Taboo Topics of Discussion

[Swamp Fox]

Not to trivialize the issue in any way ,and this even for those who don't suffer from anxiety or depression but simply regrets, I heard a line that I think is helpful for everyone:

The windshield is much larger than the rear view mirror because it's more important to look ahead to
where you're going than to look at where you've been.
And when you look back, just glance, don't stare.

Another line ( C S Lewis?): A man with no regrets has a conscience literally as wide as hell.

Can't confirm that's C.S. Lewis, but a "conscience wide as hell" is Shakespeare.

Henry V, Act 3, Scene 3

King Henry is besieging the French town of Harfleur, offers terms of surrender, and predicts the evil that will follow defiance. It gets more graphic after I cut the quote, but you get the idea.

If I begin the batt'ry once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie burièd.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flow'ring infants.



I'm confident, though, that this is C.S. Lewis:

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

 

[CaliWoodsman]

I work in tech and talking with a co-worker this week on anxiety and depression for the average joe, not someone who went to war or had some unthinkable tragedy happen. How much of modern day anxiety is fueled by tech particularly your phone. Our thought is most brains have been rewired the last 15 years to need the constant feed of input and stimulation and it's just not healthy.

I am a very strong willed person that works out every day, doesn't drink, smoke, was D1 athlete, fancy job running IT and OPS at large company, all that junk. But I crave reaching for my phone to kill time when I should be letting my brain rest or I crave looking at emails/teams at night just to get mad. Quite a few of my developers are on sort of depression meds and battle anxiety and only one of them has a real reason he was raised in awful situations surrounded by drugs/booze and people going to jail and at one point homeless.

Growing up and now 45 most people didn't have the daily anxiety we see now. I rank social media and cell phones up near the top of life destroyers for mental health it's a drug that is highly addictive.

I agree with this so much. I know it’s affected me. Many times I have thought about how good it would feel to put my smartphone through a paper shredder and change my email password to some random text, then log out.

 

[Fowl Play]

I work in tech and talking with a co-worker this week on anxiety and depression for the average joe, not someone who went to war or had some unthinkable tragedy happen. How much of modern day anxiety is fueled by tech particularly your phone. Our thought is most brains have been rewired the last 15 years to need the constant feed of input and stimulation and it's just not healthy.

I am a very strong willed person that works out every day, doesn't drink, smoke, was D1 athlete, fancy job running IT and OPS at large company, all that junk. But I crave reaching for my phone to kill time when I should be letting my brain rest or I crave looking at emails/teams at night just to get mad. Quite a few of my developers are on sort of depression meds and battle anxiety and only one of them has a real reason he was raised in awful situations surrounded by drugs/booze and people going to jail and at one point homeless.

Growing up and now 45 most people didn't have the daily anxiety we see now. I rank social media and cell phones up near the top of life destroyers for mental health it's a drug that is highly addictive.

I definitely agree. I believe allot of it is fueled by a combination of stressful desk jobs, tech addiction, 24 hr news cycle spewing bad news all day long, etc.

Long work hours in a stressful desk job is a recipe for depression/anxiety caused by Low Testosterone. If you sell your soul to work and give up on taking care of yourself with good sleep and exercise -- you will fall victim to Low T eventually, likely in your 30's or shortly after -- depending on how much T your body makes naturally.

Everyone tells you, you need to exercise. That's easy to just take dismissively and allow to fall by the wayside -- thinking your career is more important. No-one told me... you need to lift weights to ensure that your body keeps making testosterone and your brain keeps functioning correctly. That is a whole different ball game.

 

[Customweld]

I definitely agree. I believe allot of it is fueled by a combination of stressful desk jobs, tech addiction, 24 hr news cycle spewing bad news all day long, etc.

Long work hours in a stressful desk job is a recipe for depression/anxiety caused by Low Testosterone. If you sell your soul to work and give up on taking care of yourself with good sleep and exercise -- you will fall victim to Low T eventually, likely in your 30's or shortly after -- depending on how much T your body makes naturally.

Everyone tells you, you need to exercise. That's easy to just take dismissively and allow to fall by the wayside -- thinking your career is more important. No-one told me... you need to lift weights to ensure that your body keeps making testosterone and your brain keeps functioning correctly. That is a whole different ball game.

It's a damn shame that when we are born, we don't come with an instruction manual! There are so many things that I know now that I wished I would have known earlier.
I started listening to podcasts this year out of sheer boredom. The Huberman alcohol episode helped me stop drinking. Then I started in on his other podcasts and so many of them have helped me make sense of growing older and keeping your body healthy. We as men, aren't wired to ask the right questions (or any at all) when we visit our doctor.

 

[DangerRanger]

I’m diagnosed general anxiety and OCD. It was extremely hard as a teen when the OCD set in.

I washed my hands practically raw from ocd. Therapy helped a lot, and once older I used Xanax for panic attacks. Lexapro did not work well for me. At this point I have gotten to where I don’t need any of it and am doing well, I still struggle with locks and stuff but I have my ways of working with it to reduce the worrying.

