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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’m feeling healthier than I have in a while:
Maybe related to your logic puzzle rediscovery, but I had fun with LOK on an epaper device one can write on: https://letibus.itch.io/lok/devlog/466084/lok-second-edition It's donationware.
I may grab a copy!
I’ve developed a notation for standard grid logic puzzles that has been helping me greatly, I may do a video about it.
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I cooked the Good Mother Stallard beans. They are excellent by themselves which is nice and they also just needed simmering for like an hour and a half which is definitely something I am capable of.
I am planning to continue the Rancho Gordo subscription for at least another round. That I am eating beans and not just eating protein bars is a positive sign.
Did you soak them before cooking or is that an hour and a half starting from dried beans?
Started from dried beans this time. I read the Rancho Gordo owner doesn't tend to soak his beans so gave it a shot. Not having to plan ahead and soak beans overnight feels surprisingly liberating.
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The first time I googled the phrase "autistic burnout", one of the top results was an article titled "Help, I'm getting more autistic!" I was kind of pleasantly surprised to see that other people experienced it this way--as literally "getting more autistic" when burnt out--because perceiving it as such but not thinking that was possible or typical had me kind of feeling like I was just going crazy. This was in ~2019, shortly after the scales first fell from my eyes and I realized that relating to my (long-diagnosed Asperger's) brother but being able to route around the same inclinations so that I didn't act quite like he does was not the same thing as not being autistic. It's funny to me though, that the common opinion chalks burnout up to psychological factors. As someone with co-occurring chronic fatigue etc. type of issues, it's long been obvious to me that my social function worsens when my physical health worsens, even before the autism possibility had entered my brain. Burnout, in my opinion, is as much an energy or at least medical issue as it is a psychological one.
I live in vicious merry-go-round cycles like this: I overextend myself, live inauthentically to fit in, don't take care of myself because my needs (both in terms of health issues and in terms of autism) are weird, fake, made-up, just be normal bro--and I ruin my health, burn out, withdraw, and struggle to recover until I burn every bridge so I can start over finally listening to my own instincts/intuition again about what my needs are. However, as I get older, I seem to maybe be making strides at leveraging smaller epicycles to lessen the dramatic swings of the mega cycles. The net result, at the moment, is that I have made good strides on my physical health recently* without having indulged in the formerly-prerequisite "complete social withdrawal" step. And I'm feeling pretty rapidly quite a bit more socially functional. And feeling quite a bit of whiplash.
Anyway, the reason I bring this to The Motte: I'm curious if anyone else goes through times in your lives where you are more socio-culturally-politically more "normie" and times when you are more "extreme", outlier, believe things that could get you cancelled, etc? I feel like the one-way-street is the default: you start out normie and something "radicalizes" you (lol). Has anyone else swung back and forth?
We're not in COVID times anymore: I leave my house and interact with a variety of people. I can't maintain the same psychological/social quarantine I used to that made it less stressful to hold would-make-everyone-think-I'm-a-bad-person opinions. As a result, I can feel this go-along-to-get-along opinion-normifying happening to me, and I think most people would tell me that's normal and good for me. I know for myself it is not. I will think it's fine while the dissonance eats at my subconscious until it wrecks me again at some later date. Does anyone else experience this? What do you do to hold onto things? Is this why everyone is going to church now? I would love to talk to anyone who relates at all to being in this boat.
A lot of people (family, friends and acquaintances) have said I'm autistic, but I've never been formally diagnosed.
Sounds a little like me. There's probably no way to fix it, and one should just enjoy when things are good. I think this kind of excessive self-introspection is a bad idea and makes things worse (has anyone actually meaningfully improved their lives with this sort of self-psychologisation?)
This happened a lot to me as a teenager. I still do have these "swings", but I believe in HBD now, so even when I'm relatively "normie", my worldview lies firmly outside polite society (but sometimes my thinking becomes even more "extreme" and kind of paranoid)
Yes, I also experience this process. I guess it is adaptive - as you say it reduces stress.
I have some beliefs that I believe too strongly to ever have them "normfied out" even temporarily (specific beliefs censored because it's the Wellness thread)
As for others I just accept that they will temporarily slip out of the mind when in prolonged human presence. And, like, that's just part of being social I guess (but the positive side is that it can be a kind of holiday from things that are making you anxious or paranoid)
And as @problem_redditor said, the motte helps a lot.
DMed.
