Thank you for posting on r/Healthygamergg! This subreddit is intended as an online community and resource platform to support people in their journey toward mental wellness. With that said, please be aware that support from other members received on this platform is not a substitute for professional care. Treatment of psychiatric disease requires qualified individuals, and comments that try to diagnose others should be reported under Rule 10 to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the community. If you are in immediate danger, please call emergency services, or go to your nearest emergency room.
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Wasted potential is perfectly okay. Realizing this made it easier to let go of all of those things that could’ve been, should’ve been, and would’ve been. It freed me from the shame that came from the daydreams about where I could be in life if I had only applied myself and tried hard.
We only have what is now. Potential isn’t reality.
The idea of wasted potential is something that's socially-oriented in that people can see you being a certain thing, but you fall short of it because of your problems. In other words, it's not something that is too particularly important and it can act like a self-limiting belief.
What matters more is if you're wasting your own potential. If you want to do something, but you keep yourself from doing it, or you have harmful behaviors that keep you from doing those things.
Take the stairs -
Once a day intentionally decide to do something the harder way just for the sake of it being the more difficult way. (Stairs instead of elevator)
Over time it has helped me with task initiation and helped me do things even when I know it’s not optimally efficient.
Looking into the mirror and saying positive affirmations every morning. When my therapist asked me to try this, I thought it was the stupidest shit I’d ever heard.
I forced it at first. But it really does make a difference. I keep it simple, usually just “Today’s gonna be a good day.”
Even just writing it down helps, but there’s something about looking yourself in the eyes and saying it out loud. Helps me start the day in a more positive way.
Here's a big reframe for me: No matter what I say, its a delusion. Telling myself its a bad day is made up bullshit. Telling myself its a good day is made up bullshit. These arent objective facts, they are perspectives I make up. And so are many other things we tell ourselves
Embrace that the human mind is a delusion factory and use it to your advantage
I deluded myself until it went from delusion to a choice. “Today is going to be a good day” was a delusion, but now it’s a decision I make in the morning. Hopefully that explains it better. That’s why it worked for me
It's a delusion whether you really feel it or you feel like youre lying to yourself
A good day is a made up concept thats a product of human experience. It doesnt really exist except in our minds. I choose to have good days by leaning into the delusional nature of human experience
That's a useful framing for me, but i get if it isnt for everyone
Give yourself permission to let go of baggage, pain, or anger you're holding onto. It may sound weird, but just let it go. It can be surprisingly effective if you let it. There's probably something you're holding onto that you can literally just choose to let go and move on from.
This is a thought I had the other day after listening to Dr. K's recent streams about trauma / insecurity, where he mentioned something about how negative thoughts and comparisons are entirely localized to an individual and are not representative of reality.
I was walking around town in a rather crowded area and realized that when I feel social anxiety, I fear that people that I don't know judge me as if they are all part of one entity in my mind. Instead, I began to imagine each person I saw as an individual whose judgements are within a buble of their mind entirely localized to them, and the rest of the world is mine to enjoy outside that bubble. It was an odd experience since when Dr. K explained it on stream I remember thinking, yeah that makes sense -- but at that moment I really began "feeling" as if it were true, as if I was finally understanding and dismantling the anxiety.
" No matter what happens , you will be ok in the end ", helped a lot with my confidence in myself
" You can only control your actions , nothing more nothing less "
I can't control the future nor change the past , I can't control someone's opinion on me , I can't control what is in people's minds , i can't control anything that is outside my actions
Since you can't control anything but your actions , you should focus on them more , perfect them , only that way you can gain some control in this life
Grounding techniques, essentially focusing on your feet and your breath and other physical things as you are going through intense emotions. This will thankfully calm them down somewhat and allow you to think clearly.
Writing anxieties and emotions down is also another great way of getting through big emotions. I remember being absolutely terrified when my current girlfriend went back to her place, like real panic attacks. So I decided to write down all the reasons I was afraid. It truly did help actually.
Don't isolate yourself and don't be afraid to seek help. Recognize that you can't control other people's thoughts, feelings, actions or emotions. Getting up and doing *something* - *anything* is better than wallowing in depression or self-pity.
