Pretend ur invasive self hating thoughts r being said to u by a 13 y/o boy on xbox live trying to get a rise out of you like
“Your girlfriend dumped you because you’re ugly”
that’s nice tim isn’t it past ur bedtime
also, if you have intrusive violent thoughts, pretend they’re being said to u by an annoying backseat driver
“drive into that pole” thanks karen or i could not do that
Perfect
you can also pretend that the Super Paranoid thoughts are being said by that conspiracy theorist in your history class
“maybe they poisoned you” maybe you should fuck off, geoffrey-with-a-g
OHH MAN I DO THIS SHIT EVERY DAY
My favorite for intrusive anxious thoughts is to pretend Spock’s behind you with an answer.
“did I lock the door-”
captain you have locked the door every day for over ten years, and it is very hard for most people to break even subconscious habits, so you most definitely locked the door
I told my new psychiatrist about how I learned this from y’all and his eyes lit up. He didn’t smile but he did nod a whole bunch of times, it was great.
I like to pretend that my intrusive thoughts are being said to me by a super uptight religious white lady
“god hates you because you don’t believe in him” “your failures are too great to be forgiven by anyone” “everything you do is wrong and you are going to burn in hell”
thanks for the input brenda but fuck right off
I would just like to say that I love you all for this idea.
Ok so I rly fucking need to clean my house. Do any other People With Depression™ have any tips or ways you motivate urself to clean? Because this feels like the hardest goddamn thing in the world even tho I know it’s not and I’m just continually frustrated with myself and have been for the past two weeks.
HOO BOY DO I HAVE DEPRESSION/EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION CLEANING TIPS
in no particular order (because I have depression and executive dysfunction):
1. If something sensory about cleaning bothers you, eliminate that before you start. For example, I wear gloves to do the dishes. If the sound of the vacuum bothers you, wear headphones and turn up the music. etc.
2. If you can, make a list of everything that needs to be done. Then acknowledge that you probably can’t do it all, and circle all the things that absolutely, no matter what, have to be done. Pick one (ONE! ONLY ONE! START WITH ONE!) of those things and break it down into smaller steps. Then even smaller steps. Seriously, if step one is “stand up” and step two is “walk to closet” and step 3 is “get mop”, that’s fine. It can be that small.
3. Take a break. “But I literally only started five minutes ago!” Don’t care. If you want a break, take a break. “At this point I’ve spent more time on breaks than I’ve spent on cleaning.” Ok, but you’ve spent more than zero time on cleaning, so you’ve accomplished more than you had at the beginning. “If I take a break it won’t get done!” If you burn out it won’t get done either. Take a break.
4. If nothing is working, try what I call bin cleaning/box cleaning. Take a big trash bag and a box. Pick up the first object you see. Step 1: Is it trash? Put it in the trash bag. Step 2: Will you use it in the next 2 days? No? Put it in the box. It’s a problem for Future You. If you’ll use it in the next 2 days, take time to put it away. Rinse and repeat.
5. Did you get distracted and forget what you were doing? Don’t worry about it. Just clean a thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s the thing you were cleaning before. You have to clean lots of things, so just pick a thing and clean it. Eventually you’ll get around to the thing you forgot.
6. If you have to do a thing you really hate, do a thing you like afterwards. I hate doing dishes, but folding laundry soothes me, so that’s a nice one to do afterwards. YMMV. If there are no cleaning things you like that you can do afterwards, see number 3.
7. Make it fun. Play loud music and dance while you’re cleaning. Wear something that makes you feel cute, or if you prefer, something comfy. Light your favorite candle. Whatever.
8. If it’s nice out, open a window. Seriously, it helps.
Also, working a piece at a time can help. For example, I take advantage of times when I’m higher on energy. I’ll bag up the trash and load the dishwasher THE SECOND I’m feeling a little better, and every little bit I get done helps me feel less crappy
Instead of telling yourself, “I should get up,” or “I should do this,”
Ask yourself, “When will I get up?” or “When will I be ready to do this?”
Instead of trying to order yourself to feel the signal to do something, which your brain is manifestly bad at, listen to yourself with compassionate curiosity and be ready to receive the signal to move when it comes.
