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've never posted in the Wellness Wednesday thread before, but I've had a really interesting week that I'd like to talk about, and this seems like a good place for it. I'm curious if any of you have had a similar experience.
I've been struggling with anxiety-driven social isolation for about a decade now. Nothing bad enough to prevent me from going to work, hanging out with friends occasionally, and generally presenting myself as well-adjusted to the outside world, but I've had a hard time making/maintaining friendships, have hardly dated in years, and spend most of my time alone. I've been working on my mental health to limited success for a year or so, but it's been very slow.
Then, last week, I had one magical afternoon of lucidity where for some reason my anxieties and insecurities shut up for a few hours, and in that time I was able to finally force myself to start exercising, sign up for classes in hobbies I've long been interested in, and create an online dating profile for the first time. I had a brief moment when my executive function was running at 100% and in that time was able to make more progress in improving my life and mental health than in the prior 10 years combined.
Since then, I've managed to keep up the exercise regimen and I've been surprisingly successful with the dating so far. And things are starting to compound. The fact that I can get dates with desirable women is doing wonders for my confidence and self-esteem, which makes me more willing to put myself out there in other ways, which I expect will make me more attractive which will lead to more dating success, and so on. For the first time since school, I feel in control and that I'll actually be able to keep it up. It was like a mental dam burst and problems that seemed insurmountable two weeks ago now feel almost trivial.
I'm aware this feeling is unlikely to last, that a week and a half isn't a very long time, and I'm working to make as much of this habitual as I can while I still have the willpower. I've known enough alcoholics to understand that relapse is always just around the corner if you're not careful. This is going to be a constant journey that I'll probably never be able to stop struggling with at least a little, but it really does feel like I've turned a corner this time.
The weird thing is, I cant point to anything that may have caused this shift in perspective. I'm not on any medications (or off any old ones) or in therapy, I haven't experienced any unexpected good fortune, I didn't have any particularly meanigful conversations that day, I didn't have any sort of rock bottom "ok I need to turn my life around" epiphany. It's just that I suddenly found myself capable of taking decisive action that I hadnt previously felt capable of, for no discernable reason. The demons have largely returned since then, but they were on vacation just long enough for me to get the momentum needed to push through.
Has anyone here had a similar experience? Any idea what might have been going on? I'd like to figure out how to replicate it later on if I backslide (Note, I'm generally fairly even keeled, and have never been prone to mood swings. My mental health issues have never manifested as any sort of manic-depressive dynamic. I'm not accustomed to switches flipping suddenly like this).
You reached the threshold to enter a positive feedback loop. You explained this yourself:
The moment of lucidity comes down to pure luck, e.g. your gut microbiome temporarily aligning in just the right way. You were probably close to this threshold for a long time and never realized it, but that's super common. A lot of people in dire straits are a hair's breadth away from some positive feedback loop that would fix their lives, but they don't know how to pass the threshold. That's not to blame them; you need a period of initial success to enter the loop, which can be extremely hard to come across.
I think the situation is the exact polar opposite actually. /u/Thoroughlygruntled briefly experienced an ideal that a lot of self-help books promise but that doesn't actually exist. The overwhelming majority of people alive are clearly not living this kind of life. And I know it's not for lack of trying because I've wasted more than a decade of my own life in the same kinds of attempts.
Unfortunately, human beings are not really built for long-term satisfaction or contentment or whatever you wanna call it. This is an issue based on genes and hormones and it probably has to be fixed physiologically as well. If it is even fixable.
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