Is Anhedonia stealing your joy?

Anhedonia (an ⦁ hee ⦁ doh ⦁ nee ⦁ ah) – the super common mental health symptom you’ve probably never heard of 

Ever sat down to watch your favourite show, only to feel… nothing? Ordered your go-to comfort food and thought, meh? Or maybe you just can’t shake that weird bleh feeling, where life feels just ‘fine’?

If this sounds all too familiar, you might be experiencing anhedonia. Before you switch tabs and panic-Google “WHAT IS ANHEDONIA WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!”, let’s take a couple of calm steps back and not self-diagnose ourselves.

While it can be a symptom of some conditions, anhedonia isn’t always a sign of a mental health disorder. It can show up during periods of stress, burnout, or even from overloading your brain with too much dopamine (Hello, doom-scrollers). 

So how do you know if you’re experiencing anhedonia or just a case of existential boredom? And more importantly—how do you get the spark back?

What is Anhedonia?

From the Latin ‘an’ – without, and ‘hedone’ – pleasure, Anhedonia quite literally translates to ‘lacking pleasure’, and refers to a lack of interest in and/or an inability to experience pleasure from activities you would normally enjoy. 

Going beyond just feeling being super flat and ‘bleh’, anhedonia can present:  

• Emotionally, being unable to experience excitement and feeling disconnected from positive feelings
• Behaviourally, withdrawing from your usual hobbies, procrastinating, being flat in your tone and facial expressions, and;
• Physically, normal pleasures feel muted or unsatisfying, it feels harder to relax and get comfortable, feeling sluggish and fatigued.

The two types of Anehdonia:

From the above presentations, anhedonia is typically categorised into two main types:

1. Social Anhedonia

a lack of interest or pleasure in social situations/relationships,

2. Physical (or Sensory) Anhedonia

a reduced ability to enjoy physical sensations, like eating good food, sitting out in the sun, or having sex.

How does it differ from boredom?

It’s completely normal for your interests to change and to experience general boredom, but anhedonia isn’t just “being bored and not feeling happy”. Anhedonia is actually related to disruptions in the brain’s reward system and can completely change the way we experience life. Normally our brain uses a reward system run by dopamine to help us anticipate and feel reward. When this system is functioning well, dopamine is released in response to rewarding stimuli (e.g. food, music, affection) which gives us the feeling of pleasure and motivates us to seek these experiences again – i.e. X makes me feel good, I want X again in future.

When experiencing anhedonia this dopamine signalling becomes blunted or dysregulated, often caused by lower dopamine production or release, reduced dopamine receptor sensitivity, and/or disrupted communication between brain areas. When our reward system is disrupted like this, things that would normally feel enjoyable don’t trigger the usual dopamine response, leading to that feeling of flatness or total lack of interest. 

The most common contributors to a disrupted dopamine reward system are chronic stress, depression and other mental health conditions, long-term substance abuse, and inflammation or physical injury to the brain. 

Anhedonia and Clinical Conditions

Experiencing anhedonia can make life feel really dull or meaningless, which is why it is often linked to deeper emotional distress and mental health issues. Clinically, anhedonia is an extremely common symptom of mental health conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and PTSD, and can be linked to physical conditions like Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Parkinson’s disease. Now that is seriously not to say because you have experienced anhedonia you have one of these conditions – it can absolutely occur outside of clinically diagnosed disorders!

Anhedonia can be stress-induced where chronic stress and burnout inhibit our brain’s reward system, making things feel dull or unfulfilling, and increased cortisol levels can temporarily mess with dopamine release. 

There is an argument that you can experience temporary anhedonia due to non-clinical factors. For example, after a big emotional event (think major life transitions – breakup, losing your job, grieving), hormonal fluctuations (this could arguably be related to an underlying clinical issue like PMDD or post-partum depression/anxiety, but things like menstrual cycle changes, hormonal birth control, menopause and pregnancy can also cause short-term emotional blunting), and overexposure to dopamine-heavy stimuli (calling myself out with this one, but excessive use of things like social media, gaming or fast food can desensitise our reward system as cause a temporary “pleasure deficit”). 

Situational factors can also contribute to experiencing anhedonia through influence to dopamine regulation or response, such as fatigue and sleep deprivation and some medications and substance abuse. 

So, what can you do about it?

So how do we manage anhedonia and get excited about all the great things in life again? Given how commonly anhedonia presents in mental health disorders, if you do feel this strongly resonates with you it would be incredibly beneficial to check in with a professional to talk this through. Please seek professional help if you feel like you have been experiencing anhedonia for more than a couple weeks (i.e. it doesn’t feel temporary), is becoming worse or you are noticing additional symptoms, is interrupting your daily life or ability to function, or if you feel it could be related to an underlying condition.

In addition to professional support, there are a few self-management strategies that can do wonders for getting that spark back:

• Behavioral Activation – putting effort into engaging in the activities you would normally enjoy even if they don’t feel enjoyable at first can help “retrain” the brain and “reset” our reward system
• Mindfulness & Gratitude Practices – these practices can be a great way to appreciate and re-engage our normal, positive emotional response to small pleasures
• Exercise – exercise is a great way to naturally increase dopamine and serotonin (i.e. the feel good endorphins) and improve our mood
• Nutrition & Sleep – seeing as things like too much junk food or bad diet, excessive alcohol consumption, and poor sleep quality can all negatively impact dopamine production and release, doing the opposite can significantly improve dopamine levels!
• Social Connection – similarly to behavioural activation, even small social interactions can help us to feel more emotionally engaged and connected – you might also discover that certain people or friends are particularly good at getting you out of your funk

Even if you feel like things are ‘not too bad’ and “maybe I am just chronically bored”, it can still be extremely useful to talk this through with a therapist.

It’s really easy to pass off anhedonia as boredom or fatigue, and because you might not explicitly feel sad or depressed it is so easy to keep brushing it off until you realise it’s actually been going on for weeks and maybe your mental health does need a bit of a check-in.

The opportunity to talk through your feelings (or lack of in this case) and check-in around your overall wellbeing with a therapist is honestly unmatched when it comes to working out what might be happening and to establish strategies to address this – and we have a pretty fantastic team here just for this!