Things I did not actually realize was an option
What’s amazing is what happens when you do this with children. I hit on it when working at the foster home, where nearly all our kids were on the autism spectrum, and they weren’t “defiant” around me because I said things like, “How long do you need to stand here before we can move?” and “Come into the kitchen when you’re ready” instead of saying, “Stop staring out the window, let’s go,” or “Come eat dinner,” and interpreting hesitation as refusal to obey.
I have also definitely found that doing the “okay when I finish counting down from twenty is getting up time” has been useful.
Yup, that’s way better for toddlers and younger kids. It helps when they don’t have the self-awareness, attention span, or concept of the passage of time to estimate when they’ll be ready by themselves.
Oh I meant for me. XD Saying it to myself.
WELL OKAY WHOOPS XD I should not have been overspecific, I was just thinking about teaching this stuff to the parents at my job and your reblog made me immediately think of you with Banana and the kidlets.
Another hack: when you want to get up but are stalled by your brain and frustrated – stop. Breathe. Think about what you want to do once you’re up, without thinking about getting up. Treat it like a fantasy, no pressure, just thinking about something you’d like to do in the future. Instead of thinking “I should get up” over and over, think about having a bagel for breakfast, or getting dressed in your soft green sweater. Imagine yourself doing the thing.
I find that exercise often side-steps the block and the next thing I know I’m out of bed and on my way to doing the other thing I thought about.
Works for other things too, if you’re stuck on one step and having a hard time doing it, think about the step after that. Need to do laundry and you can’t get yourself to gather up your dirty clothes in the hamper? Think instead about carrying the hamper full of dirty clothes to the laundry room. And when you get to that next step, if you get stuck again, think about the step after it – you have a hamper of dirty clothes that needs to be put in the wash, let your subconscious handle the “carry hamper to laundry room” step while you’re thinking about the “putting them in the wash” part.
YMMV of course, and this doesn’t even always work for me (particularly not when I need to do a collection of tasks in no particular order, like packing for a trip… “pack socks, pack underwear, pack toothbrush, pack pants, pack shirts” is the kind of non-linear task list where this trick doesn’t help at all), but it’s something I’ve found helpful often enough.
This is one of the most beautiful threads I’ve seen on Tumblr simply because it deals so compassionately with an issue so many of us have and can barely even articulate to ourselves, let alone to anyone else. ❤
I think I get overwhelmed from the thought of all of the consequent steps, so maybe I’ll do the reverse of the advice above and try to focus on the first one.
@the-rain-monster i was just about to say something similar. that can work too sometimes. instead of going “ugh i need to eat something” for four hours, i try to focus on each step in turn.
and i mean each TINY step. just getting out of my chair has this many steps:
pause music
remove headphones
hang headphones on laptop screen
pick up laptop
leg-bend recliner footrest shut
set laptop aside
stand
and i reckon that’s why i get stuck on it; because i’m trying to treat it as one thing, while executive dysfunction is treating it as seven things, and choking on trying to skip to step seven.
concurrent with this is a method i call ‘junebugging’. which is where i go to the location of the thing i want to do, and just sort of bump around the region like a big stupid beetle until the thing somehow accidentally magically gets done. this is an attempt to leverage ADHD into an advantage; i may not have the executive function to make myself a sandwich on purpose, but if i fidget in the kitchen long enough, some kind of food is going to end up in my mouth eventually. and hell, even if i fail on that front, i will probably have achieved something, even if it’s only pouring all my loose leaf tea into decorative jars.*
@star-anise please may i give you an internet hug *hug!* because god how i wish anyone had known to do that for me when i was a kid. my childhood was one big overload, and like 99% of the huge dramatic meltdowns that made me the scapegoat/laughingstock/target of my entire elementary school were simply due to people not giving me time to process the next step, and interpreting a bluescreen as defiance/insult.
