i do this – Thoughtfulfangirling

laryna6:

Anhedonia – not finding pleasure in things you normally take pleasure in – is a symptom of depression.

When depressed, you will also be reluctant to start things, and won’t find things appealing.

This sets up a nasty vicious cycle where ‘life feels bleak’ -> ‘nothing sounds fun’ -> do nothing -> don’t have fun -> ‘Hey I’m not having fun, life really is pretty bleak right now’ -> More depressed.

The way to break that cycle is to do things that you enjoy. Doing things solely for the sake of having fun is an important part of handling depression. Not only does it keep you from getting more depressed, but it can make you go ‘Hey I’m having a really nice day’ and give you bouncy energy to do productive things with.

I get so focused on all the things that need doing that I forget that when depressed, doing things solely because they’re fun is the practical thing to do if I want to get thing done.

There is a difference between procrastination and having trouble activating. If there’s a thing you need to do and you know you aren’t going to be able to do it now, do something fun, and afterwards you will have better odds of actually doing the thing.

If you find yourself in the situation in the picture, pick something that you are intellectually aware you would find fun if you were feeling better and start doing it.’ This means that you are focusing on something other than *sigh* and playing a game can make you feel productive, put ‘life is good!’ and ‘I can succeed at things!’ chemicals into a brain that is sorely in need of them.

A couple weeks ago when I couldn’t even find any interest in reading fanfic, I eventually managed to start playing a random RPG and felt much better a few hours later.

prokopetz:

Of all the skills that futurists predicted would become valuable in the era of constant communication, I don’t think anybody saw “conversational multithreading” coming.

No, I don’t mean holding multiple conversations with different people at the same time. I mean holding two or more completely separate conversations with the same person, via the same medium, at the same time.

Like when you’re texting, and the person on the other end asks you a question, then mentally eight-tracks and asks a different, unrelated question before you’ve finished keying in your response to the first one. So you answer the first question, and a conversation based on that answer ensues; then you answer the second question, and a totally different conversation based on that answer ensues, and now you’re having two separate conversations with the same person at the same time, and have to keep track of which responses pertain to which conversation purely from context.

Sometimes I wonder what the generational cutoff for that seeming unusual is – I didn’t pick up the skill until I was like thirty, so there’s always that undercurrent of generational novelty there.