Depression is not only low mood. It flattens interest, slows the body, narrows the future and edits memory so that the past looks like it was always this way.
It is also a confident narrator. It presents opinions as facts and quietly removes anything that disagrees with them.
The spiral
Low mood makes you do less. Doing less removes the small good moments. Fewer good moments lower the mood further, which makes doing anything harder again.
The way out runs the same loop backwards — and it begins with action, not with feeling like it. Waiting for motivation is the trap, because in depression motivation arrives after the doing, not before it.
Behavioural activation
This is one of the most reliably effective treatments we have for low mood, and it is almost insultingly simple: choose a small thing, do it, notice what it did to your mood.
Small means smaller than you think. One sock. Standing up. Opening the curtain. The size of the step is not the point — the direction is.
Do the thing badly, briefly, and without enthusiasm. It still counts.