*this happened when i was trying to do dishes actually but the principle is sound
yeah i absolutely echo what j’s saying about the steps, it’s a lot like that for me too. i get overwhelmed at the prospect of something that should be simple, and have to slow down and sort out how many steps it’s actually going to take, and what a complicated endeavor it actually is, even if no one else thinks so.
also, i thought i should put in: try to honestly figure out what you’re averse to, that makes things so tough. making a whole bunch of decisions really fast? the potential of things to make a horrible noise? the shame of failure? having to put down what you’re doing now? having to clean up whatever it is you might go do when you’re done?
for instance, for me, the difficulty rating on anything goes waaaay up when a step of a task is ‘go somewhere people will look at you,’ which is for me about the unpleasantness equivalent of ‘jump into a very cold swimming pool right now’. you know you’ll be fine and even have fun once you’ve settled into it, but it still takes a lot of shuffling around and bracing yourself first to go for it. and some days you just don’t fucking want to go swimming.
i discounted this factor for years because i wouldn’t admit that i was so daunted by something so silly as as people looking at me. but, now i know what i’m so aversive about, i can factor it in to plans, and work around it, and be kind to myself. for instance, i was never able to get fit since highschool PE, because i couldn’t make myself go to a gym, or even out jogging. once i figured out the big problem wasn’t avoidance pain or difficulty, it was avoidance of doing a New Thing that i was Bad At in front of Unknown Quantities Of Strangers, which is like a triple threat of stressors, i started working out quietly and safely in my room at night, and i’ve been doing really good on it!
I love seeing those posts where people are like “if you have headmates or whatever you should be on meds because that’s not okay” posts. Like neurotypicals just think that there’s some magical pill out there that will ‘cure’ anything they don’t consider ‘normal.’ Meanwhile, in the land of reality, my shrink thinks it’s pretty healthy that I’m finally getting to know my headmates, and has no intention of putting me on magic pills, because as long as I’m not hurting myself or anyone else, who cares what neurotypicals think is ‘normal?’ Actually, let’s be real: who cares what neurotypicals think at all?
It is not a magic pill, it is called “Therapy” and you can even do it in groups!
i… literally mention my therapist… right there… in the original post…
did you not actually read this… do you honestly believe telling someone who has already admitted to being in therapy… to go to therapy… is a “gotcha” moment???
Okay, so there’s a relevant quote from Slatestar Codex here. (The link is to the source; attribution is a Thing.)
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
I, on the other hand, thought it was the best fricking story I had ever heard and the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you. And if your therapist can’t do that, you need to find a new therapist.
For some people, having headmates and/or alters is a debilitating condition. They’re losing large amounts of time, having trouble going to work and/or school, or hurting themselves or other people. In that case, they probably do need help, but I think most people who are getting fucked up by their headmates that badly are willing to seek out help on their own anyway.
Other people who have headmates and/or alters find it to be a neutral thing, or even a positive thing.
Have you ever been in a roommate situation where different people do different chores, because, (say) Kate loves to do the dishes, but can’t stand to vaccuum, and Toby’s the exact opposite? If Kate and Toby are headmates, they can wind up doing the same kind of thing. Headmates can also comfort you when you’re sad, remind you that your depressive or intrusive thoughts are not true, or help you deal with difficult people.
So, if you’re in that kind of situation, where your headmates are helping you to be more functional than you’d otherwise be? A good therapist is going to treat it like the hair dryer on the front seat of your car.
Sure, it is a Weird Thing. It makes you look a bit eccentric, and it’s not normal. But if having headmates keeps you from having repeated nervous breakdowns, helps you hold down your job, or makes it so that you can deal with your abusers? Then it’s a win, and a good therapist won’t try to ‘fix’ that.
It is not a therapist’s job to make you normal. It is a therapist’s job to give you your life back, on whatever terms are acceptable to you.
Well, it was either that or fall apart, like, my back was pretty much up against the wall. I was carrying a full courseload, working part-time, and after my first semester also putting in hours at the theatre for my major. And I was suffering from pretty much constant, ongoing depression, which I was aware of but wasn’t handling super well. So something had to shift, and fortunately for me, it was a positive shift.
That said, I didn’t sit down and say “I’m gonna get organized, I’m gonna do the thing”. At most, I was dimly aware that if I didn’t make a list I would forget half of what was on it, and that EVERYTHING was more of a struggle when things weren’t written down. For example, it’s easy to call the doctor and make an appointment if you have the doctor’s name and phone number in a specific place you can get to easily. Otherwise it’s like fifteen steps and then you have to actually make the call and oh my god I can’t even.
