I like the metaphor of the spiral wishingwell. The coin/ball represents the level of depression you sink into. The gravitational draw of the void makes the spiral go faster unless you figure out a way to pull out of it and the longer you wait the harder it is to pull out cause it's moving too quickly.

So the trick becomes keeping the coin/ball off of the spiral

Just another perspective to lean on when understanding others.

Once you confront it in the most absolute sense, something akin to ego-death occurs, and you make a decision about whether it is worthwhile to continue.

Everything comes from and swings back to chaos. Embrace it and you will be free.

Not sure I agree fully with the "time spent in the water" not seeming bad - I think I simply recognize it for what it was, while acknowledging the trauma and cascading effects that I'm unwinding 30+ years after the fact.

Perhaps you mean that you are no longer attached to the trauma and can view it "objectively"

More important to me now is unwinding the physical manifestations of trauma/anxiety that I never recognized as well as eliminating the behaviors (people pleasing, self deprecation etc...) that attract toxic attachment.

Woke up and thought "alright this is stupid, I need to get stuff done" and as though it were magically manifesting out of thin air I had a normal train of thought, my emotions were mostly in check, and I had motivation that I hadn't felt in years.

Almost like cracking a knuckle, but in my own brain. GP's comment resonates very hard.

> Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion that prompts people to jump to the worst possible conclusion, usually with very limited information or objective reason to despair. When a situation is upsetting, but not necessarily catastrophic, they still feel like they are in the midst of a crisis.

Anecdotally, many of the people I know with a tendency to "catastrophize" later suffer from clinical depression. The depression only exacerbates the problem.

Even more anecdotally, catastrophizing seems heavily correlated to the usage of certain social media platforms in the young people I've worked with. I don't know which direction the causality flows, but I do know that people who consume a lot of Reddit and Twitter seem to think the world is ending and everything is terrible. They can tell me about every political scandal, every shooting, every tragedy, and every natural disaster that happened in the past week. Eventually they come to believe their news sources are representative of the entire world, forgetting that none of these things are happening to them personally.

It's a weird doom loop spiral. Even weirder is that many of the people caught in it feel convinced that they "don't do social media" because they're not on Instagram or TikTok, yet they consume hours and hours of doom and gloom social media like Reddit all day.

I quit Reddit and I remember the exact day it happened. I found myself typing and deleting a reply to a comment that was overly negative on something that I was well versed in. I knew this person was incorrect and taking a knee jerk cynical approach.

At some point I just said what the hell am I doing here I need to not be on this website anymore.

> Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current.

Achieving it still feels like the end of "A beautiful mind", where there are people hanging out in the room that are not there. They sound like they are they, they feel like they are, they smell familiar. But they are not real and will disappear some wonderful day, as they always do. So you just nod to them and go on with your live.

However you may get downvoted because you asked how to get upvoted, which can be counterintuitive if you're Neurodivergent (like many of us). It's ok, that's not how you intended it, but that is most likely not a helpful part of the message here.

All your points may very well be true, but taken together, they paint a picture of you as sick and untrustworthy. Society puts requirements on people, stuff like

- wearing clothes in public

- <more examples>

One of those requirements is emotional resilience. Being able to absorb a setback or percieved slight, and keep moving forward in your day. It can also be seen as a game of emotional poker - sometimes you win a bit, sometimes you lose a bit, but if your bank goes down to 0, you're out!

You are holding on to these slights and injustices, and it doesn't matter whether you are right or wrong. It's a catch-22, the fact that you keep complaining instead of moving on with your day proves that you are unwell.

Trepanning is an analogy for schizophrenia. That's where part of a person's skull is removed, and the brain is directly exposed to the air. You are exposing your feelings to the world, where a normal person would have an emotional lid.

It seems very interesting. You can generally share how important it is to you within reason and that's pretty chill too.)

Too many assume it's a lack of willpower, but willpower can only do so much to fight the tide (depending on the severity of the illness).

The most valuable thing I've gotten from the past several years of therapy is a better model for how humans actually process information. The simple model a lot of people have is:

1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience.

2. Process and understand it.

3. Respond to that emotionally.

What we actually do is more like:

1. Receive some stimulus, input, or experience.

2. This data is way too ambiguous to make sense of on its own. So to turn it into coherent information, interpret it through the lens of a narrative about who we are and how we expect the world to work. This happens automatically and unconsciously.

