Outcomes are rarely determined by your own thoughts about the situation.

It’s like being anxious about driving because you’re worried someone is going to hit you. As long as you’re being safe and careful, being an anxious mess isn’t going to make you any safer and it can even make things worse.

Of course I’m not trying to say “just stop being anxious!” but you have to understand that only ever thinking about the worst case scenario will hinder far more progress than it will help.

LaW oF aTtRaCtIoN

It’s not about changing the outcome, it’s about stopping anxiety. This advice was given to me for use when feeling anxiety that is debilitating about a potential worst-case scenario which is usually unrealistic

Legit is this loss?

That sounds very helpful. I’ve found charts like helpful for drilling down from a general feeling to something more specific.

I especially like because it associates them with how the body feels.

Oof. Hard to say. I did it for so long and so early in life that I’m not even sure what would have happened had I not done it.

I don’t like mental meds though. And I don’t think any of them ever helped me. They have always either made me extremely risky behavior prone or just numb where the days blend together and months go by in the blink of an eye.

Therapy isn’t a single sentence, and we talked over these things for weeks for me to get to this place. It also had to come from me, one thing I talked about is that dwelling on misery/mistakes is, for me anyway, a guilty pleasure and a little addictive, so I had to be truly sick of living that way and genuinely want the change in my heart of hearts.

These are some of the most common problems people seek therapy for, and there are several methods therapists teach to address these, such as meditation and mindfulness. It takes practice, but they have a lot of potential to help with intrusive, snowballing thoughts. You can practice anytime and mostly anywhere, but doing it is the hard part.

So does shitting in a hole in the ground.

I don’t know what I mean by this; I just let the universe guide my fingers when I’m on here.

A different perspective. I like it.

Wow, ok, I don’t know what I did to make you attack me with logical philosophies like this but I’m sorry, Christ.

Sounds super healthy! :-D

Can I give you money now?

It’s almost like the entire thing is some sort of scam to trick us into thinking that feelings of injustice is a sickness or something. Like someone somewhere would rather us just be okay with bad things happening around us to the point where they’d spend a significant amount of effort pushing pharmaceuticals and illicit substances to replace the chemicals we produce naturally when things are going well.

I know that sounds crazy, but that’s just how it seems sometimes. It’s really weird.

I mean, it’s not like they’re keeping track of people who have these disorders or anything.

LOOKS AT U.S. GOVERNMENT

I mean, why would they do that?

LOOKS AT ALCATRAZ

I’m sure it’s fine, haha

Yea

Little known fact the brain is in fact part of the body.

Any advice on how to do work like other people? I am quick to grab my phone everytime I get even slightly stressed or don’t immediately know the answer to a problem.

Assuming that you have ADHD based on your other comment, I do, actually, from my own struggles with AuADHD. First thing, is a bit of radical acceptance. If you are not neurotypical, especially if ADHD and/or ASD are involved, you’re not and never will be “like other people”. No pill known by medical science, no strategy, and no therapy is going to change that because it has to do with the brain developing differently in physical structural ways than a neurotypical brain and it’s likely genetic or epigenetic.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for functionality. Just that one must approach things differently and “calibrate” strategies to work with, rather than against their brain. Importantly, it also means that most “productivity hacks” and the like are utterly useless because they were developed with a neurotypical brain as the starting point.

When it comes to doom scrolling and the like, when stressed, you’re actually at a good starting point in that you are aware of what is happening and at least somewhat aware of the cause. It might not seem apparent but, emotion is a significant component of ADHD. The biggest thing to know is that if you are fighting against a heightened emotional state that is causing you to be unable to start or continue something, it can be like quicksand. Constantly running into that emotional brick wall isn’t going to help.

So, what do you do? Well, the same thing isn’t necessarily going to work for everyone. Something that I’ve been working on with my therapist is a strategy from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) that is called the “STOP” skill (here’s a link). Essentially, it involves analyzing your state in the moment and mindfully deciding on a path forward.

If, like many with ADHD including myself (this was a fun thing to become aware of well into adulthood), you are not super comfortable with your emotions and/or have alexithymia (trouble identifying, describing, and expressing ones own emotions), it could be useful to find an emotion wheel or feelings wheel. There are many versions out there. The important thing is to find one that makes sense to you - I like the ones that start more general in the center and get more specific in the edges. To use that type to figure out how you are feeling (or evaluate how you were feeling from memory), just start with your finger in the center and work your way outwards to the emotion that most fits. Practicing this when not in a moment of stress can help to make it easier when you need it.

Other things that you can try are: practicing meditation so that it is easier to use when you need it and, if necessary, making your phone inaccessible, if you don’t need it. Overall, the goal is to improve coping strategies available to you in order to make it easier to use ones that serve you and your well-being.

And it takes a lot of time for me to do something, it takes other very little (at least compared to me). Any advice on that?

Again, assuming that you have ADHD here. The first thing that you’ll need to do is identify the causes. I, for example, often have a lot of trouble reading (even though I love it and was at a college level vocabulary in primary school). For me, this is caused entirely by ADHD, resulting in re-reading paragraphs and sometimes individual sentences multiple times before they “stick”. This caused a lot of problems for me when I was a child didn’t receive any treatment for it.

Another common thing for ADHD is getting too granular and getting into analysis paralysis or stuck planning rather than doing. I find that setting limits on myself helps to reduce this. For example, if I need to write a program, I might get stuck evaluating what language to use, what libraries to use, which perform better under a given workload, etc. I need to set limits on how long I can take to research and try to make the scope of the work as small as possible to avoid either getting sick in perpetual planning or perpetual research.

Ultimately, you need to evaluate why you are taking longer to do the tasks, which is likely not just one thing, and start chipping away at the things that are causing the time sink in manageable bites. Don’t try to fix everything at once!

The issue here is that you’re doing everything you can to avoid negative emotions, like picking up your phone to distract yourself at the first sign of anxiety.

Often some of the biggest things which hold us back in life come from avoiding discomfort. The most ‘motivated’ people you know aren’t doing all these things because it’s easy, they do them despite the difficulty and discomfort.

The best thing you can do for yourself is learn how to sit with discomfort and act on what you want to do despite it. It’s not easy, but it’ll change a lot for you.

I have that problem and it’s still a problem for me but what I’ve found that sort of works is to keep a to do list of all the shit I need to do. Kind of like a bulet journal but less complicated. If someone asks me to do something then instead of immediately jumping on it (unless it’s an emergency) I put it on the list. Then when I am working on something and it stresses me out to the point I am reaching for my phone I move to a different item on the list instead (sometimes). When I finish something or review the list and see a bunch of things crossed off it also gives me a little mood bump. Also keeping my phone in my bag instead of within reach and just listening to podcasts or whatever on my wireless buds helps.

None of this is a perfect solution but it did help a bit. Usually if I can get myself in a groove I can power through several items and make up the time I lost dicking around so having a list ready is handy for that as well.

Maybe this is an event of what happens if I don’t know? I understand that this wouldn’t be something you could cold turkey, but what I’m saying is what if I’m that scenario you start questioning “do I need to know?”. When you’re in a comfortable mind space, think about what you would have done ~15 years ago when there was no access to an unlimited amount of data?

I’m definitely not a therapist so maybe this isn’t helpful at all but worth a shot.

Have you been tested for ADHD?