What POSITIVE CHANGES are you making in your life?

Awesome, good to hear it my man.

also want to add: I am not anti-meds at all, and I do think they helped me at a point. But what I've come to realize is that for nearly a decade I've been in a situation where someone was regularly shitting on me. I'm aware I have brain issues (who doesn't?) but I don't know anymore what, and to what extent. So I kind of need to re-establish a baseline.

Plus, just before COVID I got a diagnosis of at least mild ADD. ADD and depression go together and one can often look like the other. I've talked to people with both and many said that if they'd gotten the ADD handled first, it would have saved them a lot of grief on the depression. So once my insurance switches from my ex to my own I'm going to try and get on some kind of ADD meds and see how that works for me. At least give it a try and see.

I have a really good friend with both. She said the same thing. Fixing the ADD is what helped her fix the depression, medically. I may need to look into this. I'm ADDAF.

I have started taking Adderall off and on, generally 10mg in the morning. I’ve also started going to physical therapy for low back pain and realizing my back probably didn’t need to be so sore and stiff, off and on, for the last ten years. They have these Swedish machines that remember your settings and track your progress. I wish I could go every day, but I guess that is what my unused campus gym membership is for.

I did a lot of manual labor in my teens and had recurring back problems in my early 20s. I joined a gym at age 25 and have averaged at least three workouts a week ever since. I almost never have back problems anymore. Properly lifting weights and swimming laps are both great ways to prevent back pain.

Barbell Prescription should be mandatory reading.

I was going to the gym 4 days a week when I lost my mind. Had a 60 resting heart rate and the best shape of my life. Meds they put me on knocked me out and I haven’t been back for 9 years.

I have decided to quit marijuana for a while. My use has gotten out of hand. I was smoking all day on the weekends and pretty much as soon as I got done with work and all evening. WAY too much.

Withdrawals suck. I have a great amount of respect for anyone who quits hard drugs. I'll be fine within 2 weeks or so, but those folks have it harder.

Oh, and I'm down like 90 pounds-ish. Feeling like a boss.

This may be a terrible idea, but some people moving away from the devil's salad have taken CBD oil capsules.

It's not a terrible idea. It would probably help with some of the little aches and pains that weed helps alleviate.

Still game related, and I mentioned it elsewhere, but I’ve sorta disconnected myself from the desire to win games. This doesn’t mean I purposefully lose, but I’ve done my best to not get emotionally wrapped up in my W/L performance in games. I care more about teaching new people stuff, or creating memorable experiences around the table.

Because of my mental illness, I’ve spent the last almost decade steering clear of religion. Maybe I should look into Buddhism. Seems to align with the whole letting go of desires thing.

I have been a Buddhist of varying degrees of commitment for a long time now. Currently my commitment level is low, in terms of actual practice. So grain of salt.

The good news about Buddhism is that, if you don’t like religion, there’s a lot of secular approaches that are viable.

There is some bad news about Buddhism, which will vary based on your experience.

- There’s some jerky teachers who run the gamut from narcissistic weirdos to actual abusers.

- It won’t solve your problems. It might make you more aware of them, or maybe give you some good tools to deal with them. But you’re still going to be a person, with whatever fucked-up baggage you bring to your experience of life.

- at extreme ends, it is possible to meditate enough so that you rewire your brain to the point of being challenged to interact with the everyday world. Like realizing, on a very deep experiential level, that concepts are mental constructs and have no fundamental meaning. But then you need to ask someone to pass you the salt and it takes mental effort to conceptualize “salt” and “pass” etc. because they are all weird consensus reality words.

I like Brad Warner a lot. He is a zen teacher who mostly doesn’t want to be a teacher but feels obligated because zen helps him a lot.

Dysjunct, or anyone else, can you speak to any personal experience with meditation and its positive effect on your life?

I've been curious about practicing meditation and mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition, mostly as an exploration of consciousness. But I have some hang-ups on committing to it and not quite sure where to start, or whether it would be worth my time.

I used to meditate for 15 minutes (with an app that had a timer) after the kids went to bed. Mostly transcendental meditation (repeating a word over and over again in my mind, the word isn't important so long as it's nonsense, just keep it to two syllables). At the end of the session I would be so peaceful that I'd be one step removed from sleep and feel almost disjointed from reality for a few seconds.

The biggest positive effect was it let all the stress of the day evaporate so as not to interfere with sleep. I should probably pick it back up again.

Several months ago, I dabbled a bit in meditation for a couple of weeks. Mainly just slow, deep breathing for a few minutes, less than an hour before bedtime. I slept well and felt a bit calmer the next day. Should probably get back to that, but I just feel so busy lately.