3. React to that interpretation emotionally.

4. Watch logical rational brain then scramble around trying to come up with a coherent story that explains why we started feeling a certain way. The answer it comes up with may or may not agree with the unsconscious process that happened in step 2.

So much of therapy is "Why does X make me feel Y?" How do I fix X? The answer is almost always that X doesn't make you feel Y. X in the context of belief Z you have about yourself leads do you feeling Y. You fix Z by questioning the often toxic beliefs you hold about yourself. But it can take a lot of work and therapy to even be able to see Z, much less root it out and install a better narrative.

I think step 4 is where people really get caught in a feedback loop. You come up with a reason why you should feel bad, and then you do (step 3) and before you know it you're back at step 4.

One approach is to try and cut it off at step 2 like you mention, but I've found this to be a never-ending rabbit hole because installing a better narrative requires constant work.

While of course it's not bad to work toward a better narrative of yourself, I've also had great success with meditation and humility targeting step 4. My friends with anxiety and depression all (somewhat paradoxically) are extremely confident when it comes to the rational side of their thoughts. They think they've got it figured out and it's just their emotions or other people that are the problem. I train myself in meditation (don't rationalize at all) and humility (recognize that my rationalizations are never going to be accurate).

Yes. And because our brains are naturally recursive and meta-cognitive, it's so easy to fall into the trap of painting that work itself with the same toxic self narrative: "Ugh, I better keep working on improving my psychology because mine is so screwed up and I'm such a mess."

Short-circuiting that spiral can be really hard.

On good days, I try to just observe myself interpreting things through an unfortunate lens, acknowledge that doing that is part of who I am, and try to accept that as part of being me but that I am still a worthy person even so.

https://iveronicawalsh.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/cbtafg_ab...

To retrain your brain on how to appropriately react to things.

My personal belief is that SOME cases of your Z are caused by a 'learned helplessness' situational conditioning filter. The world isn't always fair and sometimes even earnest effort that in an ideal world should yield some sort of positive result has none.

Hypothetically the human social creature evolved in small tribes / large families. Possibly in those cases slight negative reactions like that would be corrected by the presence of the family. In the distraction model of recovery possibly by redirection to a more useful effort that would yield positive outcomes for the individual and group.

In modern cities, it is very easy to end up alone, or nearly alone, with very few to rely on. Even if someone has friends in a city they might be real effort to reach, and that is assuming they've got time. If there's that effort involved maybe you don't even hang out with them and drift apart until even chance meetings cost effort and thought.

So when I'm speaking the words just come out. I've got a vague sense of where I'm going and the point I'm about to make, but it's certainly not verbal at that stage. My wife has afantasia, which is not a condition or anything as such, it just means she has no inner monologue and hears no inner voice when e.g. reading a book. Conversely one of my daughters says she is consciously aware of what she is about to say in words several seconds in advance even while speaking rapidly. My mother is an amateur artist and says she has crystal clear visual imagination and photographic memory.

There seems to be a significant variation in how our conscious and cognitive processes work between individuals, including some having varying levels of access to cognitive mechanisms that in others are completely subconscious.

That's just one example of very significant differences between individuals in one family, even in direct lines of descent, so this doesn't seem to be entirely genetic. It leads me to suspect that there may we be similarly very significant variations in how all sorts of other cognitive functions operate between individuals.

I'm sure there's an overall architecture to our brains and neurological machinery. Various brain areas are clearly specialised into particular cognitive functions, but it may well be that, within those areas, how our brains get to implement those functions might have quite a bit of variation.

This is true, but it's also a feature, and not a bug. Conscious processing is extremely slow and resource intensive. Our subsconscious processing has millions of years of evolution behind it to generate good enough solutions to many problems much faster and burning fewer calories than doing the mental processing consciously and deliberately.

It's like running an emulator versus running code natively on the CPU. The latter will always beat the former.

More broadly speaking though, depression is partially like being stuck in your foulest possible mood for years, with the full knowledge that it's not going away, at least in the near term.

The few that remained (in my personal case, can't speak about others) was a strange sense of gamification of everything. Lift that spoon with only one finger. That allows some influx of positive will but it can get drained real fast (to the point of physiological collapse .. a bit like narcolepsia)

And yeah, long term management basically teach your brain to desensitize to its own bugs so you can at least not drown in negative emotions. But it's a double edged sword cause you're tapering down your own self in the process.