Transcription
The most uncomfortable place to be in the entire world is your own mind when your feelings are not working properly. If you've been here before, you might know that I'm talking about something called anhedonia, which most commonly is a symptom of depression.
Anhedonia occurs when what's called a reward pathway in our brain gets disrupted. Your reward pathway is a series of neuronal transmissions, in other words, chemical signals that pass through your brain cells that allows you to feel emotions like joy when you're doing something fun, or excitement when you have something fun coming up, or achievement or accomplishment after you've completed a task or a goal, or or a to-do list item of some kind. We aren't always able to feel these things, and when the feelings that are normally present in our mind fade or even disappear entirely for a period of time, all that is left is our thoughts.
I found myself thinking about this the other day after I saw a TikTok video about something called the, I don't know if I'm saying this correctly, echoic chamber. You guys might know what I'm talking about. It's this, like, basically giant underground bunker that apparently was built by Microsoft for some type of sound engineering or sound testing purposes, and it's, it's literally the quietest place in the world. It's like this giant underground studio, I guess you would say. It's this huge room deep underground with just an insane amount of, of noise-canceling or sound-deadening treatments and equipment inside of it. And apparently, it is so quiet in there that you can scream and not hear yourself. So apparently, this place is so quiet that you can hear, it's kind of gross, but apparently you can hear your own bodily functions, like you can hear your heart beating, you can hear your food digesting, you can hear all the stuff that happens inside of you because there's no other sound to drown that out. Those are literally the, because they're internal, so they're the only things that are not affected by this, like, echo-proof environment that you're in. And apparently, people cannot stand being in this, this chamber for like more than a few seconds, I guess in most cases, because it's just so eerie and uncomfortable and unpleasant to not hear anything except for what happens inside of you.
So, of course, the first thing I thought when I heard that is, that's, that's just the physiological version of severe, complete anhedonia. That's what that is. It, it's when essentially you become closed off to all output from the world, like it doesn't do anything anymore. And that made me think it was probably time to do some more content on anhedonia. So if that little metaphor makes sense to you, you probably are going to understand what I'm about to say here. But anhedonia can literally steal your life from you because it creates this chain reaction, which I've talked about on here before, where once things, if you're in a period where nothing is feeling good to you, where you don't look forward to anything or don't enjoy anything, a very natural consequence of that is going to be that you stop doing those things because essentially at that point, you feel like you're working for free. I'm doing these things, I'm getting no emotional reward from doing these things, therefore I do not wish to continue doing these things. And and that's often where our lives, when we're dealing with, and I'm, I'm just going to say depression. I know there's other reasons people experience anhedonia, but I'm going to assume, you know, if you're following this content at this point, it's probably because you, you understand the experience of depression. So when you're in a depressive episode and you stop doing these things, you stop, in some cases, doing anything, right? Sometimes we stop interacting with people, taking care of ourselves, sometimes we stop eating. I mean, it can get that bad. It, it just starts to ruin your life. You're in this downward spiral that, that seems like there's no way out.
We've explored a couple of other loopholes to that before, but there's a brand new one I want to talk to you today, and it relates to time frames. There's a way that even in the midst of that complete void of reward, that complete absence of positive feeling, that you can still keep your life going, and that it will eventually pay off for you. So let me introduce the concept first, then I'm going to give you a couple of examples, and then at the end, we will really, like, solidify a strategy that I want you guys to try here.
The concept is, when we think about doing something, like you think about going out with your friends or watching a movie or taking a vacation or something like that, the time frame that we're thinking about when we try to determine, will I enjoy that thing or not? Will that expenditure of time and energy and attention be worth it? Will I get as much or more from doing that thing as what I put into it? We typically only think about the moment when we're doing it. We think about, it's technically the future when you're thinking about it, but it's what will be the present when you're engaging in the behavior. Hopefully, that made sense. So again, you're thinking about going out with friends. The question you ask yourself is, will I enjoy the period of time that I am with those people? I know you may not actually be narratively asking that question in your head, but when you try to decide, should I go or not? That's, essentially, that's the underlying question that you're actually trying to answer, right? Is it worth it? That question is a mistake because it is only considering one of the three time frames in which an experience can bring you joy.
