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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I am not doing well at all, I pulled my first 14-hour day a few days ago, it was not clean at all but I went from doing nothing to actually being somewhat better than what I thought I could be, from 0 hours per week to 40 plus. I have to implement this paper on Spectrograms and train some models (Deep learning stuff) and so far the pre-processing part has been kicking my ass and the deadline of the weekend has made me go nuts. I cannot sleep, all I think about is failing this assignment and never making it to the lab I want to work in. I do not want to work the lower paying jobs in the Indian market and wanted to pursue this Deep Learning thing full time, My undergrad got over a few weeks ago and I took the plunge. The research position pays peanuts and I would happily work for free or pay out of my own shallow pockets to work on the kind of stuff that I wish to work on but alas.
I am still working out, I am close to 157 lbs (I began at 145 and at maybe the same level of body fat percentage at 6 foot, totally untrained, still look the same though) and even did MMA for a while. Life just keeps getting worse, I see all my classmates from high school and uni lapping me and getting into great grad schools, partying, enjoying life whilst I am anxious, doing as much work as I can and still failing. My bad decisions have caught up to me but I had to take a day off totally as I was too stressed and too tired to work.
My life sounds like a broken record but the harder I try to fix these things, the more pain I feel. What if I do not get this gig and have to hear my parents and everyone I know scream at me and mock me for trying to get to grad school or trying something like research? It haunts me, I have never worked, studied or even been productive in my life and when I try my hardest I get hit with worse outcomes. My doctor diagnosed me with ulcers due to high amounts of stress and each day I hate myself more, the only reason why I do not hate myself as much as I should is that I try my hardest. Deep Learning stuff is quite fun too, I find the jupyter environment and training models way more fun than anything I ever learned in uni. Udemy and Fastai are great tools.
With no phone, no girls, no social life, no surfing as I blocked everything on my browser or any other distractions, I have been trying this for 2 weeks and can feel tired and helpless. Even really scared of posting about it here or to my friends as I am a frequent liar of sorts so it is reasonable to be skeptical Plus I am not exactly a blood relative that anyone would care beyond a point. Everyone thinks I am a fuck up who would pick garbage and see me as the village idiot. No one else will implement the paper for me and my problems are my own but I always thought that if I worked hard enough some day, I would feel proud of myself but that was fleeting as the next day I realised how much harder this thing was.
Please do not judge me, I am scared and each day I feel worse about my own life. I am sorry. I wish I were more competent but I am finally trying and I just hope that I get my break in a good lab and more importantly that I do get good at the deep learning stuff. The lab is not the main thing here, my not being good enough is and I hope I get there soon.
Even God rested on the seventh day. Or whatever the Hindu equivalent is. If you truly want to achieve peak performance, you should realize that what you're doing right now is not it. Pushing yourself so hard you burn out and literally destroy your body (ulcers) will not help you improve or grow stronger.
By continuing to post here, you are inviting our judgment. It doesn't have to always be negative though. From an outsider's perspective, after reading many of your posts, you seem to be stuck in a cycle.
You feel bad about your situation, get up the gumption to do something about it, and run as fast as you can without stopping until you run smack into a brick wall of exhaustion and overload. If you want to break out of this cycle, you must realize that there are other important axes you have to develop on to become a well functioning and 'competent' adult. Sheer effort and brute strength of will can only take you so far.
In another comment you mention:
I was in your situation too when I was a younger man, and I responded by continuing to push as hard as I could. Eventually I developed serious physical issues to the point where I could barely walk, talk or even function. I am not exaggerating. No matter how bad you feel now, things can and will get worse if you don't learn to manage your stress levels.
Now I don't know all the particulars of your situation, so you may have good reasons for pushing yourself into life or death flight or flight states for the better part of a decade. From your posts here, I doubt it, but context is everything.
That being said, for your own sake, I'd recommend you take some time to relax every once and a while. If it helps, you can reframe it as you're learning to grow your capacity in other ways than brute strength of will. Learning to relax your body and nervous system can be just as challenging as what you're pushing yourself through, if not more.
Thanks, I am better now, I actually work and have some proof of that. For the past decade, I did not really work at all, Now that I do work, feels a lot better, I weigh more and can understand a good amount of code, It is not much but it is a good beginning
I do meditate and doing more of that plus keeping track of my work helps, I can sense a feeling of progress and that calms me down. Meditation is a godsend and I would appreciate tips on managing stress and becoming a better programmer and things of that sort. Stress management and proper rest should help me live a better life and work better, work more.
There are a million ways to manage stress, at bottom that's what many of the fun activities we do help with. Sounds like you're meditating which is a good start.
Really the best way to manage stress is to have a well rounded life. Find some activities that you enjoy like dancing, yoga, BJJ, running, hell even tabletop gaming or something. Make sure to spend time for socializing, and find a few people you can really relate to and start to build deeper relationships with. Even if you plan to move on later in life, it's irreplaceable to have that experience and understanding of how to relate to others.
This framing is not going to serve you in the end my friend. If you continue to focus on managing stress as a way to work more, you'll find your ends defeat all of the means you try. I'd recommend finding a higher goal that encompasses more. There's a reason 'saving the world' is such a cliched goal, but it's effective. Serving God is another route. For some it seems that a sort of Nietzchean self-improvement due to the Will to Power works, but I haven't found it very useful.
Figure out what sort of deep motivation works out for you, and keep your eyes on that. Not on working harder just to work harder. And you may need to try out a few different worldviews, lord knows I did. But hey if you only believe in one thing your whole life and never switch it up, you've led a boring life.
I just want to be rich and help my family, that basically sums it up, I do meditate and it helps but I cannot stop a constant humming in the back of my head of seeing others doing more than me and having better life outcomes. I have friends and tell them about my life but they are all online.
I assume I will get to relax more once I get past the steep points of the learning curve and build more momentum. What helped you? I take Sundays off.
Perhaps this goal is not meaningful enough for you, if it doesn't help you drown out the constant humming.
I'm not saying you should give up your ambitions and stop learning by any means. And in any learning process there are going to be peaks and troughs. I'm trying to talk about a framework outside of these cycles.
What helped me was having my entire being shattered and enduring more pain and suffering than I could have even imagined existed. I went through hell, or the dark night of the soul, or whatever you want to call it, which forced me to call into question many of my fundamental assumptions and goals. At that point I could either continue suffering, or figure out a way to make the suffering meaningful.
Ultimately I decided to embrace my suffering, and view it as a way to get my aims set higher. Less towards getting money and status, more towards serving God.
On a practical level, I started learning about nervous system regulation, the dangers of over-stressing yourself, and began to take my circadian rhythm, diet, and exercise habits seriously. I got a puppy (although I'd recommend waiting until your pretty stable to do that).
Most importantly though, I sought wisdom in ancient thinkers like Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Plato, Seneca, Epictetus, etc. From there I moved on to more traditional religious teachings, and worked to understand those. Readings the classics is important, but given how different our cultures are I hesitate to give you any specific recommendations here.
Now keep in mind I'm condensing an over a decade long journey into a few paragraphs, so there's a lot of nuance and context missing. But those are the highlights, so to speak. Honestly at this point, I think you might benefit from starting off listening to some Jordan Peterson lectures, or find an equivalent thinker who specializes in Hindu myths and their symbolic meanings.
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