Earlier quoted context omitted.
Treatment should focus on both. That doesn’t mean that bad life circumstances are depression though; rather they can be a factor contributing to depression. If you went to a doctor for type 2 diabetes, they would tell you to eat healthier and exercise as well as to take medications when needed. Your eating and activity habits are not themselves diabetes, even though they contribute directly to your diabetes. Another…
The medical community doesn't own the entire term. An individual should be able to say "I think I'm depressed" when reflecting on their own mental state, without that implying a narrow medical condition. Or worse, some paternalistic doctor attacking them for self-diagnosing.
YouTube Addiction
401–410 of 417 posts
Re: YouTube Addiction
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're intent on getting off the internet, Gabor has several books worth reading. One trouble with his writing and speaking on the subject isn't that I think he's wrong or does a bad job at all, but like anything in psychology, you aren't going to read it and "get there", so to speak. What Gabor describes is often years of critical reflection away from fully making sense. I guess from my perspective I don't get th…
I guess you can say I just haven't reflected enough but I really have a hard time with the whole branch of thinking that blames all our patterns and activities on some hidden childhood trauma, and more generally with the obsession over finding the "original sin" cause for the patterns. It just feels like a cop out to have an explanation to something one can't deal with as if we have to blame the universe for our natu…
Many of the things I started going through with these books and later on a therapist are probably something I could have dealt with, without first identifying the trauma. But it would be the kind of "could have done it", like I also could have done learning advanced math by just reading some books instead of going to university. In theory it works, for some people it works, but for most of us, taking some classes and having homework and exams is what makes it actually possible.
Permit me an example: Imagine this - you placed an empty bottle somewhere in a corner on the ground. You were busy with chores, it was in the way, you'll deal with it later. Your partner walks in and accidentally knocks it over. You forget about your chore. Your entire mind is filled with the need to apologize, hide, try to make up for putting that bottle there. You watch your partner sigh, pick it up, put it away and proceed with whatever he was doing, but you still can't focus on anything over the intense feeling of guilt and fear. It will take a few minutes to let you get back to work and probably at least an hour for the feeling to entirely go away. What do you do with this shit? I didn't know. I just knew situations like this far too well and they happened a lot.
Reading a book on trauma gave me several clues that had gone right past me for at this point about 13-15 years of my adult life. First off, I didn't understand this was a limbic response. In hindsight, if you need a textbook example for freeze responses, I'm right here. Then I had to understand what I was afraid of. That was tough, because up until reading anything on this, I did not understand "someone shouting at me and calling me stupid for several minutes" to be something that would cause panic. For a little kid, it definitely does. And in this moment, mentally I reverted to little kid mode. I needed to handle whatever the almighty parent throws at me. In my case, handling it was suffering through it and either crying in my room when it was over or later dissociating to escape the pain.
So basically, I had a flashback. Plain and simple. While I consciously knew that would never happen, something inside of me expected my partner to go nuclear on me for being so inconsiderate and lazy and I would not be able to do anything. I would just stand there and take it until he's finished shouting and I'm allowed to go to my room and cry.
My partner doesn't shout at me. Never has. This made it so hard for me to understand, what was going on. Telling me that I was overreacting and just consciously understanding I was safe was helping a little, but it was painfully slow. Also, was I overreacting? Wasn't this how people feel when they have done something wrong? Understanding, what I was actually afraid of (my dad) and that this situation was not normal (it was emotional abuse), jump-started recovery. I suddenly knew what I had to compare reality to. I knew better what to tell myself to soothe and ease out of panic. I could start doing some of those cliche exercises to low-key trigger that fear, walk through it and come out the other end to actively understand I'm still okay. I could also imagine rescuing myself or reliving the situation today and react as the self-reliant adult I am. All the (not) fun stuff.
Going from there, I gradually discovered more and more flashbacks that kept eating up my mental capacity, so I could isolate the triggers and deal with the emotional mess they caused, one at a time. And lo and behold - if you are not busy dissociating on a daily basis, you can actually have real emotions. It's great!
At this point, the amount of blame involved is very little. Sometimes I use a little blame to get out of the shame-cycle. It usually starts with feeling guilty for not replying to some shaming message my parents sent me, starts spiraling into feeling like I'm the worst child ever and then ends with "Screw you dad, I've handled your emotions long enough. We're not doing that again." That is part blame and I hope that I will eventually be able to do without it. It's a work in progress.