Any experience that you may do in the future can bring you joy while you're doing it. That's the obvious one. I don't really think I need to explain that anymore, do you? Does it feel good while you're doing it? That, that's the question there. Some things bring us joy or excitement or other forms of reward before we actually do them, and I'm sure you've experienced that, right? You've been excited to do things that haven't happened yet because you thought they were probably going to feel good, or you thought they'd probably be a good experience. Or sometimes, when we're really deep in the depths of a depression, sometimes one of the things that keeps us going is like, I got that concert in a month, or I'm going to that convention in two months, and I really don't want to miss these things. And so even though I'm not enjoying my life right now, I'm going to stick around a bit longer because I want to make sure I get this experience. I think this experience, even in the midst of this darkness I'm in, I think that day, that week, that moment, whatever, is going to be a good one. So you can get reward from just anticipating an experience, right?
The third one that I think, this, this is the real takeaway message from this episode. The third time frame is after. And you can enjoy an experience after it has happened, even if you did not enjoy the anticipation of the experience or the experience itself. So even if, in other words, leading up to it, you weren't that excited about it, and you went and did it, it still didn't feel good, you may still experience an emotional reward from having done that thing later on in your life. It might be the next day, it might be the next week, it might be months or years later, but it can happen. And we typically fail to consider that third time frame. We usually only focus on the present, sometimes present and the anticipation. And if we don't see much possibility for reward, we usually turn down the opportunity. I'm not going to look forward to it, I'm not going to like doing it, therefore I'm not going to do it. This is how we end up in those vicious cycles where we basically just don't do anything because our brains trick us into thinking nothing is worthwhile, and we don't consider the third time frame.
I know that this is a little, little bit of an abstract idea, so I'm going to give you two examples here of how this can get disrupted and how you can overcome it. So anxiety tends to disrupt anticipation of reward the most. This, they all flow together to some degree, but if you have a chronic anxiety disorder, what you probably know is when you make plans, the, even, even if it's something you really want to do, something you're really excited about, something you're passionate about, the period of time between having made the plan and actually doing the thing is often an unpleasant period of time, right? Because you start to stress, you start to think about all the things that could go wrong, or, you know, all the ways you might make a fool out of yourself, or what's going to be difficult about it. And often with anxiety, we don't enjoy the buildup to even positive or pleasant events, even if we believe we are likely to enjoy the event itself.
Give you an example of this. A few weeks back, we planned a trip to Chicago for my daughter's birthday, our daughter's birthday, I should say. She doesn't belong only to me because she really loves aquariums, and the Shedd Aquarium, of course, is one of the greatest aquariums in the world, and she'd never seen it. So it seemed like a no-brainer. I currently live in a city of about 125,000 people, and that's honestly about my limit. I'm not a city guy. Um, I don't like driving in cities, I don't like parking in cities, I don't like walking in cities. I like big open spaces and acreages and forests and lakes and long roads with few cars on them. I'm a country guy. That's, that's my comfort zone, right? And so even though I knew that this was going to be a good experience, not just for her, but for all of us, I knew we were going to enjoy it, I did not experience a lot of excitement or joy in the period of time between scheduling this Chicago trip and actually getting there. Mostly I experienced stress about the logistics of the trip itself. You know, are we, what kind of count, what kind of traffic are we going to encounter? Did we pack everything? Honestly, that's more my wife's job, but, um, these are all things, you know, these are all things that can get messed up, right? These are all the things we worry about when we've got something big coming up. So I don't even necessarily have a lot of anxiety in most situations these days. Once upon a time, I did, but my average anxiety level is pretty low on a normal day. But driving through downtown Chicago at night is not a normal day for me. You know, some people live there, I don't. And so I had a lot of anxiety thinking about doing it, and then even more when we were actually doing it.
