First and foremost is to find a talk therapist who will work with you long term on helping you develop a mental mapping of your emotions to your physiology. When you are feeling an emotion, there is a corresponding physiological change throughout your body. The key here is that when you find yourself obsessing or avoiding or focusing on other people’s problems instead of your own, you will begin to notice the physical correlations in your own body. You will learn to use breathing techniques to notice your mental states. Emotions like despair, vulnerability, resentment, shame, guilt, etc all have physical correlations. As you begin to map the language of emotions to your physiology, you will begin to find ways to short-circuit these patterns through physical regulation and asserting emotional boundaries with your family.

The most important aspect of this… you will discover that regulating your body and your environment is the same as regulating your mind. The harder you push your body physically, the less you will feel mentally adrift or obsessing over external information to contain your emotions. Your attentional willpower will improve in parallel to your physical confidence and you will choose to care for your self.

Some other practical basic tips to self-regulate

Find some activity that keeps you centered on your own body - hard exercise, yoga or physical games are best — gardening and hiking are good too. AVOID all activities where you are constantly cognitively systematizing information. As an Information Age worker, you MUST take regular breaks for 5-10 min each hour - especially when you are in the hyperfocused productive zone. Go for a walk or do some pushups or yoga. You also cannot sacrifice sleep to the obsessive mind — if you can’t sleep or don’t have the will to sleep go do some physical activity.

Info Hygiene is key

Delete most non-utility apps on your phone and turn on time limits/screen time. Unplug from real-time digital media in your life - especially interactive media. Email and forums are fine - but not as realtime activities - check them at 2-3 fixed times each. Reading and writing are fine - but set limits.

Hope this helps. Good luck

(P.S - search for Andrew Huberman Willpower on YT)

The therapy is the last item in a very very long list of desperate things I've tried to cure PEM (metabolic typing, accupuncture, genetic testing, methylation, nutrition, crazy diets, and so much more).

What was the cause cause of my PEM? Negative emotions alone, wasn't the direct cause. But the supression of those negative emotions. In general terms: supressed, charged emotions directed at myself caused my PEM. Or in HN terms: constant low-level burnout.

Because it takes a lot of energy to hide those feelings from myself. A constant battle that I was generally unaware of that was happening at a deep level. I would deny the feelings of my body. I first had to build the support inside myself, with help of a therapist, before I could truly start to listen to the supressed emotions without being overwhelmed.

This was the beginning of the end for my PEM.

The book I would recommend would be: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D, which helped me a lot on the journey to recovery.

I've found forums to be generally very unhelpful. Something I wrote down a while back which I hope explains why I don't think they are a good place to resolve problems:

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The unreasonable ineffectiveness of communities in solving a single problem.

One person has a problem, if problem persists for any length of time, the more likely others will be experiencing that problem at the same time.

If there are enough people with that problem, a community will form around solving it. If the community is ineffective in solving that problem, then the community will grow and begin to sustain itself as new members join with that problem and the existing members continue to work on solving that problem.

For the community to survive, the problem must not be solved or the solution has to be close to unobtainable. Ineffective solutions will be devised to solve the problem. The complexity or discipline involved in solving the problem will exceed the ability of the individuals to implement it. The blame of solving the problem will lay in not in the community itself, but the individual not being able to implement the solution. An example of this may be a nearly impossible diet, regime or routine.

If an effective solution is found to the problem. There are two possible outcomes: either the community will dissipate and active membership dwindles or it will protect itself from the existential threat and block the ideas. This is especially true if the identities or financials of individuals in the community rely upon the problem existing.

Therefore, no community that sustains itself will form around the right solution. It is unsustainable. The communities with the most active members are also the most popular, propogating the problem.

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Please do let me know how you get on, I wish you the best.

Life is pretty good now. Still not perfect, but getting better enough for long enough to give confidence that the future is bright and worth putting in the effort for.

For me the turnaround started when I embraced non-mainstream subconscious emotional healing techniques, which gave me a system for working through past traumas, fears, resentments; all the emotional baggage that weighed me down, one grain at time.

These practices helped me to understand why I felt these feelings, and to learn healthier ways of thinking and conducting myself, so I could let all the baggage go and progress in life with more confidence.

There's a few of these techniques around.

NET (NetMindBody). Psych-K. Holotropic Breathwork. EFT. Hypontherapy - the Milton Erickson version or the Dolores Cannon methods. Family Constellations. Plenty of others that I'm not so familiar with.

It's a journey and if you're like me you'll need to engage different modalities on the way to get to things on different levels and from different angles. But if you stick at it long enough, it works and things get better.

All that said, if you're at risk of harming yourself or others, you should certainly see a conventional therapist and seek their advice before undertaking any of these approaches.

These techniques are all perfectly safe, but are not a replacement for psychology or psychiatry if you're in a dangerous place.

For more info, look for books/talks by Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Gabor Maté.

And feel free to email me if you want more advice. Address in profile.

Love and best wishes to you.

