Posted by fxckfeelings on August 20, 2020
When you feel like crap, an obvious goal is to feel like not-crap, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s simple. If, like our reader from earlier, you need a better goal than “feeling better,” here are five ways to find that goal.
1) Focus On Action Over Emotions
Since “feeling good” is often out of your control—the determination to have a good day is no match for rainclouds, incontinent birds, and/or current events—focus instead on what it takes to make you feel like a good person. Define for yourself the actions that define good person-hood, e.g., being a good friend, supporting yourself, delivering good work, being a good partner or parent, not being an asshole. Ignore the things that make you happy, like love, sex, money, and admiration. Being a good person isn’t always a feel-good endeavor.
2) Approach your Assessment
After making your list of good person traits, rate yourself realistically in those areas above that you think are important and meaningful. Don’t get perfectionistic or overly self-judgmental (an easy thing to do if you’re miserable and depressed), but don’t shy away from judgment. Rate yourself as you would rate a friend, looking at the facts as you know them. Good enough is a good grade because it’s not easy for most of us to be a good person, especially when we feel terrible.
3) Witness Your Weak Spots
Ask yourself whether there’s anything you really need to improve, in order to think of yourself as a reasonably good person—i.e., not an asshole—or whether you’re OK with yourself. Unlike trying to feel good, which is broad, ambiguous, and can often be achieved by destructive behaviors (e.g., lots of spending, sleeping, and/or opiates), trying to be good isn’t as complicated. If you’ve assessed where your weaknesses are then you know exactly where your attention should go.
4) Address Areas of Improvement
So now that you’ve figured out what, if anything, you really need to improve in order to be a good person, you’ve figured out your goal. Rate the probability, if you try to become a reasonably good person, that you’ll become more unhappy than you are now. For instance, if you need to control your temper, your drinking, or your spending, you may feel worse before you feel better. But understanding that, and the long-term rewards can go a long way towards making the work and discomfort more bearable. It also helps to find people, like family and friends, a therapist, or even a support group, who can offer you advice and encouragement.
5) Redefine Failure
If, on the other hand, you’re really doing OK in all the areas of being a good person that matters most to you, then ask yourself whether you consider yourself a failure because you haven’t been able to overcome your unhappiness. If so, correct your thinking. By your own standards, you’re a reasonably good person in spite of feeling a great deal of chronic unhappiness. That’s hard to do. Nobody can control how you feel; despite feeling awful, however, you haven’t given up on being your best. So give yourself the respect you deserve for achieving what’s arguably the most important goal there is under some of the most unpleasant circumstances.
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 30, 2020
As with addiction, admitting you’re depressed is merely the first step to management and recovery. After that comes the work of fighting your depressive thoughts so they no longer make you doubt yourself, your work, and your right to live. So if, as with our reader from earlier, your grief and/or depression are making your life impossible, here are five ways to prevent those depressive thoughts from becoming assumed beliefs.
1) Ignore Your Emotions
Depression is like having your own personal garbage internet messageboard in your head; it will tell you you’re bad at your job, have lost the respect of those you work with and for, and should just crawl in a hole and die. In truth, you’re probably doing a good job, given the way that you feel, so the first step is the most obvious one; learning to push back when your brain floods you with negative feedback. Just because you feel bad doesn’t mean you’re doing everything badly, so don’t let your sadness taint your impression of your performance, self, worth, etc.
2) Be Your Own Best Friend
One quick way to refute your internal negativity is to ask yourself whether you’d say something similar to someone you care about. Ask yourself what standards you would expect this friend to meet given their situation/illness, and what language and tone would be appropriate, both in terms of being kind and motivating. You’d probably conclude rather quickly that you would never been that harsh to a friend because it’d be far more hurtful than helpful, and if you wouldn’t say it to a friend you shouldn’t say it to yourself.
3) Find the Facts
The best way to combat the misinformation coming from your brain is through research into your illness, because knowing exactly how depression works, and how little you are to blame for being afflicted by it, will make the thoughts easier to ignore. You will find that illness happens and people often have very little ability to prevent it. And even when they know they didn’t cause it they find ways to blame themselves for not eating healthy or sleeping enough, even though the major causes of depression are usually bad genes or bad luck. You will also find that depression is common, can be triggered by grief, and that you can lose focus and motivation regardless of how well you take care of yourself or how motivated you are to do your work. Once you know that your illness isn’t your fault, it’s easier to take its insults less personally and be less ashamed for being afflicted.
