5 ms·

Having an understanding of what was wrong with me was an important part of understanding how to fix it, or more properly, how to work around it. I struggle ple

Having an understanding of what was wrong with me was an important part of understanding how to fix it, or more properly, how to work around it. I struggle plenty with depression and anxiety in the mental-illness sense of those words (as opposed to the current-emotional-state sense). What that means is that my brain is always over-sensitive to negatives and assumes bad outcomes in cases of ambiguity, to a degree that isn't rationally justifiable. I can't control that fact; it doesn't occur on a conscious level and those are inputs to my cognition, not outputs of it. But what I can do is recognize that because I am helpless to change those inputs, I need to know that they're warped and know how to compensate for them. I know that my brain will serve me aggressively negative examples and downplay positive ones, so I needed to practice both (a) not listening to it and (b) consciously recalling positive examples to counterbalance it. I know my brain will make me nervous and jittery, so I needed to consciously train myself to think "okay, even if I totally screw this up, it isn't the end of the world". I know I tend to avoid things that scare or stress me, so I needed to train myself to confront or remove them. What my brain tells me still "feels" right to me, and it probably always will, and in that sense I cannot not have the mental health struggles I do. They are, in that sense, cognitively incurable (and so far I have not found a medication that lastingly cures them either). But understanding the fact that that is a fundamental part of the mental world in which I live has given me a lot of tools to do better than I could in the past.

snapcaster 2y ago
Great comment, thanks for taking the time to write it out. Why do you think you're able to do this (consciously compensate for the bias your brain is generating) and many others struggle to? Have you practiced mindfulness or other things like that?
- rachofsunshine 2y ago
  One of the biggest legs up that I have is that my life has gone through extremely sharp swings. Sometimes it's easier to see a distortion if you can see something moving behind it, and when things move faster it's easier to see. When I went from "nowhere in life" to "working really hard at an exciting job where I was making rapid progress" but kept having approximately the same thoughts, that was a clue that those thoughts weren't really about my life in the first place. I'm a person who likes to think I'm logical, so my emotions like to cloak themselves in logic, but that's not what they're really about. And seeing my life go up and down over its long course has made it harder to feel like anything is "forever", which is a useful experiential defense against what depression wants to tell you. While I've never found a medication that kept working, I did find one that worked temporarily, and it was a moment of profound realization for me. I was still me, my conscious mind worked the same way, I still liked the same things and had the same values, and my life was still a mess. But all of a sudden that constant scream of self-hate in my head went quiet. It taught me that another way to be was possible, showed me what the goal was, even if I didn't know how to get there yet, and shifted me from thinking of myself as morally bad and towards thinking of myself as just someone struggling with a painful condition. I genuinely did not realize until that point just how much hate I was enduring every day of my life, or that that wasn't a normal way to be. I remember making some simple mistake that, normally, I'd have felt bad about for many hours, but that day I just went "oh, that was dumb" and then didn't think about it anymore. I'd never been able to do that before. Nor had I previously understood that there was a difference between "I feel bad and my life is not what I want it to be" and "I'm a failure and deserve it". To your last question: I haven't exactly practiced mindfulness in any structured conventional way, but I've certainly practiced trying to listen to my own emotions a little better. To treat them as a healthy and welcome part of myself and not as a thing to be argued with, and to understand that my power to control them is limited. If I'm afraid, I try to feel that fear, acknowledge it, and let it play itself out, rather than exhausting myself trying to hold it at bay. And then I can address it - "okay, if I screw up X, the worst that can happen is Y, and Y isn't that bad". All that being said, I don't always win this fight. Sometimes I struggle, a lot. But even the losses are less damaging, because I can accept that it's OK that some days I'm not as productive or I don't feel as good. I often describe it as like sailing a boat. Sometimes the winds blow the right way, and there's a skill to catching those winds to move you forward. Sometimes the winds blow the wrong way, and you drop anchor, lower your sails, and hide below decks until the storm passes. Sure, you might wish you could just power through, but that's not the way the water works. You do what you can with what you have.
  - snapcaster 2y ago
    Thanks for this and your other comments in the thread. Changed how I was perceiving these things, really appreciate you making the effort and if i'm anything like the typical reader you likely changed their views for the better

snapcaster 2y ago

Great comment, thanks for taking the time to write it out. Why do you think you're able to do this (consciously compensate for the bias your brain is generating) and many others struggle to? Have you practiced mindfulness or other things like that?

rachofsunshine 2y ago
One of the biggest legs up that I have is that my life has gone through extremely sharp swings. Sometimes it's easier to see a distortion if you can see something moving behind it, and when things move faster it's easier to see. When I went from "nowhere in life" to "working really hard at an exciting job where I was making rapid progress" but kept having approximately the same thoughts, that was a clue that those thoughts weren't really about my life in the first place. I'm a person who likes to think I'm logical, so my emotions like to cloak themselves in logic, but that's not what they're really about. And seeing my life go up and down over its long course has made it harder to feel like anything is "forever", which is a useful experiential defense against what depression wants to tell you. While I've never found a medication that kept working, I did find one that worked temporarily, and it was a moment of profound realization for me. I was still me, my conscious mind worked the same way, I still liked the same things and had the same values, and my life was still a mess. But all of a sudden that constant scream of self-hate in my head went quiet. It taught me that another way to be was possible, showed me what the goal was, even if I didn't know how to get there yet, and shifted me from thinking of myself as morally bad and towards thinking of myself as just someone struggling with a painful condition. I genuinely did not realize until that point just how much hate I was enduring every day of my life, or that that wasn't a normal way to be. I remember making some simple mistake that, normally, I'd have felt bad about for many hours, but that day I just went "oh, that was dumb" and then didn't think about it anymore. I'd never been able to do that before. Nor had I previously understood that there was a difference between "I feel bad and my life is not what I want it to be" and "I'm a failure and deserve it". To your last question: I haven't exactly practiced mindfulness in any structured conventional way, but I've certainly practiced trying to listen to my own emotions a little better. To treat them as a healthy and welcome part of myself and not as a thing to be argued with, and to understand that my power to control them is limited. If I'm afraid, I try to feel that fear, acknowledge it, and let it play itself out, rather than exhausting myself trying to hold it at bay. And then I can address it - "okay, if I screw up X, the worst that can happen is Y, and Y isn't that bad". All that being said, I don't always win this fight. Sometimes I struggle, a lot. But even the losses are less damaging, because I can accept that it's OK that some days I'm not as productive or I don't feel as good. I often describe it as like sailing a boat. Sometimes the winds blow the right way, and there's a skill to catching those winds to move you forward. Sometimes the winds blow the wrong way, and you drop anchor, lower your sails, and hide below decks until the storm passes. Sure, you might wish you could just power through, but that's not the way the water works. You do what you can with what you have.
- snapcaster 2y ago
  Thanks for this and your other comments in the thread. Changed how I was perceiving these things, really appreciate you making the effort and if i'm anything like the typical reader you likely changed their views for the better