Why Does Everything Feel Like Too Much Effort When You're Depressed?

If you have ever wondered why does everything feel like too much effort when you're depressed — why answering one text message can sit on your chest all afternoon, why the shower feels like a mountain — you are describing something researchers have been trying to measure for years. It isn't laziness, and it isn't a character flaw. A study published in Psychological Medicine in October 2025 offers a new and slightly surprising angle on it.

Why does everything feel like too much effort when you're depressed?

The common explanation goes something like this: depression dulls pleasure, so nothing seems worth the trouble. Rewards stop looking rewarding, so the cost of getting them feels too high.

That story is intuitive, and there is real evidence behind parts of it. But it may be incomplete. Interestingly, research over several decades has found that people who are depressed often still enjoy things reasonably well in the moment — the ice cream still tastes good, the funny film is still funny. What seems to go wrong sits earlier in the chain: in the decision to go and get the thing in the first place.

That's the gap the new study set out to explore.

What did this study actually do?

Researchers at University College London ran a fairly simple computer game with four groups of people, all of whom were not taking antidepressants at the time — an important detail, since antidepressants can themselves affect how the brain processes reward.

The groups were: people currently experiencing depression (41), people who had been depressed in the past but were currently well (46), people who had never been depressed but had a close relative who had (36), and people with no personal or family history (57).

Everyone played what the researchers call the Apple Gathering Task. On each round you see a tree with some apples on it — that's the reward — and a marker showing how hard you'd need to squeeze a hand grip to get them. You either accept the offer and squeeze, or turn it down and wait for the next one. Crucially, the effort levels were calibrated to each person's own maximum grip strength, so "hard" meant genuinely hard for that person rather than hard in absolute terms.

Then the researchers used computational modelling — essentially, testing lots of possible mathematical descriptions of how someone makes these choices to see which one best fits their actual behaviour. The point is to separate out things that look identical from the outside. Did someone refuse an offer because the apples didn't appeal? Because the squeeze looked too draining? Or for some other reason entirely?

What did they find?

People with current or past depression accepted fewer offers overall. That much matches earlier studies.

The unexpected part was why. The modelling suggested it wasn't because rewards seemed less valuable, and it wasn't because effort seemed more punishing. On those two measures, the groups looked broadly similar. What differed was something the researchers call an "acceptance bias" — a general, baseline tendency to say no to effort, before the specifics of any particular offer are even weighed up.

It's a bit like the difference between deciding a specific restaurant is too far away, and simply having a standing inclination not to go out. The first is a calculation. The second is a setting.

That setting appeared to be turned down in both the currently depressed group and the group who had recovered.

Does the feeling go away when depression lifts?

This is where things get genuinely interesting, and genuinely uncertain.

The people in remission — currently well, not on medication — showed the same lowered willingness to take on effort as those who were unwell. In fact, in some of the comparisons, their scores stood out most clearly.

There are at least two readings of this. One is that a reluctance to spend effort is a trait-like feature that exists before depression and helps set it up. The other is that it's a kind of scar: a residue of having been depressed that doesn't fully fade when mood recovers.

The study can't settle which. It does offer one clue against the first reading: the never-depressed relatives, who are statistically at higher risk of depression, didn't show the pattern. But the authors are careful here — that group averaged around 26 years old, past the age when depression most commonly first appears, so many of them may simply never develop it. They may have been a resilient group rather than an at-risk one.

Could this be about confidence rather than motivation?

One suggestion the researchers raise is that a lower acceptance bias might reflect low confidence in being able to pull the effort off — even when, objectively, you can. In this study, success rates were above 80% at every effort level, and there were no group differences in how often people actually managed the squeeze. So people were turning down tasks they were perfectly capable of completing.

That resonates with other work linking low mood, low self-esteem and apathy to reduced confidence in one's own judgements, independent of whether those judgements are correct. If depression quietly lowers your expectation of succeeding at things, the arithmetic of "is this worth attempting" changes without any single step of it feeling wrong.

This is speculation on the authors' part, not a finding. They say so.

Does this change anything practical?

Cautiously, it points somewhere. If the barrier isn't that rewards have lost their shine, but a general reluctance to launch, then approaches that get around the launch problem may matter more than approaches that try to make things sound more appealing.

The researchers mention behavioural activation — a well-established therapy for depression that involves scheduling activities in advance and doing them because they're on the plan, not because you feel like it in the moment. That's exactly a way of sidestepping an in-the-moment decision. It's a promising fit with these findings, though this study didn't test any treatment and can't tell you what will work for you.

If you're carrying this kind of flatness and don't have access to therapy, it can help simply to say it out loud to something that will listen without judgement — Serena is one option for that, alongside, not instead of, professional support.

What can't this study tell us?

Quite a lot, and the authors are refreshingly direct about it.

The sample was modest — under 200 people across four groups. The differences between groups were medium-sized at best, and some of the clearest contrasts were with the relatives group rather than the healthy control group. When the researchers looked for links between people's individual scores and their symptom questionnaires, the results were inconsistent between their pilot study and the main one, and wouldn't survive standard statistical correction. They flag these as exploratory.

The task also only ever asked about physical effort for points on a screen. Whether that generalises to replying to emails, or to a broader difficulty weighing up costs and benefits of any kind, isn't something this design can answer.

And "acceptance bias" is a label for a pattern in data, not an explanation of it. Something is happening upstream of that number, and nobody has identified it yet.

The full paper is open access: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0033291725101967

The part worth keeping

Strip away the modelling and one thing stands out. When effort feels impossible in depression, it isn't necessarily because you've stopped wanting good things. The wanting can be perfectly intact. What shifts is something further back — the willingness to begin.

That's a more forgiving description than "unmotivated," and it may be closer to the truth.

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This article is for general information and is not medical advice. If you are struggling with depression, please speak to a doctor or qualified mental health professional. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line in your country straight away.