4) Stand Up To Stigma
Even after admitting to yourself that you’re depressed, it can be hard to admit it to others, especially outside of your inner circle. On the one hand, you’re entitled to keep your personal information private. But if your depression is imparing your ability to do your job—if it makes you look angry or withdrawn, or less eager to volunteer to do your part, or harder to focus and do your job well—then calmly stating to your colleagues what you’re going through won’t just explain your poor job performance but will also probably make them more understanding, patient, and eager to help going forward. Don’t ask for help apologetically, as if you’ve messed up and need forgiveness. Instead, let people know you’re having a tough time with symptoms, but you’re still trying very hard to do a good job and take care of your problem.
5) Out of Hiding, Seek Help
Your depression may tell you that it’s not worth getting help, or that looking is too hard, or that you’ll just end up pumped full of drugs and even more miserable. But this, of course, is yet more bullshit. Fighting the negativity of depression is hard, but a cognitive therapist can help you identify and challenge those negative thoughts and prevent them from becoming accepted. Medication may also help, although it takes at least several weeks to work and often requires multiple trials before an effective one can be found. Mostly, finding outside help will give you the support to face your illness. It will give you an outside opinion to remind you that you’re not a bad person, that bad symptoms happen to sane people, and that you’re not alone. Respect your work ethic while you prepare to fight a serious illness and give yourself the support and treatment you need.
Posted by fxckfeelings on April 16, 2020
People worship self-esteem and confidence as if they signify success and are as much of a job requirement as being able to learn fast and use Excel. In reality, although skill and experience will certainly make you feel more confident, and while confidence is a useful trait, there are lots of random, uncontrollable conditions that can deflate your feelings of self-worth, like illness, depression, and loss, and they have a way of combining and reinforcing one another and making work, and life, impossible. So if you’ve built up real skill and experience and know you’re good at what you do, it shouldn’t matter if you feel terrible. Indeed, if you can feel lousy and still do a good enough job, you’re qualified to do almost anything.
-Dr. Lastname
It has been almost a year since I’ve lost my father. Aside from trying relentlessly to deal with the grief, I’ve also turned into a less confident, socially awkward person at the worst possible moment. I’m in my residency where confidence and interaction with people is highly scrutinized, along with the intelligence and capacity to handle extremely sick people. Stress is at an all time high, and I struggle everyday to remember how proud my dad was of me for achieving my goals. But now that I’m so close to completing my goals…I feel myself letting them slip through my fingers because I don’t have the will or energy to do the work. My goal is to learn how to get a grip and to not lose track of my life goals.
F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship
If dealing with loss and stress weren’t depressing enough, you now have actual depression to make you feel even worse. A stupid/simply as it may sound, it’s really depressing to be depressed, particularly when it interferes with your energy, performance, and ability to achieve your bigger life goals.
Unfortunately, severe depression often affects those parts of your brain that control drive, concentration and social interaction, and grief is often indistinguishable from depression, so your father’s death has, in effect, triggered a disabling illness. Then your feelings of failure about your disability are causing more depression, which makes his absence feel even more painful, and it keeps feeding itself until your career, ability to get out of bed, and will to live are completely gone.
But don’t believe for a moment that your current disability is any more significant than one caused by a stroke or concussion. Your poor performance is not a measure of laziness or incompetence, simply of temporary brain dysfunction and bad luck. Depression will tell you otherwise because it is notorious for creating intensely negative self-judgments and ruminations, but depression is also a notorious liar. So it’s important for you to confront the vicious cycle of depressive symptoms, fake news of failure, and more depression.
With the help of a friend, coach, or therapist, get help in restoring your perspective. Then let others know about your illness and its symptoms. Your colleagues and supervisors will be relieved to know why you’re not performing as well as usual and they will expect that, with time, help, and recovery, you’ll eventually get back to yourself. Meanwhile, they should be willing to give you the same support as if you were recovering from any illness.
Friends will also be relieved to know why you’ve been antisocial lately. Just as depression makes you feel like a failure, they’ve been thinking that you no longer value them as friends; your taking depression personally leads them to take your depression personally. When you let them know what’s really happening, you also block that infectious distortion, let them know you care and allow them to be helpful.
As a doctor you know that illness just happens and that it can be disabling, so use your professional experience to accept your depression as just an illness like any other. Learn to fight the feelings of failure and set up procedures and a group of helpers that will speed your recovery.
Depression hurts and disables, but it can’t do nearly as much damage as the false thoughts it creates if you start to believe them. So remember who you are and use your experience to reject false thoughts. Eventually, they’ve been so trivial and inconsequential that you’ll be able to move on in your career and from the pain of your father’s death without depression getting in your way.
