You know, I think you might be right. ;-)
But it's all for me, I have no cravings for telling other people. The exception would be if I see a possibility to inspire someone.
My gut feeling: men of a certain generation seem to have confused the skill of seeming aloof-- like when meeting a stranger or thrust in a new situation-- for being emotionally unaffected in general. One sign I associate with this would be talking only in the past tense about having felt certain emotions, but you never really witness the person feeling or expressing those emotions (outside of anger/frustration). Alternatively, the person may never really engage in discussions about certain negative feelings, unless it's to offer low-effort problem-solving advice to others.
This is difficult because there are obviously times when a small, seemingly insignificant problem can trigger an outsized emotion. It's natural and helpful to be able to sit with that negative emotion-- to feel it, express it and talk about it as an emotion you are experiencing-- to be able to eventually come to terms and get to know better whatever it is that's driving it. It's scary to do, but most people have some techniques for doing it.
If you have few or no tools to do that, it must generate an immense amount of stress. Hence wacky alternative stress-relieving techniques that are more physical and less emotional in nature. (Plus the projection of "lack of discipline" makes me wonder if he'd feel shame from sitting with a negative emotion.)
That's really insightful! Thank you. Saving your words in a scratch note for later
If it helps give you some perspective, I've been through a decade of therapy and years of group therapy, and I haven't found that my interest in "discipline" lessened or became less relevant as I've come to grips with emotional issues and learned to relate to people in different ways. There hasn't been much interaction between the two, except that when I'm doing well at one I tend to do better at the other, for the obvious reasons.
An alternative explanation is that voluntary suffering is a comforting reminder that you can do it when you need to, as well as an effort to maintain that ability. My observation is that people who engage in "gratuitous" suffering are people who were raised by parents who didn't pass on the basic skills of discipline (among which are important emotional skills) and had to learn it from scratch later in life. Since they didn't grow up with it, they don't take it for granted, and they exhibit the "zeal of the convert." Or, if they never achieve it, the persistent lack keeps it at the front of their minds.
The parent poster seems to have quite a lot of discipline but doesn't feel any need to remind himself that he has it. Maybe that's because he learned it as a child from his father?
My father had a hard and restricted life growing up, and he wanted me to grow up in a more free and easy way. He wanted me to feel free to goof off and enjoy myself. I certainly learned that, but I also grew up with a lot of anxiety about my inconsistent ability to apply myself to things I cared about. Sometimes I did, and thrived, but very often I disappointed myself. I was especially poor at boring things and things where consistency mattered, such as taking care of my health, but often, even at the things I was good at, I failed to put in effort at a crucial time and screwed up something that was important to me. My easygoing father wasn't going to tell me I "lacked discipline," but my frequent underperformance and self-failure told me loud and clear.
So I spent years figuring it out and getting better at it. Like anything that doesn't come "naturally" (i.e., wasn't learned in childhood) it has always felt like an artificial bolted-on part of myself that could fall off at any moment. So I consciously tend to it. I don't show more discipline in my life than other people, but I certainly show more interest in it, and I do some things that probably seem weird to other people. Other people probably think it's a meaningless focus that has no impact on my life, since I'm not conspicuously different in my habits and accomplishments. But not being conspicuously different is the accomplishment!
A lot of people can relate to the effort required to maintain a healthy weight after growing up overweight. People who take a healthy weight for granted might think that an above-average amount of attention and effort should yield an above-average physique, or what's the point? They might feel amused or condescending towards their friend who thinks and talks so much about what they eat but looks very average. They might get annoyed that their friend declines an extra round of drinks or skips dessert. What's the point? It's not like they're maintaining a fabulous physique. They look like anyone else, even slightly below average. Clearly their obsession with eating doesn't accomplish anything other than annoying the people around them. But it does accomplish something. It lets them be closer to normal.
A good technique to help w this is "affective labeling" (sorry, citation needed, I think I got it from one of Anne Laure Le Cunff's typically awesome newsletters/posts). Set a 5m timer, start writing words that describe your emotions and don't stop writing for even 2s till the 5m are up.
As an aside, I miss the slashdot ability to optionally assign a property to a vote. It would be neat to have some sort of indicator in addition to the greying out of downvoted or flagged comments to show specific types of upvotes. This has obviously proven to be the better system overall, but it has its pluses. Too bad it also had a bunch of swastikas and 4-Chan-esque trolls.
Slashdot had, for many years, fairly insightful commentary with that system. The fact that it has since become less insightful is, I think, less a reflection on the voting system in comments and more on people moving from the site wholesale for various other reasons.
I didn't say that it couldn't, merely that it doesn't necessarily do so.
Certainly, the highs feel better if you're coming from a low; but I tend to prefer my highs coming from mids. I will say that, although not a low, the sweet relief of getting through a stressful situation/project is great.
The increase in energy and clarity of my thinking, the tingly feeling in my body, and the improved sleep quality -- just to give you a few examples -- are hard to attribute to the mechanism you're talking about. To add to that, I regularly fast for five days at a time and I have not yet experienced the same kind of mental difference. This time I pushed it to two weeks because my energy levels continued to fluctuate upward until the 12th or 13th day.
You do feel a lot of relief that the boredom of fasting is over. But that effect lasts maybe a day or two or three. Certainly not months.
Other than the potential for mold accumulation (you definitely want some air to circulate), this is not actually a bad bed base for sleep quality. Depending on your size, it's likely better for you than some very expensive plush mattresses.
Plywood has give to it that a hardwood wouldn't, so what you're sleeping on isn't entirely rigid anyway.
