Anhedonia is the inability to feel pleasure. It's a common symptom of depression as well as other mental health disorders. Most people understand what pleasure feels like. They expect certain things in life to make them happy.
But the most overlooked fact is that your brain isn't wired to make you happy. The main purpose of your brain is to keep you safe and make sure you survive. Your body, and particularly your brain, don't care whether you're happy. According to research published in Science Advances, our brains are 40,000 years old.
However, in some cases, the inability to feel happy in spite of good circumstances could be a sign of an underlying mental health issue such as depression or anxiety. Anhedonia, which is the persistent inability to experience pleasure, could also be at play here.
The pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine contains tyrosine and phenylalanine, a pair of amino acids that occur in protein-packed foods like fish, meat and beans. The mere act of eating right can help you trick yourself into being happy.
One study even suggests that smiling can help us recover faster from stress and reduce our heart rate. In fact, it might even be worth your while to fake a smile and see where it gets you. There's been some evidence that forcing a smile can still bring you a boost in your mood and happiness level.
Exercise. Many studies show that exercise - aerobic, resistance and mind-body - all improve symptoms and severity of depression. Exercise reshapes the depressed brain, somehow activating the function of related brain areas.
Feeling not happy, not sad, just empty is an entirely normal feeling that indicates an underlying cause. It might be due to changing life situations, hormones, traumatic events, routine, lack of purpose, or mental health. Self-awareness is a significant part of identifying your symptoms or what you're going through.
Why is life so hard? Because we are human, full of emotions, desires, needs, and fears. We have bodies that are susceptible to disease and injury. We need food, shelter, and human connection to thrive.
Research by the National Institutes of Health shows that you lose gray matter volume (GMV) when you suffer from depression. This loss is caused by parts of your brain shrinking due to the hormone cortisol impeding the growth of your brain cells. The more serious depression a person suffers, the more GMV they lose.
There's growing evidence that several parts of the brain shrink in people with depression. Specifically, these areas lose gray matter volume (GMV). That's tissue with a lot of brain cells. GMV loss seems to be higher in people who have regular or ongoing depression with serious symptoms.
Feeling as if you don't care about anything anymore may be related to anhedonia or apathy. Anhedonia is a mental state in which people have an inability to feel pleasure. It is often a symptom of mental health conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder, and substance use.
What drives this is underlying anxiety. Common forms include worrying, perfectionism, struggle with making decisions, and excessive control over yourself and others. Keys to coping include getting your rational brain online, using your gut reactions as important information, and taking acceptable risks.
Each person's recovery is different. Some recover in a few weeks or months. But for others, depression is a long-term illness. In about 20% to 30% of people who have an episode of depression, the symptoms don't entirely go away.
And, since depression is often a long-term disease, people needs long-term treatments for it. “There are clear differences between a healthy brain and a depressed brain,” Dr. Katz says. “And the exciting thing is, when you treat that depression effectively, the brain goes back to looking like a healthy brain.”
A rictus is a frozen, fake smile. If the star of a play finds herself overcome by stage fright, she might forget her lines and stand, trembling, her mouth twisted into a rictus. The word rictus most often describes a smile that doesn't convey delight or happiness — instead, it's a kind of horrified, involuntary grin.
New international research has shown that posing with a fake smile can make people feel happier, but it doesn't change their levels of anger or anxiety. The scientists also found people who viewed positive images felt happier than those who didn't view the images.
The fact is, as Dr. Isha Gupta a neurologist from IGEA Brain and Spine explains, a smile spurs a chemical reaction in the brain, releasing certain hormones including dopamine and serotonin. “Dopamine increases our feelings of happiness. Serotonin release is associated with reduced stress.