STATEMENT:
“I may be performing poorly, but I know I’m impaired by depression and grief. As a matter of fact, for someone who’s as impaired as I am, I’m doing an impressive job just showing up and trying hard to get a tough job done. I can feel nothing but self-criticism, but I have good reason to be proud. I need to take good care of myself and let others know what’s happening, so they can help me get through this tough time.”
Posted by fxckfeelings on May 2, 2019
People often complain about having to deal with an overbearing boss or teacher, but they usually don’t complain when they see the results; tough-but-fair authority figures also give people well-defined goals, keep them busy and organized, and push them to maintain good habits. They’re demanding, but they’re also in demand, which is why we pay high tuitions for good schools, commute long distances to work for well-run companies, and, occasionally, flounder when a tough boss or strong structure is no longer in our lives. Living in chaos can make it easy to lose energy, confidence, and momentum, but you can implement your own sense of order by accessing the values that you care about most, limiting bad habits and developing the behaviors and plans that will make you not just your own boss, but a boss, period.
-Dr. Lastname
I’m a combat veteran who served in the middle east. I got out a few years ago, but after coming home, getting a job, going to school, and generally doing well, I’ve hit sort of a rough patch. I broke up with this girl that I was dating and I legit broke the fuck down (probably because it was my first serious relationship). I was then able to hold everything together for a bit, but over the last year I’ve lost my job, failed out of school, and have no idea what the fuck is going on. I feel as though I have lost the discipline I gained while in the military. I went to see a therapist but he was more interested in learning how to treat veterans then actually helping me figure out my specific problems. Oh, and my parents are going through a divorce right now, but that does not bother me that much as neither of them is dying or anything (but if figured this is pertinent as every head headshrinker I have ever seen in the movies always tries to blame it on your parents). Plus I was coping for a while by drinking way too much and have been smoking weed way too much, although I’ve been sober for a month or so now. My goal is to get over this hump and force myself to do the things that I know I need to do to achieve the goals that I am certain I am capable of.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on March 7, 2019
Kids hate to see their parents fight, and while you’d think that the feeling would lessen as they grow into adults, the opposite is often true; the older they get, the more they feel like having an adult’s power should give them the ability to set things right and ease their family’s pain. Of course, no human, no matter what their age, emotional investment, or relationship to others, has much power to change or ameliorate the chemistry of a longstanding partnership, so making the best of a bad parental relationship doesn’t require a determination to do good or make sacrifices. All you really need is the ability to judge the actual benefit of bearing witness to a brawl versus exercising the adult’s most wonderful superpower— the ability to leave the room and focus on your own, independent, more peaceful life.
-Dr. Lastname
My parents kept fighting nonstop throughout my childhood and teenage years and it was a painful, helpless experience for me. Even now that I’m in my late 20s and out of the house, they still fight constantly when I’m around and it still makes me cry uncontrollably and feel depressed. All through these years I’ve tried my best to solve and fix things, or just ask them not to fight so regularly in front of me, but nothing’s ever worked. My mother’s negativity, tendency to throw blame around and create chaos… I hate it all. My goal is to find ways to deal with this problem, because it’s been sucking away at my happiness and sanity for far too long.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on January 10, 2019
Persistent voices in our heads—the ones that push us to do everything from avoiding our work to immediately finding an open drive-thru—are virtually impossible to shut up. What you can do, however, is shut them out or talk them down. So, if, like our reader from earlier, you have a nagging voice in your mind that constantly puts you down, here are five ways to argue with it, work around it, and generally not keep it from controlling your life.
1) Source Your Self-Hate And Be Specific
While the negative voice in your head may be persistent and relentlessly cruel, it is also usually somewhat vague, at least when it comes to what you’ve specifically said or done to be so worthy of its endless barrage of loathing. So when it starts laying into you for your so-called awfulness, try to think specifically about whether you’ve done any bad deed or or have any habit so awful to truly deserve its torment. Limit yourself to what you would hold anyone responsible for, like drinking or lying or not keeping promises, and not for things you wouldn’t, like not being gorgeous or born rich.
2) Get Your Own Guidelines
To truly arm yourself against the voice, figure out for your own objective set of standards for what it means to be a good person. Use standards that most people would agree with and that you would use on a friend, like being reasonably respectful of other people’s needs, doing your share, and taking care of yourself. Remember, this is not about your wishes to be handsome, rich, or sociable; these are positive qualities that most people want, but they don’t really speak to one’s character and they definitely aren’t things anyone can easily control.
3) Figure Yourself Out Fairly
Using those standards, and getting input from objective friends or a therapist if necessary, determine what your shortcomings are. Remember, these are shortcomings that involve character, not just the minor things you don’t like about yourself. So avoiud fixating on your looks, mannerisms, or anxious speech and focus instead on any possible bad habits that cause harm, like being so busy hating yourself, or paying so much attention to whether people dislike you, that you don’t return calls or pay attention to the important people in your life.
