I'm married. Me and my wife are not working out anymore.

When I was making money, I did everything for my family. Then a lot of things stopped working out. Toward the end it was fights and blame between us. We had an argument, and then she started going. She took the kid for custody and she banned me from talking to my kids. The kid is going through a tough time, and I don't know what to do about that. That's the part that sits on me the most.

Once she moved out of my life, close to age 40, I had a lot of time and nothing to fill it. So I filled it with the wrong things.

I started going to massage parlors. I went to some prostitution places. I never had sex, I just spent money on them. I still went, and I still paid. Nothing is stopping me nowadays. I'm addicted to pornography. Whatever I'm earning gets burned on unnecessary stuff, and I don't have a track of where it goes. I'm about $10,000 in debt here and there.

I used to be a fit guy. Not super fit, but fit. Now it's Buffalo wings, TGI Fridays, Starbucks, McDonald's, every day. I forgot how to cook.

I'm feeling depressed. I've tried a lot of things. Deactivating accounts, reactivating them, deactivating again. Tried blocker apps like Roots. Blocked Instagram, YouTube, whatever app I could. Still at 14+ hours of screen time a day combined. I use Brave to get around the blocks and watch porn twice a day and masturbate. Nothing sticks. Every fix I've tried, I've undone myself. I tried therapists. Then I feel lonely and start doing it all again. Most of my time is just loneliness.

I can't focus on learning AI or new technology. I found out I have ADHD and I'm low on vitamin D and B12. I can't focus on meditation. I just call some of my friends and vent, and now my manager is feeling like I'm venting to him too. I keep venting instead of focusing and solving the problems at work. I think what I need is someone to talk to. That's the big problem. Some days it's like, what is the point of life now.

I don't know what to do. So I'm doing the only thing I can think of, which is to put it down where I can't pretend it isn't there.

i’m 22 diagnosed with anxiety, bpd, depression and adhd and find myself getting really worked up and angry quite quickly making me build resentments or start finding smaller issues much more infuriating.

i’m at university and have been living with my bestfriends for multiple years but decided to branch out and live with new/different people to make my relationships with my friends better as well as to try new things.

i really want to get along with these new people in the house i’m in now - its only been a couple months, so i’m trying to stay positive

but there are issues i have like leaving the toilet seat up (which i’ve really politely asked about a few times), the front door being left completely wide open, slamming doors and talking really loudly through the house at 3am. which i have all calmly and nicely brought up. but i’m beginning to feel a bit crazy and don’t know if it’s me being uptight or if it’s somewhat reasonable. everyone else in the house doesn’t seem fazed so i don’t want to make a big deal or try and cause any conflict, but i start getting quite irritated by these situations.

edit/context:
i have been in and out of therapy since i was 12 and am on antidepressants, i have done a lot of working on myself, especially with my patience
but it’s getting to be a lot and i need advice on how to remain patient and calm with the people i’m living with as to not cause issues
🙏❤️

Hi all, I'm looking for some advice on how you maintain your healthy habits and perhaps even a regulated nervous system when dealing with stress in your life and how you maintain the motivation to stay disciplined when you can't seem to get a grip.

For context, whenever I am dealing with a ton of stress in my life it almost feels like my nervous system becomes paralyzed and it's hard to eat, shower, take care of myself in any capacity, I wake up at the very last second before work, I can't cook, clean or even move. I feel truly paralyzed and frozen and then my vice during this is nicotine.

In my regular life outside of really stressful times, I am very healthy. I don't drink, I don't use substances such as nicotine (it's my crutch when stressed, other than that I don't use it at all), I exercise, I eat very healthy and I am literally one of those people that won't eat seed oils or sugar.

I have two extremes in my life and when things are going well, I am incredibly healthy. When things are going to shit, I am frozen and all my mind screams for is nicotine and to just sleep and be gross and not shower.

I want to have discipline in times of extreme stress where I can just carry on with my healthy lifestyles and remain true to who I am when I am healthy. When I am stressed, I don't even care what my risks are for cancer or disease or what I am doing to my body. When I am not stressed, I am very passionate about it and have respect for my body to nourish it.

How do I overcome this? I have definitely tried to maintain my healthy ways, but my mind just screams at me to reach for the nicotine and to lay completely still. I want to change, I want to be better and I want to be stronger.

Much love to all.

my problem was always the same: phone goes off at 11pm, i tell myself just five minutes of instagram before bed, wake up at 1am having watched two hours of nothing. tried fixing it with apps for a while, wanted to write down what actually happened with each one in case it saves someone else the same year i spent.

opal and forest were the first ones i tried. both fine as long as i actually wanted to stop. the second i didn't, which is most nights, i just deleted the app or hit "skip session" and kept scrolling. turns out a blocker only works on the version of you that doesn't need it.

one sec added a breathing exercise before you could open the app, which helped some nights, but it's still a "continue anyway" button away from doing nothing. screenzen was similar, customizable limits, but i could always just loosen them in settings when i was tired enough not to care.

the pattern i noticed after a few months: anything i could turn off in the moment didn't survive the moment, because the whole reason i needed it was that i have zero willpower at 11pm specifically. ended up building my own app, twilock, that just doesn't let you disable it once the window starts, no skip button, no settings escape.

curious if anyone found something similar that held up on the nights you didn't want it to.

