Kick-Start Your Feel-Good Chemicals

Feeling Blah: Why Anhedonia has left you joyless and how to recapture life’s highs is published this month and is the first book to tackle this little-known subject. It looks at what happens in our brain, when we feel ‘stuck in a rut’.

Tanith says: “As I have always said, I write about what I need to learn. I wrote this book after realising that just driving myself on to achieve more wasn’t ever going to be enough – and that it was actually contributing to feelings of overwhelm that were getting in the way of me enjoying life – the opposite of what I expected. In fact, I was feeling very flat.

“When I looked into it, I discovered there was a name for this state of blah – anhedonia – and there was a huge body of research literature on it. Yet it’s a word that’s little known outside psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. I spoke to some of the world’s top neuroscientists too so I could explain why joy is made in the brain, and what can stand in the way.

“The book contains the important message that although modern life is challenging, as the mental health statistics show, the good news is that we have never known more about how good feelings are made in the brain. I wanted to make this knowledge more accessible and readable so people can use it in their lives to push back against the stresses of the modern world – and flourish, rather than just ‘exist.’”

Feeling Blah? also looks at other factors that can contribute to anhedonia – such as burn-out, diet, illnesses like Long Covid, mistrust of happiness dating back to childhood, and hormonal shifts in both women and men. Plus it includes lots of evidence-based ways to get your brain's reward circuit working better for you again .

Tanith is an award-winning writer and author of books on psychology, parenting and social history which have been published in over 35 languages. This is her 13th book, but she is already working on the next, the third in the trilogy What’s my TWEENager thinking? which is due for publication next year.

To find out more about this book, please see details on Amazon here or check out Tanith’s Instagram account for the book: @no_more_blah_book.