Think You’ll Absolutely Hate It? Your Brain May Have Other Plans

You know the feeling. A friend invites you somewhere and, for a moment, you think it could be fun.

Then your brain starts listing reasons to stay home. You're tired, you won't feel like talking, it's easier to cancel.

When you're depressed or stuck in a low mood, that urge to withdraw can be especially strong. But avoiding things you usually enjoy may come with a hidden cost.

A brain imaging study1 found that depression was associated with changes in how the brain responds to rewards, offering a clue as to why enjoyable activities can feel so difficult to pursue.

About the study

The brain's reward system helps us recognize what feels worthwhile and motivates us to pursue it again. Dopamine is one of the chemical messengers involved in this process.

Researchers scanned 24 people with major depression and 24 people without depression while they completed a task involving small cash rewards.

Participants anticipated whether they would receive a reward, then found out whether they did.

The researchers focused on the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in processing rewards, and how it communicated with areas involved in decision-making and motivation.

Depression may weaken the brain's reward response

People with depression had less activity in the ventral striatum both while anticipating a reward and while receiving one.

The reward region also communicated less with areas involved in deciding what to do and getting motivated to act. So the issue may not simply be that enjoyable experiences feel less pleasurable.

The brain may also have a harder time turning the possibility of a reward into motivation to pursue it.

That helps explain why you can know that seeing a friend, taking a walk, or doing something you enjoy might help, yet still feel almost no desire to start.

This is one reason behavioral activation is used to treat depression. Rather than waiting for motivation to return, the therapy encourages people to schedule meaningful or rewarding activities and follow through.

In a separate nine-week pilot study, changes in how participants learned from rewards were linked with improvements in depression symptoms.

Your brain learns from what actually happens

Your brain constantly compares what it expects with what actually happens.

Say you expect a 10-minute walk to be miserable. You go anyway and realize it was fine, or even enjoyable. That mismatch gives your brain new information.

Researchers call this prediction error, the gap between expectation and reality.

Depression can make activities seem more effortful or unrewarding before you begin, so an experience that turns out better than expected may help your brain update that prediction.

How to give your brain new information

Start with something small enough that you're willing to do it.

The takeaway

Depression can make rewards harder to anticipate and motivation harder to access.

Acting before you feel ready may give your brain new experiences to learn from, which is part of the thinking behind behavioral activation.