So we got there Friday night, did the aquarium stuff on Saturday. The actual experience of it was mostly enjoyable. It was a really good time, and I knew it was going to be. I wasn't doubting that, but I had to like overcome, I had to climb this mountain first, basically, this mountain of my own stress about the traveling there, about dealing with the toll roads and, and, you know, where did we stop for gas? How often? All the kids need to pee? All this, all this stuff you've got to plan, right? And so I only really enjoyed it in the moment. I didn't, I didn't get to enjoy that excitement. My kids did because they didn't have to drive, right? So, you know, every day that got closer to the trip, they are getting more and more excited. I'm not. But the actual day was good. So anxiety tends to rob us of the joy that comes from that time frame, that first third of it. And because of that, we often end up not doing things, right? Even if we know the event itself will be good, we think about all the lead-up, all the build-up, all the stress we're going to feel between now and then, and sometimes we decide it is not worth climbing that mountain. I know the view at the top would be beautiful, but the climb is just too much, and I'm just not up for it. Sometimes, when we are able to focus on how much we know we will enjoy it when we do it, when we get to the top of that mountain, when we finally see the summit and look around and say, man, look what I just did. That, that's going to be worth it. So sometimes you can use that knowledge to push yourself past it. Sometimes you can't.
Now, sometimes the opposite happens, and this tends to be more related to depression, right? Sometimes we are looking forward to something, and we do think, or we do hope, that it's going to be a good experience. We are counting on that, we are trusting that. And when you get there, when it starts, and you finally start to, you know, finally in the moment that you've been waiting for for who knows how long, and you realize, I'm not feeling it. And it's not because there's anything wrong with the experience. Like, this looks the way I thought it was going to look, the things that I thought were going to happen are happening, but I'm just noticing nothing is really connecting inside of me right now. I'm, I'm looking at what's unfolding around me, and I'm logically understanding that I should feel really good right now, but it's just not there. Maybe it's only a fraction of what you thought it was supposed to be, maybe it's not there at all. That's the anhedonia kicking in, and that's the depression disrupting your ability to enjoy the present moment.
Now, I suspect many people watching or listening to this experience both depression and anxiety. And if that's the case, then you get that really nasty overlap of, I'm probably not going to enjoy the buildup to it because of my anxiety, and I'm probably not going to enjoy it even once I get past my anxiety. What's waiting for me on the other side of that anxiety is depression and anhedonia. So even if I push myself through all the stress and all this burden to do this thing, I'm still not going to get much out of it. But you probably noticed that the time frame that's not factored in to either of those equations is that third time frame that I was discussing with you earlier, the future. The emotions you experience in the future when you look back on things you have done in the past are not the same emotions that you experienced when that thing was happening. You need to understand this if you want to have any chance of dealing with depression and anxiety and anhedonia. You can have emotions in the future about things happening right now that will be different than what you're feeling right now, and it can go either way. It's probably easier to think of examples when you have less pleasant emotions in the future about something. So, for example, you might have really good memories with somebody that now make you really sad to think about because that person is gone. Maybe it's a friend who you lost touch with, maybe it's a family member who's passed on, maybe it's a partner who you're not with anymore. And these were good memories, like they're not memories when they're happening, but you know what I mean, these were good moments when they were happening, you enjoyed them, they brought you pleasure, they brought you joy. And now, because that person is gone or your circumstances have changed, when you look back on this experience, you feel grief, you feel sorrow, you feel loss, you feel sadness. You don't feel the happiness that you felt then. But it can go the other way too. You can experience happiness or joy or achievement or accomplishment in the future about things that didn't feel good when you did them. You need to factor this in if you don't want anhedonia to be able to destroy your life.