4) Make A Plan (And Script) For Improvement
Once you know where your true faults lie, you can make a plan to improve yourself or at least manage your bad habits to keep them from taking over. Work with friends or a therapist to assure yourself that you’re living up to reasonable standards, particularly in the area of reaching out and making friends, regardless of what your internal voices are telling you. That way you can go about your life and even meet people with a much lower risk of self-sabotage.
5) Use Your Self-Assessment To Shut Down Your Brain
Stick to your script, keep trying to learn from your mistakes, and never let yourself take your negative voice at its word. Remind yourself that your negative voice may be persistent but that doesn’t make it honest; you’re tough self-assessment has shown you that with ample evidence. So instead of letting the negativity run you over and keep you down, push yourself to roll your eyes at it and answer back. You may never get it to shut up entirely—unfortunately, being self-conscious and negative may just be a part of who you are—but you can put it in check and shut it out of the process of meeting people, achieving things, and generally living life on your terms.
Posted by fxckfeelings on November 15, 2018
Just as there are people who feel so confident in their greatness that they just believe in it without concrete support or evidence, there are those so certain that they’re dumb, hateful and repulsive that they can’t not find evidence of their supposed horribleness everywhere. When that happens, it seems appropriate to focus on their lack of self-esteem as a legitimate target for psychotherapy, but this focus may just intensify such a person’s self-involvement and sense of being defective without necessarily making things better. So if knowing that you’re a compulsive self-hater isn’t doing anything to make the hate stop, ask yourself to define what it means to be a good enough person, regardless of the constant thoughts telling you you’re anything but. Part of you may always be certain that you’re the worst, but if you can stick to your own standards of being good, then you’ll at least be able to refute that certainty by continuing to do your best.
-Dr. Lastname
I feel like EVERYONE hates me; I’ve got some piss-poor self esteem and try to keep conversations with strangers to a minimum since I feel like I’m a dick who’s wasting their time with whatever garbage comes out of my mouth. I’ve been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder but no amount of sugar coating with polite diagnosis can help me out of this. I’ve read books on Buddhism, social esteem, etc., but it all just feels like flimsy spiritual trash that doesn’t sink in. My goal is to either A, stop giving a shit about what people think about me and enjoy life as a curmudgeonly 20-something, B, figure out some way to not be a dick without necessitating spiritualism and masquerading kindness.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on August 9, 2018
If you live with a recurring, debilitating mental illness, you may, like our reader from earlier, be hoping to find a routine, a management plant, or just an ancient spell that will keep unpleasant, disruptive relapses at bay. Unfortunately, mental illness doesn’t reliably respect our routines—it is, for lack of a better word, crazy that way—so instead of looking for ways to prevent relapses, here are five ways to deal with a relapse if and when one does occur.
1) Don’t Confuse A Few Symptoms With Something Bigger
Beware the urge to overreact every time you find yourself dragging, getting overly anxious, feeling miserable, or generally exhibiting some of the symptoms that come with your illness, especially when they could have an easy-to-identify cause, like PMS or stress at work. Instead, force yourself to look at the bigger picture; review your list of prior symptoms and ask yourself whether these ones are occurring in the same bad combination that interferes with your work and relationships and refuses to disappear after you’ve tried to chase it away with some healthy, happy activities. Then get input from your therapist or just people who know you as you decide whether to declare an illness in progress and implement your relapse plan.
2) Put Your Relapse Plan Into Action
As described in our earlier response to our reader, you should already have prepared a list of the interventions and medications that did or did not seem to work in the past and used this experience, together with advice from clinicians and others who observed your responses, to devise a plan for stopping future relapses. Of course, you may not know for sure what worked because clinical symptoms are often slow to respond and circumstances make it hard to tell what treatment, among the many you may be trying at one time, is actually doing the trick. As such, your plan must take these uncertainties into account while offering you clear options.
3) Know What New Treatments Are Out There
After reviewing your current relapse plan with your current doctor, ask her about any new treatments that may have been developed since your last episode. While remaining open to new treatments and ideas, remember to trust your own ideas, because your doctor is less likely to remember what worked for you in the past than you do. Also, there is currently no way for doctors to make good predictions about what will or won’t work for you based on an analysis of anything but the most basic symptoms and, of course, your previous response.
