u/BuyIndependent2319

Clinicians have described my overall picture as bipolar or schizoaffective. The most disabling day-to-day problem for years has been intense, repetitive rumination about a specific decision I made around Bitcoin in 2009–2010 (I mined a meaningful amount, lost access to it, and declined buying more when it was still cheap).
The thoughts dominate most of my waking hours. I pace constantly while they run. Sleep is still disrupted because the loops don’t shut off. I was offered ECT back then and chose medication instead.
Has anyone here used ECT primarily for this kind of obsessive, high-charge regret rumination (with the physical pacing and sleep disruption that come with it)? Did the frequency or emotional intensity of the loops drop in a lasting way, or did they return at similar strength once the acute effects wore off? Any notable effects on the urge to pace?

I’ve been speedcubing since Xmas and I’m still only averaging 1 minute 20 seconds. My PB is 55 seconds but I got extremely lucky that solve.

I’m still using the beginner’s method to solve the white cross and the F2L lookahead still seems like a bit of a challenge. Full OLL looks daunting so I’ve been using 2 look OLL. I’m pretty much an expert at PLL though. Any suggestions for improving my cross and F2L times?

I’ve been day trading off and on for a long time and still struggle with the same core problems:

1. Holding winners when they don’t go up right away
2. Closing losers just because I hate looking at the red
3. Overtrading after a bad exit
4. Starting the day paper trading, then switching to live when a setup feels like a “sure thing”
   Today showed all of it. After a few paper trading losses, I switched to live and bought 100 shares of YJ at 7.12. I sold at 6.65 because I didn’t want to keep watching the red number. That same position that lost $47 would have been up over $600 if I had held.
   After the loss I switched to two 25-share trades and took small gains. Then I went back to 100-share size, had one small win, and followed it with another 100-share trade that lost about $60. By the end of the day I had overtraded.
   The bigger pattern is that I almost always start with the intention to paper trade, but FOMO (or what feels like a really good setup) pulls me into live money. The $5,000 Roth IRA sleeve I’ve been trading has lost almost $900 in the past month.
   I’m not looking for “just paper trade more” advice. I’m looking for people who used to do these exact things — emotional exits, overtrading after losses, and repeatedly switching from paper to live — and actually fixed them with concrete rules or systems.
   What specifically helped you:
   • Hold positions that aren’t moving immediately
   • Cut losers cleanly without just “getting rid of the red”
   • Interrupt the urge to sell when the P&L starts bothering you
   • Stop overtrading after a frustrating exit
   • Stay in paper (or very small size) when the urge to go live hits
   Real process changes that worked would help.

I’ve been in Bitcoin since the 2017 run (GBTC). Turned a decent profit relatively quickly, then sold on family advice and watched it keep running. That regret still sits with me.
More recently I had a position in IBIT and sold a meaningful chunk when it dipped under $64k after hearing someone on YouTube say it was going lower. I know the long-term thesis, yet I still keep making the same short-term emotional decisions.
I’m seriously considering taking a chunk of money out of my Roth IRA, buying actual Bitcoin, and putting it on a hardware wallet (or even a paper wallet) that I can just put away and not look at. The goal is simply to own a full coin and remove the easy sell button.
Two questions for people who’ve been through this:

1. Has anyone successfully used the friction of self-custody (hardware wallet, offline storage, etc.) to finally stop selling during drawdowns?
2. I once had coins stolen from a software wallet on my computer. How paranoid should I be about the security of holding a larger amount of Bitcoin in self-custody? What are the real failure modes people have actually experienced?
   Not looking for price predictions or “just HODL” one-liners — genuinely curious how others have handled the psychological side and the practical security side once the coins are offline.

So I actually solo mined a 50 BTC block back in February of 2009. I wrote the private key on paper. I deleted the wallet.dat file, and then attempted to import the private key manually. It did not work, so out of frustration I tore up the paper in a hundred pieces and threw it away.

The hard drive in question was repurposed 3 years later and zeroed, so the wallet.dat file cannot be recovered.

I guess the question is, 17 years later, is there a way to perform a self-hypnosis to recover the private key I painstakingly wrote down in February of 2009?