When I was nine, I discovered I had a superpower. Two classmates and I were playing in the playground, probably some horse-themed game, until one of them choked me in an assassin-style throat hold. It was one of those stupid things children do, perhaps copying something she’d seen on TV, not realising how dangerous it was. I simultaneously dropped to my knees, feeling as if I was floating out of my body, in tremendous pain, unable to breathe or speak. She let go just as a black curtain drew across my view of clouds and sky.

It was not my best playtime. I wasn’t able to speak for several minutes. I felt upset, confused, isolated: where were the adults? Who was looking after me?

In order to self-soothe, I took myself out of the moment and thought ahead to the afternoon. My favourite programme, Kizzy, would be on the television when I got home, where I would be safe on the sofa with my afternoon coffee (I was a sophisticated nine-year-old with Italian parents). I immediately got this warm fuzzy feeling in my chest and felt better. It was going to be all right.

For years afterwards, I’d use this technique to take myself out of a not-so-great moment and soothe myself. And long after Kizzy was the lure, I’d call them my “Kizzy moments” and get that same warm, fuzzy feeling in my chest. Kizzy moments were never about anything big, they were about small, real, joys to come. But it worked. It was my superpower.

But as I got older, and perhaps life got more complicated, Kizzy moments sometimes lost their potency and I couldn’t make myself feel better. I’d feel as flat as a steamrollered cartoon character, struggling to find meaning or purpose. It could take days, sometimes weeks, to return me to 3D.

Feelings like sadness, anger or disappointment are challenging, but they are part of life, and at least they feel active. Feeling flat is inert. There is a horrible stillness, almost an anti-life quality to it, like being stuck in a waiting room for ever. I knew that when that feeling came, none of my usual tricks would work, and I would feel bleak and hopeless.

In my job as the Guardian’s agony aunt, I have the privilege of hearing about people’s real lives: not the polished and often distorted social media versions. Through this, I get a temperature-read on what’s happening to readers around the world, often before any surveys or studies actually quantify it with statistics and pie charts.

About 10 years ago, I started to notice a common theme trickling through, which grew over time. Phrases such as, “What’s wrong with me? I feel flat/numb,” would appear with regularity, right after sentences detailing all the things that should be making them feel happy, such as “I have the job I always dreamed of, a great partner, I live in a fabulous part of the world, etc, and yet … ”

And yet.

Another typical refrain was: “I thought I’d feel differently when I got to this point [of the great job/house/family]. But I kind of feel … nothing.” Around me, people would say the same thing. “How are you?” I would ask. They’d shrug their shoulders and make a “meh” sound and say, “Nothing’s really wrong, but I feel flat/numb,” or, “Like, what’s the point?” It seemed to get worse after the pandemic.

A few years ago I discovered – with some ironic joy – that this flat/numb feeling had a name: anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure. I’m not overly a fan of labels, but finding this one felt reassuring.

Anhedonia was coined by the French psychologist Theodule Ribot in 1896. It was originally used to describe an inability to experience pleasure (hedonia comes from the Greek word for pleasure, hedone), but later the definition widened to include a motivational component: a loss of interest or pleasure in things you previously found rewarding. This definition was spot on: when I felt anhedonic nothing could re-spark me.

Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall was almost called Anhedonia, after the protagonist’s state of mind, until it was decided no one would know what it meant. It’s important to note that anhedonia can be a clinical hallmark of depression, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia. But that wasn’t me. I was generally a contented person. I just periodically felt flat and, seemingly, so did others.

I also noticed that I sometimes couldn’t feel anything at all when I was somewhere I had been really excited to be. As a child, going to Italy was a huge treat, something I looked forward to all year. But often, when I got there, I’d go numb. I remember saying as a child: “I can’t touch the feeling.” Or sometimes it would feel like looking at things through glass. This feeling would dissipate, eventually, and I started to “unfreeze” and feel things.

Tanith Carey felt so strongly about anhedonia and her own experience of it that she wrote Feeling ‘Blah’?: Why Anhedonia Has Left You Joyless and How to Recapture Life’s Highs, which was published last year. The catalyst for her book was getting some amazing news that left her feeling … nothing. But she also describes how, at her own wedding, she didn’t feel “completely there”. When I read it I recognised my own “through the glass” feeling.

Feeling ‘Blah’ talks about the multiple reasons someone may feel anhedonic, such as trauma in your past leading to hypervigilance, burnout and also the trials of modern life. Even menopause: “Oestrogen buffers cortisol [a stress hormone] so you generally feel much more stressed than you used to. And anxiety is the enemy of joy,” Carey explained to me. I asked if, after writing the book, she found people identified with this perhaps new-to-them word “anhedonia”. “Yes, so many people said to me: ‘OMG, I thought that was just me.’” She feels it’s important to recognise anhedonia as a “standalone” condition, as, unchecked, it can lead to longer-term depression.

Recently there have also been anecdotal reports of anhedonia triggered by being on GLP-1 drugs, such as Ozempic. Chatrooms aren’t scientific platforms, but there are a lot of people on Reddit and elsewhere asking “Is it just me?” when they feel flat and numb on semaglutide drugs (the active ingredient in Ozempic). They’re losing weight – and also the desire to do pretty much anything at all.

