What Matters to You — And How to Find Out When You've Lost the Thread

You used to know what mattered. Maybe not in precise language, but in the felt sense of being pulled toward something — a direction, a quality of engagement, a way of being in the world that felt like yours. You could lose hours in conversation, in creative work, in the particular kind of attention that arises when you are doing something that connects to something larger than the task itself.

Then, gradually or suddenly, the thread went slack. Maybe it was burnout. Maybe grief, or a prolonged period of anxiety that narrowed your world to just getting through each day. Maybe it was the slow accumulation of obligations — the "shoulds" I described in a previous post — that replaced genuine engagement with dutiful compliance. Whatever the cause, the result is the same: you are functioning, perhaps even functioning well by external measures, but the sense of direction is gone. You are moving, but you cannot remember why.

This is one of the most common experiences people describe when they arrive in my Colorado telehealth practice. Not always in these words. Sometimes it sounds like "I don't know what I want anymore." Sometimes it sounds like "I know I should be grateful, but nothing feels meaningful." Sometimes it sounds like "I feel like I'm just going through the motions." Underneath all of these descriptions is a disconnection from what psychologists call values — not moral values in the cultural sense, but the overarching purposes and qualities of action that give life its texture and pull.

Understanding how this disconnection happens — and how to repair it — is some of the most important work we do in therapy.

What Values Actually Are

Most people, when asked about their values, produce a list: family, honesty, health, career, faith. These are reasonable answers, but they tend to function more as labels than as lived experiences. Saying "I value family" is like saying "I value music" — it identifies a category but tells you nothing about the specific quality of engagement that makes it matter.

In the framework I use, values operate at two levels. The first is what we might call overarching goals — broad, positive directions that can never truly be completed. "Contributing to my children's capacity to navigate life with confidence." "Creating work that reflects careful attention to the people it serves." "Building a relationship characterized by honesty even when honesty is difficult." These are not items on a to-do list. They are directions — like heading north. You never arrive at north. But the direction organizes every step.

The second level is what I think of as qualities of action — the how rather than the what. These are often best captured by adverbs: with compassion, with curiosity, with integrity, with patience, with courage. A person who values integrity can find satisfaction in an infinite number of actions, as long as those actions are done with integrity. The quality is not exhausted by any single behavior. It is available in every moment, regardless of circumstances.

When these two levels are connected — when a person's daily actions are experienced as part of an overarching direction, carried out with qualities they care about — something remarkable happens. The action itself becomes satisfying, not because of what it produces but because of what it is part of. Washing dishes is tedious in isolation. Washing dishes as part of creating a home characterized by care and presence is a different experience entirely — not because the dishes have changed, but because the relationship between the action and the person's larger sense of purpose has changed.

This is the difference between conditional and hierarchical motivation. Conditional motivation sounds like: "I'll do this so that I can get that." It depends on the outcome arriving. If the outcome doesn't arrive — if the promotion doesn't come, if the relationship doesn't improve, if the effort doesn't produce visible results — the motivation collapses, and the person is left asking "What was the point?" Hierarchical motivation sounds like: "This action is part of something I care about, regardless of how it turns out." The satisfaction is not dependent on a specific result. It is contained within the action itself, because the action is experienced as an expression of something that matters.

Why the Thread Gets Lost

If this kind of meaning is available in any moment, why does it disappear?

Several things can sever the connection between daily actions and the larger purposes they serve.

Suffering narrows the field. When a person is in significant pain — physical, emotional, relational — the immediate priority becomes managing the pain. This is adaptive. But over time, a life organized around pain management becomes a life that has contracted to the point where the only question is "How do I get through today?" The person is no longer pursuing what matters to them. They are avoiding what hurts. And avoidance, as I described in my post on the quicksand problem, tends to spread. The world gets smaller. The things that once provided meaning — relationships, creative pursuits, physical engagement, intellectual curiosity — are abandoned, not because they stopped mattering but because they became associated with the risk of more pain.

Rules replace engagement. This is the mechanism I described in my post on "shoulds." When pliance dominates — when a person is following rules because of the social and emotional consequences of compliance rather than because of their own lived experience — the connection to meaning quietly erodes. The person may still be doing meaningful things. But the internal experience has shifted from "I am doing this because it matters to me" to "I am doing this because I should." The behavior looks the same. The vitality is gone. Over years, this substitution becomes so complete that the person can no longer distinguish between what they genuinely care about and what they have been told they should care about.

Goals get confused with values. A person sets a specific goal — finish the degree, get the promotion, find the relationship — and organizes their life around achieving it. This works well enough while the goal is active. But specific goals end. They are either achieved or they fail. And when a person's entire sense of meaning has been attached to a specific outcome, the completion of that outcome can produce a bewildering emptiness. The new graduate who feels lost. The retired professional who doesn't know what to do with themselves. The person who achieved everything they were supposed to achieve and feels nothing. These are not failures of gratitude. They are the natural result of building meaning on conditional foundations — on "I will feel fulfilled when" rather than on an ongoing direction that cannot be exhausted by any single achievement.

