Today carries one idea. It won't fix anything on its own, but it quietly changes the meaning of everything that comes after it: low mood isn't a verdict on who you are. It's a spiral, and spirals have moving parts.
Start with what low mood does, mechanically. It drains energy, and it raises the price of everything: people, projects, even the things you used to enjoy without thinking about them. So you do less, which is not weakness but the body pulling inward, the way it does around any injury; that is what low mood is built to make happen.
Doing less, though, quietly removes three kinds of fuel from a day:
With those gone, mood drops further, which drains more energy, which shrinks life a little more. Less mood, less action; less action, less reward; less reward, less mood. That's the downward spiral, and it will run in anyone it catches.
The critic in your head has been working from a different theory. It reads the doing-less as evidence about your character, and "lazy" is usually its word. The mechanics tell a different story: everything you have or haven't been doing lately is exactly what this loop produces in whoever falls into it. The spiral is the explanation, and your character was never part of it.
A loop also has one genuinely hopeful property: the same mechanics run in reverse. When activity comes back (carefully, gradually, in small amounts) the machinery that pulled mood down starts lifting it instead. Same spiral, opposite direction. That reversal is the entire program, and we'll walk it one small step at a time.
Where you are on the spiral turns out to matter less than which way you're moving. Someone at a five and sinking is in more trouble than someone at a three and climbing. Direction beats position, and direction is precisely what your evening check-ins measure, which is why those two quiet minutes matter more than they feel like they do.