i think being very depressed in grad school caused me to lose trust that if i just do what comes "naturally" or "go with the flow" then things will turn out okay. when you're very depressed you learn that what that does is keep you entrenched in your depression forever
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i suspect people with severe addictions learn something similar. to get out of depression i had to learn how to effortfully do a bunch of unusual things on purpose (feeling my feelings etc.) until one or more of them unlocked the lock to the dungeon i was in, so to speak
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every depressive phase is a new puzzle i have to solve involving a somewhat different shape of lock. in the course of solving these puzzles i have to pay attention to parts of my experience most ppl don't have to, and i think some ppl get weirded out by me talking about this
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e.g. i have to consciously do things that other people just do unconsciously. those people correctly would prefer to continue doing the things unconsciously themselves since that works fine for them, but *my* choice is between doing them consciously or not at all
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this kind of thing is why it's so hard to give people blanket advice. everyone needs a different shape of key for whatever lock they're currently dealing with (loosely speaking), everything gets exquisitely personal and exquisitely sensitive to fine details of how you work
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It‘s interesting that you view yourself as having that much agency though — whenever I had a depressed episode it felt more like I got lucky and one day things just started getting better allowing me to make use of that random momentum
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the most recent key for me was a simple concept of "small wins" -- gathered a little trash? small win. did one little load of laundry? small win, the day was won. this compounded, and we're back at cruising altitude after a while