So I started making sure that whenever there was information on my radar I might need, I wrote it down and put it somewhere specific that I could get to easily. It took a lot of training, and it took a lot of trial and error to find out what worked. Like: keeping a notebook where I journal all my doctor’s appointments? Does not work, I kept losing or forgetting the journal. Keeping a spreadsheet on my computer? For some reason that worked despite being no less actual labor. (I also have things like a master spreadsheet of all the sites I have logins on, the email address associated with them, the login name, and the password. Jesus it took forever to build but now it’s easy to just add one in when I make a new one; I even have tabs for different kinds, like “social media” and “medical/insurance” and “travel/entertainment”. It’s a password-protected file that lives on a flash drive that goes everywhere with me.)
The way I started using a calendar is actually hilarious. A friend of mine, for my birthday (at the start of the sophomore school year) gave me a Buffy The Vampire Slayer weekly calendar as a joke. I bonded with that motherfucker, I wrote down EVERYTHING in it; whenever I got a syllabus I immediately copied everything into the calendar and often I copied it in a week ahead of the actual date so that I’d have warning. Over the years this evolved from a “ridiculous weekly calendar” (Buffy, then vintage Spam ads, then vintage pinup girls for senior year) to a Levenger system with a monthly calendar in the front and daily calendar behind it, to my current system of a monthly calendar in google docs (made from an altered spreadsheet). I kept tweaking what worked and improving and improving until I found a functional system, one I’ve used for the last four or five years now.
So here’s the thing: the absolute necessity for all of this to function is to find a records system that functions for you. Not really something I can give you – not something anyone can give you. Full organizational systems rarely work for anyone, and it always feels like failing when you only use part of any given system, which is why most people try to adopt a system and end up reverting. But the vital part of organizing your life is to steal the bits that work, discard those that don’t, and slowly mold it into a whole.
Why do spreadsheets and Google Tasks work for me? Who the fuck knows. They’re not the most efficient, for sure, though they are usually the most accessible. The main reason I use Google Tasks is that if shit is written down, I’m at a point where I check Tasks by muscle memory. So I know I’ll see whatever task it is I need to remember to do. I don’t have to keep it in my mind, and my anxiety drops way down if I know I don’t have to work to remember something important. Why do I have a folder labeled “LIFE SKILLS” that has nested folders for insurance and housing and taxes? Because that’s how my brain works. I use that TAXES folder literally one month out of the year, but when I do, I know right where to go and what to do with it. I now obsessively label files (like PDFs of medical bills) with the date and what they really are, because otherwise I’ll never find them and I’ll give up and fail and cry. Or at the very least turn in my medical insurance paperwork very late.
So the best I can recommend is every time you struggle with something, stop and think, how can I make this easier for me the next time I have to do it? (Sometimes this is even easier than doing the thing, so you can set up for next time and THEN do the thing, like easing into it.) Even if it’s just opening a Word document and detailing what you did this time, that helps. After I leave a meeting at work, I decide if I’ll need the notes I took, and then I type them into a word document helpfully labeled 2016 MEETING NOTES. Yeah, it’s a pain in the ass, but two weeks from now when I need to remember the process we talked about in meeting, it’ll save my bacon. And then I throw out my paper notes, so that they won’t get in the way of me finding paperwork that’s actually important.
It’s a lot of labor initially, but once you get rolling and find what works, it takes very little effort, because you know where to go and what to do. And since it’s automated, like you just go and do it out of habit, things like depression and procrastination don’t interfere as much.
So yeah, that’s the advice I have: find what works for you, rather than searching for what should work for you; take the time now to do that little extra bit of work that will mean less later; and allow yourself to be imperfect. My initial attempts worked maybe 50% of the time. It took me at least eight years to build a system that functions 98% of the time, and I’m at peace with never getting that last two percent. And you may never get to 98% – but that’s okay. 50% is better than nothing.
