Just wanted to let you know - I am currently examining my anxiety and exhaustion generating work and study habits hard (and why they are so easy patterns to slip into), and your post helped me answer a question I had and couldn’t quite grasp.

Because for me, I generate The Dread© by imagining the disappointment of my professors, my boss, or parents, or whoever gave me the task or has a stake, if I don’t do it in time. Which also means that I can’t really do stuff for myself unless I imagine my therapist being disappointed or something. Which leads to weird and unusual attachments to people who have no idea of their significance, and a LOT of social anxiety.

But knowing the functionality of this pattern should be quite helpful in gently disengaging from it 🙂 So thanks!

Possibly a stupid question, but are you having a menstruation cycle, and if yes, are you tracking it? I was not able to infer the likelihood by your previous responses…

I’m asking because a certain amount of being high energy before and during ovulation, and more down between ovualtion and menstruation is very common, with some people having more severe bodily symptoms (PMS) in the down phase, and there is also a supercharged version of PMS with mainly depression like symptoms, called PMDD. It’s caused by a sensitivity to hormonal changes and can develop at any point in life. The monthly cycling sounds a lot like it.

(Possibly not applicable to you, then please ignore it, but maybe useful info for others).

Not for me, I literally don’t notice it unless I know it’s happening right now and “listen” for it.

But I’ve been told by other patients that they feel it as light-headedness or dizziness, may feel their heart pounding or like they can’t breath, or like the heart/body skips a step, and if the arrhythmia exacerbates to fibrillation, people lose consciousness very quickly (and may or may not die if untreated). Maybe that translates to your experience, but I don’t know. Generally it’s described more as a continuous feeling for some time, from a couple of seconds up to hours. But it varies a lot. ECG monitoring helps there.

But my specific arrhythmia were also found quite a long time ago, by chance during a standard exam for sports competition fitness as a child. So for pretty much my whole life I’ve been barred from stimulant and basically psychopharmaceutical medication of any kind, since pretty much all of them can cause or exacerbate heart conditions.

Seeing as I totally don’t notice episodes, a scenario where someone didn’t go to that exam and unsuspectingly walks around with that same or similar heart condition completely untreated, and kills themself by self-medicating and slipping into fibrillation is totally possible.

That said, it’s also not a very wide-spread condition, just a rare possibility. Still, please continue to advocate for yourself to have that checked out!

(Edited for an attempt at brevity)

The problem I have with self-medication (of ADHD meds or any other substance) is not so much that people are doing it - as you said, it’s a rough world out there, and you do what you can to survive and function.

But - “Medical supervision of treatment” is (or should be) not just a couple of empty words. All ADHD meds can have serious side effects and contraindications that you don’t necessarily know about beforehand or notice by yourself. Discovering your un-diagnosed heart disease by taking amphetamines without supervision and getting life-threatening arrhythmia can just feel like “I’m getting a bit dizzy for a time after taking the meds, no need for concern, I’ll just take it easy” (I know, because I have arrhythmia, and wouldn’t know it if I hadn’t had an ECG, as I barely notice it happening). Medical supervision should catch that kind of thing, that’s what it’s for.

You and I don’t know who reads this and what kind of conclusion they will draw, and what kind of risk assessment they do beforehand trying it out themselves. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have done your full research, and are aware that there is a chance you might harm or, if particularly unlucky, kill yourself doing this (especially if you cannot verify the purity of your medication, it could be cut with anything), and have weighed that against the benefits of being able to do work and function better in everyday life, I have no problem with you self-medicating or talking about doing that.

But if you don’t transparently communicate these risks, and how you came to your conclusion that this is the only way for you, it looks to others like an easy way to forgo the harder, non-medical, not-as-effective but also not-as-dangerous ways to treat yourself, implying that everyone can and should do it this way.

And I understand why some communities want to curb that from the get-go. Some rules are written in blood.

Absolutely, yes. I managed to get “has to be treated in a clinical setting as it’s actually exhaustion depression” burnout trying to keep a job in research. And I wondered for the longest time afterwards how on earth I am supposed to earn a living being that way.

It really helped to realize that as long as I can pay for rent, food and other basic needs, I am not actually required to a) stick with anything I do or any path I choose and b) be accountable for my life or “career” to anyone other than myself.