***

In order to figure out why I felt like I did, I thought it would be useful to work backwards from the maze that leads to joy. If I could find out what gave me joy, perhaps I could fathom out why I sometimes couldn’t feel it. The answer was much more complicated and, dare I say, beautiful than I had anticipated.

My first stop was with the neuroscientists: Prof Jon Roiser, a neuroscientist at University College London, fortunately based near a great bakery; and then to Oxford to meet Prof Morten L Kringelbach, who is director of the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing. (Eudaimonia is a Greek word that means happiness or a life well lived.)

Anhedonia in humans has been central in Roiser’s research for the last 10 years. The first thing he put me straight on, over tea and doughnuts, is that joy, to neuroscientists, is called reward and “is a complex construct and really represents the interplay of a variety of psychological processes”. I would learn later that these processes are not only wildly complicated, but also highly subjective. My Kizzy moments would probably only have worked on me.

Roiser said that joy is not a linear process, but is split up into phases or, as Kringelbach later explained, cycles. Put very simply, we have the appetitive, motivational stage, for which we need dopamine (“I want it, let me go and get it”); the consummatory (“I like it” or, maybe, “I don’t like it”), when our brains release opioids; and then the learning stage (“Was that meal/friend worth the trek across town?”); and we then consolidate it to memory for another time. When foraging meant expending large amounts of energy to get dinner, there was little point in revisiting a site that didn’t deliver rich plunder. However, it might be worth repeating a long trek to a bush that was heavy with berries.

So motivation, that first slide into the ball pit of joy, is key. We would have been wiped out as a species if we didn’t have the motivation to go and get food or have sex. Roiser went on to explain that a vital distinction is that “in clinical anhedonia – mainly in depression – there is actually very little evidence that the hedonic experience of rewards is itself blunted. That may surprise you; it surprised me! But there is extensive evidence that earlier stages in the process – the ‘appetitive’, as opposed to ‘consummatory’ parts – are disrupted.”

They don’t really know why yet, but Roiser said that antidepressants and talking therapy didn’t seem to help with this. His latest research looks at the role physical exercise may play. I thought back to my days of feeling flat and realised that part of the flatness was, indeed, a total lack of motivation, but not only that, a real sense of “what is the point?” – even though the sensible part of me told me to get up, get moving, see people; all things I knew would help. Yet I was like a dog that didn’t want to go to the vet: stuck to the floor. If I had any dopamine in my body at that moment, it wasn’t firing.

As I left Roiser, I asked why he thought I might feel flat/anhedonic sometimes. His reply shocked me. I was expecting an “I don’t know” evasion. Instead, he was quite emphatic: “Inflammation.” He went on to explain that sometimes the brain acts as if the body is ill and quietens everything down. I thought about this for a long time. I was terrible at slowing down. I was fairly relentless in my pursuit of (often quick fix) joy at times, and I took on a lot of other people’s problems. I overworked and overthought. Perhaps my brain just wanted to go into a fallow period for a while. But I hadn’t put all the pieces together quite yet.

Then I went to Oxford to talk to Kringelbach, whose shtick is a life well lived: fulfilment and flourishing. Here, I learned that more pleasure doesn’t necessarily mean more joy and, in fact, pursuing pleasure for the sake of it is a short road to dissatisfaction. One doughnut? Nice. Ten? Not so much. To turn pleasure into real enjoyment, and that life goal of satisfaction, means layering on something else: meaning and context.

I was also keen to know if the stages of the pleasure cycle could be manipulated, drawn out. I know some people who can leave a present to be opened later, savouring the moment of anticipation. I told Kringelbach that when I was a teenager I made an audio mixtape of all the best bits of my favourite songs, the parts you’d wait for before you’d get that release of joy. I thought I had hit on a masterplan, a tape of pure hedonism. But without the crescendo, the buildup, the waiting, the experience was ruined. “Yes,” he said, “it’s like the part at the end of Cinema Paradiso, with the film reel of all the kisses.” In that film, a priest has insisted the kisses be taken out of all the films shown, so the projectionist saves them all into one giant kissathon. “Devoid of context it proved pretty meaningless.”

Kringelbach went on to tell me that it wasn’t really about moderation. I couldn’t force myself to draw out the appetitive part of the pleasure cycle if that’s not the way I am about certain things, any more than the greedy child can wait for the marshmallow in the eponymous test. But it is about a balance in life: variation. And pleasures, such as food and drink – almost every pleasure, in fact – are augmented by doing them with people. So it becomes a memory rather than something to tick off. “Real pleasure,” he said, “is not egoistic.”

So it is not about the pleasure alone, but creating a memory around it. An isolated joy doesn’t have anywhere near as much value as one that’s shared. To keep it more family-oriented, think about all the nice meals and foods you’ve eaten: I bet the best memories centre on not just the food, but the fact that there were other people there.

