You clearly find it easy to stop doing things that are bad for you (drinking, drugs, eating meat), but you struggle to start doing things that are good for you (exercise, cooking, eating enough/well).
She was right. I still don’t do the bad stuff and started doing the good stuff and now my life is so much better. Ironically it was quitting the last bad thing (weed) which allowed me to start taking care of myself. It’s not enough to not hurt yourself, you have to be good to yourself too.
Go for a walk, be mindful of your surroundings
That’ll be $300
Girl I have a $120 bill that is going to bankrupt me at the moment, you ain’t getting shit from me.
That’s fine, we aren’t accepting new patients right now anyways
Last therapist I talked to asked me what my problems were. I said they’re personal and I have a hard time talking about them. He essentially said “alright not much we can do then” and ended the meeting. This was after about 2 weeks of waiting for the appointment too. I haven’t bothered looking for another therapist.
They don’t care about me. They care about the money I give them.
i mean, what did you want them to do? slice your head open and dig around manually until they find the Bad Thoughts?
It’d be nice if they didn’t give up in 2 minutes.
I had a friend in college who shopped around between all the available therapists and finally decided on the one she had the best rapport with. I know there are wait times and other difficulties, but it goes a long way to find somebody you click with.
If you’ve chosen to take in the weight of the world, no amount of therapy can solve your problems.
Actually I want every living and potentially living thing in the universe to expire, including spores, viruses, text and LLMs
Sounds miserable lol
Try something other than amex cards.
For everything else, there’s MasterCard
May be kinda specific (and poorly worded), but basically she said that negative feelings come from places where my mental image of the world conflicts with objective reality. This was mostly related to my relationship with my father, as i was looking up to him and seeking his approval, while ignoring the fact that neither he should be a role model or i can be a person whom he would accept. I found this advice applicable to many other situations, but unfortunately i mostly use it after the fact — i get disappointed or angry about something and then i ask myself “Ok, but what i imagined things would be? What else am i wrong about?”
This sounds a lot like the Second Noble Truth in Buddhism. “Suffering is caused by desire”, meaning that there is a disconnect between what you wish were so, and what is actually so.
I started writing “true, but in my case it wasn’t limited only to desiring something” and stopped mid sentence. I was sad that i couldn’t fit in my family, because i desired to be a part of it. Giving that desire up removed my suffering, so yeah.
I should probably look into Buddhism.
Mine explained my emotional dysregulation patterns and helped me identify the triggers and how to address them.
By far, the most useful technique they shared with me was the TIPP skills technique, which helps me come down when I am having strong emotional reactions as a trauma response or from anxiety. Essentially:
- temperature - use cold temp to lower heart rate, warm to raise it
- intense exercise - helps manage overwhelming energy levels
- paced breathing - I’m not big on breathing but it works for some
- paired muscle relaxation - my favourite as it also interrupts thought patterns
Hope you’re able to access help though, obviously it is much better when personalized and you also get the safe space to release your fears and anxieties
“We’re raising our hourly rates”
think about all of the shit that makes life suck. think about the things that make you miserable. now imagine ✨pouring your love✨ on those things like a great big waterfall.
…what do you mean that didn’t help? you aren’t cured now?? welp, that’s all we have time for. see you again in two weeks.
Right, kick ass. Well, don’t want to sound like a dick or nothin’, but, ah… it says on your chart that you’re fucked up.
What issues are you dealing with (if you feel like sharing)? I can speak from my experience being in therapy for AuADHD, anxiety, depression, childhood traumas, and a few other things.
ETA: Some generic things from my therapist that will help most people:
- Drink enough water. This alone can have a significant impact.
- Try to do regular physical activity that you enjoy, if possible. Even if you don’t feel like it.
- Check your posture. If you find yourself hunching, try fixing that.
- Do things that you know that you enjoy when you are not depressed, when you are depressed. Our brains are weird and “fake it 'til you make it” kinda works - by doing non-depressive things, you can trick your brain into being happier.
- Try to engage socially, if you find yourself to be a hermit. Our brains are evolved to be social animals and isolation can be damaging.
- If you are having trouble with the state of the world and things that you do not have control over, try engaging in things that you do have control over. This can be as simple as deep cleaning your sink or fixing a squeeky hinge. The amount of frustration caused by inability to impact important global happening is problematic for maintaining good mental health - our brains evolved in environments where life-threatening problems had immediate solutions but humans have built societies that don’t work that way.
Important items
- Be patient and kind to yourself. Especially your past self. We all did cringy things when young with brains not fully-developed and/or without the information that one has currently. If you have trouble doing so, try mentally taking a step back and pretending that you are dealing with a close friend who you care about deeply. Would you judge them and make them feel bad about their past mistakes? I hope not.
