Imagine saying to yourself that you ate dinner today, happy now? Why are you not happy? See it’s not working yet, nothing is working. I should just give up on trying to get into a good mood. It’s hopeless.

This is what happens when you say I exercised today, but I still feel like crap. I did this or that which was supposed to fix my mental health, but still it feels like nothing. Nothing happened. It seems that these tips, ideas, or strategies don’t work. Because I tried something, and it still feels as bad as it did before trying it. Why would I think that doing more of the same thing or other things will be any better or will lead to any change that I’m seeking. So you stop doing anything that can potentially get you into a better mood, and now your mood will go back to declining again, instead of steadily going up after everything helpful you do, only to confirm your hypothesis that nothing can help your mood get better these days, there must be something wrong with you.

But you still ate something after dinner when you felt hungry. Somehow you were able to wrap your head around the fact that dinner wasn’t enough for good or for the rest of your day, and so having to eat something else later on that day is totally normal despite the fact that dinner was still amazing. It worked, but not until you sleep that day. And you do that every day without thinking that you should stop eating dinner or give up on eating altogether because it doesn’t work. Dinner didn’t do its job. You still had to eat afterwards.

None of you think this way, but you say hey you did this or that to enjoy yourself, but somehow you still aren’t at peak enjoyment yet after that and you still have to do a ton of other stuff just to get your mood above normal. Think about that.

It’s not a rat race. You’re not a hamster on a wheel trying so hard all the time just to not feel miserable. You’re not insatiable. You don’t have anhedonia, necessarily. It’s not that stuff doesn’t work for you. It’s totally normal. You will never have good mental health without having to work hard to attain and maintain it all day long. There is no one solution that will fix your mental state for good, that you only need to do it once and that’s it. Do everything you can to get there.

And don’t stop because it doesn’t feel good yet.