I remembered learning some years ago that buying things gives you an initial buzz of joy, but then becomes habitual, whereas experiences usually get more golden with time. Who hasn’t bought a new item of clothing and marvelled in its newness for one or maybe two wearings, before it fades into everydayness? Now think back to holidays, time spent with friends, doing things. Even when they didn’t go to plan, things look better with time.

The other thing we’re not told is that our brains aren’t endlessly capable of producing joy. Neurotransmitters need time to reload. Too many joys in, say, one day, become too much; they become meaningless because our brains just can’t keep up. This is something to ponder when we’re endlessly scrolling or pleasure-seeking. If we think of a meal eaten while hungry, it’s infinitely more enjoyable than a meal eaten after you’ve snacked all day. (There is a reason for this: the brain releases a hormone called orexin when we’re hungry, which stimulates hedonic hotspots, enhancing flavour.)

No one knows how many people may or may not feel anhedonic. It’s not a question asked in general surveys. It wasn’t specifically asked when gathering figures for the NHS’s latest mental health statistics, published earlier this year. But those figures do show a rise in “common mental health disorders”. A study in 2024 revealed: “An estimated one in six adults have experienced a ‘common mental disorder’ like depression or anxiety in the past week.” And as we’ve seen, anhedonia is often present in depression. The World Happiness Report of 2024 also showed that happiness in the under-30s is declining.

It is hard not to put the blame on an increasing focus on instant gratification, particularly in the me-me-me world of social media, which, despite the name, can actually be pretty lonely. So much of what we do is about short-term fixes, often done alone: checking notifications, buying stuff, sending a text, email or voice note.

***

Next I went to some of the psychotherapists and analysts I often speak to for my column. Why did they think one of their patients might present with anhedonia? “It can be a defensive retreat,” explained clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr Stephen Blumenthal, “maybe after trauma, or because they’re finding it very difficult to engage with painful emotions. Anhedonia, that numb state, is like a retreat from pain. But along with retreating from pain, the downside is that you end up blunting everything else, including any pleasures.”

And there it was: my answer. In the middle of researching this article my mum died. I’m no stranger to grief or to the temporary anaesthesia of retail therapy. (I sometimes think therapists could tell a lot about a person’s state of mind if they were to look at their ordering history. My purchases were about containment: stencils, endless boxes, files and … aprons.) I wanted the instant soothe of the checkout button. I realised it was a way of numbing myself, just as those Kizzy moments were about numbing myself. And when you numb yourself you end up … numb.

Psychoanalyst Prof Alessandra Lemma thought that “if we think about pleasure as being the anticipation of what we want, and then being able to enjoy it, I have observed young people have a very different relationship to desire and wanting. My sense is that it’s possibly connected to technology.”

We talked about how in “our day” we had to wait for things, from items ordered in catalogues (“allow 28 days for delivery”) to photos developed in a lab and then posted to you. “There was a predictable sequence: desire, delay, delivery,” Lemma continued. “For the digital generation, you have a desire and you can get it satisfied immediately, whether it’s for pornography or something from Amazon. There is no delay.” And why is that so bad? “Psychologically speaking,” explained Lemma, “delay is important. We have to accept the concept of time and waiting, because it allows us to think: ‘Do I actually want this?’ It’s in the waiting that we are pushed to think about what it is that’s going on for us. When there is no delay in getting what we want, the space for thinking is foreclosed.”

Everyone I spoke to for this article, in common with all the research I read, said there were three key things to guard against feeling anhedonic: go outside and be in nature if possible, especially nature that is awe-inspiring and makes you feel small; do some physical exercise; and spend time with other people (who make you feel good). These sound underwhelming, and are the very last things you feel like doing when you are feeling flat or depressed, and yet they are vital: we are social animals built for connection and movement. And perhaps the underwhelming is what we need.

Personally I’ve discovered that routine is super-important to me. I’m never happier than when I know what’s coming and can look forward to it.

I’ve made a conscious effort to vary my pleasures and layer them with purpose. To make the joys I chase less evanescent; to think more meta-cognitively, rather than emotionally about things I consume.

For example, I try to eat in company, or make it about more than just the food. I also try to make my retail purchases lead to experiences with others rather than just about an item purely for me.

I try to be with people, instead of shutting myself away, especially when I feel myself flattening. I’ve thought more about what I want and why. The last anhedonic phase I had lasted fewer than 12 hours: I forced myself to go for a walk with people (outside, exercise, real person interaction), and as it dissolved I felt myself unpeel off the metaphorical floor and come back to 3D.

But it has not been easy. I realised I’d spent a lifetime numbing myself when things got difficult, not because I feared confrontation – quite the opposite; I love it and think it can lead to resolution – but because others did. My anhedonia was often a result of being overwhelmed by the frailty of others. Maybe instead of Kizzy, I should have channelled the Hulk.

But my biggest discovery, and the one that has given me the most joy and is perhaps the vaccination against anhedonia, was something I didn’t expect on this journey. Finding the answer to an age-old question that has vexed many: what’s the meaning of life? I realised it was there all along in the question: the meaning of life is that it has to have meaning.