Ask Lemmy

This is my experience with CBT. It was fine in a way, to recognize my feeling, but it never dealt with them. Only when I found a therapist who worked in CBT and acceptance based therapy did I start to improve.

I've been doing cognitive behavioural therapy to try and sort out my depression and I found that having to stick to an exact time table actually made it worse, instead I've just got to try and get one thing done at some point every day and then each week I add another job on untill I'm able to get all of them done like a functioning person.

I'm also supposed to pair it with doing something that I enjoy that gets me out of the house but I keep forgetting to do that bit.

The Insomnia Coach App. It’s a completely free app on iOS and Android for tracking your sleep and developing the tools and habits for getting a full night’s rest. It’s a CBT-based app with a sleep diary, weekly training plan, and tools like guided meditation.

Weirdly it’s developed by the US Department of Veteran Affairs, which explains why it’s free and there’s no in-app purchases. Nothing about it is specific to veterans, and it’s one of the most commonly recommended apps for dealing with insomnia.

I can vouch that it helped reduce the frequency of sleepless nights for me, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone unfortunate enough to be dealing with insomnia.

I have a reminder go off on all my devices that reminds me to think of three things for which I'm grateful. In fact, I still haven't addressed it for today, so let's do so here:

- Three day weekend

- The recent heat is absent for the entire weekend at a good 70-71°

- Partner took care of planning a trip so I didn't stress about it

And with that, I get to close that reminder. Doing this as daily has been a positive for my mental health.

analog lists to cross off for more productivity.

i wrote out "pushupsx20" and then "1, 2, 3"....up to the number of days in the month.

same with "paintx20min", "running 1hr", and so on.

so I wrote out a list like that of 20 or so activities that I wanted to regularly get done and i cross off the 1, 2, 3 so on each time I completed one instance.

crossing off an item on the list is extremely satisfying, and it was fine to do like five sets of push-ups over the day and cross off 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to get ahead of the schedule.

i didn't have to do 20 different activities everyday, but It's very fun to write a big x through a number and the goals themselves were modest enough that by the end of the month, everything was crossed off and I had done hundreds of pushups and situps I otherwise wouldn't have and paintings and focused on several hobbies that I usually didn't give enough attention to.

I also could look back at the sheet with all of this activity and marvel at how much i accomplished that month, that's pretty good.

it was a very productive method.

Huh, I might try that sheet planner myself, thank you.

The one thing that helped me a lot was just my therapist explaining to me that my mom was an adult who made her own decisions about her own life, and It wasn't my responsibility to fix her problems because of her decisions that she kept making

She's a huge enabler of my adult brother to the detriment of her own life/wellbeing, and I was so fucked up over not being able to help her in any way. Just that explanation was enough to get me to breathe functionally again.

Series

Please edit that (you can) or I'll keep thinking of puns instead of what I tried