- Concern and depression about the world at large is a very valid way to feel. It’s important, especially for those of us with mental health challenges, to take the airplane safety spiel “put your own mask on first before helping others” approach to rendering aid to others. If you are in or near crisis, you are not in a place to help others and need to focus on getting to stable ground yourself first. Needing to do this isn’t slacking off or “not doing your part”. Not everyone is equipped to be out marching all the time (some are not equipped for this at all). If someone offers unhelpful criticism of inability to engage physically due to mental or physical health, they are best ignored rather than responded to.
So many of these are so good, too many people don’t realize you can use your body to essentially “hack” your brain
Little known fact the brain is in fact part of the body.
Source?
Thank you for these
Any advice on how to do work like other people? I am quick to grab my phone everytime I get even slightly stressed or don’t immediately know the answer to a problem.
And it takes a lot of time for me to do something, it takes other very little (at least compared to me). Any advice on that?
Any advice on how to do work like other people? I am quick to grab my phone everytime I get even slightly stressed or don’t immediately know the answer to a problem.
Assuming that you have ADHD based on your other comment, I do, actually, from my own struggles with AuADHD. First thing, is a bit of radical acceptance. If you are not neurotypical, especially if ADHD and/or ASD are involved, you’re not and never will be “like other people”. No pill known by medical science, no strategy, and no therapy is going to change that because it has to do with the brain developing differently in physical structural ways than a neurotypical brain and it’s likely genetic or epigenetic.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for functionality. Just that one must approach things differently and “calibrate” strategies to work with, rather than against their brain. Importantly, it also means that most “productivity hacks” and the like are utterly useless because they were developed with a neurotypical brain as the starting point.
When it comes to doom scrolling and the like, when stressed, you’re actually at a good starting point in that you are aware of what is happening and at least somewhat aware of the cause. It might not seem apparent but, emotion is a significant component of ADHD. The biggest thing to know is that if you are fighting against a heightened emotional state that is causing you to be unable to start or continue something, it can be like quicksand. Constantly running into that emotional brick wall isn’t going to help.
So, what do you do? Well, the same thing isn’t necessarily going to work for everyone. Something that I’ve been working on with my therapist is a strategy from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) that is called the “STOP” skill (here’s a link). Essentially, it involves analyzing your state in the moment and mindfully deciding on a path forward.
If, like many with ADHD including myself (this was a fun thing to become aware of well into adulthood), you are not super comfortable with your emotions and/or have alexithymia (trouble identifying, describing, and expressing ones own emotions), it could be useful to find an emotion wheel or feelings wheel. There are many versions out there. The important thing is to find one that makes sense to you - I like the ones that start more general in the center and get more specific in the edges. To use that type to figure out how you are feeling (or evaluate how you were feeling from memory), just start with your finger in the center and work your way outwards to the emotion that most fits. Practicing this when not in a moment of stress can help to make it easier when you need it.
Other things that you can try are: practicing meditation so that it is easier to use when you need it and, if necessary, making your phone inaccessible, if you don’t need it. Overall, the goal is to improve coping strategies available to you in order to make it easier to use ones that serve you and your well-being.
And it takes a lot of time for me to do something, it takes other very little (at least compared to me). Any advice on that?
Again, assuming that you have ADHD here. The first thing that you’ll need to do is identify the causes. I, for example, often have a lot of trouble reading (even though I love it and was at a college level vocabulary in primary school). For me, this is caused entirely by ADHD, resulting in re-reading paragraphs and sometimes individual sentences multiple times before they “stick”. This caused a lot of problems for me when I was a child didn’t receive any treatment for it.
Another common thing for ADHD is getting too granular and getting into analysis paralysis or stuck planning rather than doing. I find that setting limits on myself helps to reduce this. For example, if I need to write a program, I might get stuck evaluating what language to use, what libraries to use, which perform better under a given workload, etc. I need to set limits on how long I can take to research and try to make the scope of the work as small as possible to avoid either getting sick in perpetual planning or perpetual research.
Ultimately, you need to evaluate why you are taking longer to do the tasks, which is likely not just one thing, and start chipping away at the things that are causing the time sink in manageable bites. Don’t try to fix everything at once!
If you are not neurotypical, especially if ADHD and/or ASD are involved, you’re not and never will be “like other people”.
I try and remind myself about this. But It fucking sucks that some people diagnose themselves with ADHD, but have no problems doing stuff. Then I have to fight my mind and not compare myself to other people. Irl, I guess you just have to suck up, I remember my boss telling me I was a disappointment compared to my colleagues. People suck.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)
Oh okay, I didn’t know about this. I will check this out in detail.
If, like many with ADHD including myself (this was a fun thing to become aware of well into adulthood), you are not super comfortable with your emotions and/or have alexithymia (trouble identifying, describing, and expressing ones own emotions), it could be useful to find an emotion wheel or feelings wheel.
