The Reason You’re So F**king Depressed (According To Science)

The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for it’s own sake leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.

— Dr. Anna Lembke in the book Dopamine Nation.

Depression is the result of a broken pleasure button.

Like a broken bone the only way to fix it is to stop using it until it heals.

To do this, first ask yourself what pain is it you’re trying to escape by hitting the pleasure button so damn often, and deal with it at the source.

Then once you know why you crave stimulation in such massive quantities…

Start removing your most artificially stimulating activities 1 by 1 until you’re left with activities you’d catch our ancestors participating in.

Things like Socializing, exercising, exploring, the things nature intended to make us happy.

Here’s how I did it.

My Experience With Anhedonia (The inability to feel pleasure)

Back in college I got prescribed adderal, right?

For those of you who aren’t in the medical field, adderal is literally amphetamine salts… you know like meth amphetamine.

And all amphetemines, meth or otherwise have one thing in common.

They make you feel really REALLY good.

You see after I started taking adderal everything in my life got better.

Why?

Because everything became interesting:

I started enjoying my homework and getting straight A’s.

I started enjoying talking to strangers and learning how to socialize.

I started investing and learning how to make money online.

Everything was going great, that was until I started to develop a tolerance.

So what do I do?

I get the dose increased.

A few weeks start to go by then the tolerance starts creeping up again.

The last time I raised the dose I started getting cotton mouth and overheating so instead I started looking up ways to make it last longer like taking it with coffee or using neurotransmitter precursors.

This worked so well, I felt like my brain shut off and thus began the worst 6 months of my life.

I became profoundly anhedonic.

This was SO bad I lost the ability to cry.

I didn’t know you needed dopamine to cry but apparently you do.

Imagine waking up seeing everything in black in white.

Imagine hearing the funniest joke ever, and being PHYSICALLY INCAPABLE of laughing.

Imagine wanting to die, but being physically incapable of even anticipating the pleasure associated with oblivion.

I literally felt like I lost my soul.

This was the reality I was forced to live with until one day I told my psychiatrist I wanted out.

I couldn’t live in a world devoid of color, laughter, crying, or anticipation anymore.

The first few weeks without adderal I started binge eating, I can only assume in my brains febble attempt to make up for the dopamine it was used to.

Then I just existed with a low level of background depression, for months.

Then the color started coming back.

Then I got the ability to laugh again.

Then I could cry again.

Then I could find interest in the things that I was studying again.

That’s when I learned one of the most important lessons I’ve ever encountered:

When you drown your brain in pleasure,

An EQUAL amount of pain will follow.

When you can sit with pain.

It will eventually turn to pleasure.

If you want the pain to stop.

Stop doing the “fun” activities.

Sit with the pain.

Then the once “boring” things will start to become interesting again.

Here’s how you can start doing it:

Understand Why You Seek Pleasure To Begin With

No one wakes up and says to themselves,

“You know what? I want to go inject heroin today.”

They go do these things because they’re trying to numb the pain.

So step #1 is to start curing what’s causing the pain.

This is SUPER anti-climatic but trust me I’m on the money here.

The thing causing me the most pain almost every single day the most was:

• Sleep deprivation
• Loneliness
• Purposelessness

So the first step to stop seeing out things to numb the pain, is to put out these fires causing you the most pain to begin with.

For sleep:

For better sleep, literally just start practicing sleep hygiene consistently here’s a link to the CDC’s sleep hygiene guidelines:

If you want to go overboard, peep huberman’s sleep toolkit here:

For loneliness:

For loneliness to make friends simply do this.

List things you’d love to go try, or go to.

Go to them, and invite people.

The fastest cure to loneliness is by being the initiator.

You really think people are gonna say no if you invite them to go drive go-karts then get pizza after?

If you want to get really good at this start reading social skills books.

Start working out.

And start solo traveling to practice meeting strangers.

These steps changed my life.

For purposelessness:

I’m about to tell you your purpose brace yourself.

Your purpose = Your Biggest Problem In Your Life.

If you want to die, your purpose is: How to create a life you don’t feel the need to end.

After you solve that, your purpose becomes the next biggest problem you have.

Mine progression was like this:

• How to cure anhedonia
• How to be productive without adderal
• How to get into my major
• How to get a girlfriend
• How to get my first job out of college
• How to start a business…

Purpose is like an onion, whatever you problem is…

Once you solve it address the next layer… and the next.

You’ll never reach the core, but you get deeper and deeper into finding yourself.

Once you know how to stop the pain, bring back the pleasure.

To bring back the pleasure…

You need to start removing the things you consider “pleasant.”

• The drinking
• The porn
• The smoking
• The fast food
• The social media

If you think you can’t live without it, you should probably put it on the list.

Don’t do this all at once, just start with the worst offenders.

Then start removing about one every 30 days.

I got started I started by removing video games.

Then I removed social media.

Then I removed porn after I got a partner.

Then I threw away my television.

Then the more “fun” things I removed…

The higher my default level of happiness became.

Right now I just wake up happy, not because my life is all that remarkable.

But because I don’t expose it to stimulation over and over throughout the day.

So when I do receive stimulation.

A kiss.

Chocolate.

A new song.

It hits hard.

In A Nutshell How To Stop Being So Depressed

Depression is the result of a broken pleasure button.

Like a broken bone the only way to fix it is to stop using it until it heals.

To do this, first ask yourself why you hit it to begin with and remove those cues.

Then start removing the most stimulating activities 1 by 1 until you’re left with mostly activities you’d catch our ancestors participating in.

• Reading
• Exercising
• Socializing & Laughing
• Cooking
• Dancing
• Kissing

Then like me, you may find yourself waking up one day and notice.

You no longer hate your life anymore.

My brothers, if you want more heat like this…

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