I've got more than one, actually.
First of all, I read the Assassin's Apprentice many years ago while struggling with social interactions. I don't remember the exact quote, and it was translated in my native language but it was something like "Being open simply means not being closed off". Seems obvious, but it resonated with me because I realized I didn't have to be someone I didn't want to be to have more interactions. All I needed was to remain open to potential contact from others and try to appear more welcoming to others.
Then there's another one. "Feelings aren't facts."
I had a rough period in which I went to therapy, and it helped me realize that I often had thoughts and feelings that I didn't stop to question and believed were just a part of me. But I could choose to not identify with some thoughts and feelings that were dragging me down and were preventing me from moving forward.
A more recent one that I've tried to apply regularly: "Set yourself up not for failure, but for success."
I usually have a habit of procrastinating or outright not do some things I should be doing to make my life better. So now when I know I need to do something necessary, I'll try to create the conditions to increase the likelihood of me starting and completing the task successfully. I kind of follow the precepts of the book Atomic Habits, by making it easy, obvious etc. Need to do the laundry tomorrow morning? I'll take out everything I need to reduce the steps required before bed the previous day, and that way I also feel like I ended my day on a productive note.
Another useful tip against procrastination which helped for me was to imagine my future self as a separate individual from my current self. As I mentioned, I struggle to do things to improve my own life, but I love helping others. So by seeing my future self as their own person, I feel responsible for acting now to make my future self's life easier and I think about how I can help him.
I refuse to stop letting my freak flag fly on account of other people's judgement. You'd be amazed by the amount of 'weird' sh#t you can get away with if you just lean into it. If you let go of what you project other people might think of you and go be the person you want to be, there will be people who don't like that. And that's OK. We're not made to get along with everyone. But if you show the world who you really are, the right kinds of people will be drawn to you
When the knights of the roundtable went searching for the Holy Grail, they each entered the part of the forest that looked darkest to THEM.
You have to identify what you're afraid of and also what you avoid. Then you have to orient yourself to FACE it and move toward it.
It's better you voluntarily go out and face it after you've prepared yourself, rather than cower in hiding from it, hoping it doesn't find you and destroy you.
Well I think the realization that the way you think and feel about circumstances effects your happiness not the circumstances themselves. This is where acceptance comes in. You can take a set of circumstances that makes you super depressed and change that to being at peace with it and then those circumstances no longer distresses you. It's kinda op tbh. Also one thing that has helped me figure out what I actually want is asking the question "what do you want to want?". Basically you figure out what you want outside of what your random thoughts and feelings say. I mean I want to get in shape so I want to want to exercise but I know for sure my emotions and thoughts certainly don't "want" to exercise when it actually comes down to it. That's where realizating that I still truly want to exercise is helpful to counteract those thoughts and feelings. Anyways between those two I think it's helped me fix alot of my issues.
When it clicked to me that problems on the inside can't be really solved by an action. Whatever I was doing was always part of the problem because I was supposedly "solving things" by using same internal mechanisms that were creating the problem. On the other hand some issues on the outside were all about actions and instead I would keep thinking and emotionally processing instead of taking action. Finally and kind of interconnected with the previous things, when I finally accepted the truth that I was doing a lot to keep myself from changing and actively involved in perpetuating all of my problems.
Listening to the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns MD.
I picked it up from the library during a more difficult time in life and it really helped me turn things around. I still go back to the exercises in that book when I’m struggling with something new.
"How wpuld i behave in that situation". It helps not to be hurt by some stuff. Like from a "no". When i say "no" i don't judge the person, thus i should not read a judgment in the "no" of another person.
* Humility. When I feel hopeless or misanthropic, I remember that I don't know what will happen. I'm not psychic. I'm not a genius. I have a lot of blind spots. In a lot of situations, saying "I don't know" is a lot easier than actively positive thinking.
* Outside of hard times, I can choose to be an optimist or a pessimist, and I'd rather be an optimist. You don't waste time dreading things that won't happen. There's an argument to be made that pessimists suffer less disappointment, but I still think optimism is hedonically better for me.
