The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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WRT masturbation specifically, from a therapeutic standpoint my understanding is that children can and do sometimes discover it at an early, pre-sexual age absent any sort of sexual abuse. There is even some debate about whether some observed fetal behavior/movement in the womb is actually masturbation! For whatever it's worth, while my earliest concrete memories date back to 4-5 years old, some of those memories are of masturbating. I don't remember discovering it, mind, but I do remember it as being this strange sort of urge that would come over me from time to time. Puberty/sexual awakening also happened for me at a normal age, and it was at some point during that time of my life that I connected the dots and came to understand that what I had been doing was masturbating. I've also never had a single nocturnal emission in my entire life, but then, I don't think I had any periods of complete sexual abstinence greater than six weeks or so before my mid-thirties.
As for the rest of your broader post, I share several other symptoms. I am a disordered eater myself, either over or undereating depending on what's going on with me and I was a chronic undereater as a teenager. I've always had occasional problems sleeping and the most reliable sleep aid that I've found for myself has been pointing a small fan at my head and turning it on before going to sleep. That habit broke in my 20s and although I'll still sleep with an oscillating fan during the summer months, it's not something that I practice any more. I didn't have chronic tendinitis when was younger, nor did I ever experience a rash of UTIs. I do, however, have above average social anxiety, part of which manifested as keeping my head down and throwing games and the like to keep the peace with more sensitive friends, and looking back in my past, I can identify it in my behaviors then even though I didn't know what I was dealing with. In fact, I'm confident that masturbation as a young child was an unconscious coping mechanism to deal with my own otherwise high strung nature. Ultimately, my own sleep and anxiety issues are a result of being on the spectrum, which were it not for you saying that you seemed to have excellent physical coordination, I would otherwise suspect could be the case for you as well.
You seem to have a lot going on with irregularities in your life, and I sympathize with you when you say that you feel that it's unfair. It sounds like you put a lot into your own well-being, though, and that's actually pretty awesome if not a superpower in its own right and I encourage you to keep it up.
Thank you for sharing and for the encouragement. I do have social anxiety as well actually, I hadn't considered whether or not I'm on the spectrum until now, although if good coordination removes you from that I guess I wouldn't be. I definitely sympathize with keeping the peace among sensitive friends!
I ended up deleting my other post and shortening it because I thought it was too long but I appreciate you reading through it. Interesting suggestion regarding the fan for sleeping, perhaps I will try that. I bought this book that I have yet to read called the effortless sleep method that seems promising, we'll see what it says. My main issue with the abuse thought is that I basically hallucinated an angry stranger with context/framing that I shouldn't really have been able to know as a 3 year old, but also the framing wasn't too outrageous/overtly sexual, so who knows if I somehow overheard something in media accidentally, felt some kind of shame about what I was doing subconsciously, that got incorporated into a hallucination, that's the only nice explanation I can think of. But it is reassuring that at least the masturbation itself isn't too weird at that age.
Arright, I'm going to try and stick with spectrum specific stuff here and just say that it's probably worth looking into ASD regardless but generally speaking, the cerebellum is underdeveloped in ASD folks, leading to characteristic clumsiness/physical awkwardness/gawkiness. Hope the book gives you some good stuff on getting better sleep and I'd be interested to hear what you've learned from it. WRT sleep and autism specifically, basically my understanding is that the autistic brain has a smaller reservoir for emotional stimulation while also processing emotions more slowly, and one of the ways that this manifests is in an active resting network and generally more frequent and vivid dreams compared to neurotypicals.
Interesting regarding the smaller reservoir for emotional stimulation, and more active resting network. I haven't seen it put in those words, "active resting network" before. That seems to be similar to what I experience, in that my thoughts just don't shut down even when I want to rest. Feels like I'm calculating (to what end I don't know) the previous mundane events of the day sometimes, not even in a stressed way but in a doing-arithmetic mechanical sort of way, but I can't shut it off. Unless sometimes like I said, if I do everything else right while also managing to not overthink sleep hygiene. Not sure if that's really emotional processing going on though, more just an instinctive reluctance to let go of active thinking, but perhaps processed by the cerebellum too, idk?
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