Self-care? At least twice a day, unless the shower's sticky....

I've struggled with suicidal depression since I was about 14. I'm little over 6 years since my last attempt, and I have had a great run with a therapist until 2 months ago. I'm trying to find that right fit, and in the meantime, I'm doing some reading. I stumbled upon "Flourish" by Martin Seligman, by reading a couple of books by his followers ("Grit", by Angela Duckworth is one I'd suggest).

Seligman pioneered positive psychology, and I'm hoping to use his work with my therapist to re-wire some of my brains pathways to be more innately positive. It's....a lot, but it's a more realistic goal than to convert my depression to happiness with the power of meditation or dandelions or CBD or whatever.

https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter has a host of questionnaires for anyone interested, and there's a few Coursera courses based on his work.

Part of this has been inventorying and identifying what I do for self-care....and I really don't fucking know.

I work out. I try to eat healthier than I did earlier in life (with mixed results). I fuck as much as I can, and jerk off a lot. I...make elaborate coffee and take my time shaving? Fuck. I dunno what self-care is.

Focus: What do you do for self-care? Is that a term with meaning for you, or more woo-woo bullshit?

Alt-focus: Depression. What do you do for the folks afflicted by it?

 

Nothing that makes you feel better or helps you cope is woo-woo bullshit. If it doesn’t have other, negative impacts that is.

When I was younger I burned the candle at both ends and the middle. Work, school and play, hard, resulted in getting about 4 hours of sleep most nights and not taking care of myself physically or mentally. But I was young, getting lot’s of physical activity through work, having fun, and feeling indestructible.

Now I find myself 30 years later with poor care habits that will kill me if I don’t change. Terrible sleep habits, inconsistent physical activity at best, don’t drink anywhere near enough water but way too much booze. All of this takes a toll physically but also mentally. As basic as all of that sounds, there’s a reason they say that habits are hard to break. But I’m always trying at least.

Probably the best self care I’ve done is to cultivate a great group of friends, and wisely pick the woman I married.

 

As a full-time working mom of 4 (2 kids, a dog, and a husband (ha! kidding, not really tho...)), all I ever see on every news feed are articles about "self care" - "Take time for you, mom!!" "If you're not taking care of yourself, you can't take care of others..." Yadda, yadda, yadda. While it's mostly true, it's annoying that it's constantly shoved down my throat because I'm a "mom". Everyone can benefit from self-care and it's different for every person.

The position I have at work is stressful as well as the environment, which causes my anxiety to flare up. My kids also cause my anxiety to flare up. To mitigate that, I need to start my day with some sort of physical activity - walking the dog, running on the treadmill, doing yoga. It's hard to get up earlier than I HAVE to in order to get it done, but I've convinced myself that it is something I HAVE to do, or I suffer, and so does my family, frankly.

Also, I've really come to value my drive home from work, where I can just jam out in the car and be alone with my thoughts before having to go home to my second full-time job of being "mom".

While these aren't the most mind-blowing revelations for "self-care", these are a few actions that have really helped me over the last few years.

I think it's really important to acknowledge how important your mental health is, and the fact that you can recognize you need to take care of yourself and being proactive by trying new therapies is really commendable! Not a lot of people have the guts to even admit something is wrong let alone seek help for it.

 

I'm currently going through a lot of change in life with leaving Defence and studying for a new career while on leave and while I started out alright I've fallen into old habits lately and spending way too much time on the Xbox. Something I found that was great for me was when I lived in Newcastle and had a great Yoga studio 800m from my front door, I couldn't ever make excuses with it being that close and always felt great afterwards. At the moment I'm finding excuses for a lot of stuff and procrastinating a lot with all the anxiety and depression added to the mix it's meaning I'm not getting a lot done. Booked in with the psych for when I get back from Perth in a couple of weeks to start digging into the issues again.

Aside from Yoga and Pilates other things that have helped over the years are mostly common sense like others have mentioned, eat right, drink less, be active. The biggest one for me though is being surrounded by nature.

 

Stopping drinking alcohol was the biggest thing I've done for my mental wellbeing. Little over two years ago, the results both mentally and physically have been drastic. Not for everyone, it was for me though. Still drink just as much, just a lot of non-alcoholic beer and zero-proof cocktails. Currently having a CBD sparkling water that's brewed with watermelon and lemongrass.

