Your life will be better for it. Snapchat can stay…for reasons.
If you start getting out there and communicating with real people on intimate level - most addictions melt away by itself.
It makes more sense to focus on the root cause instead of fighting the symptoms.
What it does is “hooks the attention” using outrage and a constant stream of dopamine hits.
“ If you start getting out there and communicating with real people on intimate level - most addictions melt away by itself.”
I highly suspect you are not an addiction specialist…
We don't like to talk about it, but there is a biological component to how happy or anxious someone is. Not to say that everyone is doomed to be a certain way because of their genetics, but I've known people who are basically never sad, and it's not because they've found some kind of secret of happiness. I have a friend who has the temperament of a golden retriever.
Dr Bloom spoke about how your overall mood during college is a good predictor for how happy you'll be as a person throughout your life. He talked about the optimum time to get married is 26. He elucidated the idea of your prefrontal cortex solidifying around 25, making personality changes MUCH more difficult.
Dr Sopolsky spoke about biological markers that may affect human behavior - both inherited and environmentally influenced.
At 35 I am starting to suspect that I may be on the spectrum ( I kinda expected some adult to tell me this as a child, if it's true ).
The males on my fathers side (with the exception of my uncle) do not make it past 67.
My mothers side has inter-generational trauma that I know i've inherited avoidant behaviors that limit my social ability.
So great news.
Welp, I guess I'm dead then.
>around 25, making personality changes MUCH more difficult
Maybe it's just me but my personality keeps changing every year or so, based on the positive and negative experiences and challenges from living abroad alone, having to always adapt to new stuff to stay mentally, financially and socially afloat.
I assume it's different if you spend your whole life in the same place you grew up in with the same people doing the same things. Maybe the brain checks out from the repetition.
>avoidant behaviors that limit my social ability
Move aboard to another country where you don't speak the language.
My mood in college was suicidal. My mood by my 30s was better than most people I’ve ever met (sans hiccup from a year of no sleep with a newborn).
Looking back my horrible mood in college was probably caused by isolation, no sleep, high pressure course load, and too much alcohol. And I’ve noticed my mood drops dramatically when I get it in my head that I need to be more successful, at any point in my life.
...which is bunk; the studies that are cited as showing this actually showed changes in the prefrontal cortex up to the oldest people in their study, which was 25-year-olds.
Current research suggests that it continues changing throughout our lives.
But if you do want to be happy, you can find stories, if you look hard and long enough, of "outliers". People who, against all odds, defied "statistics" and broke out of whatever expectations society and "facts" projected onto them.
I tried "everything" until age ~27 when I finally found one dial (very specific elimination diet) that made the rest of my body act mostly normally. Other changes were easier to make from that point onwards, altho there's a lot of damage to undo still. Diet is just one factor, for others it could be completely different.
My point is - I thought I would never be healthy. This stuff runs in my family too. But I just kept trying things. There's no other option.
You are a unique human being and soul who has something valuable to contribute to this world. Even if that's being unhappy.
Hope that doesn't sound condescending, it's something I tell myself too.
Hard to be optimistic when you have cancer and can't afford treatment.
Insanity•1h ago