How To Cope With Anhedonia During Recovery

Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure or joy, and it’s extremely common in alcohol addiction, drug addiction and addiction recovery. When you’re anhedonic, things that you used to find pleasurable aren’t enjoyable anymore, and you feel emotionally flat and numb. Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression.

There are two types of anhedonia – social anhedonia (you don’t like being around people) and physical anhedonia (food, exercise and other physical sensations don’t feel good). Ways of coping with anhedonia can form part of your relapse prevention plan, as anhedonia is associated with cravings and relapse.

Coping with anhedonia is difficult. A lot of advice about anhedonia offered to people starting their recovery journey or in addiction rehab can seem difficult to engage with when you struggle to feel positive emotions. It’s hard to see the use of building healthy routines or embracing new activities when they don’t make you feel good. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s important to know that anhedonia does not last forever – but you do need to take it seriously and work on building new coping mechanisms, routines and healthy habits.

Anhedonia and the brain

Like many addiction symptoms, there is evidence that anhedonia has a neurobiological basis – originating in the dopaminergic, mesolimbic, and mesocortical circuits of the brain. These pathways are all associated with reward.

Not everyone who struggles with addiction is anhedonic, but anhedonia is associated with an increased risk of addiction. This makes sense – if you struggle with feelings of numbness, substances are a way of making you feel something. Unfortunately, addiction tends to increase baseline anhedonia.

Anhedonia is extremely common in recovery too, and is related to your brain’s neurochemistry returning to a new baseline after being altered by substances for so long. The good news is that anhedonia does tend to lift with sustained abstinence, meaning the longer you are in recovery from drugs or recovery from alcoholism the better you will feel.

Signs of anhedonia

• Isolating yourself, as the company of others is unappealing
• Loss of interest in hobbies
• Skipping events
• Food, exercise and sex don’t interest you
• Dulled or absent positive emotions

How do I stop feeling so numb?

Anhedonia can feel like a trap – you know there are things you should do to help you heal, but they don’t make you feel anything. It’s important to be gentle and patient with yourself. It takes time for anhedonia to lift.

Having a solid self-care routine and building positive habits will help.

Self-care

It is important to cover the basics of self-care if you’re experiencing anhedonia. While they aren’t shortcuts to feeling good, they need to be in place so you’re able to do the things that will help you feel better.

Exercise, hydration, a decent diet, sleep and sunlight are your baseline self-care activities to look after your physical and mental health. They keep you stable, healthy, and strong so you can engage fully in your recovery and work on relapse prevention.

Because of the association with anhedonia and relapse, it’s important to take it seriously. If you’re finding anhedonia to be a struggle while getting addiction help, speak to a professional about further treatment options.

Therapy

Therapy is important for addressing negative thoughts and feelings, traumas and strong emotions. Therapy will help you understand and address the difficulties that led to your addiction, but it can only go so far in treating anhedonia. This is because therapy focuses on helping you to cope with your negative emotions like grief and anger. Anhedonia isn’t about these emotions – anhedonia is a lack of positive emotions, something an intervention like therapy is less able to address.

This is why many of the things that help anhedonia can be less likely to come from the world of therapy but from real-world actions and practices. They’re about getting you to engage with the world and form connections with yourself and others. However, the work you do in therapy will make it easier to do these things.

It’s important to recognise that the long-term recovery plans or practices you try to reduce your anhedonia might not feel good immediately. You may keep feeling numb for a while, and this can be very frustrating. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t working. Your brain needs time to heal and your new habits need time to become embedded.

Mindfulness

Several studies have shown mindfulness has a positive effect on anhedonia. An 8-week clinical trial published in the journal Affective Science reported that participants who practised mindfulness-based stress reduction experienced an improvement in their social anhedonia.

Another study in 2023 looked at Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) to help long-term opioid users treat their anhedonia. This is a behavioural intervention that trains the mind to savour natural rewards – something that people with anhedonia struggle with. This was another 8-week trial and showed positive results.

Both of these studies suggest that working on remaining present, which is the goal of mindfulness, can help ease anhedonia.

The gift of time

Anhedonia is particularly acute in initial addiction treatment and early rehab but can persist beyond this phase for quite some time. However, as you heal and maintain your sobriety, anhedonia will ease. Be patient, and treat yourself with kindness. The work you do now on your sobriety will pay off in the future.