How to enjoy life again: 5 steps that start with your senses

Enjoying life again starts with a distinction almost nobody makes: wanting and liking are two separate functions, and they do not break down together. You can want nothing at all and still feel perfectly normally once the thing has started. That is in fact the usual case.

The literature on anhedonia has said so for about fifteen years. In a 2011 review that became a reference in the field, Treadway and Zald argue that the contradictory findings piled up around dopamine came from an underspecified definition: one word was being used to measure two different things, consummatory pleasure and the motivation to obtain it. Since the preclinical evidence points mainly at the second, they propose splitting the two inside the definition of the symptom itself.

That piece of vocabulary changes what there is to do. If the capacity to feel is intact and what is missing is the drive, then waiting until you feel like it is exactly the wrong strategy: it asks the broken function to repair the other one. And since nothing happens, the conclusion “nothing brings me joy” confirms itself, having never been tested.

The loop closes fast. Fewer pleasant experiences, fewer reasons to expect any, so even less drive next time.

The five steps below are built on that asymmetry. The first two go after the drive by making it unnecessary, the next three after what happens once you are there. None of them asks you to restart an activity, buy anything, or find time.

There is no single cause but a family of situations that produce the same picture, and telling them apart saves you from working on the wrong one.

Long-running tiredness comes first, and it is the most underestimated. A body in sleep debt cuts its spending, and the pull towards anything that is not strictly necessary is among the first budget lines to go. Next comes mental load: when attention is permanently taken up by what remains to be done, pleasant moments still happen, but nobody is there to receive them. That is the mechanism at work in a mind that keeps circling the same thoughts (in French) while you are supposedly enjoying yourself.

A very stable routine plays a third, less obvious role. What stops varying stops being perceived, in the same way you stop feeling the weight of your clothes. Nothing has gone. The recording has stopped.

Finally, a depressive episode produces the same symptom and calls for a completely different response. The marker that counts is not intensity but steadiness: low mood varies across the day and sometimes gives way to good news, a depressive episode holds for two weeks or more without real respite, and affects sleep, appetite and concentration at the same time. The last section of this article returns to it.

These causes often stack. The steps below are useful in the first three cases and remain an adjunct in the fourth, never a treatment.

The starting point is not an activity, it is a threshold. As long as the first step requires motivation, it will not be taken, since motivation is precisely what is missing. The only way out is to lower the threshold until the question of wanting stops arising.

In practice: open the window and stand there for thirty seconds. Put a track on and listen to it sitting down, doing nothing else. Walk to the end of the street and turn back. If you catch yourself hesitating, the step is still too big: cut it in half and start over.

The principle is not new. It is the one behind behavioural activation, used in therapy since the 1970s: you schedule the action independently of mood, and let mood follow. What tends to get lost is the size. The popular version of the idea suggests “restarting an activity you used to enjoy”, which already assumes some available drive.

A useful yardstick: aim for something you could do while ill. Not what you would do on a good day.

An activity is a bundle. Dinner with friends contains noise, conversation, tastes, social fatigue, and the whole thing has to work for the memory to be a good one. A sensation asks for none of that. It takes thirty seconds and it cannot half fail.

Hence the exercise, which fits in one sentence: pick one sense, just one, and give it a full half minute. Hearing on Monday, touch on Tuesday, the order does not matter. What matters is taking only one, because that is what makes it possible on a day when nothing is possible.

Hearing is the easiest sense to come back through, because it requires no travel: there is always something to hear, and the layers of sound in an ordinary street are richer than you remember. Touch comes next, taste is the most rewarding but needs a meal. A guided five-senses practice (in French) walks through them one after the other, which is useful once the single-sense version has become easy.

One clarification that avoids a false start: the point is not to make it pleasant. A neutral sensation properly received is worth more than a pleasant one missed. The aim of this step is to switch the recording back on, not to produce joy.

If you keep running into the fact that the moment “does nothing for you”, that is an obstacle in its own right, covered in what to do when you cannot enjoy the present moment.

This is the step nobody takes, and probably the highest yielding one. Something pleasant happens, you notice it, and you move on within the second. The moment did take place, it simply had no time to count.