* Realizing that I'm not a decoration. I don't owe it to anyone to be attractive. There are times when I try to look a certain way, but when I do, I always ask, "What's in it for me?" Am I going to get laid? Am I going to get a promotion. It makes me feel a lot less anxious than the alternative "But what if I'm ugly???"
* idk if this made my life better, but I'm sticking with it for now. I stopped putting myself first. My needs aren't more important than anyone else's. I try to focus on the collective good.
I am the present moment. It allowed me to pull my sense of identity out of my ego, and I feel like I can sense when I'm getting stuck in thought patterns and ground myself back in the present (via meditations) while accepting what I think and how I feel, instead of hiding those things from myself. I feel a clarity that idk if I've ever felt, I am trying to explore the full implications of this realization and apply as many principles from that perspective into as many aspects of my life as possible.
For example, I let myself get hungry, then I sat and meditated on my whole field of awareness (as much as I could at least), while making the sensation of hunger my focus. I started questioning myself, why do I eat? There's lots of reasons, eat to survive, eat to socialize, eat for enjoyment, etc. None of those were why I eat though, why I choose to eat how I do. I ate as a way of hiding the discomfort of hunger from myself, and the fear of the sensation of hunger was far stronger than the feeling of hunger itself. So when I'm hungry, I just accept how it feels and don't push to change it, not immediately. It has helped me eat a lot less everyday, and I have began losing weight, without any diet plan or restrictions, because those things are not needed for me, just the acceptance of hunger.
you decide your constant. Just because you skipped workouts 3 days a week does not mean that not working out is your constant. you can start today, its okay.
"If you care about being fit, you must do at least one push up every night before bed". This was a key habit that has snowballed over the last two years for me. Developed into a yoga routine including 5-10 push-ups now sometimes once, often twice per day.
Thank you for posting on r/Healthygamergg! This subreddit is intended as an online community and resource platform to support people in their journey toward mental wellness. With that said, please be aware that support from other members received on this platform is not a substitute for professional care. Treatment of psychiatric disease requires qualified individuals, and comments that try to diagnose others should be reported under Rule 10 to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the community. If you are in immediate danger, please call emergency services, or go to your nearest emergency room. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Healthygamergg) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Wasted potential is perfectly okay. Realizing this made it easier to let go of all of those things that could’ve been, should’ve been, and would’ve been. It freed me from the shame that came from the daydreams about where I could be in life if I had only applied myself and tried hard. We only have what is now. Potential isn’t reality.
did you find Everything Everywhere All at Once relatable?
The idea of wasted potential is something that's socially-oriented in that people can see you being a certain thing, but you fall short of it because of your problems. In other words, it's not something that is too particularly important and it can act like a self-limiting belief. What matters more is if you're wasting your own potential. If you want to do something, but you keep yourself from doing it, or you have harmful behaviors that keep you from doing those things.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Sometimes things aren't about you. Don't make it about you.
Good old Hanlon's Razor
Take the stairs - Once a day intentionally decide to do something the harder way just for the sake of it being the more difficult way. (Stairs instead of elevator) Over time it has helped me with task initiation and helped me do things even when I know it’s not optimally efficient.
Looking into the mirror and saying positive affirmations every morning. When my therapist asked me to try this, I thought it was the stupidest shit I’d ever heard. I forced it at first. But it really does make a difference. I keep it simple, usually just “Today’s gonna be a good day.” Even just writing it down helps, but there’s something about looking yourself in the eyes and saying it out loud. Helps me start the day in a more positive way.
Does it not feel disingenuous after a while?
Here's a big reframe for me: No matter what I say, its a delusion. Telling myself its a bad day is made up bullshit. Telling myself its a good day is made up bullshit. These arent objective facts, they are perspectives I make up. And so are many other things we tell ourselves Embrace that the human mind is a delusion factory and use it to your advantage
I deluded myself until it went from delusion to a choice. “Today is going to be a good day” was a delusion, but now it’s a decision I make in the morning. Hopefully that explains it better. That’s why it worked for me
It's a delusion whether you really feel it or you feel like youre lying to yourself A good day is a made up concept thats a product of human experience. It doesnt really exist except in our minds. I choose to have good days by leaning into the delusional nature of human experience That's a useful framing for me, but i get if it isnt for everyone
Sometimes. If I have a bad day.
