The low-down: In the opening paragraph of Tanith Carey’s new book, Feeling ‘Blah’?, she asks us to consider whether we feel fully alive, or as though we are merely going through the motions. She realised that for some time, though she wasn’t depressed, and on paper her life looked great, she felt a sense of disconnect.

Experiences that should have left her feeling elated and joyful, gave her barely a flicker of satisfaction and left her feeling flat.

As a journalist and author, her curiosity about this state of being was piqued and she went in search of answers. She discovered that these feelings of ‘blah’ and ‘meh’ had a name: anhedonia.

To find out more, Carey interviewed some of the world’s leading neurologists to see how pleasure is formed in the brain and why it might be lacking. In her quest to find out how to get feelings of joy flowing again, she looks at the latest research across psychiatry, psychology, endocrinology and nutrition.

What is anhedonia? The word comes from the Greek term for “without pleasure”. Roughly speaking, it describes the inability to enjoy things and these persistent feelings of ‘blah’.

Carey breaks it down into three distinct parts: not looking forward to activities, not enjoying them while you’re doing them and tending to look back on them negatively (so you don’t want to do them again). All of these are flipsides of a finely calibrated reward system (made up of wanting, liking and learning), that in the case of anhedonia, has been blunted and thrown out of kilter.

In her exploration of the science behind anhedonia, she finds that like any mental state, it’s on a spectrum: “Like a dimmer switch, it can dull your capacity to experience joy just a little, or a great deal.”

“A palette of muted greys”

Carey describes anhedonia as the grey space on the mental health spectrum between depression and happiness. As if the world no longer seems to be “in glorious technicolour and more in a palette of muted greys”. Her book offers helpful insights into why this might be, along with practical, evidence-based strategies to address standalone anhedonia.

It is worth noting here that anhedonia can be both a precursor to, and a symptom of, clinical depression: “a red flag that the brain’s reward system is no longer working as well as it should.” Carey outlines the differences between depression and anhedonia and advises seeking a diagnosis from a medical professional if in any doubt.

“If you have standalone anhedonia, you may not be happy, but you may not be miserable either. But you have probably lost delight in the little things”, she observes.

Thumbs up: Feeling “Blah”? is grounded in science and Carey’s delivery is intelligent, accessible and down-to-earth.

While not all feelings of “blah” relate to how our brains are designed, or the stresses of modern-day life, an understanding of the chasm that’s emerged between what the brain was designed to do (“not for pleasure, but survival”) and the demands placed on it by modern lifestyles is an important part of understanding anhedonia.

Carey looks at how the always-on culture of the modern world has taken advantage of our basic reward circuits and overloaded them, making “dopamine addicts of us all, blunting our sensitivity to pleasure and letting stress hormones prevail.” Stress hormones that in turn “drown out feelings of joy, love and calm.”

How to feel happy: Understanding that the brain’s “primary role is to keep you alive long enough to reproduce”, and not to generate pleasure for its own sake, gives us a more realistic baseline to work with when it comes to our expectations.

“It’s a reminder that happiness is never supposed to be a permanent state of mind, despite what the modern world – and companies who want to sell us things – tell us”, writes Carey.

That’s not to say “moments of joy can’t be achieved, but it may take a little more conscious work than we have been told to expect”, she goes on to say.

This conscious work includes harnessing your happiness chemicals and creating a lifestyle that beats ‘blah’ (strategy-packed chapters on both of these). And if anhedonia is essentially a breakdown in the brain’s reward system, it stands to reason that to get things back on track it’s necessary to get the system’s component parts working together again.

As is often the case when it comes to progress and self-improvement, this process begins with awareness. To beat anhedonia it’s important to identify what’s important and then find the motivation to do it. Carey suggests that the first step is to decide what you want to do and then actively look forward to it. Secondly, you need to be fully present in the moment, and free from worry and self-consciousness, to make the most of the experience. Thirdly, you need to remember the event and be grateful for it, so you recall it positively, and want to do it again.

A note on phone use: Carey has no doubt that our compulsion to constantly check our phones is a behavioural addiction that’s contributing to anhedonia and standing in the way of meaningful experiences.

“It’s not easy to enjoy the here and now when we are clutching an object which noisily demands so much attention”, she writes.

The chapter on blah-beating lifestyle changes suggests a number of ways to put boundaries in place around phone use. One such suggestion is to create friction by putting a rubber band around your phone.

“As you will have to remove it to use the phone screen, it becomes a brake that forces you to pause and ask if you really need to check it. Or set a lock screen that reminds you that the most important moment in your life is now, and not to waste it unnecessarily.”

A combination of easy to implement and practical ideas such as these, plus scientific insights and evidence-backed ways to get feel-good chemicals flowing again makes this a thought-provoking foundation for banishing those feelings of ‘blah’.

• Want to find out how to boost your mood today? Read this extract from Feeling ‘Blah’?
• Feeling ‘Blah’?: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless and How to Recapture Life’s Highs by Tanith Carey (Welbeck Balance) is out now in hardback.
• Lead picture credit: Julia Caesar on Unsplash