So let me give you an example of this one too, and then we'll wrap up with some practical applications. When I was 17 years old, my father and I spent about nine months planning a scuba diving trip. And something you should know about me, a couple things you should know about me, I love water, I love fish. And mid to late adolescence was the absolute worst time of my life. And so essentially, the circumstances here were, this was a dream come true vacation being planned for me in the midst of one of my darkest periods of life. So it was this, there's this interesting overlap of this amazing thing happening at a time when I felt awful in my life, felt awful. And we, we had to do all this buildup, right? So we had to, we had to take lessons and get certified and, um, figure out where we're going to go and like what kind of dive we wanted to do, what kind of stuff did we want to see. My dad took care of most of that, but I did have a, I did have a hand in that process. And I remember not feeling that excited about it, not because I didn't think it was going to be fun, but just because I was thinking about, you know, the plane ride there. And I was, I was literally nocturnal at this point in my life, so I was like, what, I'm going to be asleep during the day? Well, he's going to want to do stuff, and then I'm going to be awake at night just in a hotel room by myself with nothing to do while he's sleeping. Like, how, how is this even going to work? So leading up to it, I, I, I had more stress than excitement or joy.
And then, you know, we, we did it. So we fly there, we get there, and there's a moment I remember so distinctly, which was the first day. So we get on this charter boat, we go like three, four miles out in the ocean in the Florida Keys to some coral reef. We get in the water, and I'm not even, we're not even under the water yet, we're just floating on the surface, right? I got all my gear on, we're just getting ready to get started. And I remember just looking down in the ocean as I'm bobbing there in the waves and just seeing hundreds of fish of every color you could imagine, just this unbelievable natural beauty, like I had never seen anything like that before. And my logical brain was in awe and was like, oh my gosh, that is an incredible sight. That is so cool. And I actually, this is a little weird, but you might, you might get it. I felt that thought get to, like, like start in my brain and get to, like, where my emotions would happen, and I anticipated this feeling of like awe, like, or joy or reward, like, like, wow, what an amazing thing this is. And it just stopped. Like it hit a brick wall. And I, I remember in that moment thinking, like, oh man, even this can't get through to me right now. This is a dream come true, and I'm aware of it. Even this can't break through that wall. What am I going to do?
There are a few pictures of me on that trip. Um, I might try to add them to the YouTube video, just put them on the bottom here, because they're, it's a little bit funny to me now. Like, it's, it's not funny because we're literally in this paradise looking place, right? This wonderful tropical environment, and then there's me, my long black wet hair, I was in kind of this goth phase, my hair was wet because we were in the water, obviously, just pale as can be, looking as depressed as a person can be, like, in paradise. And it's just this crazy juxtaposition, but it matched perfectly what I felt inside. That the discrepancy between my surroundings and what I looked like was the same discrepancy occurring inside of me, between my logical mind and my emotional world, basically. And it wasn't, this is crucial, other people in your life won't always understand this, but you need to understand this about yourself. It wasn't because I didn't appreciate it. It wasn't because I didn't appreciate all the hard work that my dad put into planning this trip, or, or the expenses that went into it. I'm sure it wasn't cheap. It wasn't because I didn't appreciate the incredible natural beauty that surrounded me. I appreciated and was very consciously aware of all of those things throughout the trip. In fact, I kept reminding myself of those things over and over and over again in an attempt to break through to my heart and to make this incredible experience feel like what I knew it was supposed to feel like. And it just didn't work.
I don't actually remember exactly how long we were there for. I want to say it was maybe three or four days. It was a fairly brief trip, and there really weren't a lot of cool stuff happened. Like that thing I described just now, that was just the first day. I mean, I remember we did, we did a charter fishing trip, we caught some really big grouper. Um, a moray eel swam between my legs. That one actually scared me a little bit too, but it was also kind of cool. Like, there were a lot of amazing things that happened. There were a lot of highlights. It was a great trip, but at no point did it reach my emotional world. At no point during that trip did I feel this explosion of joy that I knew should be there. So stressed leading up to the trip, didn't really get much out of it when I did it. Waste of time, right? Waste of money? Wasn't worth it? No, not true. Not true at all. Because when I look back on that trip now, I feel incredible joy. Because I, I remember it. It was such a memorable experience that even though I wasn't feeling the feelings I should have been, those images, there's certain just flashes of things that happened on that trip that were so memorable, so memorable that they just stuck in my brain. They're core memories that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. And now that I am in a different place emotionally than I was then, my life is a lot different at 40 than it was at 17. I still have access to those memories. They are still in my mind, and I am now in a place where I can pull up those memories and replay them in my brain and experience the feelings to access the emotions that I should have had then. It's a lot like when you're a kid, maybe you remember listening to a song or watching a movie or reading a book that was a little too advanced for you, and, and you didn't really, you didn't follow the plot, or you didn't really understand what it was about. And maybe you re-experienced that thing as an adult and you're like, oh, that's what this was about. I get it now. It's a lot like that feeling. If you know what I'm talking about, you can have an appropriate emotional reaction to things from your past, even if you didn't have it happen, even if you didn't experience that emotion during the period of time when you were experiencing that event.