4) Push Back Against Fear and Pessimism
Drawing on your previous experience with depression and anxiety, as well as any ideas you have picked up from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doctors, and friends, ask yourself whether your current thinking is distorted by symptoms, e.g., whether your depression or anxiety is making you believe that nothing seems to be working, you can’t tolerate your symptoms, your health routine has failed, etc. Then use your knowledge about the facts of depression and your own experience with it to respond to those false, negative perceptions of reality that your illness is flooding your brain with.
5) Begin Treatment While Staying Both Positive And Pragmatic
Knowing, as you do, that the results of current treatments for mental illness are always hard to predict, even when a certain treatment has worked well in the past, focus on how well you do with the process rather than the quality of its results. If improvement is delayed or a particular treatment fails, remind yourself that other treatments may well succeed and that keeping your life on track and persevering with your work and relationships when you’re impaired and distracted by psychiatric symptoms is always an achievement to be proud of and feel good about, even when you feel terrible overall.
Posted by fxckfeelings on July 12, 2018
After experiencing something painful and difficult, it’s natural to work hard to regain control and find ways to avoid going through the same thing again. In some cases, that means avoiding a certain kind of person, or type of dark street, or a specific hairstylist, and hoping that these better choices, combined with better luck, will keep you safe. However, when the experience involves a severe episode of what could likely become a chronic mental illness, your smart choices and allotment of good luck are fairly limited; as much as you may want to prevent a recurrence of your disease and future symptoms, no search for the best treatment or routine is guaranteed to help. And pushing yourself too hard to keep yourself safe won’t just dangerously raise your expectations but distract you from the real work of making a plan for how to deal with a relapse. So real hope should never create expectations of control, be it over your safety, heart, or bangs, but on living one’s life as fully as possible when control isn’t possible.
-Dr. Lastname
I am a person who has a mental illness! I have treatment-resistant depression and ADD and a soupçon of PTSD. I am in treatment with a psychiatrist I like very much and it’s actually pretty chill that therapy really works. I’m a much healthier person than I was five years ago! So between that and the fact that I have been in therapy long enough to throw my inner child a quinceañera, I am not asking for treatment-related advice. It’s just that sometimes, daily life is really challenging, and as a moderately successful person with a moderately growing career, I spend a lot of time worrying that my relative instability is going to just tank everything. Like I have spent the past three days in a panicky fear that I had re-entered the depression abyss when it turned out to really just be hideous PMS, which I can’t predict (really). Either way, my Depressed Self was back in action and I spent a couple days sleeping, crying, and unable to work. My goal is to build a routine, consistent life with steady work and self-care, despite the occasional, disruptive curveballs that depression throws my way.
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Posted by fxckfeelings on May 3, 2018
ADHD, like any cognitive disability, can be misdiagnosed as a personality flaw; seeing your problems as due to your character, not a disorder, can make you self-critical and vulnerable to the criticism of others at a time when you should be self-motivated and eager to find outside encouragement. Blaming yourself for everything you can’t achieve will just make you depressed, which just makes it harder to do well, which of course makes you feel even worse and more responsible, further impairing your ability to perform. So before you let your depression and/or critical audience bring you down entirely, push yourself to recognize that you aren’t a bad or worthless person, just a good person with the bad luck to have a quirky brain. Then develop standards that are realistic and respectful of good efforts rather than competitive results so you’ll be able to give yourself, and demand from others, the respect you deserve.
-Dr. Lastname
So my husband and I have had a very bad run over the last few years of our marriage, after we had our first child and made the mistake of getting into business together. We do things VERY differently; he’s always on time, organized and knows his mind, and I’m the opposite on all fronts. The cash flow and our available time kept dwindling while our family grew. And I caused a lot of damage—in our relationship and in our business—so that we had to shut the business down. He kept telling me what I needed to do to change my ways, buying me books and sending me links to articles, all along believing that I would and wanted to change, until at some point he realized that I was uninterested in the work. He also concluded that I am the most selfish person he’s known, and that I have been lying, thieving, and not investing in our relationship a fraction of what he has. He stopped helping around the house and with the child. I now had baby, house AND work to do up to his standards in order to redeem myself. So from here it goes like this; I’m constantly in a frame of mind that I don’t have enough time so I don’t do anything significant to address things, then wait ’till the last minute and then throw up my hands saying that, well, I did not have enough time to do it (when in truth, I had a lot). He then turns into a nag, waiting to catch my every slip-up and make a mountain out of it. Now the house and the child also start getting short shrift, up until the point where EVERYTHING lies around incomplete or half done and I have no motivation to do even the things I loved doing. I don’t groom myself anymore. He’s so nasty with me that he’s recently become short with our child and physically abusive to me. My goal is to understand why I don’t do things I know I should be doing so I can overcome both my inertia to change and this hellish situation.
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