Organization isn’t a matter of inherent skill or willpower – just a matter of self-examination and experimentation. And it takes time and luck to make it work.
they’re all like “don’t catastrophise!” and “practice mindfulness” and stuff which is fine but where are the genuine “make functioning so much easier” LifeHacks for people who can’t get out of bed
like there is such a market for that
“set several very annoying alarms at different places in your room so you literally have to get up to turn them off! when you get up to turn them off, turn the kettle on so you’ll get up again when that shit starts boiling! oh, what do you know? now there’s fucking coffee!”
“set some more annoying as shit alarms at meal times to remind you to eat food!”
“don’t do that mindfulness Adult Colouring Book bullshit, those tiny meticulous designs are a bitch designed for people who don’t panic attacks about what colour shirt to wear. instead, buy some early childhood colouring books and some thick fucking pencils or textas and focusing like a motherfucker on not going out of the lines like you’re three fucking years old again and watch yourself become immersed so quick you forget to be hyperventilating and crying”
“just buy some fucking paper plates when you can’t do dishes! who’s gonna tell on you?”
Stop telling yourself that the grass is greener on the other side, because it’s not. It is greener where you water it. So take control of your life and start watering your own pastures and grow your own greener grasses.
Stop both envying your neighbor’s green grass AND watering your own. We’re in a fucking drought. You can’t sustain that shit. Think beyond the lawn that society told you to want. Put in some native plants that will thrive and bloom with very little water. They might be a little more spiny than what you first planned, but there is great beauty and variety in these hardy survivors. Your yard will be way more interesting and friendly to wildlife than that of the people who took the easy route and poured on water at the expense of other people and organisms. (This has been a California-themed post hijacking.)
No but like along with being literal good advice (GRASS AND LAWNS ARE A TERRIBLE IDEA WE SHOULD REVERSE THIS CULTURAL EXPECTATION NOW) this is also metaphorically good advice (as I’m sure you knew when you posted it).
There are sometimes things that you take for granted that you are just Expected To Want or Do or Be that you don’t actually have to. You’re so used to it you don’t even think about it, but the moment you do a less resource-heavy alternative appears.
On an environmentally friendly level this is a terrible example, but a couple years ago I was talking with my therapist about problems I was having being a functioning human being, and I went on a rant about the dishes and how they stress me out and I feel like I never get them done and then I hate myself and after listening to this whole rant I expected my therapist to give me the normal pep talks about being kind to yourself and taking it on a little bit at a time but instead he just had the most exasperated look on his face and he said,
“Buy some paper plates.”
He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world and I was completely speechlessly thunderstruck.
He said, “As an environmentalist, I am giving you permission for your own health to buy some paper plates. Problem solved.”
I don’t always use paper plates now. My mental health does allow me to keep up with the dishes better than I was (though these days my physical health has started interfering). But when I feel that slipping? I skip the cultural expectation that I should just be doing the dishes all the time. I conserve my (metaphorical, the opposite of literal in this case, sadly) water, and I buy some paper plates.
There a thing that’s ruining your mental health? Your life? It feels like a simple thing that other people can just DO, but you can’t? Often there’s a simpler solution. If you are tired of taking care of your hair, cut it into a pixie cut to save yourself the hassle. Hell, shave it off. You don’t need hair! Google hangout is a great alternative to going out when you want to talk to a friend but aren’t sure you can get yourself out of your house. If food stresses you out, buy shit you can just grab and eat without even having to microwave (I fucking love cottage cheese and vegetables for this exact reason).
You do not have to cook. You don’t have to date or get married. You don’t have to be monogamous if you do want to date or get married. You don’t have to be straight. You don’t have to be a boy or a girl. You don’t have to look a certain way or talk a certain way or eat certain things. You don’t have to go to college. You don’t have to be in that major. You don’t have to own a house. You don’t have to want or have kids. You don’t have to wait for the perfect partner to have kids if you do want them.
It’s such a normal thing to have a lawn that many people don’t even consider the time, money, and water it would save to just get rid of it and replace it with an alternative that takes into account the native environment of where it’s growing. How much easier their life would be without maintaining something that just went there because it was expected with no regard for whether it naturally fit, and instead put in plants that serve the same function but actually thrive and take root with no real effort.
Instead of fighting to maintain expectations, throw away your lawn and plant natively instead. Both literally and metaphorically.
Kimchi and Justice 