When the Medication Turns Down the Volume on Everything

What GLP-1 Drugs Are Teaching Us About the Joy We Lost Long Before the Injection

By Sonja Irina Johansen

There's a lot of chatter right now about GLP-1 medications — Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound — and depression. People are reporting emotional flatness, loss of motivation, a kind of numbness that nobody warned them about. Online searches for "Ozempic depression" have surged over 300% in the last year. Reddit threads and support groups are full of people describing feeling "flat" or "numb" — going through the motions without feeling much of anything.

And when I read these stories, I thought: I know this feeling. I lived it for decades. Not from a medication — from food.

Because here's what I've never heard anyone in the GLP-1 conversation say: this emotional flatness isn't new. Many of us were already living it. We just called it "normal."

My Own Volume Knob

When I was deep in my food dysfunction — using engineered food substances to manage every difficult emotion — I wasn't just numbing the grief, the fear, the loneliness. I was numbing everything. The sad got quieter, yes. But so did the delight. The giddiness. The glimmers.

I didn't even know what I was missing until about a year into abstinence, when I felt genuinely giddy for the first time. Not the sugar-rush high of a binge — actual, embodied delight. The kind that makes you laugh for no reason. The kind that hits when you see light through leaves or hear your daughter sing with abandon.

That giddiness floored me. Because it revealed how long I'd been living in grayscale.

And now I'm watching thousands of people on GLP-1 medications describe the exact same thing — a turning down of the emotional volume — and I want to say: welcome to the conversation we should have been having all along.

What the Science Is Actually Saying

Here's where it gets fascinating, and also contradictory — which, if you know me, is exactly where I like to dig in.

The research on GLP-1 medications and mood is genuinely split. Large meta-analyses of over 100,000 participants have found no significant association between these medications and serious psychiatric events. Some studies even show modest antidepressant effects, particularly in people with Type 2 diabetes.

And yet.

Thousands of users are coming forward describing something the clinical trials didn't capture — a shift in their emotional landscape. Crying more often. Anxiety without reason. A deep sense of emotional detachment. A psychiatrist writing about this recently made a comparison that stopped me in my tracks: he likened GLP-1 medications to the early days of SSRIs in the 1990s. Remember when fluoxetine was hailed as a miracle? Only later did we recognize the trade-offs — emotional blunting, loss of motivation, a subtle flattening of the inner emotional landscape.

His core observation? These medications affect appetite for food — but also appetite for life.

Let that sink in.

The Reward System Connection

Here's where the neuroscience meets everything I teach about reward chemistry hijacking.

GLP-1 receptors aren't just sitting in your gut regulating appetite. They're widely distributed in the mesolimbic reward pathway — the brain's core pleasure and motivation circuitry. They sit right in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and nucleus accumbens, the same regions that light up when you experience joy, connection, excitement, and yes — the pull toward food.

These medications work by dialing down the "wanting." They reduce the craving, the anticipation, the food noise. And for many people, this feels like liberation. Finally, the obsessive pull toward food softens.

But here's the thing I need you to hear: the brain doesn't have separate volume knobs for food cravings and life cravings. It's one system. When you turn down the wanting for food, you may also be turning down the wanting for… everything else. Socializing. Hobbies. Sex. Laughter. The things that used to make your eyes light up.

One fascinating new study found that semaglutide didn't change how much pleasure mice experienced when actually eating — it changed the anticipation and craving leading up to eating. The "wanting" got turned down, but the "liking" stayed intact. This distinction matters enormously. Because it suggests the medication isn't removing your capacity for joy — it's dampening the seeking and anticipation circuits that drive you toward joyful experiences in the first place.

If you've ever felt like you could enjoy something if you got there, but you just can't seem to muster the motivation to start — that's what this looks like in real life.

This Is What I Already Knew (and So Did You)

In Chapter 2 of my book, I talk about the four biological systems that create genuine urges for food. System One — Reward Chemistry Hijacked — is about how ultra-processed food substances flood the dopamine system, causing receptors to downregulate. Your brain needs more to feel satisfied. Natural foods taste bland. And eventually, natural pleasures feel bland too.

This is literally the same mechanism that GLP-1 medications are activating — just from the other direction.

With food dysfunction: You flood the reward system with artificial dopamine hits → receptors downregulate → you need more food to feel anything → meanwhile, non-food joys get quieter and quieter.

With GLP-1 medications: You pharmacologically reduce the dopamine-seeking behavior → the food noise quiets → but because the same pathways handle all reward and motivation → non-food joys can get quieter too.

