Emotional Control?

[Black Rose]

first steps?

maybe give up control to not be affected by anything?

but everything seems too important not to let go.

thinking about how I was conditioned:

life seems to punish you for acting emotional

which makes me bottle things up at times

I am not allowed to feel emotions

or then bad things happen

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if emotion is not the way to go, it may come out in other ways

emotional people seem to not have any deep thoughts

because deeps thoughts require delayed gratification

everything they want must happen NOW

this makes it hard to deal with them

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Given I have too little intelligence to do anything to take care of myself,

I choose not to do anything I know I will obviously fail at.

I do not care about cat videos and I do not care about sports.

But as it is, depression kills my energy to study.

Much of what I do is just thinking, but thinking is the only thing life will not punish me for that often.

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I would like to feel things, to have energy, and not to fail at things.

That would be nice to do.

I might then find things to do.

If people do not have things to do this causes difficulty in life.

It creates an abnormal way of existing.

Humans seek control,

at their level of purpose.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

My fix:
Start with addicting video games. If you have to rotate from a couple every day/hour. You can keep your mind going for a long time you'll see, actively try to improve at the game as much as you like.

Once you realize that you can play video games all day, you'll ask yourself, "Why can't I be active in this way about other things?"

Answer that question, it might take a while, but don't settle for a simple one sentence answer. Get a comprehensive reason why it may be impossible for you at a given time.

You'll see that even when you "solve" your problems, you still always seem to have problems. After a while of this, you'll realize that it doesn't matter what you do, you are just unhappy in someway.

Then you'll realize that the best use of your time is just relaxing and unlearning past unhabits that make your life worse.

I think that's a good start. The parts of the brain of interest are the orbital frontal cortex, the insula, amygdala, and cingulate cortex.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Video games is a better use of time than social media 90% of the time btw.

If you're trying to win, you'll slowly realize that a overt emotional response rarely helps you win. It's super good for brain plasticity.

 

[birdsnestfern]

For me, I have energy when I have money. Could your issue be that you just don't have money to do things? Is there something you can do for 20 hours a week, maybe even just buy and sell things on ebay to earn a few dollars? Or write on substack and charge a 5 dollar monthly subscription? Or go door to door and offer old people your help, maybe polish silver, clean a bathroom or wash their dishes for 25 dollars an hour? You could spend time designing a printout of what you can do and put it in peoples mailboxes for example offering to help with cleaning for $25-40 per hour.
At the bottom of each paper put a letter or number like A1, A2, etc so you have a code for which address and ask them to call you with your code so you know who is calling, then make a database with their address and codes and notes about the type of customer and what they want or if they paid. Set up Zelle or Venmo or other Cash App so payments can come to you for your work. Keep a record of earnings on another spreadsheet for the type of work you did, the invoice and the amount received.

Or, find a hobby you like. Walk around the block each morning, or jog to the store. Challenge yourself to take a bus, find out where each bus line goes by staying on for the whole loop for example and write in your notebook what you saw on that route and which stops you'd want to make on that route. Or, just take photos of nature, architecture, people or pets in your area for fun. Just keep your phone in your pocket with your home address and the number to a taxi company and $30 so you can get a taxi home if you get stuck or lost.

 

[dr froyd]

i personally never understood to the "bottling-up" idea. To me it looks rather the opposite - the more you engage in certain emotions (like anger, frustration) the more easily they become available as responses to events. They become like any other habit - it takes effort and time to change them, but it's very much possible just by the power of one's will and the ability to reframe things by means of one's prefrontal cortex. In fact i would say that preventing your caveman-like brainstem from being the primary agent of your brain is something trainable, like a muscle.

 

[Black Rose]

i personally never understood to the "bottling-up" idea. To me it looks rather the opposite - the more you engage in certain emotions (like anger, frustration) the more easily they become available as responses to events. They become like any other habit - it takes effort and time to change them, but it's very much possible just by the power of one's will and the ability to reframe things by means of one's prefrontal cortex. In fact i would say that preventing your caveman-like brainstem from being the primary agent of your brain is something trainable, like a muscle.

I think it is because I am on the edge of where I cannot do anything but I still feel bad.

Carl Jung would call that a neurosis. (going against what feels natural to us)

And as to what @birdsnestfern said, my energy has to do with mental things. Where in the past we did not have internet so had to do stuff in real life, I find that I spend all my time trying to learn stuff but can't find much at my level. So it is the case that things are too hard, all the time, and to stop myself from feeling anxiety I cacoon myself (shut down) as much as possible. That zone where I need to do things is unavailable and I do not want to be a vegetable but I do not want to do physical things that much either. I read as much as I wanted to at the library and I cannot afford to buy books so this puts me in a bad spot.

Actually, by realizing I had this emotional pain I can see now that what I have been doing all these years is simply to cope with having nothing to do I can achieve on my own. When I had this pain it drained my energy to learn stuff. That is why I now have the reasoning skills to understand why that pain exists and why I have no energy to learn stuff.

If I try harder I may see what to do because I gave up a long time ago which is not to say I did not gain experience from it only I now know what I need to do to feel better. I need to feel the pain, and get through it which is what I avoided from everything not working out for so long. Avoiding pain is what dropped my mental energy. The physical sensations inside me, not any actions of seeking more pain. There is in fact a way to deal with this and that is to be myself more often, I could not do that before is what I am saying.

 

[birdsnestfern]

Ok, just know it depends on who you are with as to how much you can be yourself too. But you can practice on us, INTP's let you say what you want to pretty much. I think.

 

[Old Things]

I have come across a book that I think will be helpful in this regard. It is called, "Telling Yourself the Truth". It is a Christian book so be aware of that. But it is a way to recalibrate your thinking without having to delve into a painful past. It works by, well, telling yourself the truth. You can rewire your brain by changing what you are telling yourself about things.