Why Does Life Sometimes Feel Emotionally Numb? - Dr Scott Eilers - #966

How would you describe to somebody who's never felt it what depression feels like? It's tricky'cause it can feel like a lot of different things. It depends on the person, but for a lot of people Depression is not as much The sadness and the despair as it's often portrayed as.

And it often is more of a numbness or an emptiness. So one of the core symptoms of depression that nearly everyone experiences to some degree is what's called anhedonia. The literal translation of anhedonia is the loss of joy. So the reward system in your brain, right, your dopamine pathway that causes you to experience emotions like Enjoyment when you're doing something fun or achievement after you accomplish something. It basically stops functioning. It can it can be a diminished functioning. Or it can be a completely absent functioning.

And what that feels like on a day to day basis is you can go out and do the things you would normally do that would normally make you feel some certain way, and the emotional reaction that you would expect to experience upon completion of those tasks or activities. is either significantly dulled from what you usually experience, or it is just not there at all. It's very much I I hear a lot of people describe it as As if there were a black hole inside of them where their emotions or their reactions should be. And obviously for many people when you start feeling this way

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (76 minutes, 15,016 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.