What issues are you dealing with (if you feel like sharing)? I can speak from my experience being in therapy for AuADHD, anxiety, depression, childhood traumas, and a few other things.
ETA: Some generic things from my therapist that will help most people:
- Drink enough water. This alone can have a significant impact.
- Try to do regular physical activity that you enjoy, if possible. Even if you don’t feel like it.
- Check your posture. If you find yourself hunching, try fixing that.
- Do things that you know that you enjoy when you are not depressed, when you are depressed. Our brains are weird and “fake it 'til you make it” kinda works - by doing non-depressive things, you can trick your brain into being happier.
- Try to engage socially, if you find yourself to be a hermit. Our brains are evolved to be social animals and isolation can be damaging.
- If you are having trouble with the state of the world and things that you do not have control over, try engaging in things that you do have control over. This can be as simple as deep cleaning your sink or fixing a squeeky hinge. The amount of frustration caused by inability to impact important global happening is problematic for maintaining good mental health - our brains evolved in environments where life-threatening problems had immediate solutions but humans have built societies that don’t work that way.
Important items
- Be patient and kind to yourself. Especially your past self. We all did cringy things when young with brains not fully-developed and/or without the information that one has currently. If you have trouble doing so, try mentally taking a step back and pretending that you are dealing with a close friend who you care about deeply. Would you judge them and make them feel bad about their past mistakes? I hope not.
- Concern and depression about the world at large is a very valid way to feel. It’s important, especially for those of us with mental health challenges, to take the airplane safety spiel “put your own mask on first before helping others” approach to rendering aid to others. If you are in or near crisis, you are not in a place to help others and need to focus on getting to stable ground yourself first. Needing to do this isn’t slacking off or “not doing your part”. Not everyone is equipped to be out marching all the time (some are not equipped for this at all). If someone offers unhelpful criticism of inability to engage physically due to mental or physical health, they are best ignored rather than responded to.
Assuming that you have ADHD based on your other comment, I do, actually, from my own struggles with AuADHD. First thing, is a bit of radical acceptance. If you are not neurotypical, especially if ADHD and/or ASD are involved, you’re not and never will be “like other people”. No pill known by medical science, no strategy, and no therapy is going to change that because it has to do with the brain developing differently in physical structural ways than a neurotypical brain and it’s likely genetic or epigenetic.
That doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for functionality. Just that one must approach things differently and “calibrate” strategies to work with, rather than against their brain. Importantly, it also means that most “productivity hacks” and the like are utterly useless because they were developed with a neurotypical brain as the starting point.
When it comes to doom scrolling and the like, when stressed, you’re actually at a good starting point in that you are aware of what is happening and at least somewhat aware of the cause. It might not seem apparent but, emotion is a significant component of ADHD. The biggest thing to know is that if you are fighting against a heightened emotional state that is causing you to be unable to start or continue something, it can be like quicksand. Constantly running into that emotional brick wall isn’t going to help.
So, what do you do? Well, the same thing isn’t necessarily going to work for everyone. Something that I’ve been working on with my therapist is a strategy from Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) that is called the “STOP” skill (here’s a link). Essentially, it involves analyzing your state in the moment and mindfully deciding on a path forward.
If, like many with ADHD including myself (this was a fun thing to become aware of well into adulthood), you are not super comfortable with your emotions and/or have alexithymia (trouble identifying, describing, and expressing ones own emotions), it could be useful to find an emotion wheel or feelings wheel. There are many versions out there. The important thing is to find one that makes sense to you - I like the ones that start more general in the center and get more specific in the edges. To use that type to figure out how you are feeling (or evaluate how you were feeling from memory), just start with your finger in the center and work your way outwards to the emotion that most fits. Practicing this when not in a moment of stress can help to make it easier when you need it.
Other things that you can try are: practicing meditation so that it is easier to use when you need it and, if necessary, making your phone inaccessible, if you don’t need it. Overall, the goal is to improve coping strategies available to you in order to make it easier to use ones that serve you and your well-being.
Again, assuming that you have ADHD here. The first thing that you’ll need to do is identify the causes. I, for example, often have a lot of trouble reading (even though I love it and was at a college level vocabulary in primary school). For me, this is caused entirely by ADHD, resulting in re-reading paragraphs and sometimes individual sentences multiple times before they “stick”. This caused a lot of problems for me when I was a child didn’t receive any treatment for it.
Another common thing for ADHD is getting too granular and getting into analysis paralysis or stuck planning rather than doing. I find that setting limits on myself helps to reduce this. For example, if I need to write a program, I might get stuck evaluating what language to use, what libraries to use, which perform better under a given workload, etc. I need to set limits on how long I can take to research and try to make the scope of the work as small as possible to avoid either getting sick in perpetual planning or perpetual research.
Ultimately, you need to evaluate why you are taking longer to do the tasks, which is likely not just one thing, and start chipping away at the things that are causing the time sink in manageable bites. Don’t try to fix everything at once!