If you can’t stop thinking about the worst possible outcome, try imagining the opposite. A nice and comfortable situation that makes you happy. To take up space in your thoughts and orient you towards more pleasant emotions
Eh? How it will change the outcome?
Outcomes are rarely determined by your own thoughts about the situation.
It’s like being anxious about driving because you’re worried someone is going to hit you. As long as you’re being safe and careful, being an anxious mess isn’t going to make you any safer and it can even make things worse.
Of course I’m not trying to say “just stop being anxious!” but you have to understand that only ever thinking about the worst case scenario will hinder far more progress than it will help.
It’s not about changing the outcome, it’s about stopping anxiety. This advice was given to me for use when feeling anxiety that is debilitating about a potential worst-case scenario which is usually unrealistic
LaW oF aTtRaCtIoN
Shitty low-quality advice tbh
That thing you like doing that makes you feel better? Stop it.
Instead do this thing that is tedious/boring that you never look forward to.
Eventually you will fool yourself into enjoying this boring/tedious task and trick your brain into releasing dopamine when you perform it.
I was still a kid. At my first session I opened up hard. I spoke nonstop for the whole hour.
When I was walking out I asked them “now what?” And they replied “Now it’s a long battle”.
That stuck with me.
Did it help you?
Oof. Hard to say. I did it for so long and so early in life that I’m not even sure what would have happened had I not done it.
I don’t like mental meds though. And I don’t think any of them ever helped me. They have always either made me extremely risky behavior prone or just numb where the days blend together and months go by in the blink of an eye.
It’s minimal how you can change other people. But you can change your own environment, actions and worldview. Even though it might take a long time for your body, nervous system and brain to change and adapt.
Even if your parents want to change themselves for the benefit of your health, it might not be possible for them. But you might be able to help them by changing yourself, and then indirectly change their environment.
Please remember to bring exact change next time.
“No one else can do the work for you.”
Elon Musk enters the chat room
This is the best response.
a therapist I had helped me rethink problems in terms of pragmatically adjusting my environment or conditions to nudge my behaviors rather than relying on willpower or behavioral changes that were slow or simply not happening
a small example was moving my computer out of my bedroom and developing a night-time routine that included reading a book before bed to help reduce compulsive computer use
realizing I am somewhat deterministic in my behavior, and my behavior is caused by conditions I have some influence over, was a helpful insight and got me past just constantly failing to live up to my expectations for myself and never moving past that - I can treat my psychological problems like puzzles to solve
realizing I am somewhat deterministic in my behavior
So you are like this:
Sorry, I know that the joke is terrible, but I had to bring it.
Legit is this loss?
How in hell do you think this could be loss?
Super sleep deprived 😔
What do you mean?
Can confirm - switching my approach to changing my conditioning rather than directly trying to change my behaviors through sheer will, I’ve actually managed to make some progress for the first time in what feels like years. Take it slow, step by step - you don’t have to change everything about your environemnt all at once - it might even be counterproductive. And in a few months you start to notice an accumulation of changes in your behavior.
I also kinda feel this corraborates my suspicion that conciousness is not as conciouss as we like to give it (ourselves, really) credit.
+1 learning to parent yourself
I had to self-teach myself that once I hit adulthood. Things like “if left to pay a bill at some specified time (not immediately), I will fail. So all bills go on autopay.” It’s burned me a few times, but not nearly as often as constantly being burned with late fees and such.
Also, when my wife met me, she met someone who led a Spartan existence, with all my no-furniture belongings fitting in a piece of luggage. She thought it was preference, and completely blew off me constantly complaining about clutter and mess in the house. Once I explained (ten years in) that I can’t have many things without it becoming a huge unmitigated mess (like having “pathways” through the clutter), so having a whole lot of stuff is shitting on my coping mechanisms and stressing me out, making me constantly uncomfortable in my own home. She understood, and stopped giving me shit for it… not that it changed the clutter, but at least when i complain I don’t get hand-waved, I get an apology. Which is something, I guess (until I snap and the dumpster and donation center get a ton of bags).