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I'm glad you undeleted your post! In exploring my own issues with severe burnout, I stumbled upon some good information about autistic burnout myself, and I believe the criteria for autistic burnout is significant exhaustion and increased social withdrawal along with either reduction in functioning, increased executive challenges, and reduced capacity to mask/camouflage. I had all five of those symptoms in spades, and it sounds like you meet the criteria as well. I'm a lot better than I was when I was at my worst but my executive functioning still isn't what it was before, and my ability to mask/camouflage is still reduced as well. So yeah, you're not alone in experiencing this. In fact, when you talk about swinging back and forth between being more normie and being more radical socio-culturally-politically, that sounds a lot to me like reduced masking.
FWIW, and because you asked, my life is significantly different now than it was before burnout really set its teeth into me, and that's kind of the Thing. The answer to the question of, "what do you do to hold onto things," for me, is as simple as it is difficult: I literally can't hold onto All The Things anymore, and though I think that's more from burnout proper as opposed to autistic burnout specifically, the two were closely intertwined and interrelated in my case. In Showstopper!, the book about Dave Cutler and the development of Windows NT at Microsoft, there was a coder named Walt Moore who was so burned out that he spent the bulk of his time at work developing and playing pai gow poker simulations instead of doing his actual work. I identify a lot with his story, having been barely functional myself for about two and a half years, starting around October of 2021, and the long hard road back from burnout has involved a ton of learning how to really take care of myself, which in turn meant admitting my needs to myself and prioritizing giving myself the time and space to meet those needs instead of just doing without and soldiering on. At the beginning of my digging out, I was not even aware that I qualified for the spectrum, just that I was not normal, and strongly identified with being a geek/nerd and had cultivated an unconscious habit of developing assimilation behaviors, the go-along, get-along normifying stuff, at least to the extent that I didn't get myself duct taped to the flagpole. It turns out that assimilation habits/behaviors take the most out of those of us on the spectrum and are the least adaptive of our coping strategies in the long run. These in particular are things that I've had to re-examine and re-work in my life, as well as the masking/camouflaging behaviors, simply because they take too much out of me and they leave me too drained. Likewise, I've had to adopt a lot of behaviors like walking outside and journaling that help me to process my emotions because not only is that a Thing wrt ASD, but I took the possibly-traditional route of stuffing them into a closet and identifying with my executive brain instead of actually taking the time to deal with them until I hit my absolute limit and crashed and burned. My family connections have changed dramatically, my marriage may well be beyond salvageable, and being given a more focused position at work that allows me to see my progress much more clearly has, along with a growing team of fellow spectrum folk in our IT department, has been a saving grace that has kept me employed, but I could have easily lost or left my job as well. I say all this in the hopes that I've made the gravity of my own situation clear, and to hopefully encourage you to keep listening to what your instincts and intuition are telling you that you need, and to keep doing things for yourself that truly help you and sustain you in life, instead of merely surviving to face another day. That seems to be the only real antidote to burnout in the long run.
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Not only am I pretty certain I'm autistic (undiagnosed but the constellation of social deficits, special interests, executive function disorder and intense catastrophic burnout fits me all too well to ignore), I have independently written about coming across the normifying tendency in my own life and steadfastly refusing to succumb to it. Most of your comment could have been written by me, and fucking hell I also write massive unreadable blocks of text which then get trimmed down to something more manageable.
The primary difference is that I don't live in "merry-go-round cycles" as you describe them - I am now sustainably functional, though currently working in a job that threatens to burn me out a lot. And neither do I swing back and forth in terms of the actual opinions I hold; I have always been rather politically radical from young and very strongly police any such tendency to just moderate my opinions since I view that as stultifying one's own intellectual development for the sake of social harmony. What has varied over time is my ability to argue my positions, and the amount of energy I have to care about them and articulate them.
When it comes to keeping myself intellectually honest, I personally find that hashing things out with people and participating in places like this one helps; actually trying to test your opinions and rearticulate them via debate really helps clarify and sharpen your point of view. It can change your point of view too, but at least reasoned debate is an actually valid means through which to shape your beliefs as opposed to simply succumbing to a zeitgeist.
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My journey feels like it is mostly unidirectional and I haven’t noticed the cycles. For me it was:
Okay, I deleted my post before any comments showed up for me because I decided it was too long for anyone to engage with and I would try again when I had time to make it shorter. Whoops.
I am curious how social you are in your current life, and what portion of your social interaction is in-person vs online?
I’m not very social, but I’m mostly content with that. I go to a weekly online book club about spirituality, but most other online content I just consume without engaging with (like listening to long-form podcasts).
