When the heaviness will not lift
The Qur'an takes the weight seriously. It has language for a heart gone quiet, for a chest that feels pressed in, for someone who is still upright and still cannot feel much of anything. That language is given to prophets, which is worth sitting with: the people held up as closest to God are shown flattened by sorrow, and the text never treats it as a lapse in their faith.
Much of the vocabulary is bodily before it is emotional. A burden weighing down the back. A heart described as emptied out, or as pressed. The three men left behind at Tabuk are described with "the earth, for all its vastness, closed in upon them" and then their own selves closing in after it, which is about as exact as language gets for the condition. Readers who know the state tend to recognize themselves on first reading.
What follows in these passages is rarely a quick reversal. People crying out at their lowest are told that help is near, with no date attached. The mother of Musa has her heart steadied while her circumstances stay exactly as they are. Ya'qub goes blind from weeping before anything is restored to him, and that account sits at the center of our page on grief. The comfort on offer is that God is present inside the condition, and that presence does not depend on your being able to feel it.
For the stretch when worship feels mechanical, one line reframes a great deal: revelation came to lift weight off a person. God names the state before asking anything of the one carrying it, telling the Prophet that "your heart is weighed down by what they say". That cuts against the instinct, common in low periods, to read every missed prayer as a verdict already passed. The image the text keeps returning to for relief is rain arriving after people have stopped expecting it, which puts the timing outside your control and outside your fault. More of that register sits on our page about hope.
Care matters alongside all of this. A verse is company, and a doctor or a therapist is treatment, and the long regard for medicine in this tradition leaves room for both without embarrassment. If the weight has reached the point of wanting out, tell someone tonight. Keep the verses for what they are good at, which is company at four in the morning and the reminder that this state has been named out loud, in the book you are holding.