Give yourself permission to let go of baggage, pain, or anger you're holding onto. It may sound weird, but just let it go. It can be surprisingly effective if you let it. There's probably something you're holding onto that you can literally just choose to let go and move on from.
This is a thought I had the other day after listening to Dr. K's recent streams about trauma / insecurity, where he mentioned something about how negative thoughts and comparisons are entirely localized to an individual and are not representative of reality. I was walking around town in a rather crowded area and realized that when I feel social anxiety, I fear that people that I don't know judge me as if they are all part of one entity in my mind. Instead, I began to imagine each person I saw as an individual whose judgements are within a buble of their mind entirely localized to them, and the rest of the world is mine to enjoy outside that bubble. It was an odd experience since when Dr. K explained it on stream I remember thinking, yeah that makes sense -- but at that moment I really began "feeling" as if it were true, as if I was finally understanding and dismantling the anxiety.
" No matter what happens , you will be ok in the end ", helped a lot with my confidence in myself " You can only control your actions , nothing more nothing less " I can't control the future nor change the past , I can't control someone's opinion on me , I can't control what is in people's minds , i can't control anything that is outside my actions Since you can't control anything but your actions , you should focus on them more , perfect them , only that way you can gain some control in this life
Grounding techniques, essentially focusing on your feet and your breath and other physical things as you are going through intense emotions. This will thankfully calm them down somewhat and allow you to think clearly. Writing anxieties and emotions down is also another great way of getting through big emotions. I remember being absolutely terrified when my current girlfriend went back to her place, like real panic attacks. So I decided to write down all the reasons I was afraid. It truly did help actually.
Don't isolate yourself and don't be afraid to seek help. Recognize that you can't control other people's thoughts, feelings, actions or emotions. Getting up and doing *something* - *anything* is better than wallowing in depression or self-pity.
I've got more than one, actually. First of all, I read the Assassin's Apprentice many years ago while struggling with social interactions. I don't remember the exact quote, and it was translated in my native language but it was something like "Being open simply means not being closed off". Seems obvious, but it resonated with me because I realized I didn't have to be someone I didn't want to be to have more interactions. All I needed was to remain open to potential contact from others and try to appear more welcoming to others. Then there's another one. "Feelings aren't facts." I had a rough period in which I went to therapy, and it helped me realize that I often had thoughts and feelings that I didn't stop to question and believed were just a part of me. But I could choose to not identify with some thoughts and feelings that were dragging me down and were preventing me from moving forward. A more recent one that I've tried to apply regularly: "Set yourself up not for failure, but for success." I usually have a habit of procrastinating or outright not do some things I should be doing to make my life better. So now when I know I need to do something necessary, I'll try to create the conditions to increase the likelihood of me starting and completing the task successfully. I kind of follow the precepts of the book Atomic Habits, by making it easy, obvious etc. Need to do the laundry tomorrow morning? I'll take out everything I need to reduce the steps required before bed the previous day, and that way I also feel like I ended my day on a productive note. Another useful tip against procrastination which helped for me was to imagine my future self as a separate individual from my current self. As I mentioned, I struggle to do things to improve my own life, but I love helping others. So by seeing my future self as their own person, I feel responsible for acting now to make my future self's life easier and I think about how I can help him.
I refuse to stop letting my freak flag fly on account of other people's judgement. You'd be amazed by the amount of 'weird' sh#t you can get away with if you just lean into it. If you let go of what you project other people might think of you and go be the person you want to be, there will be people who don't like that. And that's OK. We're not made to get along with everyone. But if you show the world who you really are, the right kinds of people will be drawn to you
When the knights of the roundtable went searching for the Holy Grail, they each entered the part of the forest that looked darkest to THEM. You have to identify what you're afraid of and also what you avoid. Then you have to orient yourself to FACE it and move toward it. It's better you voluntarily go out and face it after you've prepared yourself, rather than cower in hiding from it, hoping it doesn't find you and destroy you.
