Comment by FFRefresh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FFRefresh | Hacker News Reader

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I do wonder if there's a culture-wide bug/meme with regards to mental health (and beyond) that makes it hard to push for lifestyle changes at scale.

I think one such meme is around agency, with the underlying meme being that humans have no control over their circumstances or mental state. They have anxiety or they have depression. It's part of their identity, and these seem to be thought of as immutable diseases.

And it's a social faux pas to suggest to someone with anxiety (particularly someone you are not super close with) that if they altered their behavior and consciously tried to work on their thought patterns, that they could get better. In our culture now, that gets translated as 'blaming the victim', because with a victim mindset, such a suggestion implies that it's the fault of the person.

It's an unfortunate state of affairs. It feels like we are increasingly leaning into concepts such as an 'external locus of control' and 'learned helplessness' as a society. I don't know how we can push back on these ideas at scale, but if we don't, it's hard not seeing mental health issues and the externalities of the easy pharmacological solutions expand.

I was on SSRIs for a time until my thoughts became so irreversibly cloudy that I weened off and stopped. After that I coincidentally stopped drinking, my weight dropped, and now I've stopped using weed for the most part. My anxiety doesn't go away, even if I go ride my bike for hours.

The things that give me anxiety are largely social. How people think of me at work, my appearance, what women think of me, and how they perceive how I act. The only thing that helps is shutting these thoughts down with CBT. I've dubbed this my, "Nobody cares Mother Fucker™" routine.

I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about support systems, it's mainly a farce. People will only tolerate hearing so much of your internal dissonance, concerns, and stressors. People want to enjoy you, for the most part. Maybe a partner will be there for you, but not likely in my experience (though, I'm unmarried, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)

> I was on SSRIs for a time until my thoughts became so irreversibly cloudy that I weened off and stopped. After that I coincidentally stopped drinking, my weight dropped, and now I've stopped using weed for the most part. My anxiety doesn't go away, even if I go ride my bike for hours.

You may want to try a primarily anaerobic exercise like lifting weights to supplement your cardio. Your mileage may vary, but I personally get a huge endorphin rush from a heavy[1] deadlift. It's so powerful that it takes an effort to not start hugging other people at the gym.

> I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about support systems, it's mainly a farce. People will only tolerate hearing so much of your internal dissonance, concerns, and stressors. People want to enjoy you, for the most part. Maybe a partner will be there for you, but not likely in my experience (though, I'm unmarried, so take what I say with a grain of salt.)

More than anything else, people remember how you make them feel. If you're always dumping your negative issues on them, even if they like you, subconsciously they'll learn to associate you with feeling bad and avoid you.

A much better approach is to show an interest in your friends and try to sympathize with what's going well in their lives. And I mean really sympathize. Let yourself feel happiness on their behalf. Encourage them to keep it up. Then they will learn that being around you makes them feel good. Once you build up a good feelings battery in the relationship, you can draw down from it a bit when you're feeling down.

Dating is a different ball of wax. If you're having trouble with basic friendships then it's probably best to establish some healthy habits there first.

[1] https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards. Bear in mind these are single rep maximum effort, which an untrained person isn't likely to properly do.

I definitely have healthy friendships, I was just sharing a learning.

Transactional costs must also have a similar factor. Friends were difficult to make and retain the the suburbs as a kid. They've been nearly impossible as an adult.

Traffic and the dispersion of people across a wide area, driven by rent and jobs and just it being a huge metro region with some of the worst traffic in the country. The transactional costs in even the effort required to be there; let alone having time to make that effort.

thank you friend for sharing your experiences and stories.

> I've noticed relying on my friends to vent just sours relationships. As much as people gloat about support systems, it's mainly a farce. People will only tolerate hearing so much of your internal dissonance, concerns, and stressors.

i resonate with this a lot. have you heard of the author Francis Weller?

“At the core of this grief is our longing to belong. This longing is wired into us by necessity. It assures our safety and our ability to extend out into the world with confidence. This feeling of belonging is rooted in the village and, at times, in extended families. It was in this setting that we emerged as a species. It was in this setting that what we require to become fully human was established. Jean Liedloff writes, "the design of each individual was a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter." We are designed to receive touch, to hear sounds and words entering our ears that soothe and comfort. We are shaped for closeness and for intimacy with our surroundings. Our profound feelings of lacking something are not reflection of personal failure, but the reflection of a society that has failed to offer us what we were designed to expect. Liedloff concludes, "what was once man's confident expectations for suitable treatment and surroundings is now so frustrated that a person often thinks himself lucky if he is not actually homeless or in pain. But even as he is saying, 'I am all right,' there is in him a sense of loss, a longing for something he cannot name, a feeling of being off-center, of missing something. Asked point blank, he will seldom deny it.”

― Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

this a great conversation with Weller that i seem to return to about once a year: https://charleseisenstein.org/podcasts/new-and-ancient-story...

That quote really resonated with me, I appreciate you sharing it. I think it's something I'll stock away and read from time to time.

I don't think I've ever seen someone so eloquently paint the picture of the world I see.

i'm glad to hear it. that whole book is full of gems. sometimes when i want to find a quote by Weller in my notes i now go to this quote page instead, because it has many of them: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6154098.Francis_Well...

Consider a hypothetical solution.

There's a place similar to 'college' but focused on adults. Admittance to that college is free. Anyone can attend. Room, board, meal plan. At least some classes must be attended; though the term 'class' is vague. For some a class might just be seeing a councilor to talk things over, or some other doctor prescribed treatment routine.

Some of the classes should be group activities that are cooperation based rather than rivalry based. The focus should be on establishing the expectation of positive interactions and experiences. Also about helping to train people to respond to others in the same way.

Suddenly, I think I'm describing kindergarten for adults from an amateur psychological perspective.

The problem is that college selects for intelligent, functional, successful people. Whereas this institution (yes I used that word) would select for dysfunctional people. So it would be less pleasant, and the likelihood of making high-quality friends lower.

Cf. 'The Myth of Mental Illness' by Thomas Szasz (1961): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Mental_Illness

> And it's a social faux pas to suggest to someone with anxiety (particularly someone you are not super close with) that if they altered their behavior and consciously tried to work on their thought patterns, that they could get better.

We seem more attuned to emotional distress. And illnesses like anxiety present as acute distress, usually. We naturally want to assuage the person. And a person with anxiety naturally learns all sorts of avoidant coping mechanisms.

We seem to have entered some sort of negative feedback cycle there. Medications do help some, but it goes best with therapy, and the mainstay is basically exposure therapy. Face your fears, and struggle through something uncomfortable, until you learn to tolerate it. People should be gently nudged in that direction, not encouraged to lean into their withdrawal from the negative triggers.

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