4 Ways to Get Some Pleasure Back Into Your Life

"Daily life can be full of both pleasure and pain, but the trick to finding fulfillment is to allow the pleasure to outweigh the pain. Consider how you feel when you get up in the morning. What’s the first thought that pops into you head? Is it that you’re looking forward to what the day will bring or that you don’t even really care? It’s going to be the same old same old.

According to a new study by Gabriela Khazanov of the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center and colleagues (2022), your feelings of “blah” may be a sign that you’re experiencing anhedonia, or “diminished interest or pleasure in usual activities” (p.256). It’s not that you’re miserable; it’s just that you’re not particularly happy, either.

Maybe you haven’t always felt this way. Perhaps there was a time when you couldn’t wait to get your day started, not necessarily because you were doing anything very exciting, but because you got simple delight from simple things. Even something as mundane as watering your plants seemed to make you feel a tiny surge of enjoyment as you notice a new bud that’s coming into bloom.

Treating the Anhedonia Factor

If you can relate to the idea of anhedonia, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you would fit the diagnostic criteria for depression. Khazanov and her colleagues focus their paper on clinical depression, but as you read about the treatments they propose, you can still pull out helpful suggestions for getting more zest out of your everyday life, especially when it comes to finding that route to more rewarding experiences.

Returning to the idea that even if anhedonia is inherent in an individual’s personality, it can still be treated, the VA-led team provides very practical suggestions for enhancing your ability to derive pleasure out of life through changing your behavior with respect to rewards. All you have to do is adapt these four behavior-oriented elements of their proposed therapeutic approach:

1. Reward valuation: To get to a positive outcome, no matter what that outcome is, requires at least some effort.

2. Reward anticipation: People high in anhedonia look at a potentially rewarding situation as one that they couldn’t benefit from.

3. Reward learning: When something good happens to you, how do you translate that success into your plans for future efforts?

4. Reward delay: Many rewards come immediately but there are certainly many others that require some time to transpire.

To sum up, savoring the good can help you build back your feelings of enjoyment that, over time, can allow you to translate those boosts to your mood into daily sources of inspiration. Restoring your ability to derive pleasure from the past will help you build those feelings of fulfillment that you can then become able to project into the future."

*We all have moments in life where we can become complacent and that's normal! What's important is to make sure we are trying our best to move forward. I think being able to find happiness in the little things is really important to maintaining happiness when things get into a standstill. The tips above are a few that can help you retrain your brain to gain more pleasure out of the little things! What are some ways you practice finding happiness when you may be feeling more bored in life than normal?*

#Pleasure #Rewarding #Anhedonia

Please find the full article at Psychology Today.