Two different roads to the same emotional flatness.

And here's what really gets me: neither approach addresses why you needed the volume turned up in the first place.

The Missing Piece No Injection Can Provide

What GLP-1 medications do brilliantly: they dial down System One (reward chemistry). They quiet the "food noise." For many people, this is genuinely life-changing.

What they don't do:

They don't address System Three — your nervous system's need for regulation. They don't soothe the activation that sends you to the kitchen at 3 AM.

They don't address System Four — the habit loops that run on autopilot. The "stress → car → drive-through" pattern doesn't disappear because the craving is softer.

They don't address alarmed aloneness — the state of being activated and alone with that activation, which is the root driver for so many of us.

They don't teach you resonance — the practice of accompanying yourself through difficulty instead of numbing through it.

They don't build internal wisdom — the slow, messy, neuroplastic process of learning to trust your own signals.

And they don't rebuild your capacity for joy — which requires time, new pathways, and the willingness to feel everything, including the hard stuff.

This is the piece that makes me want to gently take every person on a GLP-1 medication by the hands and say: the medication may quiet the noise, but YOU still have to learn the music.

What My Year of Giddiness Taught Me

When I hit about a year of abstinence and felt that first wave of genuine giddiness, it wasn't just withdrawal resolving. It was my brain — slowly, imperfectly, beautifully — learning to find delight in life instead of in substances. Dopamine receptors were upregulating. New neural pathways were forming. My reward system was recalibrating to respond to sunlight and laughter and the smell of lavender instead of requiring the sledgehammer of engineered food.

That recalibration took time. About a year, in my case. And during that year, I did feel flat sometimes. I did wonder if joy would ever come back. I did grieve the loss of the one thing that reliably made me feel something.

But here's what I can tell you from the other side: the joy that came back was different. It was cleaner. Sharper. More textured. It didn't need a substance to exist. It just... arrived. Playing with Doug. Watching puppies play with gusto. Hearing my daughter sing. The flickering of candlelight on bathwater. The epiphany when dots are connected.

That joy wasn't possible when the volume on everything was turned all the way up — or all the way down. It lives in the recalibrated middle, where your nervous system is regulated enough to notice, your reward system is sensitive enough to respond, and your heart is open enough to receive.

A Both/And Conversation

I want to be really clear: I am not anti-medication. GLP-1 drugs are genuinely helping people, and the metabolic benefits are well-documented. Some people report that these medications freed up the mental and emotional energy they used to spend obsessing about food — and that freedom allowed them to actually engage with their lives more fully.

But I am pro-honesty. And the honest truth is that the emerging science — a 2026 systematic review, a growing body of pharmacovigilance data, and the lived experience of thousands of people — is confirming something that anyone who has lived through food dysfunction already knows:

You cannot shortcut the reward system without consequences to the full emotional landscape.

Whether you numb through food or through a medication that turns down the volume on craving — if you don't simultaneously build new pathways for joy, connection, and regulation — you end up flat.

The researchers are now saying what I've been teaching for years: the best outcomes happen when pharmacological approaches are combined with therapeutic and community support. The medication alone, without the internal work — without nervous system regulation, without resonance, without addressing the root patterns — leaves people in a kind of pharmacological version of the emotional flatness that food dysfunction itself creates.

What This Means for You

If you're on a GLP-1 medication and you're feeling flat — you're not imagining it. And you're not broken. Your brain is adjusting to a new neurochemical reality. The seeking and craving circuits are quieter, and your whole emotional landscape may feel muted as a result.

If you're in recovery from food dysfunction and you remember that flatness — you're not alone. That emotional grayscale is a real phase, and it does pass. The giddiness comes back. But it comes back through doing the work, not waiting it out.

And if you're watching this conversation from the sidelines, wondering what all the fuss is about — pay attention. Because what GLP-1 medications are revealing at scale is something millions of us already knew in our bones:

The relationship between food, mood, and joy is far more intertwined than anyone has been willing to admit.

Our food dysfunction was never just about the food. And the solution — whether it involves medication, abstinence, or both — was never going to be just about turning down the cravings.

It was always about learning to turn the music back up.

Sonja Irina Johansen is the author of "Thinking Outside the Box: A Revolutionary Approach to Food Dysfunction" and founder of Transform with Sonja. She has maintained significant weight loss for over 9 years through a neuroscience-based, trauma-informed approach that honors the intelligence of our biological responses. Learn more at [Transform with Sonja].