u/deepturned180isdeep

I'm 30 now, and I still feel like I have no concept of being or feeling like an adult.

I see so many people having built families, have kids, aggregate wealth, become integral community members, seniors, leads, chiefs, leaders.

And I still haven't figured out how to bring myself to want to shower every day.

I'm stunted by the same anxiety/fear mindset I've had since childhood trauma. A mindset that reinforced me into avoidant, comfort seeking, aimless behavior, living a non-participatory life.

It's such a scary retrospective feeling. It's an innate habituation of "I am going to be the same scared person next year", and then it happens, and continues to happen. You can't even conceptually think in years. It kind of just meshes your life into one blur that has never changed since being a kid. It's looking back on your life and seeing one continuous brokenness, except now you're just that much older, still feeling incapable.

I know I'm allowing the same anxious/avoidant/comfort-seeking mindset to propel the same stagnant life, but it has always felt like there's something deeper where I truly just continually feel like a child growing in an adult body.

Can anybody relate, or have insight?

I read side effects mainly dissipate after 6 weeks, but only for 50% of people.

I'm on week 7 of 42mg, and the fatigue and brain fog has only gotten worse.

My waking life feels like how you would feel after being awake 48 hours. That numbing blunt feeling in the front of the brain and behind the eyes.

Sad to feel like I cannot healthily take advantage of the depression reduction this drug has a reputation for.

But coming back to hopelessness because of the physical fatigue is by far a great opposite of the intention.

I've come back to a place of terribly high fear, anxiety, and hopelessness plagued by all or nothing thoughts that I am unable to be objective with. They only feel like truths, verdicts, or final sentences. I've come back to feeling like life is unlivable.

1. I can't maintain any sort of positive change. My mind is constantly focused on negativity, fear, or comfort.

2. I cannot show up for myself consistently because I'm hyperfocused on my exhaustion, anxieties, fears, and insecurities. They all feel like identities I cannot combat. They take up so much mental bandwidth from wake to sleep, to where I'm living life on 1% efficiency.

3. I cannot show up for the people I care for the most while they are alive. I am wasting the time I have with them, and then they will be dead.

4. I am not strong enough to see a loved one pass. When my dog or dad goes I don't want to be around anymore. I can't even begin to wonder how I'd respond. I'm so sad and scared.

5. I will always come back to this extreme place, like many a time before, resetting any positive steps I've taken.

6. It's been years of therapy and medications. My condition always just gets worse, because I've never been able to change my mindset and therefore behavior to make true lifestyle changes. It all has been a tenuous climb up a soapy hill.

7. I'll always be 99% think and 1% act, the act of which will be just more fodder for me to negatively analyze and think about.

8. I will always be this negative, low energy, exhausted, fearful, no risk, aimless, goalless, comfort seeking, isolating, cognitively damaged, performantly damaged person.

Please tell me how I'm wrong, perhaps with your own anecdotal evidence. Just even one thing...

I've dealt with ten years of mental health challenge perceived as just MDD and GAD. Not one doctor went without hearing me mention "I feel like there's something deeper causing the depression and anxiety, and it always seems to deal with my inability to function properly and do rudimentary things, making me extremely anxious and sad." I've held six different tech jobs in that time and they all let me go in one way or another. I'm now living back at home after two years unemployment. Maybe it's add, maybe I just suck at software.

I always wondered if I have inattentive adhd, and recently my psych put me on vyvanse because I think he's trying to piece it together for me for the first time in my life after trying so many different med regimens and yet, time after time, devolving into the same mess.

I started on Vyvanse 30mg first two weeks and now am at trying 40mg. I exempt taking on Friday as to prevent quicker tolerance. As far as breaking the resistance to starting things and thereafter finishing them, I have not found them to work. I don't know if it matters, but the one time in college I tried cocaine nothing happened at all, while everyone else was hopped.

I understand it could be a dosage thing, but I actually tried two 30mg once and just felt wired, but not in the way someone would engage more in tasks or flights of fancy, but wired as in my anxiety became more physical in my stomach and core and it actually made focus more difficult. It increases this somewhat uncomfortable physical sensation of butterflies.

For the same decade I've dealt with chronic fatigue. I read that people take vyvanse for that but also the therapeutic dose for that is 70mg, which I'm not so sure about given my experience with 60mg.

I check literally every single box for inattentive adhd as an adult, but was decently organized and successful as a kid into college, until I faced a breakup and got used to substances, which honestly set the pace for my life and subsequently mental health after college.

I'm starting to wonder if the core issue I've faced most of my adult life is not inattentive adhd, but maybe just more a debilitating anxiety I've practiced my whole life that started from trauma in my childhood due to an abusive parent (a therapist did note in my chart I have CPTSD once). I can attest to my anxiety always being a major crux: avoidance behavior, complacency, comfort seeking, lack of goals or direction, substance abuse, bad decision making, all increasing depression. And the cyclical nature of the anxiety promotes fear, disinterest, disengagement, lack of focus, and distraction in everything I do. Or maybe it's both? I just don't know anymore.

I don't know what to do or say anymore honestly. Maybe I'm supposed to be a Xanax guy instead of a Vyvanse guy. Disappointing how long this process takes, but understandable given my substance abuse history.

I could really just use some advice from anyone who might be able to relate. Thank you

My anxieties have been perpetuated for so long, so habituated and hardened into my identity, that every action I consider becomes an analysis to corroborate all the negatives about myself I've ever thought.

I think I have learned the following:
\- Don't give anxiety or bad thoughts any importance. That's what brought you here.
\- You have to go on with your life while you feel the anxieties. You have to do all the things while you feel them in order to train your brain that you can do them even in discomfort. You basically have to do this every day indefinitely.
\- True growth always happens through discomfort, so increasing your tolerance to discomfort is important, and that's done by just doing things regardless of how you feel.
\- Anxiety is a natural mechanism of the body. Instead of fearing it when it comes up, feel regard for your body and mind just trying to keep you safe, and move on.

But this past year has been especially difficult. It's a place I've been before, that scared, hopeless, deer in headlights feeling with the inability to reject the thoughts that I can't change or nothing even matters. When I'm here, I cannot be objective, and all the anxieties rule as identity or truth, strengthening one another even more. I tend to fail to take action more often than not, and when I do, the action is reduced to only negatives. I'll feel like I've made less progress over time and my anxieties just got stronger or further validated.

This place I am in, I admit and can see in retrospect, is the culmination of me not doing those things in that list and not working hard enough to disempower my anxieties. I haven't taken much action in discomfort still, in fact have seeked comfort more like I have my whole life. I haven't implemented meditation. I neglect breath work even when I know it works. I have more indulged into my anxieties and the fears behind them.

It's like my brain has found out the most successful way to always be comfortable is if I ensure I don't take any action, and so it defeats me by using past "evidence" to highlight how I would fail in any action before I even start it, perpetuating the cycle by attributing the not doing it to how much of a failure/loser I am.

How do I get out of this horrible cyclical mindset? Is it really just doing more actions in discomfort more consistently? What all else would you advise?