If you find yourself feeling apathetic or generally lacking passion, this might be why.
Rachel Havocost: I recently have started to feel a little bit apathetic about life. She says sometimes we don't care about things as a way to protect ourselves from getting hurt. But caring is a choice, she says.
If you're feeling apathetic about life, watch this video. Hi, my name is Rachel Havocost. I'm a writer and mental health advocate, and I am on a mission to help one person feel less alone. I like to share experiences from my own time in therapy. I've been in therapy for about 19 years for my mental health. I also have a master's in psychology. So I like to bridge the gap between knowledge and expertise and lived experience and hopefully meet you somewhere in the middle. So I made a video previously about low motivation and why we might experience low motivation.
And this is a follow up to that video on another reason that we might not have motivation in our lives. And it has a little bit more to do with apathy and feeling like we don't care about things rather than experiencing just a difficulty getting going. I recently have started to feel a little bit apathetic about life in the last year or so. I'm not necessarily sad, I'm not necessarily depressed, but I'm also not necessarily excited or euphoric. And for a while, I thought that was good. I thought that was an indication of being stable at baseline.
And while I am stable in a baseline, I also am experiencing this sort of lack of passion, a lack of fire, a lack of love. Typically someone who's incredibly passionate. I love very deeply, and I'm very sensitive. So it sort of felt out of alignment for who I am. And so I was talking to my therapist about it, and she said, you know, Rachel, sometimes we don't care about things as a way to protect ourselves from getting hurt. Because if you care about something, then if you lose it, it will be painful.
So sometimes it's easier just not to care. And that hit me really, really hard, because she was right. In some ways, I've been actively choosing not to care about my life, not to care about the things that I normally love to do, not to care about people in the ways I normally care, because then it might not hurt if I lose them. And that was a really good reframe for me because it reminded me that caring is a choice. I can choose at any moment in my life to care about things, and I want to. I don't want to wake up one day and look back and think, wow, I was really apathetic about my life.
I would rather care so deeply about the people in my life, about the work I do, about the things that I engage with and risk losing it, than never care at all. I hope that this was helpful for you the way it was for me. And as always, if you have questions or comments, please let me know. I'll see you next time.