The generalized anxiety ebbs and flows, but is always there. I’m far better at dealing with it than I used to be.

 

[duckcarver]

The community of Rokslide is more evident in this thread than any other that I have read. I am close with someone who has wrestled with anxiety and depression for years. I'll echo the comments above regarding finding the right therapeutic fit. The 4th psychologist made connections in a matter of weeks that were not accomplished by others over months or years.

A range of prescriptions for management of depression and anxiety have been tried with varying degrees of success--none seemed to truly control the anxiety. I wouldn't believe this if I hadn't observed it directly, but we recently discovered that L-theanine (an over-the-counter amino acid) makes a dramatic difference in reducing or eliminating his anxiety. A 200 mg dissolving tablet in the morning leads to a nearly anxiety-free day. No idea whether this compound alone has this effect or whether it helps with absorption or processing of the prescription meds, but it truly has been a game changer.

I'm not competent to provide medical or mental health advice and am sure it may present no benefit to others, but I hope this compound helps just one person to even half the extent we're experiencing. $13 bottle from Target is the best money I've every spent.

 

[100percent]

Our response to many of the things that stress us out are influenced greatly by our self talk. Thinking yourself in circles that escalates negative feelings isn’t easy to stop, but like anything in life the more you try the better you get at it. From small things to major persistent issues I have no control over at home or work, if I’m thinking about them in a negative way, or ruminating on them too much I literally remind myself “not helpful” and either reframe it in a healthier way or move on to something else.

For anxiety and depression, thought stopping and reframing can change your life. In relationships, thought stopping reduces conflicts and they get resolved faster. Anything that gets us thinking in unproductive circles, even if it’s what caliber our next rifle should be, can be helped.

This is not to diminish the importance of professional help for the most serious issues, or just opening up to others which is healthy for anyone.

With you on all points!
After many years of dealing with anxiety (mostly panic attacks) with a daily small dose of Zoloft and counseling periodically, the big man steered me to a book that helped immensely! ‘The Secret Art of Not Giving a F%&K ” by Mark Manson has helped me realize self talk can be really good or really bad! Manson talks about many of the false narratives and punishing expectations that society creates for us in this modern age. Over-stimulation at every turn! Also, shortfalls (and pitfalls) in self-help, counseling, etc… that is pushed on us in dealing. I abhor the title but, this book helped me bring peace and calm back to my life. I haven’t taken the meds in several years and life is back to normal. The book didn’t do it all but, it created the necessary perspective for ME. Maybe it could help another?
May peace be with all who might suffer!

 

[BFR]

PTSD, thanks to my time in Viet Nam and the Army and the anti war crowd who did nothing but insult and/or ignore us when we came back. Depression and anxiety are part and parcel of that package. Took 25 years of misery and making those around me suffer before I came to grips with it and got help. As has been said before find professional help that you relate to, I went thru 12 different counselors before I got one that helped me. If you’re suffering from anxiety and depression do get help, it’s not a diy condition. Life has definitely improved for me and especially for my wife who has stuck with me through it all.

 

[tony]

Thanks to this thread, it pushed to get some one on one with a professional.
Next Tuesday I do an intake screening to see what I need and who I will see.

Bravo gents on assisting me.

 

[displacedtexan]

Thanks to this thread, it pushed to get some one on one with a professional.
Next Tuesday I do an intake screening to see what I need and who I will see.

Bravo gents on assisting me.

The first step is the hardest man!

Good for you, and you're more than welcome for any tiny bit of nudging I did.

 

[Swamp Fox]

[...] I've learned to accept the intense, total body pain for what it is, which may sound weird, but the layer of "suffering" on top of the plain fact of constant pain can be learned to be dealt with.

I'm in a vastly better place than I was even a few years ago. For me, I count a strong family as central; finding a PTSD guy who is really skilled and whose approach goes "in" very lightly, which has yielded a far better approach than anything else I've done in close to 20 years - too often, yes, "buck up" I think is everywhere, and while resilience is a worthy goal, getting there isn't always a straight shot and in fact, working from that view can just drive things more to ground. Meditation, meaning nothing more than literally being "here" now in breath and body (I often do it when working out intensely - and especially in yoga at the end of any training day), realizing the past is gone and has no reality now. I do have meds for anxiety but find the total exhaustion of this level of training is something like a "tap" that drains anxiety spikes, even if it's only temporary.

I imagine like most if not all of us, I take a lot of comfort in wild places.

One of the greatest gifts my gp told me years ago - "what you have is frontier medicine. We just haven't caught up yet." For years I dealt with many doctors who either thought I was hysterical or malingering, etc. To be told by a skilled and compassionate doctor that medicine didn't have the answers, but we'd keep trying, meant the world to me at the time.

I hope you, and anyone else suffering with what many do in silence and shame, get the help you need. 62, and for the first years in decades, I look forward with reality, and hope, with a body that is fighting back.

“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us…they can’t get away this time.”​

“We’ve been looking for the enemy for some time now. We’ve finally found him. We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.”

“Great. Now we can shoot at those bastards from every direction.”​

“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”​

--Chesty Puller