Microdosing on Joy: Managing Exhaustion and Burnout

Newsletter #4

It’s not uncommon that people tell me that they spend much of their time feeling exhausted and unfulfilled. Life is busy, I get it. We spend an awful amount of time working, hustling, planning, cooking, cleaning, organising and doing life admin. When you’re not running around doing ALL THE THINGS, the urge to do nothing can be VERY tempting.

Whilst I am all for doing nothing (who doesn’t need a good Netflix session?), it doesn’t necessarily equate to doing things that genuinely bring you joy. The problem with too much mindless couch time, is that once the joy slips away, it’s easy to find yourself complaining of being “burnt out, depressed and uninspired”.

When people are struggling with depression, there are a couple of behavioural changes that I always ask them to make:

1. Activity Scheduling – Start by doing one productive thing and one pleasurable thing every day. Structure it like you would any other appointment, this one is just with yourself. If nothing currently feels pleasurable, then you need to go ahead and schedule in something that *used* to be pleasurable so we can trick your brain into releasing some dopamine.
2. Write a List - Include everything you either enjoy or have enjoyed in the past. It’s not uncommon for people to feel quite confronted by this activity because they can’t think of anything to write down. Go deep, think about your favourite activities, favourite people, favourite colours, favourite textures, favourite feelings. Write down as many things as you can, no matter how small.

think about how you can integrate more things from that list in your day-to-day life

Maybe you used to really enjoy taking a long hot shower with some music on, maybe you like to curl up under a beautiful soft blanket and read by the fire, maybe you like to go out into the garden and pick a single flower to put in a vase on your counter. It could be even a smaller, you could love singing along to a particular song, watching something silly online for a couple of minutes, looking at old photos.

The trick is, when you feel exhausted or burnt out, you generally don’t feel like doing any of this stuff. You might take the shower, but you can’t be bothered putting the music on. You can’t be bothered reading or walking outside. You are in survival mode and just focusing on getting through the daily grind.

So, if you were going to microdose on joy this week, what would you do? What could you schedule in for even 2-3 minutes each day that might bring you a moment of joy and make you smile.

Add it to your to-do list. You’re worth it.

Bec x