In-person I go to a weekly men’s group and meet with a close friend or family about once a month. I also do my exposure therapy at a bar 2-3 times a month. My hobbies are mostly solitary: bicycling, working out, reading, and video games.
I used to attempt to be more social by going to things like Meetups, but I felt like the best outcome I could get was to be tolerated and it was very exhausting being around people I didn’t know in loud environments when I was sober. If I'm not in the right environment (quiet with a structure that encourages going beyond small talk) it feels very hard for me to succeed.
I get frustrated sometimes that I have so much social drive considering my social difficulty. I think I need to remember to pace myself and keep a good amount of my "social" craving getting met online, via podcasts, etc. even when I'm feeling more up to attempting charm. I definitely have the same experience at meetup type groups where the best case scenario is to be tolerated and maybe find one person who partly likes partly tolerates me. Though I'm sometimes reminded when interacting with people IRL for other reasons that there is a bias to the type of person likely to show up at a Meetup group, so that they're more likely to be people I have a hard time clicking with. Throw me in with a group of gamers and I have a fighting chance, though again, that is online...
I'd be curious to hear more about your exposure therapy if you're inclined (I'm moderately into nootropic/biohacking stuff), but no stress if not.
I was just thinking earlier about how much of an easier time I had in college, where socializing meant going deeper into conversation about the day's class discussion for a couple hours with the other biggest nerd in the class before heading back home into a homework hole.
Sure, but I must add a caveat that my approach is controversial, potentially dangerous, and not medical advice. Also, the medical system has not been open/supportive of my approach.
The cornerstone of my approach is to turn off my anxious thoughts with phenibut (an uncontrolled substance in the United States. Some people call it a nootropic, but it is more accurate to think of it an anti-anxiety drug). Then I do something like improv where I design a role that allows me to be confident, weird, and causes some people to be curious enough about what I'm doing to approach me (something like the wizard/magician archetype). When people approach me I can either respond in character as the role I'm pretending to be, or as my authentic self where I talk about experimenting with exposure therapy to help with my social anxiety.
The exposure therapy teaches me that people will accept me if I do odd/creative things without heavy masking if I'm in the right environment and I take a playful approach instead of a logical one. My exposure therapy role communicates a lot through non-verbal presence that I don't normally practice. It also teaches me that it can be fun/useful to play a different role and that I can play a role I want instead of the one society expects.
The exposure therapy experience runs into an issue with state-dependent memory where it is hard to recall the confident behavior when sober due to the altered mental state. Therefore, I do a lot of sober planning, integration, and journaling to integrate the confident behavior into my sober persona. Tapering helps to transfer the learned skills to the sober state. Also, researching cognitive science and psychology helps me come up with new ideas for my exposure therapy experiment.
I also combine phenibut with real nootropics to reach an optimal state for the exposure therapy role. On the phenibut day I might use things that increase energy/motivation (dopamine precursors)/mood. I do get a bit of rebound anxiety about 48 hours after taking phenibut so I experiment with nootropics to manage this too.
Phenibut is not well understood but my personal experience tends to indicate it has 3 primary effects that have different timeframes. GABA-B receptor agonism peaks around 4-5 hours after taking phenibut. There is a slight impact on dopamine the day you take it that increases the motivation to socialize. Finally, the calcium channel blocking mechanism lasts the longest and creates a next day after glow for me - I feel calm and in a good mood all day but I don't have the same motivation to seek out social connections as the dosing day. Also, I found that I should never use phenibut more than once a week, and that I must take longer breaks occasionally.
That's interesting. I'm very timid about anything GABA-based after issues both taking and getting off of gabapentin (for restless legs syndrome) some years ago. I have been experimenting with intranasal oxytocin recently, which I think is good to experiment with, but the juxtaposition between connecting with people more vs less easily is pretty jarring. Honestly I can't tell if it has a slightly addictive or unhealthy quality for me as result. It does have the affect of making me feel suddenly very aware that the unnaturalness and second-guessing that comes from my anxiety is about half of my off-puttingness on its own and people would probably rather me be relaxed and open even if that means some peculiarness showing. Hard to convince myself of that without the oxytocin in my system though, as you said state-dependent memory can be a bitch.
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Mind saying more about this? What's this type of person like? And how do those "meetups for the purpose of meeting people" actually play out? I haven't tried them, but I started considering it lately.