I think I understand my feelings most of the time, but I do have difficulty controlling them.
I have had trouble explaining why I can’t sometimes work for more than 15-20 minutes, but I’ve always attributed that to stress anxiety. Like my body and brain just stop and refuse to work all together untill I shake that feeling off.
Thanks for the very comprehensive answer internet stranger, I appreciate it. The feeling wheel and DBT are something I’ll check out.
I think I understand my feelings most of the time
I thought I did too but just had trouble communicating them. It turned out that I had overestimated my comprehension. Practice has helped me a lot.
but I do have difficulty controlling them.
Something that I’d caution is that framing altogether. Emotion is part of our experience as humans and an integral part of our consciousness. Controlling our emotions (with exception of those with conditions like Bipolar PD that need help with emotional stability) is not the best goal. Emotions are important, involuntary, and frequently serve evolutionary purposes.
The more healthy way to look at it is addressing how we react when we experience our emotions. That is something that we do have control over. Those of us with ADHD often have trouble with emotional dysregulation (kind of a misnomer, IMO, as it is more about managing reaction to experienced emotions), which makes it more of a challenge. It is still possible though with practice (and accepting that failure is part of the process).
Thanks for the very comprehensive answer internet stranger, I appreciate it.
You’re very welcome. If I’ve helped yourself or anyone else in the slightest, I am delighted.
The issue here is that you’re doing everything you can to avoid negative emotions, like picking up your phone to distract yourself at the first sign of anxiety.
Often some of the biggest things which hold us back in life come from avoiding discomfort. The most ‘motivated’ people you know aren’t doing all these things because it’s easy, they do them despite the difficulty and discomfort.
The best thing you can do for yourself is learn how to sit with discomfort and act on what you want to do despite it. It’s not easy, but it’ll change a lot for you.
I have that problem and it’s still a problem for me but what I’ve found that sort of works is to keep a to do list of all the shit I need to do. Kind of like a bulet journal but less complicated. If someone asks me to do something then instead of immediately jumping on it (unless it’s an emergency) I put it on the list. Then when I am working on something and it stresses me out to the point I am reaching for my phone I move to a different item on the list instead (sometimes). When I finish something or review the list and see a bunch of things crossed off it also gives me a little mood bump. Also keeping my phone in my bag instead of within reach and just listening to podcasts or whatever on my wireless buds helps.
None of this is a perfect solution but it did help a bit. Usually if I can get myself in a groove I can power through several items and make up the time I lost dicking around so having a list ready is handy for that as well.
How do you manage between difficult and simple tasks? And Do you do the simple items first or the tough ones?
I’ve found myself of two minds about this.
Completing smaller simpler tasks feels fulfilling in that moment and helps boost productivity but doesn’t feel so good from a broader look back at them.
Whereas finishing difficult tasks feels really good but they can sometimes keep going on and on and on and feel never ending. They might take up a whole day and in that I might miss the small tasks.
Thanks for your reply.
I manage them mostly by timeline. At any given time I have 15-20 things going I need to get done so whatever is due next gets priority. Unless it’s something difficult and I’m having trouble getting my brain to go into gear I will switch tracks and do the next item down that I’m able to knock out quickly. I also try to break larger things into small tasks. So instead of “xxxx deployment”. It’s schedule XXXX planning meeting with customer, get quote, get PO, document site, and so on. With things getting added as they come up.
I can’t really speak to the rest of your comment because nothing I do ever really gives me any kind of lasting good feeling, other than having it off by back if it had been stressing me out. Sometimes that is impetus enough to focus and get something done though.
Have you been tested for ADHD?
Yup 👍, none of the meds available in my country worked.
I’ve been rawdogging ever since.
I can’t heal you. You have to learn how to manage your situation. That I would be glad to help you with.
I know she said it differently but that’s how I remember it. I’ve never been so terrified in my life but she helped me (so far) to get really excited for change.
I shouldn’t be paranoid about him double billing me/my insurance.
Not all therapists are good ones.
that negative feelings come from places where my mental image of the world conflicts with objective reality.
Used to work in the backend of insurance.
It’s ‘possible’ to double bill for a good reason, but it’s an outlier of a situation.
If you have a shitty insurance company, they’ll stretch money in bad times by only paying places out after multiple requests. They also get trained that if an insurance company drags their feet, the second time they’re billed, they get paid, so they always do it.
Any insurance company worth its salt will catch double billing.
Now, all that said, a LOT of providers double bill and get paid multiple times.
It’s usually assholes all-the-way down.
Bro just do it you wont. (I got a therapist from betterhelp)
“I think you should come here twice a week to work that out”
I’m not sure how that helps you though.
“never challenge worse”