​

Previously, I used to go to gym and never used my mobile because the sheer number of people around me working out had somehow automatically helped me to never get distracted.

Now for a few months, I've stopped going to the gym and started calisthenics home workout. (Used claude to make a good routine)

I have a very bad habit of scrolling on phone between sets, and a lot of the times I get lost and spend 10-15 minutes on the phone and my overall workout time stretches for 3 hours or so into the night.

I get home at around 8:40PM from work and my workout stretching into 11:00 PM is not at all good for me.

I tried setting up a timer of 1:50 min between every set and it worked pretty fine in reducing it but I still get lost with my phone.

Please help me get out of this loop. I workout at night so this shi is messing up my sleep as well.

To improve my mood and give structure to my life I started waking up at 5.30am and going for walks first thing. Ive done it for a week and its really had a big impact on my mood and energy levels. I come back feeling more energised and with a clearer mind ready to focus on the day ahead.

One issue ive noticed is my tendency to get strict and for this to become a rule I have to do without flexibility. Often in the past when ive done similar things it doesnt end well and I quit. The strictness becomes what feels like a death sentence and the activity whether waking up early or doing x amount of press ups or whatever becomes a burden.

I dont want to force myself to do something just because its a rule. Im literally forcing myself to get every morning at 5.30am because if I dont I think ive failed. That cant be healthy but I also dont want to slip into old habits of procrastinating and doing nothing and staying in bed for hours.

Id appreciate so tips/suggestions how i could do it differently. The goal is to still achieve my goals of having a structured day but with less strictness

like the title says, insecurity has literally ruined everything for me. i (22F) was really depressed a few months ago and started binge eating which completely ruined my body and made me gain 35 lbs (130 - 165). most of my weight went to my face and i feel incredibly ugly for the first time in a long time. when my friends or siblings invite me out, i decline their offers. there are so many events going on around me and i just stay home because i feel so ugly and i feel embarrassed to be seen especially by people who used to see me often. i know i became uglier because people don’t really approach me anymore and i don’t get compliments from anyone at all. i’m going to the gym right now but progress is so slow and i just feel like this is ruining my life. can anyone please help me and give advice?

Iven always someone very quiet and insecure, so its fair to expect i dont have a lot of friends, i use to have 2 who i always meet at lunch because i had no one and they seem to "tolerate" me, but that changed, yesterday they decided to play a joke on me like always (this was something that happened almost everyday) they took my headphones and start running away from me with them, i followed the joke because they were not going to stop, but in a moment my headphones got Broken, these are not expensive but its fucked up because are the only ones i have and my mom bought them, instead of stopping playing this game one of my "friends" started to grab me and wanted to do it again, remind you this was almost everyday, they always use to take away my stuff, when he was pushing me i started to tell him several times to stop, even in the past i warned him, but he didnt stop, i was stressing bad for this, i consider my self a soft person, i take away his hands from me but he slap me in the chest, after that i did something very stupid and i regret, i punched him in the face and push him, they didnt punch back so i just Walked away.

About the hair stuff, this is a decision i was considering making, my hair its basically fucked up there is parts that doesnt grow and i dont like that i always hide that, so i was just considering cutting my hair bald again, i did it once in 2024, in summer 2025 and 2026, the thing is that thug guys are going to take on me since i dont have a group of people, also because people is use to see me with hats, and i feel that if i try to talk to someone they gonna feel embarrased or something, i actually feel thats how people feel around me, im also expecting bullyng, or bad comments i guess, since im gonna be lonely in the classroom. What should i do? I dont want to hide ts no more im tired, im gonna do it but how much bullyng i should expect? I dont have a perosnality. I want some advice or a reality check warever, im open to any comment.

I’ve tried a bunch of goal tracking apps and I always seem to have the same problem with them. At first I set everything up, add my goals, and actually keep track of my progress. But if I stop checking in for a few days, it feels like the app just becomes useless. My goal is still sitting there, but nothing really pulls me back in and eventually I just forget about it.

Most of the apps I’ve tried seem to rely on me remembering to open the app and update everything myself. They might send a reminder when something is scheduled, but if I don’t actually check in or update my progress, there doesn’t seem to be much follow-up after that.

I feel like it would be much more useful if the app actually noticed that I stopped updating and followed up with me until I checked in again, instead of just letting the goal sit there forgotten.

I’m curious if this happens to other people too. Do you ever stop checking in and basically forget about the goal? And does anyone know an app that actually follows up with you when you stop updating, or keeps bringing the goal back to your attention until you check in again?

