Feeling alive
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For those of you have gone through periods in your life where nothing you do mitigates stress, you feel like you’re only surviving and life is dull, how did you pull yourselves out? Did any change you made make a bigger effect than the others?
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@bigdeuce white knuckling it until i found peating and then after reading positive stuff about regeneration from haidut and ray and danny’s podcasts with them which switched me to optimism, as well as recognizing the power of the mind
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Embrace novelty in your life. Cultivate intuition. Do things that might seem uncomfortable like invite people over for dinner that you made. Be indifferent to your failures and just move on. Learning always. Be apart of real life and think of online digital culture as like a treat in your life not the full deal. Examples of real life:
Play the piano or drums
Cook meals for more than yourself
Have a garden or many plants
Bowling with friends
Climb a mountain.
Walk through a park but not on the paved walkways. Be spontaneous
Get lost. Find your way back! -
Looking outside yourself, consider joining a social activity or even volunteering in some way. Creative hobbies, especially learning something new, like painting for example. These things are usually what’s missing when I fall into a rut. Often it’s too much consumption and not enough output.
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The feeling that the only goal is to survive is pretty much my baseline. But spending time in nature can pull me out of that funk for a while.
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You need change. I don't think there's a supplement or dietary change one can make to produce this. You need a life full of novelty and progress. When you're in that state, life is naturally going to feel vivid and involving. Routine is death, essentially.
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Ray identified two paths for this kind of situation: go to sleep, or escape.
The rise in serotonin caused by agonizing routine, a hormone of hibernation, represents the first option.
The latter option is afforded for working people in small segments of (8 - 2 - 2) = 4 hours (or often less) of daily time to do something nontrivial, weekends +- other chores/maintenance, sometimes a week or two of vacation time per year.
What to say? Maybe it's the serotonin talking but sometimes I feel the need to be a good soldier and live in the trenches for a few weeks.
Injecting just a tiny bit of novelty (go for a walk outside for ten minutes, a chaotic living environment) really helps when you're in this mode.
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@bigdeuce Take all the good advice provided in this thread, just start small and don't stop.
Maybe just start with doing some meal/food experiments, finding/reading interesting books, going to new places, etc. Then learn how to get more CO2 with bag/Buteyko breathing
Also, read/learn how to lower stress in peaty ways:
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2014/05/25/stress-a-shifting-of-resources/
https://raypeatexplained.com/ray-peat-on-stress/
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/gelatin.shtml
etc."To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in suffering" - Friedrich Nietzsche
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@bigdeuce Peaty basics do help but not always.