Sunday, 25 February 2024
------------------------

Hello there. Yesterday I took the bus to town. While sitting in the bus, my mood started to worsen. I felt a sort of anxiety, specifically in my breathing from my nose to my stomach. I also felt a restlessness in my legs, mainly in my calves. A tingling sensation, an excess of energy. My eyes felt tired and I had to make an effort to keep them open, as well as keeping my head up. After the bus had arrived, and as I was walking down the main street, I noticed that my outlook on life and my judgement of my abilities were becoming negative. This is in stark contrast to what I thought previously in the morning and the day before. I started wondering if my mood and how I was feeling was impacting my thoughts and my judgement. It made me think back to all the late nights before sleep, where my feelings and my thoughts were both very negative. My impression was that it was always my thoughts, thoughts that I found rational, was what was causing my bad mood. But I started to wonder wether my feelings were influencing my thoughts. One idea is that your feelings can impact how important some thoughts and which thoughts are had. But I think your mental state will also influence your ability to judge or estimate reality correctly. Or is it that feelings completely alter your perception of reality? At the very least, it seems that how I am feeling has in some form a major role in how I think and judge.

That rational thought is not independant to some extent but their focus/bias are dependant on feelings. To think of a specific example, lets start with when im in a bad mood. I may start to think about life will always feel painful because I have great difficulty in connecting with other people. But specifically in the ways I feel are the right ways to connect with people. What I mean is that I'm not open to connecting with people in ways that I find atypical/"weird" perhaps. I seem to therefore make a hastily conclusion that connection with other people is impossible because I'm not able to connect with people in a way that is aligned with how I feel one should connect. Perhaps what we value is ultimately decided by emotions and how we feel. Also because I remember that I've explicitly said to myself that I found my thoughts irrational but because they were aligned how I felt or what I valued, I felt I had no other choice than to follow them. This of course resulted in more pain as you feel less in control. Not feeling in control because what you feel is right feels like something permanent or something existential about who you are. At least something very difficult to change, and if able to be changed, seems to bring some uncomfortable ideas about the nature of living and expericing life as a human. Ideas that bring a meaninglessness to life, a sadness of there not being something deeper and meaningful that makes who we are as an individual that we experience as we are.

What is the difference between or the relation between feelings and values. By values, I guess I mean the things we fundamentally see as truths or what is most important or matters the most. And then I guess you could think of feelings as a currency or metric to measure or give a worth to values/ultimate truths. So then feelings are a way for us to intuitively measure how correct a thought or idea is in terms of how aligned it is with our values. But that doesn't seem to fully make sense with the idea of different moods throughout a day change our outlook, or maybe it does, we're just missing something. Going back to when I made the example of my thoughts when I'm in a bad mood. Lets say I have a certain value of the correct way to connect with people. Now with an example where I'm in a good mood, what sort of thoughts would I make about my chances and ability to connect with people? Thinking back, I would typically have a positive outlook, and think of mangeable ways of improving my ability to connect, and most importantly, just throw myself out there, as practice was key I thought. But ultimately I would not accomplish what I wanted. Some examples from my life include reading books about social skills and social anxiety, attending a boarding school, travelling alone to random cities to try out social interactions without fear of seeing them again (though that did make me suprised of what you can get by asking), participate in group classes, specifically drama and improv. I also travelled to different countries, including netherlands where I forced myself to attend a large music festival alone. The qoute about insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result seem appropriate here.

But something changed this, me trying again and again. After I got an assesment and I started taking stimulant medication, my life would gradually completely change. Not because the stimulants made me smarter or have better thoughts, but I think they allowed me to hold a thought or a feeling for longer. I think this made me less dynamic of course but allowed me to better learn and retain an awareness of my behaviour and patterns over a longer period of time. Because it was after I started medication, that my failures started having a much greater effect on me that also compounded in a much greater way than ever before. Of course this could probably have happened without medication eventually, but it seems like the medication has allowing me to better listen to the feedback. Now this resulted in me finally becoming extremely negatively affected by my failures that I had episodes of becoming completely nonresponsive and making no effort to be pro social towards my surrondings. How I see it, is that the medication gave me a more appropriate feedback to me (the feelings I felt) in the contex that I was failing to connect with people in the way I valued. Because of course the medication wouldn't change the values I had. So now I was a little stuck. I would take a complete pause on my mission to connect with people (it has been a little over a year now since I last left the isle). I took a pause I had seen how greatly my suffering had compounded in the previous failures, and it would simply be irresponsible to continue. I decided to distract or indulge myself in programming (though this already started before this time just not at as much)