Beyond that, years ago when I realized my brain wasn't right I saw a therapist and was diagnosed with PTSD from my brain surgery. I do take some medication for depression and anxiety, lexapro is amazing. Exercise is, or at least was, a huge part of my life as well. I'm one of those crazies who genuinely enjoys running, so I'd do 3-5 miles at a shot, and do either cardio or weights for roughly an hour a day 4-5 times a week. Then COVID hit, then the snowpocalypse, then our house flooded from pipes so it's just getting back to normal. Routine got disrupted, but as far as the little things, I enjoy cooking, just in general doing anything outside. I'll do cigars sometimes, enjoy the peace and quiet of the experience of having one by the fire pit as much as anything. I've found the outdoors to be very calming, kinda re-sets me in a way. My 6 year old and I go on hikes for antler sheds around the ranch. I'll start fishing more once the weather warms.

Currently I'm still struggling massively with long-covid, as I've detailed in that thread, so physical exercise is out the window while I just actively try to not die. Most days it's anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour or two max of work, followed by laying in bed reading and just messing around online because I'm too physically weak or confused to do much of anything else. Keeping my mind busy is the biggest self care thing right now, because if I focus too much on how I am physically then it can absolutely get not great in a hurry.

 

This is challenging for me. I've been very goal-oriented my entire life, yet, I'm 36: how many "milestones" am I going to get that leave me disappointed and back at the starting point of "well, this sucks balls, how can I change this?". I'm at a point of diminishing returns: I've got 4 degrees, and as many certifications, adding another one won't move the needle. I've got a cool job, near the top of the pyramid, and the path upward is longer, less secure and covered with bullshit, for a tiny increase in salary (most of which is eaten up in taxes), no noticeable difference in lifestyle and a massive increase in politics and responsibility. The things I've pursued that got me to here won't continue to work in the next phases of my life, and that is a huge challenge: abandoning what used to work for what might work in the future, when I feel very successful, lucky and accomplished, just not "happy"?

Working to be better off makes absolute sense, over a long haul. Doing it day by day makes me feel like I'm on some sort of sprint: "just finish this degree/certification/action to get this milestone". For me it's a cycle of "new exciting challenge" then "slog of misery and despair" then "yay, I'm finished, triumph!" then "Oh. That didn't really change anything, or it came with it's own drawbacks that I had my head down too deep into the thing to realize were coming." Part of that is the hedonistic treadmill, which if you haven't heard of, I strongly encourage you to get familiar with.

@walt, one of my friends is a nutritionist, and the best thing she ever said to me (besides, "No I won't fuck you but I know someone who will"), was "food guilt serves no one and nothing, and if you're eating healthy and gaining weight, so be it." I look at that as saying if I eat right and my body keeps more of it around, it's probably for a reason.

CBT-cognitive behavioral therapy is what I did for most of 2020, and it was valuable. When I started, I felt like shit and I lacked the vocabulary to explain my emotions ibeyond "I feel shitty." Now, I have a plethora of words to describe what shitty feels like! Compartmentalizing, ignoring my feelings/emotions/thoughts, and not having ways to express/manage emotions has been my de facto for most of my adult life, and CBT helped me process things in a healthier way, and helped me get to the root cause of what I was feeling/experiencing. It might sound simple, but just having the ability to recognize "I did this/felt this because of X" is a monumental change over "I feel shitty and I don't really know why."

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_this_could_be_why_you_re_depressed_or_anxious
This guy wrote a book about depression that I've thought a lot about, when I found myself saying "I did all the things: I drank the water, I quit the booze, I exercise like a maniac, I eat like a rabbit trying to outlive Methuselah, why brain won't you make happy chemicals, you lump of fuck?"

It's in part, due to the changing nature of my relationships and the wild imbalance between the volume of information I consume on a daily basis, the relationships I have, what they do/how they manifest in my life, and how our brains evolved.

So, for me, being an extreme introvert, isolation was reinforcing my depression. I've started to work on how my relationships across the board (friends, family, coworkers, random acquaintances) impact me and can help me feel better. It's probably the hardest thing I've done yet, because it's just always been easier for me to be alone.

Lastly, the positive psychology school of thought makes more sense to me because I always thought I was supposed to go from depressed to happy, and that felt frankly fucking stupid. Misery to euphoria sounds like a chemically-induced cycle, not something that a therapist can actually do. The positive psychology slant to it says "no, not happy but positive." It's not about chasing happiness, but putting myself more firmly on a spectrum of positivity in small, meaningful ways. Things like resilience, grit, gratitude, contentment, respect, and changing my default internal dialog from a compelling need to change (ie, avoiding a negative) to a desire for growth (seeking a positive). It's going from escaping a burning building to constructing a home.

