Part of my therapy for Depression/Chronic Pain is to try and make little goals that I can achieve each day. For example: "Take a shower", "eat something for breakfast", "put real clothes on", "brush your teeth". Sometimes, more lofty ones like "wash a few dishes".

The idea is that once you achieve these small goals, you'll feel better about yourself and you'll be able to do those every day without any trouble. Then, you can move on to more challenging goals. I know you guys know what I'm talking about.

Well, "start small" doesn't work on me, and that is a serious problem.

I do the small goals, and the immediate affect is something like, "this is utterly pathetic, i should be doing more, normal people do this every day, i want to do more, why can't i do more, this isn't achieving anything, this is not enough"
Then it spirals out of control, where doing even the smallest things are completely useless and not worth doing at all. In other words, achieving small goals makes me feel WORSE and will result in days, sometimes weeks of no activity what-so-ever. I think I'm on week 3 at the moment, of literally sitting for 14 hours playing video games and watching Netflix.

So instead, I try to do some hard goals like "do 10 loads of laundry" which then turns into "your pain levels are out of control now and you're in bed for days".
But doing the 10 loads of laundry makes me feel GREAT even though I'm going to pay for it, seriously pay, later. Doing a bigger goal is what I need, but it costs SO much to do it. My therapist tells me NOT to do this. My doctors tell me NOT to do this. EVERYONE tells me not to do this.

This is a combo question for Depression/Chronic Pain people alike. My therapist knows this issue, and yet, will tell me to continue with the small goals even though they make me feel SO much worse.

Has anyone else figured out HOW to fix this problem?

Thanks guys.