Staying with it ten seconds longer is enough to change what the day leaves behind. Try it once. It is very short, and surprisingly long.

The skill has a name in the literature, savouring, and it has been tested in its own right. A 2023 randomised trial split eighty-five people with generalised anxiety disorder across two seven-day smartphone programmes that were identical except on one point: the first asked participants to dwell on the pleasant aspects of the moment and revisit them in the evening, the second mirrored the same activities and the same wording with that instruction removed. The savouring group saw a greater rise in positive emotions, and a greater drop in worry, over a week. A design like that does not settle everything, but it does isolate what is acting.

A second 2023 trial, published in the same issue of that journal, points the same way with a far heavier setup. Eighty-five adults here too, this time with severely low positive affect and moderate to severe depression or anxiety, received fifteen individual sessions, of either a positive affect treatment or a standard treatment aimed at negative affect. The first did better on clinical status and on reward sensitivity, anticipation included.

In practice, three questions are enough, and they are asked silently: what exactly am I feeling, where in the body, and what would be different if it lasted a minute longer.

There is a way of doing the previous steps that cancels them, and it is very common: watching the sensation while judging it insufficient. “This is nice, but less than it used to be.” “I should be enjoying this more.” The attention is there alright, it is just busy measuring a gap.

Two randomised trials published in 2018 suggest this nuance is not a detail. Researchers split mindfulness training into two structurally identical programmes: one taught participants to monitor their experiences and to accept them, the other only to monitor. Participants reported their emotions in daily life, before and after. Only the programme with acceptance raised positive affect, in both trials. Monitoring without accepting was not enough.

So the instruction fits in one line: take the sensation at the level it shows up, without trying to make it stronger. A pleasure at two out of ten stays a pleasure at two out of ten. Comparing it to what it ought to be takes it back to zero.

Same mechanism, in reverse, as the reflex of blaming yourself for feeling nothing. Adding a fault to a dip has never lifted the dip.

Almost every page on this subject recommends a gratitude journal. The practice has its merits and rests on a serious body of work, but it asks for something particular: judging that a thing is precious. And when nothing lands, that judgement is still available while the sensation is not. You write “my health, the people I love, my job”, you mean it sincerely, and you close the notebook exactly as empty as you opened it.

The variant that works here changes one thing: instead of writing what you are grateful for, write what you actually felt during the day, even for a second, even trivially. The warmth of water on your hands. The silence right after switching the engine off. Three lines are enough, and they do not have to be positive.

The reason for that shift is the same as in step two: you rebuild perception before rebuilding meaning. A nine-week longitudinal study supports that ordering by showing that present-moment attention and the ability to savour are two distinct dispositions that interact: savouring predicted daily positive emotions among people attentive to the present, and that relationship fell to non-significance among the less attentive. It is an observational study, so nothing establishes cause and effect, but the order proposed here is consistent with the result.

If the notebook format suits you, the classic version is laid out in this guide to keeping a gratitude journal (in French): the structure is the same, only the writing instruction changes.

One last thing about pace. These five steps consume energy you may not have, and doing one of them every day works better than all five once a week. If even the first feels out of reach, energy is probably the main issue, and the fatigue side of this (in French) is worked on separately.

Nothing above replaces medical advice, and there are situations where it is the first thing to do rather than the last.

The markers that count are duration and spread. A state that has lasted more than two weeks without any variation, including on days when everything is objectively fine, is outside the register of low mood. The same goes if the loss of pleasure comes with disrupted sleep, a changed appetite, difficulty concentrating on simple things, a gradual withdrawal from relationships, or tiredness that does not yield to rest.

And without waiting at all: if dark thoughts appear, if you start thinking others would be better off without you, or if the idea of not being here settles in. In the United States and Canada, 988 answers free of charge at any hour; in the UK and Ireland, 116 123. Talking to someone that day counts for more than any exercise on this page.

A general practitioner is enough of a starting point. The five steps remain useful alongside treatment, they do not replace it, and none of them should make you push an appointment back.