u/Infamous-Ad-9149

i have a history of anorexia, during which my noise sensitivity skyrocketed.

now i'm out the other side and weigh a little too much; i can tell my current way of relating to food is still fuelled by reactance more so than peace. i would like to address this, but i live in an apartment where i receive strong sensory triggers from my neighbours and that dysregulates my nervous system even further.

i feel a bit desperate because how am i supposed to recover when my environment is not safe? i could move to a new place, but i looked into it and it's not so simple to find one. i'm in a top location rn and could live with every other aspect of my apartment. the rent is comparably low, too. only problem is i am literally being woken up at night from my neighbour's steps on the ground 7 nights a week, and this is quite terrible on my nerves.

please help or let me know what i can do to cope with the situation. thank you.

i am trying to recover from emotional eating and have been wondering if meal prep is harmful or helpful in this scenario.

on the one hand, meal prep means every time i do want to eat something, i can have something healthy and balanced without needing to overthink it or make impulsive decisions. on the other hand, i have definitely seen it happen that i eat my healthy meal prep (for example my breakfast for the next day) as a snack, and that typically doesn't leave me feeling so well.

i'd love to hear about your experiences and learn if you generally deem meal prep helpful or harmful for the sake of emotional eating recovery. (the foods i eat are generally healthy anyway, but i do overeat healthy stuff, too.)

i have bpd and misophonia (and misokinesia).

noises are a major self-harm trigger for me if they cause a lot of discomfort. but that feels so weird to say and i wonder if anybody suffers from the same pattern?

noises make me feel so incredibly trapped and uncomfortable and if i cannot change the situation, hurting myself is the only choice i have.

i have bpd and misophonia (and misokinesia).

noises are a major self-harm trigger for me if they cause a lot of discomfort. but that feels so weird to say and i wonder if anybody suffers from the same pattern?

noises make me feel so incredibly trapped and uncomfortable and if i cannot change the situation, hurting myself is the only choice i have.

hi there:)

so i've been overconsuming artificial sweeteners for several years and at the moment, (TMI) i have watery diarrhea almost daily.

i typically avoid table sugar and stuff like maple syrup altogether and look out for clean ingredients, but instead, i've got so used to buying diet coke, zero sugar energy drinks, flavour powders, artificially sweetened protein bars and powders.

obviously, they aren't good for my health and i have made a choice to stop buying artificially sweetened drinks, bars and powders, at least for a while, to see what happens. however, i do wonder how i can adapt my diet to feel satiated without accidentally consuming more sugars or overcompensating by eating more fruit. i eat mostly intuitively and do not want to start tracking, as i feel that could have a negative impact on my mental health.

do you have any tips on how i can prepare my meals to be less sweet, but none the less satiating?

for example, in the mornings i usually have oatmeal - either with yoghurt and fruit or cooked with soy milk and topped with fruit. but in either scenario, i would typically add some flavour powder. should i just skip this and get used to the lack of sweetness, or can you think of small adaptations to make this easier?

what about healthy desserts and snacks?

thanks so much.

i am planning a trip to Scotland, but since i am vegetarian, i wanted to ask if anybody can recommend traditional foods that i can eat while i'm there.

so far, oat cakes are on the list, but that's about it.

i'll be buying most of my food at the supermarkets but still get an occasional restaurant meal, i assume.

so i have a history of anorexia. even just from a physiological pov, it's just the case that restriction made me incredibly anxious and, consequently, compulsive when it came to the environments i'd allow myself to eat in. i.e., alone, at home. i know the physiological side of things made it only more prominent, but even at a healthy weight, i still struggle eating around other people.

however, there is one anorexic boy in class (you can see it, and having been there myself, this is pretty obvious), but he regularly brings food and eats it in class. and i just wonder HOW does he do it? he is underweight so i would imagine that even just physiologically speaking, this would enhance the anxiety around food a lot, and he'd maybe want to save his calories and eat them alone at home. this is how it would go for me, anyway, especially when i was restricting heavily.

i'm really curious if there are any people on here in the community who are like him and not like me, in that they are totally unbothered by environments even when restricting? i thought being deeply bothered by your environment while eating was a natural side-effect of starvation (see Minessota Starvarion Experiment)....anyway, i'm just curious:) hope you don't understand this to be judgemental, i'm really just trying to learn something or understand, since i haven't understood yet how to stop struggling with my surroundings when eating outside my home.

i'd like to understand the psychology of anorexic people who still manage to eat in front of others and be completely unbothered by it, even if they are thinking a lot about restriction in general.

i would like to create my own website to put me and my skills out there, but my tech abilities are very limited.

should i pay someone to create a website for me? where can i find people who do this kind of work? would it be a one-time payment?

