491–500 of 685 posts
Setting a time to put away my phone and laptop every single day and sticking to it has rewired my brain and allowed me to rediscover old, slower, richer ways of thinking that I used to engage in. I cannot recommend it enough.
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I have found that people who grew up on the internet tend to have a "third place" that's online, which it sounds like for you is discord. That kind of makes that your priority over a real-life third place like a pub or something, since it's where all the people you are super familiar with are it's easier just to stick around that. For me all my online third places disappeared (specific IRC chats and forums), and I ne…
Third place? What are the first two?
What has helped me immensely is intermittent fasting from the internet. Setting a time to put away my phone and laptop every single day and sticking to it has rewired my brain and allowed me to rediscover old, slower, richer ways of thinking that I used to engage in. I cannot recommend it enough.
sites with commenting trick your brain into thinking you are having social interactions, at best it’s a waste of time, at worst you end up legitimately feeling worse than you did before
the feeling of wanting to look up some random factoid and not being able to feels unsettling at first. this is how you know your brain is getting fucked up by this. whenever is stick to this for a couple days my brain feels much more normal and i feel more relaxed
I know exactly why I do it and it feels impossible to stop. I scroll endlessly to avoid the pain of everything else in life. Doing work, doing chores, doing hobbies, talking to anyone, making decisions even about projects I'm excited to work on, it all causes a small hit of emotional pain. I don't really know where this pain comes from either. Maybe some childhood trauma that I can't even remember? I don't know. The…
That hit of pain is just a small feeling of loss for part of your childhood self, when you were all potential and didn't have to make any real choices. With each choice made, with each position we commit to, we expend some amount of our potential and turn it to something actual. The reward for this is obvious, the development of an adult self, a self we have chosen. The cost is less obvious, what if the person that you become cannot possibly live up to the ideal image of self you had as a child? What if you don't like the person that you become/are becoming? In fact, what if you can't even decide whether to like them or not because you're unsure of what your own values are?
The whole process of adulting can induce grief for the loss of an ideal, or anxiety over ambivalence towards one's self. Whether this happens or not probably is, at least partly, a result of what happened to you in childhood. Another part of it is probably genetic predisposition.
Anyway, the mild form of this is just procrastination, you avoid the anxiety of dealing with choices by doing something to sooth "that small hit of pain", but the price of that is wasting time and letting problems mount, which leads to worse anxiety, which leads to more procrastination. In more severe cases, when soothing behaviours no longer work, you get in to substance abuse and there are a whole of other ills.
Hope that helps in some way.
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I’d recommend you get your testosterone levels checked. One of the symptoms of low total testosterone is depression in males. When I was checked I was on the lower end at 200 ng/dl and had the symptoms you describe. My doctor prescribed me first stanolone (DHT) and then switched me to regular testosterone. All I can say is it has changed my life. It may not be applicable to your situation but it might help.
Gotta love internet diagnoses. Probably well-intended, but you don't even know if they are male or female :)
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I’d recommend you get your testosterone levels checked. One of the symptoms of low total testosterone is depression in males. When I was checked I was on the lower end at 200 ng/dl and had the symptoms you describe. My doctor prescribed me first stanolone (DHT) and then switched me to regular testosterone. All I can say is it has changed my life. It may not be applicable to your situation but it might help.
Not to pew pew your suggestion, but apparently sleep, diet, and, exercise effect test levels as well, so more things to check at and rule out before committing to lifelong trt. Although I keep reading testomonials where people say they don't mind jabbing or applying creams. Also test levels vary drastically during the day in a two peak fashion, when you get tested can affect results in a misleading fashion.
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Much like making new friends past university, therapists are a crapshoot. Some simply aren't a good fit or have poor sofa-side manner or fail to develop a sense of trust. If the therapy is part of an employer funded benefit, you also only get a limited number of sessions, and only with the employer-approved provider.
Also, your employer funded therapist will likely have a specific mandate to basically help you get back to work, meaning no longterm solutions or help, only bandaids.
Because we humans have a lot of idle time. We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out o…
>Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it Lions are at peace with the world. They sit around with clear minds, watching nature go by. They are content with the world and their place within it. This is absolutely not the same as a human who spends 4 hours a day doomscrolling through twitte…
"If you gotta eat shit, do it first thing in the morning." like Albert Einstein used to say.
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> For a long time, religion filled this void, but for almost everyone, it no longer does. Did religion actually fill this void? Or did enough people simply go through life not voicing any of their troubles for fear of exclusion or even institutionalization in a religious and highly superstitious society that didn't understand mental health? Religion didn't prevent alcoholism, out of wedlock pregnancies or domestic vi…
If you have no strong opinions on the meaning of your life , strong religions would come and greedily take any ground you were willing to concede. If you really had no idea what you want to do you might as well end up in a covent or an abbey. The presence of that extreme also allowed not being religious to be itself a strong voluntary choice. It doesn’t prevent alcoholism or other human problems, just force filled th…
Religion can only reasonably fill the gap in meaning if it isn't forcefully shoved into said gap. If shoved there, it's just another foreign body that miserably fails to heal anything as any number of other quack solutions: alcohol, social media, impulse purchasing, etc. In other words, it's just another opiate, but one which for a long time, was forced on people at literal gunpoint.
Not dissing religion per se, I just think that when we say "we used to have religion, and psychological health was fine", then we're looking at it with insanely rose-tinted glasses... actually, veering off in to total delusion?
But I am kind of guessing what historical periods we're talking about. Maybe we mean in prehistory, like the mesolithic? Because there's a lot less evidence about that so you have space to suppose that it was all very lovely, there were few tribes, they didn't have to violently compete, and internally they were all emotionally supportive environments in which a rich tapestry of mystical beliefs provided members with a deep sense of meaning and connection. But I would still be pretty skeptical about that. Not saying it didn't happen. But how widely and for how long?