Absolutely. When I’ve been in a bad place mentally in my life, I literally wouldn’t eat except about once a day when I became starving. It was like the whole system that was supposed to make sense of what I was feeling and take actions to fix something that was producing a “bad” signal just was burned out, not working at all.

I started seeing a therapist, and a big part of her solution was for me to go on antidepressants. I refused, stopped seeing her, and continued roughing it out unsuccessfully on my own. Great stuff. Better now. I would say that not being able to function enough to feel hunger or eat when you’re hungry is a bad place though. That’s pretty far down. I would take it seriously.

I have not a lot of input about how to get yourself out of that way or what to do. Not sure if you’re even looking for advice anyway, or just curious. If you are looking for advice, then about all I can come up with is this: A lot of life is habits. Habits don’t consume mental energy, and so if you have a lot of good ones, you’ll automatically be doing a bunch of great stuff without having to expend. It’s like autopilot. And, it feeds on itself: As you’re taking better care of yourself you’ll have more mental energy to expend to make deliberate choices and put in effort, and you can get to new places. It’s crazy how much freedom life really has, it’s wide open. But it’s not automatic and your brain and your self are one of many types of limited resource that can stop you from getting there.

A lot of it starts with just your thoughts: Your visions for what you’re trying to get to. It has to translate to action to do anything, but having the vision will make the action easier, it’ll give a reason. But recognize that setting the habits in the beginning is mad hard. Chip away at it, keep building up that consistent track record of the stuff you want to see yourself doing starting small, try things and adjust as you go. It’s harder than it seems but you can make small changes consistently and it can work. It’s just hard.