Thread by @thetomzyd

You’re not lazy.
You’ve lost the ability to feel pleasure.

Chronic stress rewires your reward system—killing motivation, joy, and drive.

But this isn’t your fault.

If you've never heard of anhedonia...SAVE. THIS. THREAD: 🧵

You stop enjoying work.
You feel distant from people.
Even things you used to love feel like a chore.

You’re not broken, you’re disconnected from the part of your brain that feels reward.

It’s not burnout from doing too much.
It’s anhedonia—the inability to feel anything at all.

It starts in the brain.

Chronic stress activates your HPA axis, a system designed for survival, not happiness.

This floods your body with cortisol and weakens dopamine signaling in your reward circuits.

Your brain gets stuck in threat mode.

When dopamine pathways get dulled, motivation dies.

You stop wanting, doing, caring.
Not because you’re lazy, because your neurochemistry changed.

This is called anhedonia.
And it’s far more common than most people think.

There are 2 types:

• Consummatory – You do the thing, feel nothing.
• Anticipatory – You don’t even want to do the thing.

Most people struggling with stress and burnout experience both.

But they have no name for it until now.

Unchecked, anhedonia leads to:
• Emotional numbness
• Isolation
• Chronic fatigue
• Loss of meaning

It’s a neurological shutdown, not a personality flaw.
The reward system goes dark to protect you.

But it can be reset.

Here’s the truth:

You can’t “push through” anhedonia.
You have to retrain your nervous system.
This isn’t mindset work. It’s neuroscience.

Here are 5 proven techniques to restore your reward sensitivity:👇

1. Dopamine Decompression

Reduce overstimulation:
• Cut back on rapid dopamine spikes (scrolling, caffeine, porn, sugar)
• Replace with monotask activities (walking, deep work)

Why it works:
This restores your baseline sensitivity to dopamine.

2. Vagal Nerve Activation

Use physiological signals to exit stress mode:
• Cold exposure (face splash, shower)
• Slow, diaphragmatic breathing (6 breaths/min)
• Humming or gargling

These stimulate the vagus nerve, shifting your body from fight-or-flight to calm-and-reward.

3. Behavioral Activation (BA)

This is a gold-standard depression treatment:
• Schedule small, achievable activities tied to past sources of joy
• Do them regardless of current motivation

Action precedes emotion. Not the other way around.

4. Frictionless Goal Structuring

WOOP method (Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan):
• Set specific, time-bound micro-goals
• Anticipate emotional obstacles
• Create “if-then” plans to overcome resistance

It improves motivation by activating the brain’s goal-reward pathways (prefrontal cortex + striatum).

5. Structured Cognitive Reframing (CBT)

Challenge distorted thinking patterns using proven CBT techniques:
• Write down recurring negative thoughts
• Label the cognitive distortion
• Reframe with evidence-based alternatives

This improves prefrontal regulation of limbic activity, critical for emotional stability and reward perception.

None of these are hacks.

They’re physiological and psychological tools backed by clinical research.

Stress hijacked my nervous system and I didn’t even realize it.

If that’s you too, read this:

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Share this thread, someone you love needs this.

What’s one insight from this thread that hit hardest? 👇