyone feels miserable once in awhile. But when it happens too often, when you start feeling desperate, when desolation takes hold of you and just won’t go away, you could be suffering from depression.

Depression can make it hard to work and enjoy life as you did before. Just trying to live through the day can be crushing. Yes, no matter how despondent you feel, you can get better only when you understand the cause of your depression.

Depression is a severe psychological illness that can be very merely misconstrued or ignored by those around the depressed. While many may just neglect one or more of the five warning signs of depression as someone “being unhappy,” they could be the signs of severe depression.

Like other illnesses, the key to treating despair is to identify it early. The longer you wait to receive treatment, the more risk you subject yourself to when it comes to the probable undesirable effects of living with depression.

Keeping that in mind, here are the five signs of depression in men and women.

Weight changes
Do you find yourself putting on weight even though you aren’t eating junk food? Or do you see yourself losing weight in a non-reasonable manner? Then this can be one of the primary depression symptoms in men as well as women. When a person is in depression, then sudden weight gain or loss is one of the standard signs of severe depression. You need to keep a check on this so that you don’t end up causing permanent damage to yourself.

Changes in sleeping patterns
Whether it’s sleeping more than usual or suffering from episodes of sleeplessness, persistent, irregular sleep patterns can be signs of unsolved depression. Your energy levels go down when you sleep too much or little. To finish your daily tasks, you need energy. When you can’t cope with hard circumstances, the fall down the emotional black hole becomes tempting. This is the time to ask for help.

Spending more time online
In the 21st century, the virtual world is taking over the real world. The virtual world has made it easy for people of different ages to spend more time than ever time online. You may think it’s cool to be online all day, but it is one of the first signs of severe depression. You start becoming anti-social and spend more time online with activities like spending hours gambling or scrolling through social media channels. Initially, you may not understand the effects of these depression symptoms, but later the results may become worse. In a few cases, some have developed bipolar depression symptoms that affect the mind and the body.

Feelings of being ‘nothing’
It may sound a bit harsh, but it is a fact that those suffering from depression feel that they are nothing. They aren’t motivated enough to pull themselves out of their bed and work. It is one of the prominent signs of depression in men and women, especially the teens and young adults. Such people feel numb for a long time and behave like automatons or zombies. They avoid crowds and prefer staying alone away from friends and family. Such behavior is a sign of clinical depression.

Loss of focus, concentration
Most face a time when they find they lose focus and concentration and their mind is in a fog. It is nothing a nap can’t solve. However, when the loss of focus persists, and rest doesn’t work its miracle, that is a sign of depression. When you experience anxiety trying to get back on track and don’t know why perhaps it is time to examine our surroundings and seek guidance outside your direct social circle.

Understanding the signs of depression can pave the way for early treatment and fewer emotional woes. Unless the symptoms indicate clinical depression, you can seek advice from others and try a few natural and simple remedies, before you find a doctor who may or may not prescribe anti-depressants, etc. to get rid of depression.