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Can you elaborate on how you felt after you took your week off? In particular I'm interested in differences in sleep requirements & quality, difficulty handlin

Can you elaborate on how you felt after you took your week off? In particular I'm interested in differences in sleep requirements & quality, difficulty handling eye contact (the 'slightly aspie' stuff), and general cognition. "In tatters": can I get a description of that also? Only reason I ask is because I've had a similar experience...twice. Once when moving into an apartment (no power, close proximity to roommates) and again when on a trip (golfing all day, close proximity again). My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber.

tetraca 9y ago
> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber. Well, I guess I'm not alone. I feel like I've struggled with that for many years.
- md224 9y ago
  Sounds kind of like ADD (or ADHD-PI, as it's now called)... do you find that coffee helps at all?
  - Mouse47 9y ago
    FWIW - I drink nearly an entire pot of coffee every day. No creamer or sugar or anything, just black. It's indispensable IMO.
avtar 9y ago
> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber. That hit really close to home. I've attributed my symptoms to lack of exercise and perhaps not reading enough long-form but this all conjecture at this point.
rwnspace 9y ago
I felt more socially confident (perhaps not confident exactly, though that was an aspect -- more strident). My sleep was at healthy times, for slightly longer, but the difference between being 'asleep' and 'awake' was, well, night and day. Rather than the slow, drawn-out waking, for which there's a gateway to very negative appraisal of the world. When I came back, I binged, heavily. 'In tatters', hmm... My self-regulation is poor but I'm desperately trying to claw upwards, so I have erected a lot of barriers between me and my lovely but drug-addicted friends, which gives me a lot of free time. I spend a lot of time purposefully and sanely researching things I want to learn, where I should learn them from, then feeling pooped out and gawping in front of YouTube or Reddit, then blaming myself for wasting time etc etc. It's hard to summarise, to be honest. Feeling 'locked-up' and 'scattered', maybe? I'm often exhausted by reading Reddit, it really feels like work. Honestly, I feel like I spend most days working intensely and not sleeping enough to manage it. Despite spending most of my time gaining weight on a desk chair, and not actually working. I'm very gullible. I tend to remember a lot of what I read, and I'm naturally full of doubt, and over-analytical. So reading a thousand conflicting opinions on subjects makes me... A little loopy and conflicted. Like I'm always in last place, trying to catch up with the 'right' opinion on everything. There was a Reddit thread for the OP's link just today, where someone mentioned arguing with their girlfriend like an anonymous Redditor - I also definitely empathise with that one. I have problems with eye contact, for sure, I tend to 'fall into' it if I look too long, as it seems to me to be a remarkably intense thing to hold eye contact for longer than an instant. I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI in September, and haven't gotten on medication for it just yet (I've been disorganised...). I think reddit-like media is particularly bad for people like us. They say ADHD is more of a working memory disorder than anything, and I think we need our cache clearing regularly, let's say. A Reddit addiction tops it up at every opportunity.

tetraca 9y ago

> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber. Well, I guess I'm not alone. I feel like I've struggled with that for many years.

md224 9y ago
Sounds kind of like ADD (or ADHD-PI, as it's now called)... do you find that coffee helps at all?
- Mouse47 9y ago
  FWIW - I drink nearly an entire pot of coffee every day. No creamer or sugar or anything, just black. It's indispensable IMO.

avtar 9y ago

> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber. That hit really close to home. I've attributed my symptoms to lack of exercise and perhaps not reading enough long-form but this all conjecture at this point.

rwnspace 9y ago

I felt more socially confident (perhaps not confident exactly, though that was an aspect -- more strident). My sleep was at healthy times, for slightly longer, but the difference between being 'asleep' and 'awake' was, well, night and day. Rather than the slow, drawn-out waking, for which there's a gateway to very negative appraisal of the world. When I came back, I binged, heavily. 'In tatters', hmm... My self-regulation is poor but I'm desperately trying to claw upwards, so I have erected a lot of barriers between me and my lovely but drug-addicted friends, which gives me a lot of free time. I spend a lot of time purposefully and sanely researching things I want to learn, where I should learn them from, then feeling pooped out and gawping in front of YouTube or Reddit, then blaming myself for wasting time etc etc. It's hard to summarise, to be honest. Feeling 'locked-up' and 'scattered', maybe? I'm often exhausted by reading Reddit, it really feels like work. Honestly, I feel like I spend most days working intensely and not sleeping enough to manage it. Despite spending most of my time gaining weight on a desk chair, and not actually working. I'm very gullible. I tend to remember a lot of what I read, and I'm naturally full of doubt, and over-analytical. So reading a thousand conflicting opinions on subjects makes me... A little loopy and conflicted. Like I'm always in last place, trying to catch up with the 'right' opinion on everything. There was a Reddit thread for the OP's link just today, where someone mentioned arguing with their girlfriend like an anonymous Redditor - I also definitely empathise with that one. I have problems with eye contact, for sure, I tend to 'fall into' it if I look too long, as it seems to me to be a remarkably intense thing to hold eye contact for longer than an instant. I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI in September, and haven't gotten on medication for it just yet (I've been disorganised...). I think reddit-like media is particularly bad for people like us. They say ADHD is more of a working memory disorder than anything, and I think we need our cache clearing regularly, let's say. A Reddit addiction tops it up at every opportunity.