I'm not sure how to manage myself at the moment. My ability to apply myself productively diminished after my traumatic experiences, and it continues to diminish in a negative feedback cycle of the above coping mechanisms.

In other words, I have little gumption at the moment. All my enthusiasm is tied up in escaping my negative traumas and giving myself a pleasurable existence. When I try to get myself to send a resume or study a new skill, all of my traumatic experiences seem to surface and overwhelm me.

If you have been through something similar, what changes did you make which helped you?

By the way I have seen a professional therapist and psychiatrist before. Unfortunately, these were not really productive experiences, and I've come to be inclined to think these suggestions might be helpful but might also be a little bit canned.

I care deeply about necessary virtue in the world, but I don't care about taking care of myself anymore. This has led me to being primed for constant stimulation, therapies and I'm struggling to get back into a pattern of productively applying myself. Have you been through something similar?

What helped me out is finding a good information about CBT and its principles, where it explained clearly in simple terms. After that - actually doing the work myself. I did journal different situations that produced strong negative emotions or body reactions throughout the day for 3 months. Event-Thought-Emotion-Reaction. That helped out to find running themes in my head. Then afterwards every 2 weeks I went through the journal and wrote down alternative thoughts for it.

Remember when you going to the talk therapist you are expecting them to solve your problem, to give you the pill that solves everything. That won't work. You must do the job in the first place. With good information you don't even need to go to the therapist, you just need to be desperate enough that you start actually working on it. At least that what worked for me. Meditation is also pretty good, but same as exercise won't take you all the way there

Please remember that it may take some time for you to find the answers out of your situation, including to grasp everything your therapist had explained. Please give yourself permission to let those discussion / feedback sink in, no need to rush. Trying to speed things up will only make it worse, as my experience during my post-grad time shows.

Besides, I can't stress enough the importance of physical exercise. I wish I had practised yoga back then. Or swimming as others had suggested.

I only relied on meditation and jogging, which was not effective given the gloomy sky of Edinburgh that let the bad feeling coming back even during post-running cooling down. Running made me feel a little better, but only for a short while. You need to try any exercise that work for you. Running with your friends, I think will, also help.

Now that I practised yoga for almost 2 years, and am learning piano from scratch, I feel much better though that unwanted feeling sometimes keeps coming back, but at least I can slowly win the battle.

Hope this helps.

Today I’m sort-of functional in that I show up to work every day, get most of my tasks done, and pay the bills. But I have very poor executive function and I’m really scared of dropping off the deep end again. Stories like yours scare me and inspire some disgust because I see the same tendency in myself and I don’t want to go there.

I also know that practically speaking prolonged engagement/discussion with someone having such issues is unlikely to help. Nor is providing suggestions or blame. There’s not much anyone can do. The best I can offer is, if there was ever a period of your life where you were happier or more functional, can you see how to switch to that mode again? And if there’s one big thing blocking you (the fatigue, in your case), maybe there’s a one-time action you can perform, like going to a doctor, that could help.

I’m not offering this advice to you specifically but just to anyone who might feel similarly stuck.

If you have positive cash flow right now I’d recommend finding a therapist, since personality changes like this can take some deep digging. Personally I have found experiential therapy useful, things like EMDR, process work, gestalt, or even jungian dream analysis. Many on HN speak positively about cognitive therapy like CBT. You will need to spend a little time exploring and may not find the right fit with your first therapist. Good luck!

I've been reading and listening to a few things that are helping me. One thing I've been learning about recently are the body's responses to chronic stress, such as the release of cortisol in the body, and the long term damage that can do. And about allostatic load, which helps explain how it gets perpetually worse as time goes by.

The author's experience is real of course, but it doesn't sound like she is an authority to discuss if it can be cured or not.

Exercise is key. Probably a hard one to implement, but makes the largest difference in all.

Speak to a counsellor. Pragmatic, impartial perspective seems to be a good addition to other methods.

Eat well. A crap diet will put a lot of drain on your body and its part of a terrible cycle.

I've heard mixed impressions on things like SSRI's, but they can help over the short term to tear you away from burying yourself in negativity. I've heard over the longer term they become rather insufferable due to emotionally suppressive nature of them.

If anxiety is a part of it, other pharms like Citalopram can be a great help to manage attacks and help you see the 'other side' as it were.

People here praised this book recently, maybe worth reading: "The Body Keeps the Score" https://www.amazon.com/Body-Keeps-Score-Healing-Trauma/dp/01...

The fundamental premise of REBT is that it's not the events in our lives themselves, but our beliefs about the events that upset our emotional state. Hence to change our negative emotions, we must attack through reason the beliefs that promote negative emotional states. Here's is a useful summary of the REBT approach: https://rebtnetwork.org/whatis.html .

What I love most about REBT is that it trains us to be our own therapist. That is quite empowering and liberating!

If you feel too much pressure weighting you down go get proffesional help, even if it feels like a defeat.

http://quietkit.com, guided meditaton for beginners