EDIT: to specify, all i need is a simple website to make people aware that i offer private English lessons and maybe an option for them to contact me and book calls.

i am currently overthinking my career choices A LOT.

from the moment i wake up to the second i go to bed, my mind drifts from thinking i should move abroad, study web design, no, sociology, maybe start a business....there are at least 5 new ideas emerging every day, and this has been going on for a few weeks.

i have taken steps to try out a new job in a couple of months, so this should be good enough and i have already done the thing i am in control of. it's not like i am procrastinating on that.

but then i can't stop thinking and researching to figure out what my options are. it's really stressful and the thoughts are especially intrusive when i'm just trying to relax, read a book, etc.

how can i cope with this in a healthy way?

The advice my therapist would give goes: "have you tried headphones?", which I honestly think is kind of insulting. Yes, I've tried that, and noises are worse for me when they're all muffled and imprecise, but i know exactly they're still there.

Idk what to do about my neighbour, though. Two nights ago, I woke up at 11pm just from hearing his steps on the ground. Idk if i feel ready for a personal confrontation. would it be an option to simply leave a note by his door explaining my sensitivity? would that be hypocritical since i sometimes use a blender in my kitchen and he might hear that too? or is there anything else i can do to deal with the situation?

Okay, so I've got a couple of questions as I am currently working on setting up my first ever mind palace (or memory palace).

1. If I have to study for various subjects (for example social psychology, general psychology, cognitive neuroscience), can I store them all in the same building? Will there ever be a point when the palace is overly full and needs to be emptied or replaced?
2. Should each session of a lecture course (for example 10 different sessions with different topics in social psychology) really have its own room? Or is it okay to associate freely and across different rooms?
3. I read a lot that people use their mind palace to memorise their shopping list, but I wonder if this could be inefficient, especially if you are prone to buying some similar items every time but also want flexibility in "deleting" items, too. You might, for example, have images of carrots, apples, yoghurt, tomatoes all over your memory palace because you buy these items often. But what if on a given day, you only want a subset of these, plus some other new items? Given that grocery shopping is something we do so often and the list always changes at least slightly, I wonder if this could cause confusion when you remember things that shouldn't be on "today's list". ...hope that makes sense.
4. Is it okay to make the memory palace itself an imaginary place? As in, is it okay not to build it on the basis of a place I have already been to irl?

Okay, so I've got a couple of questions as I am currently working on setting up my first ever mind palace (or memory palace).

1. If I have to study for various subjects (for example social psychology, general psychology, cognitive neuroscience), can I store them all in the same building? Will there ever be a point when the palace is overly full and needs to be emptied or replaced?

2. Should each session of a lecture course (for example 10 different sessions with different topics in social psychology) really have its own room? Or is it okay to associate freely and across different rooms?

3. I read a lot that people use their mind palace to memorise their shopping list, but I wonder if this could be inefficient, especially if you are prone to buying some similar items every time but also want flexibility in "deleting" items, too. You might, for example, have images of carrots, apples, yoghurt, tomatoes all over your memory palace because you buy these items often. But what if on a given day, you only want a subset of these, plus some other new items? Given that grocery shopping is something we do so often and the list always changes at least slightly, I wonder if this could cause confusion when you remember things that shouldn't be on "today's list". ...hope that makes sense.

4. Is it okay to make the memory palace itself an imaginary place? As in, is it okay not to build it on the basis of a place I have already been to irl?

i'm studying for exams in July and this weekend, my personal preference has been to do the quizzes without any revisions first (on material i've only encountered once or twice before, during lectures), and to then read the textbook after.

