The first step is to take care of your body. Exercise, sleep 8 hours, eat healthy.
Next step is to start taking care of your mind. Not as straightforward as the first step, with quite a bit more nuance.
Lastly, something that helped me is to find the difference, in your life, between motivation and discipline.
fuck off. I did all of that shit at times when I was depressed and guess what, I just wanted to die even more because eating healthy is so much work
sleep 8 hours
🥲
(above is simultaneously crying and smiling emoji)
Best I can do is 4.
The first step is important and well studied. Double your results with exercise by doing it outside. Again, it’s well studied that being with nature improves your mood, so why not take a hike through the woods or along a river? Put your phone away, leave the earbuds at home and just focus on the moment.
From time to time, when the weather is good and everyone’s still asleep, I’ll take a hot cup of tea outside to the woods near my place and sit on a fallen tree and just be quiet. It improves my mood all day. I did it during the first snowfall of the year during covid and could hear the snowflakes hitting the leaves. I could still hear the yelling from inside the house, but somehow it was not my problem in that moment.
Getting a job will get you out of the house
I joined a men’s group. We meet every week.
That means at least once a week, I see someone who cares about me.
Nah it’s less like a team rally thing and more like a weekly standup meeting about emotional state, as an exercise to train perception of our own emotional states.
I myself discovered I had absolutely no idea what emotion I was experiencing. What I believed was my emotional state, was a sort of “good” or “bad” depending on how much energy I had to act like I felt good.
I was playing this character, and the character was a positive person whenever I had the energy to be pleasant and act happy. And I played that character for decades from childhood on and wasn’t aware of it.
Just identifying how I felt once a week, and staring it to the group, helped me notice that there was an actual stream of real emotion happening, that I was treating as a sort of background noise to my project of summoning the energy to “feel good”.
It’s hard to explain. I had this universe of emotion that was fake, and I thought it was real. It’s like having black and white patterns, different patterns for different emotions. Angry is diagonal stripes, scared is squares, happy is circles, whatever. Then one day that rips open and behind it are these fields of pure color: blue, green, yellow.
I don’t know what those are.
But week after week we meditate and then after meditation I tell how I’m feeling. And eventually I realized those colors are the real thing that I thought those patterns were referring to. I thought those patterns were the colors.
I wish I could describe it better.
That’s the neat part, I don’t.
This is a defeatist answer. The real answer is yours to truly find and the advice here can really help, but you absolutely can pull out of it even though it might seem insurmountable
That’s assuming someone has the skills. I’m surrounded by people everyday. As friendly as they are, they are too exclusivist for me and I have the problem of not being good at keeping a conversation alive. Nothing sticks and it’s hardwired, it’s not going to change unless one of the unchangeable circumstances change.
Well do you think socializing is something you even enjoy? If yes, then most people I meet that aren’t good at conversation are facing 1 of 3 problems. One being they just don’t want to talk or two they have nothing in common with the person or lastly you might struggle with a lack of confidence. To keep a convo alive just ask the person about themselves is the easiest way. But truly getting into hobbies and interests will help you find friends and good conversations. This is one reason why I find video games so useful because you will always find someone who likes the same game as you.
And if no well then what does make you happy?
Create something. Art, music , programs or whatever.
Keeps me going regardless of what’s happening.
