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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When everything feels flat
The first question maps what is being managed: numbness, rage, panic, a need to make something visible. The second gives you a goal in their words rather than yours, and it is usually more honest than any target you would have written for them. Once you know the state they are aiming for, you can look together for other routes to it, and the gap between where they are and where they want to be does the motivating for you.
Your Lord is sure to give you so much that you will be well satisfied (Quran 93:5). Being satisfied is named as the destination, which makes asking someone how they want to feel a reasonable question rather than a soft one.
الضحى
وَلَسَوۡفَ يُعۡطِيكَ رَبُّكَ فَتَرۡضَىٰٓ
your Lord is sure to give you so much that you will be well satisfied
Qur’an 93:5read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What people want tends to be a better lever than what they are told. In a meta analysis of people with severe mental illness, the wish to improve mood was among the strongest reported motivators for exercising, while low mood and low energy were the most commonly reported barriers. The wanting and the difficulty live in the same person.
Firth J, Rosenbaum S, Stubbs B, Gorczynski P, Yung AR, Vancampfort D. (2016). Motivating factors and barriers towards exercise in severe mental illness: a systematic review and meta-analysis.. Psychological medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A goal someone chose themselves pulls harder than one handed to them.
When the same medicine keeps turning up for unrelated problems, that usually means one action touches all of them. It does not mean somebody has found a cure for everything.
A medicine that lifts drive is not the same as one that settles anxiety, and for some people the energising kind makes the worry louder.
When something has helped a little and then stalled, adding a different kind of help often does more than pushing harder on the first one.