Re: YouTube Addiction
#403I am seriously addicted to the internet in general and while it may not be an addiction in the physical sense, it has caused major issues in my life. The amount of time I spend on the Internet is insane and no matter how hard I try to will power through it and cut down my usage I always fail. If I ever figure out how to overcome it I'll have to write a book or something, because I've wasted years of my life and misse…
TL, DR; You are addicted to other people, without lasting connections. Shame on you for being a social animal
Re: YouTube Addiction
#404I am seriously addicted to the internet in general and while it may not be an addiction in the physical sense, it has caused major issues in my life. The amount of time I spend on the Internet is insane and no matter how hard I try to will power through it and cut down my usage I always fail. If I ever figure out how to overcome it I'll have to write a book or something, because I've wasted years of my life and misse…
Re: YouTube Addiction
#405I am seriously addicted to the internet in general and while it may not be an addiction in the physical sense, it has caused major issues in my life. The amount of time I spend on the Internet is insane and no matter how hard I try to will power through it and cut down my usage I always fail. If I ever figure out how to overcome it I'll have to write a book or something, because I've wasted years of my life and misse…
What do you want to spend your time on other than the internet? I don't know what you've tried, but you've talked about what you don't want to do, and didn't talk about what you do want to do. And it's hard to remove a habit if you don't have something ready with which to replace it.
Re: YouTube Addiction
#406I am seriously addicted to the internet in general and while it may not be an addiction in the physical sense, it has caused major issues in my life. The amount of time I spend on the Internet is insane and no matter how hard I try to will power through it and cut down my usage I always fail. If I ever figure out how to overcome it I'll have to write a book or something, because I've wasted years of my life and misse…
Go to a rural area ,with some good friends of yours, intract with local peoples.
Re: YouTube Addiction
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it just me or is Google quietly in serious distress? Ads have been getting a LOT worse very quickly. Almost every ad I saw in a day when my UBlock wasn’t working was advertising an actual fraud. Whether crypto or recession get rich quick or “aluminum is giving you cancer.” Advertising frequency is cranked way up. On mobile 5 second unskippables are 6-7 now. I’ll do a search and my ENTIRE screen is advertising unti…
On this topic, what do people recommend for mobile adblocking? I've been using AdAway which redirects ads to your phone's loopback in non-root mode.
Re: YouTube Addiction
#408I like that this author called out YouTube as a specific type of addiction. It seems their main way of combatting the consuming side of their addiction is by creating. I spent the last year writing a book about technology addiction. Through that process, it has helped me find better ways to fill my days and moderate how much time I spend on devices. There's also a good book called "Stolen Focus" that outlines a numbe…
I tend to agree with you a lot, and find the process entirely terrifying. I've grown up with a history of being shut down and bullied when attempting to create (by teachers, peers, or mistakenly by family), and have as a result become an permanent observer to nearly everything. Only in the workplace have I turned things around because I could invoke the necessity to bypass everything else in order to make something t…
Re: YouTube Addiction
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are using a word by its most common definition then sure. Addiction has more casual definitions in the dictionary. Language evolves and the word addiction has evolved. It's used casually all the time like this blog post although there's no formal diagnosis. Your examples bring up a good point. Many parents have the TV on all day in the background because they were raised with it. Many kids today will likely ha…
I personally like the definition of addiction from David Foster Wallace. I couldn't manage to find the exact quote, but it's something like: Addiction is when something purports to solve the very problems it creates. Certainly not a standard definition, and might not be true in every case, but an interesting way to think about it. In the case of Youtube, watching videos might seem to solve the problem of loneliness a…
Re: YouTube Addiction
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I chalk it up to lack of other things to do In my case, I don't have other things to do because I'm on the internet. When I manage to turn off the internet (HN, Youtube, podcasts, Twitter, LinkedIn, reading up on random, pretty useless stuff), suddenly I get pretty good ideas on what to do. Oh, I wanted to learn finally that language. I wanted to clean up in the kitchen cabinet. I wanted to meet up with a friend. I…
Social media gives you that dopamine fix quicker than your other options. It quickly becomes a habit if you've been doing it for long enough. I'm sure if you tried to make doing other things a habit, it would come easier to you over time. Then there's less reliance on willpower required. If you put a block in the calendar at the same time each week, you will feel more obligated to do it. I've done this with all kinds…