Apr
24th
2020
What Self-Improvement Strategies Have Worked For You or People You Know? · 4:13pm Apr 24th, 2020
How do I love and care about myself as much as I say I love and care about my friends? I want to stop disappointing myself so I stop breaking my mom’s heart, because she already lost her husband to shittyness, she doesn’t want to and can’t watch me squander my amazing potential on idle hedonism every single day year after year.
P.S: this extends to writing as well. Believe it or not, I would like to write more than just shitfics all the time. 
Report
Super Trampoline · 269 views
·
#Depressed
#depression
#self-improvement
#self improvement
#I want to be well
#help
#mental health
Still workin' on that one. :B
Not doing benzodiazepines helps lol
5249356
I’m really lucky that I don’t have any substance addiction/abuse issues beyond masturbating too much when I take too many of my ADHD pills.
Meditation is great for focus.
Write a list of goals.
Avoid intoxicating substances.
Actually, look up the teachings of Buddha. You don't have to buy the mystic gibber-gabber, but he did have some great ideas.
Set some goals that you’re pretty sure you can meet. They don’t have to be big—if they’re too big, and you don’t meet them, make some smaller ones so that you can get some successes under your belt. Writing a good story is really hard, but writing a paragraph that doesn’t suck is much easier. Maybe you try just picking some item or room or whatever and describing it, so you can focus less on what you need to write and more how you want to write it.
I find writing these things down helps, if only because I want to see a complete column of check marks next to them when I’m done.
I was motivated by a negative example. Looked at my boss. Thought about the trajectory of my life. Decided I didn't want to become him fifteen years later, stuck in a decaying orbit, spiraling into an eventual, fiery death. Fired boosters to escape orbit. Community college, university, career.
Get specific. A goal of "suck less" is too vague to take action on.
Identify which behaviors you want to change and make them specific. "Eat more beets" should become "eat 3.5 beets a day." Make a checklist to remind yourself you still have 1.7 beets to eat, and graph the results. Stick the graph on the wall so that it's easy to see if you're succeeding or failing. If you're winning the beet war, good for you! If you're failing, change your strategy.*
Don't cheat and check off beets you haven't eaten, because you're only cheating yourself.
Monkeys are good at lying to themselves and believing those lies. Kill your inner monkey.
-------------------------
* This is not some Twilight Sparkle OCD bullshit. This works.
Find someone who wants to see you improve as much as you want to improve. You can usually do that by finding someone who wants to improve as much as you want them to improve.
Patrons give me a few dollars a month. This means I have an OVERWHELMING sense of obligation the requires, nay, DEMANDS that I give my time to that project, until it consumes every waking hour of my day and every crevice of my brain.
My day job, that pays significantly more, gets no such reaction.
I realise that's not helpful.