Learn to identify what you’re feeling.
This, big time.
One thing that helped me: I went out and found a list online of emotional descriptor words and, while journaling, I’d start my entries listing the emotions I felt in the moment and elaborate on them individually.
I struggle hard to verbalize my thoughts in general, but emotions (especially strong & conflicted ones) can be overwhelming to verbalize!
That sounds very helpful. I’ve found charts like
helpful for drilling down from a general feeling to something more specific.I especially like
because it associates them with how the body feels.
Allow yourself to feel something first.
It’s ok to look back at a painful event and have empathy for that younger person, then you can either stay there or accept any wisdom to be learned and write the next chapter but you can’t live in both places at once.
A really big part of therapy is learning how to communicate what happened, what is happening, and what you are feeling.
It takes a lot of time to organize it all into words that another person would understand, and doing so helps you.
The therapist might aslo reccomend what to do going forward but 9/10 times you already know that.
If you think you picked a bad partner because there’s something wrong with you because of how you were parented, actually a bad partner sought you out because they saw those vulnerabilities in you.
What is is an anchor for what can be.
That one’s from Adam Savage
Also, know that you have no control over the choices of others.
Oh you can have control
You got to get that Monopoly on violence.
“JulieLemming announces they will be running for the next presidential race”
Every day is my personal presidential race. Vote me up bitches
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.
More generally, feelings do not care about facts. We must accept how we feel, even if those feelings don’t “make sense”. Trying to reason with feelings is a fools errand.
That doesn’t mean we can’t change how we feel. It just doesn’t happen by denying reality.
I love this! Thank you ❤️
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.
Inside every man are two wolves…
Not even kidding. I had a therapist tell me this story once. I promptly found a new therapist.
Did you get GPT Therapisted?
This was in January of 2023, right when chat gpt was becoming popular. So it’s possible, but I think it was just a crappy therapist, it was free through my employee benefits. ~6 sessions per year were free, I never used any more, found a real 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’
Thanks, I needed that.
I hear these and I’ve had some therapy but I don’t know how to believe the lines and not dwell.
Therapy isn’t a single sentence, and we talked over these things for weeks for me to get to this place. It also had to come from me, one thing I talked about is that dwelling on misery/mistakes is, for me anyway, a guilty pleasure and a little addictive, so I had to be truly sick of living that way and genuinely want the change in my heart of hearts.
“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.
These are some of the most common problems people seek therapy for, and there are several methods therapists teach to address these, such as meditation and mindfulness. It takes practice, but they have a lot of potential to help with intrusive, snowballing thoughts. You can practice anytime and mostly anywhere, but doing it is the hard part.
Do you happen to have a good source for learning these? I’ve looked into it in the past but everything I find about meditation and mindfulness is riddled with nonsense that doesn’t make any sense to me.
Just a simple example I googled:
- Sit in a quiet, comfortable place.
- Set a short time limit if you’re a beginner (e.g., 5–10 minutes).
- Focus on your breath and notice bodily sensations.
- Gently return your focus to your breath when distractions occur.
With body sensations, you can focus on the taste in your mouth for a minute, then switch to sounds you hear, how your fingertips feel etc. I usually close my eyes to better focus on each sensation. Just relax and gently observe what you experience right now.
One common misconception about meditation is that meditation is and end goal, not a practice. That to meditate is to sit down and have your brain be quiet, and if you can’t do that, your session was a failure.
But that’s like saying weight lifting is about deadlifting your body weight, and any session you don’t manage do that was a failure. That is something you might be able to do after years of training. But you start with the smaller weights, learning form and technique, setting reasonable goals, and find a practice that you can make a habit out of. Because a five minute walk every day beats a day at the gym/retreat once a year.
I agree 100%. It’s a shame, because pretty much everyone would benefit from just trying to meditate once in a while.
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