 

I hate the whole "prepper" group thing, like you either are or aren't one, as I think that it's more of a general attitude of preparedness and resourcefulness rather than any label to hang on the wall. Regardless, I'm firmly in this camp, though not obviously so. It's just a matter of practice for me -- slowly build up resources over time (including financial flexibility, which becomes a resource) in a way that allows you do adapt to whatever shit life throws at you. For me, aside from being practical, this also helps my mental health in a significant way.

When I got hit with the one-two punch of COVID then the Texas snowpocalypse immediately thereafter, I was able to handle it, albeit it not in luxury, with what I had on hand, for basically two months straight. It wasn't perfect, and there's certainly things I will improve upon, and have already begun to change. But it allowed me to focus on my immediate health and environment rather than stress and get anxiety over any secondary issues that could arise like "what if we run out of food?" or "what if I can't get to the hardware store?"

COVID has me operating at about 20% of what I was prior, since late January. Yet despite making it through a natural disaster and a house flood, I haven't truly struggled.

For anyone who's not of the mindset, I would highly recommend just taking a bit to think "what can I do today that would better help me tomorrow if something unexpected happened?" Yesterday I got some powdered coffee creamer with a long shelf life, and a few rolls of moleskin. Maybe $25 total. It will absolutely be used at some point, and could very well save the day if I have an issue tomorrow. At the absolute very least, that's one less thing I have to worry about.

 

For example, my brother, who after two days of the freeze had to wait several hours outside a local pizza joint that was somehow open because they literally ran out of food. His entire house, with two toddlers, and a pregnant wife. He refused our offers to take whatever he wanted, because pride or something. They literally did not keep more than two days of food on them at any given time.

A little common sense goes a long ways, especially when you need it. And more than anything, it gives you peace of mind too.

 

Some of this is basic skills that when exercised aren't easier/cheaper/more convenient than diving into consumerism, but more rewarding. Like, making a pizza from scratch can be a 4+ hour experience costing well over $20 worth of materials, or it can be a 15 minute wait and $10. Domino's doesn't do shit for my skills, memories, or relationship.

Making pizza and funnel cake with my niece has been educational, a good memory for both of us, healthier than buying it, and delicious. Buying it on the way home because I'm too fucking tired to cook is miserable, less healthy and meaningless, but it is way cheaper and faster. I think most folks emphasize the time and money, over the quality of the experience and the fidelity (for lack of a better word, the difference between exactly what I want in an ideal sense and what I get).

I can get into a flow state when I cook very easily, the more complex or hectic the kitchen, the better. It's highly rewarding work, and something that's very often overlooked: the kitchen is our default "creative" space, it's one of the few places I actually make stuff.

It always kind of concerns me when I see adults who have feeble household or life skills, like folks who can't cook anything more complex than a box of mac and cheese.

Personally and professionally, I can whole-heartedly endorse being prepared for an emergency. Most folks don't because they can't afford it, and those that can often overlook it for different expenses (I can get a 70" tv or I can spend some cash at Costco to be able to keep us safe, clean and fed when the lights go out..."). I think we're reaching a point where some of these projects add meaningful value to the home, in some cases well over the cosmetic projects. The biggest thing is when shit goes down, and you're well taken care of, you reach out to your neighbors, friends and family as well.

 

Let's call "prepper's what they really are: hoarders. Plus,they typically focus on shit that you don't really need a lot of, or need at all in any emergency, outside a zombie apocalypse. They'll have no sleeping bags, candles, water collection & purification devices, etc. They'll have little or no basic canned/dry goods, or they'll have pallets of chili, or one kind of freeze dried food, that they'll likely get sick of eating. Also, no matter how bad it gets after a real world emergency...you will not need 50 firearms and 50,000 rounds of ammo for each.

 

I bought 15 lbs of dry pasta. I ate it all.

 

I was talking with my dad about this recently, and I said my goal was to be able to operate, completely cut off, for seven days. I figured that would be a good buffer in case of emergency, without going full-on "we'll outlast the mole people with our stored vittles!". So fresh water, power, food, etc that can hold out for a week until utilities come back online, or to gtfo to some place better. Obviously I'm nowhere near that currently because I don't even own a house, but it's a nice dream.

 

This is more media caricature/stereotype than reality. I'm not a prepper myself, but I've known a few of them. You know what they there were obsessed with? Positively couldn't shut up about?

Gardening. Growing their own crops.

Regardless of what you believe the future holds, what exactly is the harm in a bunch of guys learning to garden and grow their own vegetables? To be more self-sufficient and prepared? Of course larger society wants to paint them as all a bunch of violent lunatics. Think about it for a second. Society wants to depict those who want to live outside of society, or be less reliant on society, as insane or evil. What a surprise, right?