All of these are in quotes because it's self diagnosed and I'm not a professional. Also, there's no such thing as mild depression.
But I expect many people who visit here are also just "self diagnosed" or just have some of the symptoms, but it doesn't matter what it's called. If it makes your life shit and there's a way to fix it, then why not use it.
Of course, I'm not here to tell you how to fix your problems, because your problems may not be my problems and even if the symptoms are the same, the cause may be different and the fix may be different.
But I figured I'd still try to explain the facts of my experiences and keep speculation to a minimum. So I'll try to stick to saying what I was experiencing, what I did to fix it, why I believed this was the way to fix it, and what the result has been.
I'll try to keep it short for the depression and anxiety and go into more detail for the ADHD, to keep it mostly on topic.
Background
As a kid I was always the smart one and my identity centered on being the smart one of the group all the way through college and even somewhat into the workforce. For context, I'm in my early 40s now.
I thought memorizing things was for stupid people, smart people don't need to remember things, they can solve any problem on the spot.
By my late twenties I had some decent savings and decided to spend some down time to improve my personal life (I was an incel, but not the bad kind, which depending on your definition might mean I was not an incel), reduce stress, and travel.
I tried to learn a third language in a month, made extraordinary progress in a couple of weeks and ended up sort of burning out and pissing the bed, I guess my brain didn't even have enough juice left for bladder control.
I took it easy for a few years, worked for a year for some extra cash, and then went back to unemployed.
So, now I'm in my early thirties and that's when I start recognizing and explicitly addressing my mental issues.
Mild Depression
Just generally speaking, I just couldn't get the energy to get much of anything done. Through enormous amount of willpower I would be able to get through up to an hour of cleaning before being unable to gather more willpower to keep going.
I couldn't cook, and only ate frozen pizza and on occasion boiled pasta and microwaved steak. On rare occasions I managed to add store-bought pasta sauce to my pasta. But 90% of the time, I just ate frozen pizza.
So that's how bad things were. Here's how I fixed it and why I chose this. And it's really simple:
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Started eating meal replacement powder. Obviously, my diet was a massive contributing factor and mixing powder with water was something that my depressed self was able to handle and it gave me a regular healthy diet full of all the stuff I needed.
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Stop centering my personality as the smart one. The thing about being smart is that in fact, I was just routinely sending my brain on overdrive to solve whatever interesting problem I encountered. I started adjusting my thinking in that way after my burnout from trying to learn a third language, but I started taking it more seriously when I decided I had some form of mild depression.
And that's it, things improved over then next 5 years and as the energy came back symptoms of ADHD became more apparent, which I'll explain later.
Social Anxiety
I've always had social anxiety, but I only started to address it explicitly around the same time that I addressed my mild depression.
The way I experienced social anxiety, is that all social situations made me very anxious, to the point that I would keep my social experiences to a minimum. Sometimes not going out to meet people for weeks at a time. In addition, in social situation I would always be very shy and not know how to behave.
I never had panic attacks or anything close to it.
After reading something about anxiety online, it seemed mostly relatable to me and led me to the following interpretation of my situation:
My social anxiety was caused by the combination of three things:
- My need to fully understand something before taking action.
- Me enormously underestimating the complexity of accomplishing goals in social situations.
- Lack of experience.
Basically, the way I pictured the problem is like this. Say I'm at a bar and I need to order a beer. I'd just send the request "how do I order a beer" to my subconscious, the same way I'd send the request "what's 3+5" and I'd expect the answer to come to me. But it doesn't show up, so now I don't know how to order the beer. Since I need to know how to beer before I go order a beer, I just don't go to order the beer.
Once I understood that, the solution was pretty simple:
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Don't underestimate how complex social situations are. If I need to order a beer, there's a ton of variables involved, from availability of the bartender how to react to being ignored, what tone of voice to use what kind of phrasing to use, how to behave with respect to other customers in the area etc... Explicitly assessing these questions makes the problem a lot more understandable.
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Even the simplest of social situations is unsolvably complex. You just have to accept that you're going to need to try things even when you don't really know what the outcome is going to be. From that, you get more experience and eventually it does become as easy as sending the question to your subconscious and your subconscious gives you the answer.
After a few years of this approach, my social anxiety is now completely gone and I'm now socially competent.
ADHD
In my late thirties as my depression and social anxiety was essentially fixed is when I started to recognize symptoms of ADHD.
While, I did have the energy to cook. Following step by step instruction to cook something was nearly impossible for me. I'd just get distracted and start doing something else.
In the past I had been able to keep an almost reasonable level of cleanliness because from time to time I'd have guests or something, so I'd go on overdrive and clean everything. But now that I tried not to send my brain on overdrive, these cleaning sessions weren't nearly as effective and the cleanliness was getting much worse.
But I could still regularly hyperfocus on certain topics, whether it was a game or a work project and these would usually last two weeks at a time.
I've eventually decided that the following are the two primary causes for my ADHD:
- I'd spent decades to train my brain to work in only one of two modes:
- The 5% mode, where I relax, watch tv, browse the internet and play video games in a braindead manner.
- The 200% mode, where I leverage my social anxiety, the stress of workplace pressure, or the adrenaline of an impending deadline to send my brain on overdrive.
- My disdain for having a good memory has left me unable to intentionally form habits. I also believed that people that lived through habits weren't really alive, they were just delusional robots. (I still kinda do, but beggars can't be choosers, y'know).
