Freedom from Anhedonia: 2 ways to escape the prison of your mind

living with anhedonia can feel a lot like living inside of a prison cell you know that the world still exists outside of you but you can't really access it or touch it or interact with it it's there you're here and there's a barrier in between that you don't know how to get past hi I'm Dr Scott I'm a licensed clinical psychologist I create and facilitate intensive outpatient programs for people with moderate to severe depressive and anxiety disorders and I'm the author of the book or when everything is burning if you're not familiar with anhedonia really quick it is the loss of joy and it's a disconnect from your ability to feel pleasure excitement happiness most of the good emotions that make our lives enjoyable and feel worth living it's not necessarily A sadness or an anger it's more of a hollowness and emptiness a void it's most commonly a symptom of depression but there are a few other reasons people can experience it too if you have struggled with anhedonia and you've looked for and answers you've done Google searches how do I get rid of this you have probably felt discouraged and disappointed because there aren't a lot of answers offered out there anhedonia because it is not a diagnosis itself but a symptom of other conditions is usually treated by treating the underlying condition and that isn't always easy to do if you experience anhedonia as part of a mood disorder then you've probably been told to treat it with therapy or medication and those things can help but they take a while they aren't something that you can just do today and instantly start to get better I don't necessarily agree with the assertion that anhedonia itself cannot be targeted or treated anecdotally in my personal life and in my clinical practice there are two strategies I've found that sometimes do break through in hedonium they don't work 100 of the time I'm not going to promise you that they're gonna work for you but I do believe they are worth trying so stick with this metaphor of anhedonia being like prison so you wake up one day and you're in a prison cell didn't do anything wrong to get there someone you're just there someone threw you in and every day you live with anhedonia is another day you wake up in the cell the very first thing I want you to do every day no matter how you feel and as dumb as it may sound is check the door because you never know when the Jailer might have forgotten to lock that door what this means practically is make sure that every single day you're living with anhedonia that you at least try something that has the potential to bring you Joy or something that has brought you Joy in the past far too often the pattern that we fall into is because we have stopped being able to experience joy we stop even trying we don't even do things that might bring us joy because it feels pointless because we feel hopeless we feel defeated and it feels like a waste of time and energy because we've been trying it and it hasn't worked but you never know which day that anhedonia will relent it will relent it does not last forever and just as suddenly and just as randomly as it came it can go but sometimes we stop doing the things that make us feel good and then we experience what I call an artificial anhedonia where we aren't enjoying our lives not because we are unable to enjoy our lives but because we are not doing anything enjoyable because we have lost our momentum we have lost our hope we have lost our drive and we have days where we are capable of feeling good but we still feel nothing because we don't do anything that feels good so check the door every day that Jailer is not super on point and he will sometimes forget to lock the door and sometimes you can just walk right out the other thing you can do if that door is still locked is if you look up about 10 feet up there's a little window at the top of your jail cell now you can't you're not 10 feet tall you can't just climb out I get people are going to tell you that right people will say well just just feel better just choose happiness just just be in a better mood those people don't have any idea what they're talking about because they don't know that your jail cell is 10 feet tall maybe they felt like this too but their jail cell is four feet tall so they just stood up and got out and they were fine it's different for you I get that but if you look around yourself you'll see a few objects boxes buckets they look worthless it doesn't seem like they could do anything they seem to have no purpose and one of them by itself won't do anything but although they're rickety and unstable if you stack enough of these things you will be able to reach that window at the top of your jail cell functionally what this one means is that there's a threshold of how many things you have to do or how good the things you do have to feel before you're able to experience the emotions associated with those things and that's true even when you're not experiencing anhedonia like really little things don't necessarily make you go like oh I'm having a great day because I have gum you know it maybe some days it will but most of the time it's going to take more than that right so every day you have to kind of do multiple things to really get to the point where you would say like I am having a good day I am enjoying my life anhedonia functions the same way except it just raises that threshold so you have to stack a lot of things to get past this threshold and get to the point where you can feel again one or two things are not going to get the job done unless they're like life-changingly amazing and some days it still won't work some days you'll start to stack these things and they'll fall apart they'll fall down some days you'll slip some days you won't even have the energy or the motivation to stack them and you know what I get that that's all right you're not gonna win every battle you're not going to conquer in hedonia every day but I want you to try to stack those seemingly worthless useless pointless objects in your prison cell and what that means is I still want you to go out and do multiple things that in the past have been reliable for you pick your highest value things pick the things that have been like the best parts of your life previously that are simple and easy to do I know you can't take a lavish vacation every day or anything like that but do what you can and try to stack as many of these experiences on top of one another as possible and sometimes you will reach that window 10 feet up and you will be able to pull your yourself out of this state that you're in and you will have a good day it will not work all of the time but it will work some of the time now even when it does work I know this is probably what you're thinking about so I'm just going to address it even when it does work and you get out of that prison cell you might wake up tomorrow morning back in it I know this is not fun I know but the more times you escape prison the less scary and defeating it becomes when you wake up in prison again if you have escaped from prison 15 times and you wake up the 16th time and oh they got me again I'm back in it yeah I want to be careful with how I say this because I don't want to invalidate how anybody feels but sometimes it almost can feel like a game at that point because you're so familiar with how this system works and you're so confident in your own Escape methods that you begin to trust yourself and you feel secure and comfortable in your knowledge that you're going to be able to make it out again as you've done it 15 times before and you are a master escape artist and you have proven it to yourself so when you wake up in that prison cell again at some point you don't worry anymore you might even chuckle a little and say oh guess it's one of those days well I know what I'm gonna do and I may not work today but it will work eventually and I will escape this prison cell and I will get back to my life and I will live again and even if I have to keep escaping from prison for the rest of my life I will do it as many times as I have to because it is worth it you are worth it and I hope you do not give up

Channel: Dr. Scott Eilers

Views: 60,285

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Id: tLRqfgAugF4

Length: 8min 23sec (503 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023