Step 5 of 10 · Lift Low Moods
The Stories That Keep You Low
The Stories That Keep You Low
Step 5 · 12 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
There is a particular cruelty to the low mood that takes away pleasure.
Not just sadness — but flatness. The absence of enjoyment. Looking at things that used to delight you and feeling nothing. Going through the motions of things you know you love and finding them grey.
This is called anhedonia, and it is one of the most disorienting aspects of low mood. Because when pleasure disappears, it's easy to assume that meaning has disappeared too.
Today I want to tell you something that helped me more than almost anything else: meaning and pleasure are not the same thing. And meaning is significantly harder to kill.
Anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) is different from meaninglessness
Viktor Frankl: meaning can be found in suffering when pleasure is unavailable
Values-based action: doing what matters even before it feels rewarding
Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He lost nearly everyone. He had every external reason to lose meaning. And what he observed — in himself and in others — was that those who found some form of meaning, however small, however provisional, were more likely to survive psychologically than those who didn't.
His conclusion, which he articulated in Man's Search for Meaning, was radical: pleasure is a consequence of meaning, not its prerequisite. You can act in accordance with what matters to you even when nothing feels good. And in those acts, something sustaining is maintained — something the low mood cannot entirely extinguish.
This is not about toxic positivity or forcing gratitude. It is about a real psychological distinction.
In acceptance and commitment therapy — one of the evidence-based approaches to low mood and depression — there is a concept called values-based action. It asks not "what would feel good?" but "what matters to me, even when I don't feel like it?"
Being a good parent, even on the days you feel empty. Showing up to a creative practice, even when the output feels mediocre. Being present with a friend, even when you can barely speak. These acts may not produce pleasure in the moment. But they are in alignment with something that doesn't disappear when mood drops — your values.
And values-based action, over time, creates its own quiet reward. Not the bright pleasure of a good day. Something steadier. The sense of having been, even in a difficult season, someone you recognise.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
I want you to do something now that takes about three minutes.
Take a breath in... and out.
Quietly ask yourself: what are the two or three things that matter most to me? Not goals. Not achievements. Not things you should value. Things that, when you really sit with it, feel like the true shape of what you are.
Family. Creativity. Honesty. Learning. Nature. Service. Connection. Growth. Love. Contribution. Whatever the words are for you.
Let them sit in your mind. Don't judge them. Don't compare them to someone else's values.
Now ask: in the last week, was there any moment — however small — when I acted in alignment with one of those? When I was present with someone I love, or made something, or helped someone, or noticed beauty?
If yes, let yourself acknowledge that. That was meaning. Even if it didn't feel like much.
If no — not a judgment. Just information. And an invitation for this week.
What is one small act you could take this week that would be in alignment with what you most value? The smallest version. Not the grand version. Just the version that fits a flat day.
Pleasure will return. The flatness is not permanent. But even while it's here, meaning doesn't have to disappear with it.
You can be someone who acts from values even when they can't feel rewards. And in that — there is a kind of quiet dignity that the low mood cannot touch.
Tomorrow we look at the most misunderstood tool for lifting mood: gratitude. Not the forced kind. The neuroscience-backed kind.
Until then — one small act of alignment. One thing that is true to who you are.