among other things, i deal with major depressive disorder and dysthymia. since i started treatment several years ago, most of my symptoms have either gone away or at least become much more manageable. i've noticed, though, that i don't seem to enjoy things much, or at least as much as i remember enjoying things. i'm a voracious reader, for example, but lately i'll start reading something only to realize i'm just doing it out of habit and not because i'm enjoying myself. or the same with a computer game. on the other hand, maybe a quarter of the time i'll be doing the same things and i will enjoy myself. when i find myself just reading/gaming/etc. out of habit and not enjoyment, i also tend to be unable to find my interest grabbed by anything else. i'm not sure if it's that i'm burned out on my hobbies (but i don't think that's the case with the reading, at least) and i need some new ones, if it's anhedonia, or something else. (i'll admit that i'm really not sure how to develop new hobbies and the like, especially when it's summer and there's no clubs or anything to try out. i also have very few local friends, so tagging along with someone isn't really an option.) anyway, has anyone else dealt with this? any advice?
Have you tried (this sounds so weird) reorganizing your things, or going through your storage, or anything like that? I often find nostalgia-related items, "oh wow, I used to love that, why don't I try again for old times sake?" If nothing else, it'll keep you busy and you'll get cleaner. And there's less of a burnout chance with something you don't do as often anymore. It may also be a spoons/gratification/Skinner box thing, where you need high gratification output for low spoon input. I used to do a lot of word searches and Sudoku at my lowest and it was... Not the greatest ever, but soothing.
Sometimes the way treatment forces us to reorganize our minds shifts the kinds of things that we're interested in. It's not that you're a completely different person, but in some places you've come to think differently, and that different thinking carries over in subtle ways to a lot of places. Maybe the genres or tropes that you like reading about are different now. Maybe the kinds of games you used to play aren't as appealing now that your brain can do all this shiny new shit and it wants a different kind of challenge. (I was all about match-three games before I got treated. A few months into drugs and therapy I found I was bored all the time when playing them and started playing a bunch of flash games only to discover that suddenly I really really loved rhythm games when they'd only been kind of interesting before.) I've also noticed that a lot of people, as they recover from depression in particular, hit phases when they're really bored periodically. And it's not a shift in interests like I've mentioned before. The brain seeks stimulation, but being depressed means that there's a really, really low bar for what counts as stimulation, ie, wow doing the laundry is a massive cognitive undertaking. But as you recover, you become able to do more things--and so you want to do more things. It's like when you have a stomach bug and all you can eat for days is toast. When you're still sick, the toast is enough of a thing that you don't really care about other food. But as you get better, you might get really bored with eating just toast and want to eat something else with more flavor.
