u/Engineseer5725

I watched that "1 Psychiatrist & 20 Depressed People" Jubilee video today, and Dr K mentioned an example of a patient to whom he once said "I don't think you have depression, I think you are just unhappy". What exactly is the difference here? I get that you can be depressed for no reason - you can want to die in spite of having an outwardly good life. The depression itself might be your only complaint in the most extreme cases.

What if you feel like life is a miserable experience because of a lot of specific but unchangeable reasons that you find hard to stomach in various ways? Is that being unhappy or is that being depressed? How bad does the world need to get, before we would "grant" someone that it's just totally the reasonable reaction to no longer want to partake in life itself?

And how would unhappiness be treated differently from depression when you can not change the circumstances that make you unhappy? Do we just not have a medical treatment for that because it's not rooted in malfunctioning biology, and instead is caused by correctly functioning biology trapped in a bad situation?

Question is in the title. You've all heard the advice about "Just do it for xx days and it will become a habit and be easy, you won't even think about it!". This does not work for me. In fact, all effortful healthy things feel like the polar opposite to me.

There was a time where I measured my bloodsugar regularly. That is done by jamming a needle in your finger with a spring-loaded thingy - perfectly predictable amount of pain every time. I have no fear of needles. I wasn't scared before I did it for the first time. It hurt more than I anticipated - the bad kind of prediction error. The brain will punish actions leading to outcomes that hurt more than expected to avoid future pain. As a result the second time took more willpower than the first to inflict pain on myself, so far I'm on board.

What I don't understand is how after weeks of doing it, it was over time just getting harder and harder to bring myself to do it. There was no habit building whatsoever, no pain becoming lesser the more often I did it, no psychological mechanism that supported my continued self-stabbing for the greater good of medical insight. So I stopped...

I should mention I'm not a diabetic, I was just trying to find out why I'm always tired and exhausted just from being alive, because nothing ever gets easier. Everything feels like this - inflicting pain on myself in hopes of some future benefit, action feels disproportionately painful, no reward for effort, everything becomes harder, rinse and repeat until I stop doing it.

I asked google what the word for it is, and it just throws unrelated words like "procrastination" or "avoidance" at me. That's for when you don't do the thing, but I specifically want a word for the mechanism by which hard things just become harder over time, and not satisfy the narrative of the supposed habit building.

I feel like there must be some great insight to be extracted from this observation that there being no common word for it, might mean that it's rare - pathological perhaps. Why is my brain like this and more importantly how can I fix it?