But drill some holes in it :)
I fast somewhat frequently, and I don't really associate it with pain or discomfort, but I'm also doing it for 24-48 hours.
Extremely long fasts (like your two weeks) should come with a disclaimer, they're not for everyone.
That's not an alternate "theory".
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/theres-scientific-...
> People who self-harm, writes Arnold, have “learned that, while the pain peaks with self-injury, it then comes down the other side. The physical pain lessens – as does the emotional pain.”
People don't self-harm because it hurts. They self-harm because it _feels good_. Pain is "pleasure", for lack of a better phrase.
Though there probably are some masochists that truly enjoy the pain, but that's a different condition than the more common I-hate-myself-so-I-hurt-myself.
Not quite. The pain causes an endorphin release. It's also addictive (not technically by the DSM sense, but those who do will often call it as such) and has been compared to heroin.
Spicy foods might be another example.
Good luck if you are suffering from most forms of depression in getting that relief since everything is suffering.
I tried for 8 hours straight to code just a little bit, but was unable to. I guess that is burnout, or, in general, understanding that I am not interested in all this computer stuff anymore after doing it for 15 years.
Last year I cracked my hip joint and ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks, doing physio to regain my ability to walk. I certainly don't want to repeat that experience but I was surprised that I felt less depressed during it, because there was clarity in what I immediately needed to do and I was focused on just getting through it, not existential angst.
Give yourself big dopamine rushes and the scale balances by reducing your sensitivity to dopamine and (crudely put) causes feelings of discontentment, and you’ll need more dopamine released to feel like normal. Alternatively, push down on the pain side of the scale by doing some controlled suffering — fasting, cold plunge, intense exercise — and the receptors become more sensitive, and you feel better.
I’m sure this is too simplistic of a model but it makes sense to me in terms of lived experience.
Behaviour therapy would say that it worked because you took some action to improve your life and counter the depression. (Even cognitive therapy says that small, meaningful actions can have a dramatic impact on one's depression). The motivation and action of fasting, and the positive and noticeable / observable physical effects of fasting changed your focus from your depression, which alleviated your depressive symptoms. Once depression alleviates, you start thinking more clearly (make less cognitive distortions in your thinking) which further leads to a 'normal' mental state of well-being (in an otherwise mentally healthy individual).
Also, you could toy around with different fermented foods while making no other changes.
Recurrence is about 50% for people with one major depressive disorder occurence, and 80% for people with 2.
That makes it more akin to something like cancer in western countries with regards to lifetime prevalence (but not recurrence)
The "mild or moderate" segment of depression, or anxiety, is what is said to be a more common short-term occurrence amongst all of us. Most of us manage to often deal with this kind of "situational" depression / anxiety due to some stressful event (losing a job, death, breakup etc.), on our own. But long-term and / or severe / extreme depression is what often requires an outside intervention.
And since then I've done a lot of experimenting and reading other peoples thoughts, and reached the conclusion that simple carbohydrates are fucking terrible for you, for multiple reasons. The biggest is that it causes an insulin spike. If you're then physically active, you'll burn off the sugar you just ate, but your insulin levels stay high, so you'll never start burning your body fat. You just get hungry and eat more sugar.
this makes it sound like you have some sort of celiac, gluten allergy, or low-key diabetes
I did have friends and my girlfriend with me for a lot of it.
I didn’t do anything special to break the fast.
There is one medical diet, called the FODMAP diet you might want to look into. It helps you find what foods might be causing some bacterial in your gut to become imbalanced.
I am not at all saying it is all you microbiome, foods may affect us in so many more way than only in the gut. It may be that not eating has lowered oxidative stress in your body allowing your mitochondria to recover and are now able to provide the energy you need.
I'm not a doctor, but hopefully this is an example of other places to look that aren't diet related.
Sadly it feels impossible to find a doctor in germany that knows what to do about it. The last success was with something like oxalobacter. For a few months now I could eat at least some salad, but seemingly that effect weakens over time.
So I think I have found a probiotic that works, but it doesn't stick well. This article mentions genetic traits being connected to the biome. So I think I'll have to have genetic testing eventually, but I'm way paranoid to hand over my genes to some random lab.
Maintaining that diet for an extended duration, however, is always the challenge when others in the household do not follow it. Logically, I should stop being a baby and just power on with it. Or at least determine what in my "normal" western diet negatively impacts gut health/skin health and overall energy.
To answer your question: I hesitate to use the word "cure", because 3-4 months on, I'm starting to wonder if certain things have begun to slide back, or if it's just been a challenging week. Time will tell.
A datapoint that I did not mention in my first post was that there was a negative, persistent, digestive side-effect that paralleled the positive mental changes. As that has faded, so have some of the noticeable mental changes. I'm still doing better, but maybe with less energy than a month or so after the fast. I hope not, but maybe this is something I'll have to repeat every now and then.
Ignore the hurtful comments. A good portion of people don't have much empathy for others, combined with the anonymous nature of this forum, makes people say hurtful things.
Good luck on your journey.
(There are some caveats... At least for the Tibetan monks I knew, morning prayer is early at like 5am and comes with a sort of pita bread and tea, bedtime is closer to 9pm, and during these 9 hours there will be more tea. With a little googling I am able to confirm that some of the "pita" (pao balep) is consumed at the lunch tea, and I think this is after the lunch meal, so it might be 1pm. I think there's none at the evening tea that you'd have around sundown? Also in terms of calories the Tibetan tea is “bulletproof,” consisting of a very long steep for the leaves to extract maximum bitter flavors, that get mixed with a bunch of yak butter and salt. So liquid calories are very much a thing for them.)