I really hope that made sense. I know it's kind of out there. If it did, if, if it didn't make sense, leave a comment and let me know, and I'll try to use my text words to explain it better. Um, if it did make sense, then here's what I want you to try to do with that information. When you're, when you have opportunities to do things during a period of high depression or high anxiety or both, I want you to keep that third time frame in mind. I want you to try and, okay, this is asking a lot, big leap of faith here, okay? But use me as if you relate to me, use my story as an example, because that means you and I, we have some things in common, right? I want you to try to believe, maybe even trust, oh, let's say, be open to the possibility, worst case scenario, that at some point in the future, you will be in a healthier place. And when you are in a healthier place, you will be able to go back and experience some of the emotions that should have been present during the experiences you had in periods of heightened depression and anxiety. If you can keep that in your mind, and if you can believe in that, and if you can still get yourself to do things during this phase of your life, knowing, I may not feel it right now, but I hope that I will be able to later, then you are basically investing in the future. You're, you're creating these emotional opportunities that you are going to cash in on later. It's like putting money in a mutual fund. You're probably not going to touch that money for a while. It's not, it's not going to help you pay the bills. You're not, it's not going to really bring you a lot of joy or excitement, you know, they move slowly, but you're trusting that at some point in the future, you're going to be able to cash in on that investment you made. That's what you're doing when you still engage in in experiences that have high potential for reward during periods of time when you cannot feel that reward.
If you don't do that, what you're going to end up with, you're, you're, you're going to end up with a period of time in your life that looks like my life from ages 14 to 18, which is, you end up with a black hole. You end up with just kind of this blank space in your life where there should be experiences, but there's just not much because you hardly did anything memorable for that four-year period of my life. I remember almost nothing, almost nothing. Now, there are probably many reasons for that too, like I also wasn't taking good care of myself, I wasn't sleeping well, I wasn't eating right, I was very sedentary, um, I wasn't managing substances as well as I should have. So my, my brain wasn't very healthy. So some of it, I'm sure, is that my brain wasn't able to encode memories the way it probably should have. But that's not the only reason. The other reason is I didn't do anything. I, I had very few experiences worth remembering. And so it's all just a big blur of nothingness, and I just have this gap in my life where good stuff should be. And I know now that although I wouldn't have felt much differently about my life then, even if I had been doing a lot of things that could potentially feel good, I would feel differently about my life right now. I would have more happy memories to look back on. I would have more of a sense of having lived in adolescence. I, I barely feel like I lived it. Like there's just nothing there.
So I hope that this makes sense to you. Like I said, if it doesn't, let me know, and I'll do my best to follow up on it. Um, this is a newer idea that I've been, I've been kind of running through my head for about a week. So anytime I have a new idea, I always have to kind of like let it bake for a while first, and I'm always a little wary that I might have taken it out of the oven too quickly. So if you feel like I did today, you can tell me, and I'll work on improving this idea. But as always, I hope you got good value out of this. And if you did, please take the time to share, like, leave a comment, you know, do whatever you can do to, uh, to help me get this message out to more people because that's all I'm trying to do. You may notice I'm, I'm not selling a course or or a product or anything like that. I'm, I'm literally just trying to help. That's my only goal. And you can help me by just putting my word out there to more people. That's all I'll ever ask. Okay, best of luck to you. Take care.