Depression erases the felt connection. One of the cruelest features of depression is its capacity to retroactively rewrite the meaning of past experience. A client who once found deep satisfaction in reading may now say, "I don't even know if I ever really enjoyed it. Maybe I was just distracting myself." Depression does not merely reduce current motivation. It reaches backward and strips meaning from memories that once provided evidence that life could be satisfying. The person is left not only unmotivated in the present but unconvinced that they were ever truly motivated at all. This is coherence maintenance operating at its most destructive — the depressed self-concept reorganizing the past to match the present.

The Morning Problem

There is a specific version of this disconnection that almost everyone recognizes, even people who are not depressed. I think of it as the morning problem.

You decide, the night before, that you will go for a run in the morning. You are clear about why: it connects to your health, to your sense of vitality, to the kind of person you want to be. In the evening, the connection between the action and its meaning is vivid. You can feel why it matters.

Then the alarm goes off. It is cold. You are tired. The bed is warm. And the connection to meaning that felt so alive last night is nowhere to be found. In this moment, the immediate context — discomfort, fatigue, warmth — dominates completely. The overarching purpose that made the decision feel obvious is now an abstraction. You know, intellectually, why you wanted to run. But you cannot feel it. The symbolic bridge between this moment and the larger meaning has gone dark.

This is not a failure of willpower. It is a failure of connection — a gap between what matters to you and what is present in the moment. The meaning hasn't changed. Your capacity to contact it has temporarily collapsed under the weight of immediate experience.

This is why the common advice to "just think about your goals" often fails. Thinking about goals is a verbal exercise, and verbal exercises compete poorly with direct sensory experience. The warmth of the bed is immediate and concrete. "Being the kind of person who takes care of their body" is abstract and distant. The contest is not close.

What works instead is not thinking about the goal but contacting the meaning — making the abstract concrete and present. Not "I should run because it's healthy" but the felt memory of how it feels to finish a run on a cold morning, the way the air tastes, the particular quality of aliveness that follows. Not the rule but the experience. Not the obligation but the thing the obligation was originally connected to, before it became a "should."

Finding the Thread Again

If you have lost contact with what matters — if the thread has gone slack and you are not sure where to find it — the process of reconnection does not begin with setting new goals or making commitments. It begins with noticing.

Notice what still pulls you, even slightly. Meaning does not announce itself with fanfare. It often shows up as a small tug of interest, a moment of engagement that feels different from the rest of the day, a conversation that holds your attention in a way you didn't expect. These are not distractions. They are data. They are signals from parts of yourself that are still oriented toward something, even when the larger structure of meaning has collapsed.

Follow the thread upward. When you notice something that matters — even something small — ask: what is this connected to? If you find yourself lingering over a conversation with a friend, what quality of that conversation pulled you in? Was it honesty? Curiosity? The feeling of being truly seen? Those are not just features of a pleasant interaction. They are qualities of action — things you can bring to any number of contexts, relationships, and activities. The specific conversation ends. The quality it expressed does not have to.

Distinguish between what you value and what you have been told to value. This is perhaps the most difficult step, because as I described above, the two have often become indistinguishable. One question that can help: if no one would ever know, and no one would ever judge you — no praise for doing it, no guilt for not doing it — would you still choose this? If the answer is yes, you are likely in contact with something genuinely yours. If the answer is that you would feel relieved to stop, you may be looking at a rule that has been masquerading as a value.

Allow the thread to be different from what you expected. People change. What mattered to you at twenty-five may not be what matters to you now — and that is not a failure. It is evidence that you are paying attention. Holding onto a value that no longer fits, simply because it was once central to your identity, is just another form of the rigid coherence maintenance I described in my post on how labels become prisons. Values are meant to guide, not to constrain. If the direction has genuinely shifted, following the new direction is not abandoning yourself. It is trusting yourself.

The Difference This Makes

When a person reconnects with what genuinely matters to them — not as an intellectual exercise but as a felt, present experience — something shifts in the quality of daily life. Actions that once felt empty or obligatory begin to feel purposeful, not because the actions themselves have changed but because the person can now experience them as part of something larger. Motivation, which had been dependent on external pressure or willpower, begins to arise more naturally — not because the person has become more disciplined, but because the connection between action and meaning is once again alive and present.

This is not a permanent fix. The thread will go slack again. There will be mornings when the bed wins. There will be periods when suffering narrows the world back down to survival mode. But the thread is always there. It does not disappear because you lose contact with it, any more than the stars disappear because the sky is cloudy. The work is not to manufacture meaning from nothing. The work is to keep finding your way back.

Getting Started

If you recognize the disconnection I've described — the sense that you are functioning but not living, moving but not heading anywhere that matters — therapy can help you find the thread again. I provide telehealth psychotherapy to adults across Colorado, integrating ACT and related approaches within a Process-Based Therapy framework. Contact me at rachael.stclaire@hush.com for a free 15-minute consultation, or visit the Appointments page.