Here's how I fixed it:
Firs, I swallow my pride and accept that I'm getting old and I need some habits if I don't want to end up completely senile. And I endeavored learn to have my brain operate at more sensible power levels.
In practice, here's what I did:
1. The "might as well" principle
I found out about this one watching a pretty popular ADHD TikToker. It's pretty simple, when I'm on my couch and I need to get up to got to the kitchen for whatever reason, I "might as well" take one of dirty dishes I have lying around with me.
What I figure this does is that it doesn't put any pressure on getting the thing done. I'm not trying to pump myself up to finally doing some cleaning. I don't care about the outcome of performing the action. I'm just doing it with as little effort as possible.
In other words I'm doing it, but I'm keeping my brainpower at 15%. Which means I'm learning to do things at a lower brainpower level.
2. Planning: Remember into the future
No, this is not about time travel. I read some AI guy a several years back explaining that planning is about remembering doing the thing but somehow you remember yourself doing it the future instead of in the past. But to be able to remember into the future, you need to be able to remember in the first place.
So I tried it out. I started cleaning my bathroom, but with the only goal being to pay attention to what I was doing so that I could remember it afterwards. So that later, I could try and remember what I did the previous time and thereby plan to do the same thing again.
I'll explain the final results of this after I explain the next two techniques.
3. The unexpected task
One time, I was totally committed to finally getting my kitchen cleaned up. Half an hour later, my kitchen was still a mess and I was playing video games. And I'm like, WTF happened?
Eventually I found my way back to the kitchen and made sure to pay attention. Two minutes later, I catch myself already going back to the couch.
Why? Because I couldn't find the sponge I needed to clean the dishes.
My mind was on the idea of cleaning the kitchen. I needed the sponge and automatically I started looking for it. But as I couldn't easily find it, soon enough my mind wandered off and then I forgot about cleaning the kitchen and remembered fun or interesting things I could do on the computer.
My conclusion there is that when you're doing a thing that doesn't require a lot of brainpower. Occasionally, you're going to need to turn up the power a little bit to take care of an unexpected task.
If you fail to do so, you'll fail the task and naturally move on to something else.
4. A job well done
This is my most recent addition. I noticed that while I was able to get a lot more done thanks the last two techniques I noticed that I never really got things done all the way.
So I figured that what I was missing was the sense of a job well done.
When you play a video game and accomplish a goal, the video game shoves the sense of accomplishment down your throat using music, visuals and incrementing numbers.
In real life, you got to put some effort into giving yourself the sense of accomplishment.
The idea is to plan to give myself a pat on the back (not literally) once the job is done. Planing is remembering into the future, so I started with a dead simple task (don't remember what it was). Gotta say it wasn't that satisfying. But then I went for something more complicated and went out for shopping AND putting all the things in their place afterwards.
I got that done and it was pretty satisfying.
Then I figured I'd go for completely cleaning my room. And I failed. I couldn't get it done.
So I added another component to it: I'd regularly make sure to get annoyed with myself for not having finished the task. Even if for circumstantial reason there was nothing I could do about it in the moment.
So now the next time I try to clean my room. I'd regularly assess the progress, but to keep my motivation up, I have the killer carrot + stick combination. If I keep it up all the way to the end, I get to pat myself in the back, and if I fail and give up, I'll be annoyed with myself until I finally give it another try and this time get it all the way done.
The Results
I've only done the full "a job well done" 3 times so far. But I can say, my apartment is clean and I can keep it clean.
I can feel a much greater presence of mind today vs a year ago.
The way I figure the "job well done" works well is that it never really requires huge amounts of willpower which is what I needed whenever I wanted to get something done before.
It really doesn't take much effort to get annoyed at something not being done.
And when you're annoyed about something, it's nearly effortless to get started at it, provided you think you have all the prerequisites to get the job done.
And the combination of carrot+stick is enough to keep going when motivation wavers. Or if ADD kicks or something happens, the annoyance brings you back to it pretty quick and with little effort or willpower required.
Executing on it is just treated as a repeated series of "might as well" principles. Until you hit the occasional unexpected task, and you remember the carrot and the stick so you put the energy in to figure out how to get this unexpected task resolved, however complex it may be.
I can't say I'm totally cured from ADHD yet, but I honestly feel that I'm 70% of the way there.
In closing/disclaimers
I hope none of this sounds like bragging, while I'm proud of myself I recognize that everyone's issues are unique and many can't be easily solved or can't be solved at all.
I post my experience here to show that the kind of mental issues I've described CAN be solved just by behavioral and mental pattern adjustments. But I want to stress that this doesn't mean that YOU mental issues can be solved in this way.
I do believe (caution: uninformed, unqualified belief), that even with the help of professionals and pharmaceuticals, taking your mental health into your own hands in the way I've done it (not necessarily with the same techniques but using a similar approach) will greatly help with the outcome and might even be indispensable for a favorable outcome. Your mental health professional can't hold your hand every minute of every day.
I'm also curious how similar/different other people's experience with ADHD is and whether they believe my techniques can help or what techniques they employ. Also if by some miracle there are actually qualified and informed professionals on here I'd be curious to know how my experiences and solutions stack up to literature.
P.S.
Is it absolutely foolish to post a wall of text in ADHD forum? Yes.
What am I going to do about it? Self-mockery and post it anyway.
Edit: I removed the TL;DR because I think it oversimplifies things and leads to misunderstanding.
