@peatlegal said in Time, Progress, Despair / Recovering from Stress:
Years of anhedonic living driven by stress demons. My reaction to stress is to retreat, and so I've retreated for ages.
I could be wrong, but it seems most people retreat when stressed. I'm sure tolerance and source of stress vary for people, but eventually everyone reaches their "threshold" and shuts down in one way or another for some period of time.
I retreat when stressed. Your post rings true for my experience as well. "Stress demons," demons in general, have had too much power over me for a long time. I wish I had more helpful things to say, but past a certain point, medicine and substances can't really help.
I'm now mentioning Dr. Sarno, who studied the mind/body connection and back/muscle pain, and thought many pains stemmed from repressed rage. I mention this because physical pain can keep someone from overcoming stresses (true for me). His belief was that rage can't be eliminated, but its expression can be managed. In this view, rage targets certain body parts, depriving them of oxygen. Well, I wonder if rage or x factor is targeting certain brain parts and depriving them of oxygen / stressing them.
I don't really know, but I think that the body "shutting down" from stress is also the body shutting down because the mind is in turmoil. The mind directs the body, but often the body leads the mind... so I think it's always both and if we can understand the interaction better, then we're going in a better direction than the anhedonic / automatic route.
I somewhat agree with Sarno, but I think he is wading completely into the dark with the unconscious causation: it could just as well be fear or some unidentified biological response causing our bodily pain, and not simply "rage" (that is non-falsifiable, too, afaik, so it's really more of a therapeutic framework anyways, but can be helpful).
I think to avoid contradictions we can not say "x y and z are good substances." If you see good results from food etc. then that is good. But considering how many things you were taking maybe try to disconnect from that habit of intake and addiction. I think antidepressants and weed both cause serotonin syndrome and that probably takes time to get back to good health.
I was reading deeply into SSRI / depression things the last few years and discovered these drugs can have lasting effects, if not long recovery times. Weed alone I think is terrible for mental clarity, memory, planning, anger, libido, emotions, etc. But at the same time, the fact is that unmanaged stress and anger drive marijuana use in the first place. It seems like the anticipation of the high is the culmination of the stress one wants to unload. So instead of someone punching a wall or a lifting a barbell, they're hitting themselves in the head and lungs with weed.
Find good outlets and things that keep you going. Don't waste energy on people who don't make time for you. I think these two things are what relieve stress but also paradoxically the two things causing so much stress.
