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Looking back, it seems odd that a call with the best news of my career convinced me to change my life. After months of research for a book I'd always wanted to write, it was my agent on the line. Great news. A major publisher was offering a generous five-figure deal for a book I'd always wanted to write.
As she delivered the news, I heard myself making the right noises: "Amazing … brilliant … great." But far from feeling joy, I felt nothing. It was if the words were coming from some disembodied me. When I ended the call, I knew I should have felt euphoric. Instead, I felt numb.
After that day, I started noticing this disconnect more. I couldn't understand it. After all, I wasn't depressed. I was a get-things-done career woman, with a lovely husband and two happy, healthy daughters. I've always loved music. Now when I heard my favorite songs, the chills no longer came. My Instagram looked like a multicolored patchwork quilt of fabulousness. The reality was, life felt grey, no matter what I did. Surely, I couldn't be the only person who felt like this?
So putting my guilt to one side, late one night I went in search of an explanation.
With my oblivious partner Anthony sleeping next to me, it felt like the ultimate ingratitude to be Googling "Why aren't I enjoying my life?" I wish there was a more exciting story for how I found the answer. In 0.63 seconds, the offer of 6,770,000,000 results flashed up on my screen. The first headline was: "Don't enjoy anything anymore? There's a name for that. Anhedonia."
Gripped, I kept reading. Research paper after research paper revealed that while anhedonia is well-known to psychiatrists and brain researchers as a symptom of full-blown depression, you don't need to be depressed to feel it. You can be getting on with life, with everything you need — except the mental bandwidth to enjoy it.
This bothered me. After all, we hear so much about modern life's most pernicious disease, depression, at one end of the spectrum, and happiness at the other. Why don't we hear more about the no-man's-land in between? As an author, I write about what I need to learn.
Over the next 18 months, I discovered there's a range of possible environmental and biological causes for "blah." Apart from burn-out, I discovered diet, difficult childhoods, hormonal shifts, as well as illnesses, like Covid and Type 2 Diabetes can all play a role in taking the brain's reward system, the mesolimbic pathway, "off-line." But while blah is little talked about, it's not unusual.
In the first studies on "languishing" in the early 2000s, it was estimated 12.1 percent of US adults were affected by it. Two decades later, using the same criteria, an IPSOS US Mental Health report found that 21% were in the same mental space. In a breakdown of age, it was found millennials (age 26 plus) were most likely to be languishing at 30%. Next were Gen Z (up to age 25) at 26%, Gen X (age 42 plus) at 21% and, lastly, baby boomers (age 57 plus) at 14%.
But it's not just overwork and stress that makes us feel like we are emotionally flat-lining. Anhedonia is a disease of modern life, particularly in first-world countries. The constant dopamine hits of the convenience society, everything from online shopping, movies, dating, food delivery, and porn, designed to give us whatever we want, whenever we want it, with so little effort, can blunt our sensitivity to pleasure. When everything is designed to feel good, nothing does.
Now I knew there were reasons for "feeling blah," I spoke to neuroscientists about the best tools to address it. For instance, when I discovered dopamine is not the molecule of pleasure, but of anticipation, I started making sure I always have something in my diary to look forward to. After learning that regular enjoyable experiences are not just one thing, but three separate parts: anticipation, appreciation in the moment, and remembering it afterwards, I paid attention to each phase so I could feel joy more intensely.
After a few months of tweaking my life in many small ways, I gradually felt lighter. I smiled more easily. Hearing myself laugh no longer made me fall off my chair in shock. It's true that modern life is tough. We are in a global economic downturn. Life on earth has rarely seemed more unpredictable. The good news is that I now know there's a flip-side.
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We know more about how the neuroscience of how good feelings are made in the brain than at any time in history. I'd say it's time to harness that knowledge — and push back.
Excerpted from FEELING 'BLAH'?: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless and How to Recapture Life's Highs by Tanith Carey (Welbeck Balance, 2023). Reprinted with permission from Welbeck Balance.
