but what if it doesn’t
Thank you for sharing this… I like really needed this and opened lemmy in the middle of a really bad depressive episode and this was on top of my feed… Saving this for future me and friends.
I hope you don’t mind me sharing something I’ve learned that I think is truly fascinating and very powerful: If you can recognize your negative “automatic thoughts” and what triggers them, and then argue against them, it gives you incredible power over that kind of dark cloud that can hang over your life.
For example:
"Fuck it, nothing matters and the world is going to shit. Well… what caused me to think that? Could be bad sleep last night, a bad mood from getting in that argument with my friend earlier, too much time on social media reading negative news, and a general sense of exhaustion.
Ok… I might be biased in my thinking about these things without realizing it. If nothing matters, than there’s nothing to worry about. All my fuck ups are… whatever. There’s no way that I’m “supposed to be” that I’m failing at. Nowhere I’m “supposed to go”, which is actually kind of freeing. Actually, looking around I can find plenty of examples of people that think everything is meaningless but still enjoy their lives. They’re are many philosophies addressing this exact problem that I can explore.
There are a lot of bad things in the world… but also I have way more freedom and longer life expectancy than almost everyone else in human history. There are terrible things happening to the environment, but there are also millions and millions of dedicated people protecting the environment, and on the whole humanity has made a lot of progress in how we view that issue in just the last 25 years."
This is just a stream of thought example to demonstrate how it works. It’s very powerful, especially if you write the key points down. It gets much easier after doing it a few times. This is you restructuring your neural networks–its literally changing your mind. It’s eye opening to practice doing this and share it with others.
Next time something triggers these negative automatic thoughts, you’re much more likely to not only recognize that it’s happening, but also have a different way of thinking about it right there waiting for you. A doorway out of this dark loop of sadness.
I won’t set myself up for disappointment by giving myself hope. Rather be realistic
Rather be pessimistic and be surprised when I’m wrong … spoiler never …
I was ready to give up, but this is exactly right. What’s one more night waiting outside her house when true love is the reward?
anxiety and delusions are not the same thing lol
“interrupt your psychosis with this one weird trick: just keep going!” 🤣
for that to have a chance of helping you have to have some expectation of it being possible in the first place and i don’t understand how false hope is supposed to help.
if there’s really a zero shot why not plan for adapting to the bad outcome instead of worrying about something you have no control over?
(answer, because you know somewhere that you do have some control and that there is some hope but for one reason or another you refuse to see it.)
bruh fuck off
predictable answer. enjoy your misery
toxic positivity will crash and burn eventually
Exactly what part of this is toxic positivity? This is about acceptance and control. Toxic positivity is when someone smiles at you and insists you play nice as they trample on your rights. You’re just being a miserable shit who feels offended by being called out on it. In fact I contest the positivity part more than the toxic part - I don’t mind being toxic; think you’re a right git!
What if it works out? Then I’ll have a lot of work to do to keep it working. What if I’m not good enough to keep it working and I turn it into a failure?
What if you are good enough and you do pull it off?
