Edit:
Fuck. I don’t want to downplay your suffering if you’re American, Arab or Ukrainian, an oppressed minority and/or female (I’m neither) but sometimes I feel like empathy is taking a toll on me. It’s a huge weight to add to my mental problems. Thanks for the advice, I’m trying to get my parents on board with the “winding down” on the project while I try to get my mind off things and establish a schedule by trying to work in a help call center (I would have preferred manual labor but they are the only company hiring around that is large and evil enough I don’t mind them losing money through my incompetence in the presumably short time I last).
Original comment content below.
I’m European but after doomscrolling on Lemmy, watching Last Week Tonight etc. I can’t keep my calm over the US election, which is not helping my existing depression and suspected ADHD. The only good thing I did today was not eat much (I’m overweight) and 15 minutes of gardening. I can’t keep todo lists because I’m really depressed over not having completing any meaningful item for weeks, and not even my long-abandoned passion projects spark joy anymore.
I’m afraid things will go very wrong for my mental state if Trump wins. I have two psychologists and a psychiatrist but I’m only meeting them next week. Please help me get my mind off this and maybe even get something done.
Do yourself a favour: put the phone down. Stay away from your computer screen. Do literally anything else - some chores, a hobby, counting the number of people walking by your house, fill pages with drawings of squares, take several really long walks, find a pond and skip some rocks, whatever floats your boat. The point is not trying to accomplish anything, but to shift your attention. If something you’ve been putting off gets done, that’s a nice side effect, but not the point - so don’t worry too much about the result.
You have no control over the outcome of the U.S. election whatsoever. It is not worth your health to obsess over something that you can’t control that fills you with negative feelings. So block it out - if anything, try to summon some gratitude that you have the option to do that (though it’s ok if you find that hard to do).
I know this is much easier said than done. But you’ve got this. You’ll be ok. I’m pulling for ya.
Thanks. I’ll be trying to push my psychiatrist to do ADHD tests ASAP so I can get productive before the project’s Christmas deadline. Until then, this is pretty much the best advice I could be given. Thank you for your empathy.
No problem my friend. On the project side of things, a couple of thoughts. This is assuming it’s a project for school, if it’s not either see if any of this can be adapted to your situation, or otherwise discard it without any guilt.
100%, do whatever is in your power to expedite things with your psychiatrist. Ignore my caveat above on this one.
If possible, do one thing a day that moves the needle a little bit. It can be tiny - like, write 2 sentences - but just something where you can say “I did something”.
If you need to use a computer for some project tasks, go to campus (or a library) and use theirs. Sometimes being in an environment where folks are doing focused work (or at least pretending to) can help people stay on task a bit better. Turn off wifi and mobile connectivity on your phone, and keep it in your bag.
Set timers for doing project related tasks in increments - 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 5, whatever makes sense for you. Try your best to just do something project related for that increment. If the end product is you wrote a sentence, that is still something.
If you find you’re lapsing into doom scrolling instead of project work, give yourself permission to stop ASAP and go do something else (see prior comment). If you’re not going to be productive anyway, at least do so in a way that isn’t causing you as much distress.
If you need to review sources, print them out over just viewing them online. Go through them with a pen and a highlighter and take physical notes.
[should probably be higher on the list] Set a meeting with your prof and be brutally honest about your situation. Let them know your struggles with the project, and what you are trying to do about it. See if an extension is an option at all. It may not end the way you want, but having that conversation is something you can control (if not the ultimate outcome).
Be gentle with yourself. You’re in a hard spot, and you are trying your best while working to get the professional assistance you need. Maybe you do or are doing all of the above, and you don’t feel like it’s getting the results you need. That’s OK. When you get the professional support you need, you can revisit. Prioritize your well-being.
I hope you find at least some of this useful.
Thanks but my discipline is terrible so today I did mostly the same shit as yesterday. I succeeded at trapping a free-roaming cat that’s been coming to eat but after half an hour sitting in the cage with it I grew no closer to befriending it, just got bitten. Oh well, at least you get a cat pic.
I sent the “progress” report to my coach and she told me I don’t have to bother coming next week, as there is no point when I can’t follow her advice.
I replied positively to a course offer at uni that will make this “gap year” at least somewhat productive, so there’s that. I still have to type out the email to the psychiatrist before I go to sleep.
The college is impractically far and commuting makes me tired. My parents are at home in the afternoon but they are way too aggressive at trying to get me to work, I am already too tired most of the time and can’t focus when they’re watching. I tried dad’s office but his boss is not happy with my frequent toilet visits and I don’t get too productive there either. The problem is: they’re right, the only time I’m productive is when there is somebody around but they just wreck my mood when they’re behind my back so there is a huge cost: I get 0-10 minutes of productivity for every evening spent crying or pouting. However, still better than what I would be doing alone.
The nearest town has a library but I’m still pretty sure I couldn’t end up productive if I used the study room. The work is coding btw and I’m not disciplined enough to disable procrastination webpages; still I would probably end up binging “Unusual articles” or similar collections on Wikipedia. I guess it there is harm to try the library, though.
Thank you for the cat tax, though I’m sorry to hear you got bit.
I completely understand re: campus being too far to be practical, but 100% recommend giving the library a shot. Given that it’s coding, the whole ‘use an organization’s device rather than yours’ thing is tricky (unless you can put everything you need on a remote/web-accessible IDE or something - I remember screwing around with something like this but as decidedly not-a-coder, it may not be practical). Still, the library has the whole other humans being around aspect going for it, with the benefit that said humans aren’t going to go out of their way to distract or push you. Sometimes people just being there, but doing their own thing, is enough to help folks buckle down a bit. But it might not be, and that’s ok - at least you’ll know.
If all else fails, pay more attention to my first post and the others like it here than the second one. It’s certainly worth trying for progress while waiting on meds, but if it’s just not happening focus on well-being. I obviously don’t know you well enough to offer more practical advice on trying to get the project done, but definitely think meds will help if your psychiatrist agrees.
Hang in there buddy.
No problem. I’d take a gruesome, mind-wrecking rabies death over Trump any day if it didn’t entail so much suffering for everyone around. So yeah, I thoroughly disinfected the wound. The election scar on my soul will stay way past 2029 though, if I love that long.