In The Rooms Episode 4. Anxiety and Depression

William Ferrell set up his phone on a warm afternoon in Atlanta, filming from his dad's backyard with no studio lighting, no branded backdrop, just a counsellor with something he wanted to say. He'd been sitting with a pattern he keeps hearing from clients dealing with depression and anxiety, one that doesn't get named often enough because it sounds almost too simple: the brain keeps running old patterns as if nothing has changed.

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The past, the future, it's all just ideas, it's not here. All that we actually have is right now.

William Ferrell, M.Couns.

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Ferrell holds a master's in counselling and works with clients across a range of issues, but anxiety and depression are the ones he keeps coming back to in this series. Not because they're the most dramatic, he suggests, but because they work the same way underneath. That overlap is where he tends to start.

What the Brain Keeps Doing

The most common thing Ferrell hears from clients struggling with depression is that they can't stop replaying the past. What happened, what was said, what should have gone differently. This is rumination, and Ferrell is careful not to pathologize it outright. "The brain ruminates because things are familiar," he says. "You keep on going down the same path, it's very safe." The loop isn't random. It's just the brain defaulting to well-worn neural pathways because repetition feels like stability. It shows up as lying awake at 3 a.m. replaying an argument from Tuesday, or rehearsing what you should have said to someone six months ago while you're in the shower.

The trouble is that the brain doesn't separate memory from present experience the way we might expect. "The more we keep thinking about the past, feeling bad about the past, the brain actually thinks it's happening now," Ferrell explains. "So we keep reliving the same mistakes over and over and over again." An argument from years back, a professional failure from longer still: the body registers the memory as a current event, elevating stress hormones and keeping you stuck inside something that's already over. That steady signal, Ferrell argues, is one of the more direct routes into depression.

Good When We Lived in Caves

For many people, anxiety works differently, though the two conditions often overlap. Where depression's rumination tends to pull backward through what already happened, anxiety frequently projects forward, generating scenarios about what might go wrong next week, next month, Monday morning. The brain registers all of it as threat, and the threat response is physical: cortisol rises, attention narrows, the body braces. Ferrell traces it back to something with deep evolutionary roots. "This was really good when we lived in caves hiding from predators," he says, "but in today's world, fast-paced digital world, we're not dealing with that."

The threat-detection circuitry keeps running even when the threats have changed. A difficult meeting isn't a predator. An unanswered text won't leave you without shelter. The brain keeps running the old math anyway. So it generates worst-case scenarios under the banner of preparation, and you end up with a low hum of dread about things that haven't happened and, in most cases, won't.

Waiting for the Other Shoe

The third pattern Ferrell describes is the quietest and, in some ways, the most disorienting. "A lot of my clients are literally just waiting for the other shoe to drop," he says. Things are going well right now, they tell him. Which means, in the brain's logic, something must be about to go wrong.

That waiting borrows from both prior patterns. The brain is nowhere near the present. It's scanning backward through what went wrong before or forward through what surely will. And that scanning takes people out of the only time that's actually occurring. The past is memory. The future is projection. "We really need to unlearn everything that we've been taught about the past and the future," Ferrell says. That sounds almost philosophical until you sit with it: almost every source of suffering he's describing exists somewhere other than now.

The Test Worth Trying

Ferrell closes the video with a challenge that sounds deceptively easy: stop what you're doing, look around, and ask yourself whether anything is actually wrong in this exact moment. Not in the memory you keep revisiting. Not in the scenario you're building out. Here. Now.

Most people find this harder than expected, because the brain has spent years treating remembered and imagined experience as equally real and equally urgent. Ferrell isn't claiming a moment of present awareness dissolves depression or fixes an anxiety disorder. The point is narrower: for most people, the present moment holds less actual threat than the mind has been signaling, and checking that gap is usually where things start to shift.

Try it once before the next scroll, the next what-if, the next replay. Not as a cure. Just as a way back into the only moment that's actually here.

Watch the full episode on Mindora's In The Rooms series.