In my experience when someone struggles with socializing people often suggests that person should try meetup. So, the bias is that people that go to meetup often struggle with social skills. Generally, I notice it more with groups that are for a specific age demographic, or that mostly do happy hour type events. When the meetup is around some niche hobby that requires commitment and effort the people tend to have better social skills.
To put it more plainly the meetup pattern I noticed is something like this: meetup tends to attract the possibly on the autism spectrum types that need practice at socializing because they didn't fully learn social skills at an earlier stage in life. Then the people with the worst social skills drive away the people with better social skills by doing things like hitting on multiple girls, or saying some really cringe things. There isn't really a polite/viable way to keep the people with underdeveloped social skills out of the Meetups so people with better social skills avoid them in favor of invite only friend groups. If the social skills level of a meetup drops too low then you end up with a bunch of people that are trying to learn social skills, but the other people in the meetup have the same deficit so it is hard for anyone to help each other. It is kind of a tragedy because you've got a bunch of people who recognized their social flaws and are making an effort to fix that, but are in a setting that often reinforces their social anxiety. They need something more structured with a role model/leader to help them develop social skills and give them feedback - but society doesn't really have a free version of that if you don't already have a social network.
Okay, that's VERY interesting because in my area meetups are skewed enough to the social skilled, extroverted people that's there's specifically a group advertising itself as the "introvert's" meetup group. To be fully honest though I haven't attended many. My limited experience suggested that the other social anxious people like myself were more likely to stay home.
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Are you referring to Meetup.com in specific, or to the concept of "meetups" in general?
I was referring to Meetup.com specifically.
I have attended at least 100 meetups over the course of 10 years and the pattern I observed was that the 'cool' socially adjusted people would usually stop attending after a few meetups due to their frustration with other people being socially awkward (but this doesn't happen as often in groups dedicated to niche hobbies).
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I read it before you deleted it and didn't respond because I didn't find it particularly relatable, but I was sad that you deleted it.
Some people have suggested I am autistic before, but I don't know. I think the word might have been stretched to the point of uselessness. I am admittedly strange, but I also feel normal in a lot of situations. It seems that I've become more extreme in my actual views. Doing my best impression of a normie in real life is something I strive for, though.
I appreciate you saying that.
In my mind, the purpose of diagnoses is to match symptoms to treatments. Even if the treatment is just lifestyle changes. So if you don't struggle significantly to function more-or-less like a regular adult, across multiple domains of life, on a consistent, long-term basis (or you don't but it's better accounted for by some other issue) than I think it's fair to not consider yourself autistic, whether or not you have some reminiscent personality traits. If you don't need treatment or special accommodation in order to live life, then you probably shouldn't be diagnosed with anything.
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This website allows users to "undelete" comments.
Thank you, I didn't know that. It's back, with some chunks cut out to bring it down to a saner length and readability.
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Get off the internet and learn to have a disgust reaction whenever someone IRL brings the internet into RL.
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New Year's resolution check-in:
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
Back to my business looking like it's failing and I'm crashing out again. This time actually seems terminal, but I've told people this was happening enough times previously I'm not even telling them again. Main accomplishment I can report is not using amphetamine to cope with the combination of rising expectations and falling hope.
There's a few slivers of hope to cling to. Not for this part of my career at least. I saw a legitimate falling star for the second time in my life a few weeks ago. The first time that happened everything got better more than I could have ever hoped for.
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Doing well. Moving today and it's hot as blazes. All things considered I'm in a good spot happy with where things are at. Aiming to cut porn a bit more aggressively moving forward.
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Spending is $1524.36 lower than this time last year. I had a few quarterly and yearly bills come due that bumped up my spending more than I would have liked. Nonetheless, I preservere.
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Basking in the glory of being an ACX finalist on my first and only entry - you fellas wish. Also dying of terrible musculosketal (partially psychosomatic pain). Hearteningly for my resolution, I've been doing push-ups to help with it so I hit my exercise goal? However, ibuprofen and paracetamol combined seem to do the trick. It's never been this bad, ever:
I had a lovely weekend that involved champagne (a gift, for clearing the Paper B). I was well rested and well fed. And yet, on Monday, I was as stiff as a board, half my muscles screaming at me to not go to the ward - the other half screaming to leave once I was there. But there is no problem that sufficient analgesia and stimulants can't solve, or there are, but I haven't found them quite yet. There are probably drugs for those too. At least I am spending my annual leave in bulk, and I fucking need it.
Excedrin, Zyn, and Monster White: the breakfast of champions.
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