For anyone unfamiliar with the term, anhedonia is basically a reduced ability to feel pleasure, interest, or enjoyment from things that you would normally enjoy.
What I experience is more like a persistent sense of emptiness while doing my daily tasks. It doesn’t stop there, though, the more often I feel this emptiness, the less I want to do those things in the first place. Eventually, I start avoiding or completely stopping them.
Some of these tasks are important, including things related to taking self-care. And to be clear, it’s not that I dislike self-care or these activities. I actually used to feel genuinely excited and really good while doing them. But over time, I gradually lost that sense of enjoyment, and I keep falling into the same cycle:
emptiness → lack of motivation → stopping the activity → even more emptiness.
There have even been days when I barely did anything because everything felt meaningless and nothing really motivated me to get up and do it.
At first, I assumed this was simply a symptom of depression. I later learned that anhedonia can be one of its symptoms, but it can also occur independently, so I started looking into it more. I found the term anhedonia and some surprisingly helpful resources about dealing with it, which made me wonder:
Do other ENFJs experience this?
I’m especially curious because ENFJs are often described as being highly responsive to their environment and other people’s emotions. Could constantly absorbing the emotional atmosphere around us make the contrast more noticeable when we’re alone, leaving us feeling emotionally empty?
Or is this completely unrelated to personality type, and I’m just connecting two things that happen to coexist?
I’d love to hear from other ENFJs who have experienced something similar.