ChatGPT says this is fine, but i am not sure if this is me procrastinating in some subtle way?

what do you think, is this actually an effective strategy or would it be better to do things the other way around?

i feel like doing the quizzes first (generated by NotebookLM on the basis of the slides) will at least spike my interest more and have me asking questions first before i read the answers in the textbook? if this actually works, the contents of the textbook should seem more relevant and stick better because they answer questions i've asked myself before.

last year, i was just a tiny bit underweight and looked pretty much "ideal" and people would also treat me in a way where i could tell they found me more attractive.

since then, i have gained a significant amount of weight (mostly because i was mentally unwell being too skinny, but it was also scary af to regain the weight), also muscle, but also a lot of body fat. in fact, my logic has been that i need to put on more and more muscle to visually balance out the fat, which hasn't exactly been working for me. body image is pretty bad now especially because i don't even have a feel for my dimensions anymore and i can't tell how much of my mass is muscle vs fat.

i don't think going on a cut would be healthy for me, but i feel like it's the kind of thing a person with my current body type would do if they didn't have an eating disorder.

i also don't know if trying to put on muscle in the gym had me putting on more fat unintentionally?

any ideas as to what i should do?

i eat mostly intuitively and don't think tracking is healthy for me....but then i do overeat, which i think is the crux of the problem - not my exercise routine, but my nutrition. and this is a problem even though i am very health-aware and know a lot about nutrition, macros, ingredients.

hi:)

so i am in a more or less stable/recovered place. i have a history of restrictive eating and since last summer eating problems that verge more on the side of overeating/occasional purging - which i think is still due to a good dose of post-restriction reactivity.

since April, i am going to university and i have a really busy schedule. which isn't bad per se, because it's good for me to have things in my life to think about other than food. but i wonder if the way i am handling my meal times at the moment should be improved in any way.

the way it's been these past few weeks is: breakfast, lunch, dinner - normally, i'd have a snacks, too, but now i basically have a bigger lunch and bigger dinner instead. idk if this is good and on some days i come back home at 8pm, so i have a very large gap between lunch and dinner and get quite hungry..but i don't feel comfortable eating outside the house.

so essentially i wonder if it is good or bad for my body and mind to have this pattern of - i eat breakfast - i do stuff, focus on my work and sometimes suppress hunger cues while outside - i eat a lot for lunch - i do stuff - i eat a lot for dinner - i drop into bed cause i feel super tired. is this temporary suppression of hunger cues in favour of "being busy" fine for my mind and body, if it is happening between meal times? or is it too stressful for my body and mind and implicitly counting as restriction and counting as something disordered? if anything, my weight is too high, so i don't worry about eating too little... but i wonder if maybe, paradoxically, a restriction mindset may still have me overeating at meal times when i finally get the chance?

but i wouldn't know how else to approach it because, like i said, i feel super uncomfortable eating on the go..so i don't exactly want to plan on having snacks at university.

i started wondering about this because i feel like this might put pressure on a patient to adapt or modify their emotions in such a way that they can no longer be sincere with their therapist?

if they are being "punished" for their honesty by being made responsible for the therapist's state of worry and concern...isn't that something that could ultimately even be a hindrance in therapy?

let me know what you think:)

idk if this is common with bpd, but i experience this cycle between feeling super stressed and super bored a lot. it's probably my nervous system jumping from total hyperactivation to the opposite.

anyway, i wonder if anybody can help with this? can anyone relate and have you found anything that helps?

i have recently moved to a new city to go to university here. at the moment, i am really stressed due to lectures and other appointments.

one element that i notice is enhancing the stress is the fact that i have to ride the bus up to 6 times a day. mostly just for 10 minutes at a time, but it's really hard on my nervous system, especially when it's super crowded and there's so much sensory overload from all the people cramped together in the small space.

i've been thinking that maybe there are techniques to make my daily bus rides more enjoyable, but so far i haven't been creative enough to come up with anything reasonable. i'd love to hear your suggestions if you can think of any:)

i have a formal bpd diagnosis, even though i don't experience as much distress as others with the same diagnosis may do.

however, i am cirrently experiencing a lot of change in my life and as a result also lots of worries. sometimes the worries intensify and i feel very, very scared. the key problem is i don't even know who i am, what i am doing, what should become of me. idk i feel so scared and like i am going insane.

is that something anybody with bpd can relate to? if so, can you please explain to me what is going on, and how i can deal with it?

i feel like my sense of self is disintegrating i have no idea who the hell i am and it's scary af.

i've had anorexia for much longer without ever purging, but last year i started throwing up occasionally.

i'm at a healthy weight now but sometimes i still purge and every time it feels good for a moment, but then an hour later it's actually just more destabilising than before because i think my body doesn't like the feeling of how i'm taking away its food right out of the stomach. which is of course the feeling i like, but then the day after purging is usually still marked by a lot of chaotic eating as well, because my body gets confused by the sudden drop in blood sugar and everything. so emotionally, it then sucks just as bad to have weird, intense hunger or cravings right after i managed to purge.

it's like....isn't purging supposed to "help", but then it only makes everything more messy?