With that in mind, I am now trying to find another way - I read (among other things) the book “How to be everything” by Emilie wapnick, which is basically career advice for people who want/need to do lots of things instead of having one specialist career path. It helps you explore what you actually need in terms of money and free time and variety, and gives you some example ways of how you could structure your life to meet these needs, with pros and cons.

As a result, I now set myself on a track to qualify for a job field which would allow me to meet my modest financial needs by working part time (yes, it’s software development), while still being paid during qualification. I’m hopeful I’ll always find something interesting to do in that field without requiring that soon-burnt-out need-to-know-everything-about-it-NOW passion for it all the time (which was quite necessary in research to tolerate the shit working conditions, and which I cannot sustain), and allows for ample time and energy to cycle through temporal interests at my leisure.

I can’t tell you yet if this idea actually works out for me, but I feel that I’ve covered all my bases to be sure that it feasibly could (which included an internship to make sure the working conditions aren’t shit, as well. Discovered they can be, but aren’t everywhere, so I tried to keep where they wouldn’t be for the getting paid part). I’m really quite happy to be on the way to finding it out, though. I’m starting in September. Check back in 4 years and I can tell you for sure!

I’ve been there, as well. Luckily (or something like that), I’m sufficiently poor to be noticably anxious about spending more than 200 EUR in one go, and with that managed to convince myself that now that I know the parts and their price, I can hold off until I have accumulated half the extra funds by saving (drew up a saving plan and everything as the last step of obsession, and then re-focused on saving).

That was in January. I have stopped tracking my money and actively saving for this by April, and now the new PC build is again just something I wanna do some day, but not right now.

Negotiating with myself to first work towards possible and reasonable, but ultimately unlikely financial circumstances, and then predictably running out of steam, is my go-to strategy for expensive stuff I really want right now, but don’t actually require to fulfill a need. Works surprisingly well!

I process ideas and concepts mainly visually, in forms, colors and movement entwining (the movement especially is the most important!).

Verbal thoughts occur, but they are more of a chorus, or chord, rather than one voice - there is always several aspects sounding out together, and it can be hard to pick the dominant one to verbalize for communication.

There are thoughts which have already been translated to words before and I can communicate then easily, but also deeper areas or newly occuring “movements” which are still only visual, and I have to put in a lot of work to put them into words.

There’s more, but this is as far as I have pre-verbalized…

Only this - I once read a book that talked about minds as a rainforest, brimming with life and built in layers and impossible to fully grasp at once. I think that metaphor works pretty well.

Suspending worry for the future might be a plausible function for religious experience as an evolved feature of the human mind, yes.

I would also point towards the biological fact that while the existence of a higher being, consciousness or reality, is still ineffable, even after having had an experience that felt like there might be one, there is also an empirically true, measurable interconnectedness for humans that can be tapped into.

We live, and have evolved, in and through ecosystems that highly depend on interconnected species and processes that are so complex and intricate that we are still working on fully grasping them, and still discovering new connections (unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more because we have disrupted the connections by environmental damage, and the ecosystems start to fail due to that, making the connection obvious only after it ceased to exist). Connection between humans in the form of love in its many forms is also the ultimate glue that keeps societies together, and if that capacity diminishes due to circumstances, bad things tend to happen.

The myriad of connections we need to live, and to thrive and to feel like we are whole - all of this fully seen and experienced in their abstracted totality could in my eyes be one of the bases for religious experience.

And if that is true, it gives also another function - then, religious experience is the anchor and has a rebalancing function that makes sure that we don’t get lost in our own heads and human constructs, and keeps reminding us that we are part of the ecosystem, too, and keeps us from using it in a self-destructive manner. There are several deeply spiritual, nature-connected societies that only became so after a local environmental crisis caused by themselves. Tapping into the interconnectedness through religious experience has helped them find another, arguably better way.

(Of course, it doesn’t seem to be a hard, global fail-safe in human history, given the current state of the world, so I don’t know how direct this function would be.)

Thank you for taking the time to write this out, I probably would’ve been busy for a couple of hours trying to formulate my fairly similar take!

Maybe to add another aspect for - I think that the sheer ability of humans to have religious experiences in all denominations, which are often described as feelings of connectedness, does not necessarily mean that there is a higher being or reality “out there” that is being connected to in those moments.

But it does mean that our brains have religious experience as an in-built function (which, as you described, has been needlessly enshrined in religious institutions), which might mean that being able to have these experiences is an important part of being able to survive, or maybe even to thrive, as a human being, which also means as a community.