i broke
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This has been what I do with mine. Most of it is pretty fucking "well duh" type stuff, however working with people to hold you, and you hold yourself, accountable for making progress in these ways. The part of having someone to hold you to account, this is often where a therapist is the most useful. However, in this situation, this isn't an option, so you need to reach out to others.
Take your meds. If you need meds, but can not currently access them due to finance issues, there are sources out there that may be able to help. This is not often easy to navigate, but it may be something that saves you.
Try any method you can find, that is from a reputable source, to keep your sleep on a schedule, and get at least 6 hours per night. This is way more important than many wish, but generally everyone knows it is vital to health, including mental health.
Make yourself accountable to someone for daily improvement progress - eg find a friend, family member, online gaming buddy, whatever, that you report to, on a routine basis, to report the regularity of maintaining these routines. This means whatever you need to do to keep your living space clean, and in order, routine exercise, adherence to a healthy diet, maintaining the framework to keep yourself on track, like keeping your phone calendar up date, keeping lists of chores/errands you need to do, working on maintaining a hierarchy of needs (most immediate things to do, and most important), etc. This is the big one though, this person is allowed to criticize you in your failings on this, and you need to take that criticism, and use it as a call to focus on these areas. You may need more than one person willing to help. If you are isolated, there are online groups for these things. No this isn't a great alternative, but it is better than nothing, and living in despair.
You need to audit your behavior. You need to make a record of the things you do that are mentally taxing, and thus can harm your mental health. Do you spend all day, every day, at work, or stressing about work? You need to find a place you can vent this stress, and look for advice on how to disengage with work enough stop burn out, but still do what is expected. If what is expected is just too much, you need to recognize it, and work on finding a lower stress income. Do you doom scroll? Well look into apps that help you regulate the time you spend online. Also, audit your experience with the platforms you engage with. If you find one is mostly something that adds to your stress, depression, despair, etc. work on just cutting that out completely. Look at your personal relationships, and really try to assess whether or not your relationships are healthy, if not, how can they become healthy? If there is not foreseeable way to make it healthy, go low-contact, pilot no contact. If your daily life has any improvement because you no longer maintain contact, then it is time to drop them.
Social activity. This will depend greatly on how much socializing, and what kinds, you can handle, etc. This one is much more tricky, especially since anxiety, anhedonia, and other negative aspects of your mental health really affect how hard this is. However, you need to work on getting some sort of in person social contact. It needs to be regular, and I don't mean like all the time, but that there is a routine set-up for it. Local hobby groups, activities at the local library, publicly held events you may attend, try to work out a specific time period where you, and at least one friend/family member, can spend that time together doing an agreed upon activity.
Do things that allow you to put your thoughts into more of an order than they may currently be. This could be a journal, personal blog, etc. Just something where you can dump your brain, look at what came out, and apply some structure to it.
Spend time outside. Be it with people, or alone, just force yourself to spend time outside, especially in places you can see nature, see green, etc. If you just sit there observing it, it will help to maintain wellness. This is subtle, and takes a while, however it does have a real impact.
There is more, and I can ask my therapist, when I see her this week, for resources for all this, and I can update with what she says, if she is willing, which I do not see why she wouldn't be.
What to Do if You Can't Afford Therapy -
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Just cheer up.
but doctor, i am pagliacci
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"You don't have to be mad at yourself for that any more"
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"What good does worrying about that part of your past do your current self?"
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"Come on, now. You know that's not true"
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"Don't reply to messages from your ex'
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Pain is relative. Yes other people may have it worse than you. The worst pain you've felt in your life is still the worst, for you. So don't write it off so easily.
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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!
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Hot take, but I’ve done therapy with like 4-5 different therapists over like 20 years and found it to be of little to no use. What’s been a lot more helpful is just living life with the intent of letting go of past wrongs and making sure that I don’t inflict them on others.
I think the point of therapy is to help you effect changes in your behavior (mental and physical). Sounds like you were able to make some changes that help.
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Yes its *possible, but not plausible_
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Inside every man are two wolves...
Not even kidding. I had a therapist tell me this story once. I promptly found a new therapist.
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"You don't have to be mad at yourself for that any more"
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"What good does worrying about that part of your past do your current self?"
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"Come on, now. You know that's not true"
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"Don't reply to messages from your ex'
“You don’t have to be mad at yourself for that any more”
“What good does worrying about that part of your past do your current self?”
For these ones I don't really have control over that. My brain gets itself all worked up before I have any say in the matter.
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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?
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.
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A friend of mine thinks we're due for a revolution, but isn't going to start anything unilaterally. Does that constitute "a danger to himself or others"?
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Pain is relative. Yes other people may have it worse than you. The worst pain you've felt in your life is still the worst, for you. So don't write it off so easily.
Someone, not a therapist, told me pain isn't a competition. I don't have to wait for my pain to be worse than the pain of the people around me before I go get help for myself.
In this case, I had physical pain I put off getting checked because it wasn't worse than what why partner deals with daily. Turned out I needed antibiotics for a bad infection.