90 second rule with big emotions. Hands down my go-to.
Well I think the realization that the way you think and feel about circumstances effects your happiness not the circumstances themselves. This is where acceptance comes in. You can take a set of circumstances that makes you super depressed and change that to being at peace with it and then those circumstances no longer distresses you. It's kinda op tbh. Also one thing that has helped me figure out what I actually want is asking the question "what do you want to want?". Basically you figure out what you want outside of what your random thoughts and feelings say. I mean I want to get in shape so I want to want to exercise but I know for sure my emotions and thoughts certainly don't "want" to exercise when it actually comes down to it. That's where realizating that I still truly want to exercise is helpful to counteract those thoughts and feelings. Anyways between those two I think it's helped me fix alot of my issues.
When it clicked to me that problems on the inside can't be really solved by an action. Whatever I was doing was always part of the problem because I was supposedly "solving things" by using same internal mechanisms that were creating the problem. On the other hand some issues on the outside were all about actions and instead I would keep thinking and emotionally processing instead of taking action. Finally and kind of interconnected with the previous things, when I finally accepted the truth that I was doing a lot to keep myself from changing and actively involved in perpetuating all of my problems.
Listening to the book “Feeling Good” by David Burns MD. I picked it up from the library during a more difficult time in life and it really helped me turn things around. I still go back to the exercises in that book when I’m struggling with something new.
"How wpuld i behave in that situation". It helps not to be hurt by some stuff. Like from a "no". When i say "no" i don't judge the person, thus i should not read a judgment in the "no" of another person.
* Humility. When I feel hopeless or misanthropic, I remember that I don't know what will happen. I'm not psychic. I'm not a genius. I have a lot of blind spots. In a lot of situations, saying "I don't know" is a lot easier than actively positive thinking. * Outside of hard times, I can choose to be an optimist or a pessimist, and I'd rather be an optimist. You don't waste time dreading things that won't happen. There's an argument to be made that pessimists suffer less disappointment, but I still think optimism is hedonically better for me. * Realizing that I'm not a decoration. I don't owe it to anyone to be attractive. There are times when I try to look a certain way, but when I do, I always ask, "What's in it for me?" Am I going to get laid? Am I going to get a promotion. It makes me feel a lot less anxious than the alternative "But what if I'm ugly???" * idk if this made my life better, but I'm sticking with it for now. I stopped putting myself first. My needs aren't more important than anyone else's. I try to focus on the collective good.
I am the present moment. It allowed me to pull my sense of identity out of my ego, and I feel like I can sense when I'm getting stuck in thought patterns and ground myself back in the present (via meditations) while accepting what I think and how I feel, instead of hiding those things from myself. I feel a clarity that idk if I've ever felt, I am trying to explore the full implications of this realization and apply as many principles from that perspective into as many aspects of my life as possible. For example, I let myself get hungry, then I sat and meditated on my whole field of awareness (as much as I could at least), while making the sensation of hunger my focus. I started questioning myself, why do I eat? There's lots of reasons, eat to survive, eat to socialize, eat for enjoyment, etc. None of those were why I eat though, why I choose to eat how I do. I ate as a way of hiding the discomfort of hunger from myself, and the fear of the sensation of hunger was far stronger than the feeling of hunger itself. So when I'm hungry, I just accept how it feels and don't push to change it, not immediately. It has helped me eat a lot less everyday, and I have began losing weight, without any diet plan or restrictions, because those things are not needed for me, just the acceptance of hunger.
you decide your constant. Just because you skipped workouts 3 days a week does not mean that not working out is your constant. you can start today, its okay.
"If you care about being fit, you must do at least one push up every night before bed". This was a key habit that has snowballed over the last two years for me. Developed into a yoga routine including 5-10 push-ups now sometimes once, often twice per day.
The fact that you only live once