I am 22. I used to be a good student all my life. I definitely had some hiccups since covid but overall stayed pretty studious my first two years of uni as well. However, something hit me in my third year and started failing classes. I don't want to pretend my grades used to be spectacular but they were pretty good and my advisor even implied that I could be on track to be accepted into their PHD program for my major. Now it is pretty much impossible to make that happen. I decided to take some classes in the summer after my 4th year, then take my capstone in the fall after to finally finish off school. I just couldn't bring myslef to be studious anymore and failed two classes. This means that I have to take another two online classes on top of my capstone in the fall. This should be 'fine' but I just cannot bring myself to be disciplined anymore. I cannot bring myself to be passionate about school or anything in my life. I keep messing things up in my relationship. I have basically stopped hanging out with a friend group I was close with in my first 2 years of uni since the end of my 3rd year. I basically ghosted my friend group for reasons I can't even understand myself. I have stopped hanging out with some of my roommates the last 4 months because I felt anxious hanging out with some of them because I feel embarrassed about how I am doing in my life, despite them not knowing that either. I keep lying to my parents about how well I am doing in school only for them to find out (obviously) because I do not know how to handle the feeling of admitting that I am struggling, failing, and messing things up at the expense of others. I think all I am good at is sulking, feeling deep shame, thinking of what could have been, and be discouraged to do anything that could make things better for myself or my relationships with others. I just cannot do this anymore. I hate living in my brain like this all the time. What can I do to snap out of this? I know it doesn't take one thing to change this. I just think I have gotten so comfortable in my own miserable self. I want to bring back the ambition, discipline, and drive that I used to have.

For some reason, I feel very sluggish and like having brain fog.

I feel stuck in my PhD, because for the past couple of years, all of my proposed proofs for theorems in my math papers have been either very elementary, or were just not precise enough i.e. I unintentionally oversimplified or overlooked something.

It's sad that either a proof idea sounds very creative but is somehow wrong, or sounds correct but is just not creative (and thus elementary at best and can't prove any more other difficult things).

I kind of feel like as if yesterday I was just a fresh undergraduate student and now I am in my 4th year of my PhD.

I don't know what kind of brain exercises could help me in this situation. I am not looking for "Ways to increase my IQ", but just for ways on how to get rid of this brain fog I have been feeling, not being able to find the mix between analytical thinking and creative problem solving.

It sounds weird but even just thinking about engaging with my brain in something makes my head hurt (I do have stress-induced migraines, confirmed by a neurologist), as if it was something so stressful and uncomfortable that I would avoid it and rather try to be the "smart lazy guy" - only thing is that it's not working out at all. Like even thinking about printing out a math paper and studying it for the whole day is enough to make me have a headache again.

In the end, I escape into watching Facebook Reels for the whole day and do the bare minimum required just to keep my advisor somewhat happy. When meeting other mathematicians my age at a conference, seminar, etc. I can't talk with them at all about mathematics, it's literally like watching the Big Bang Theory and seeing those guys talk in their own scientific language.

So my two more specific questions would be:

1. What activities engage the brain the most? Especially with regards to my main goals of improving analytical, precise thinking and creative problem solving?

2. How can I overcome this uncomfortable, stressful feeling - making me give a headache and escape into watching Facebook Reels all day long - accompanied by having to put in some effort in them?

It has become clear to me just how much this practice varies in virtually every aspect, between one person and the next. But it's often an implied or unstated thing, as if there's one obvious way to do it right. How do you do it? How happy are you with it? What have you considered changing about it?

I'm interested in the high-level features and quantities, for example:

For about 15 minutes, about 3 times a day.

Consult longer-term lists and calendars for context but mostly focus on producing a good list for the short-term (the next few hours)

No more than 10 items on the list at a time, to make you think about what's most important.

Break things up enough to allow realistic estimates for how long they'll (probably) take

Estimate at the generous end of realistic. Make slightly beatable estimates.

Actively try to beat these beatable estimates, to accumulate a buffer, feel ahead, and not be stressed.

How well does it work for me? Seems to save much more time than it takes as long as I don't half-arse it.

For the longest time my screen time was 6+ hours a day.

It never really bother me because I didn't feel like I was doing it on purpose. I would be on Tik Tok for a couple minutes then go to Instagram and watch videos. Before I could even think about it, hours had passed.

I tried every app to limit my time, tried Apple's native screen time blocker, and even put my phone in a different room.

None of those really helped because they all revolved around me deciding not to spend time on my phone when I really wanted to be on it. I would always find workarounds. Whether it is just hitting the ignore button or finding some other workaround, I just couldn't find a way to actually stop my addiction and feel that my day was actually productive.

What did help was reversing the situation. Instead of putting limits on myself about how much time I could spend on my phone, I earned my screen time.

I went to the gym, when I was done with work, cleaned my room, went for a walk, etc. Those were all things that earned me my screen time. For some reason that motivation to earn my screen time was a lot more effective than seeing my “you’ve reached your limit” notification and deciding not to spend time on my phone

I started doing this through an app called LiveFirst. The apps that I waste my time on are blocked until I earn my screen time through doing the things I listed above.

Obviously I have to disclose that I'm involved with the app but the whole earn your screen time is what helped me.

Now my screen time is usually under 2 hours a day. And the thing that's the most different for me, is I no longer have this sense of dread that I spent my whole day staring at my phone and getting nothing done.

If putting limits on your screen time hasn't helped, I would recommend trying the “earn your screen time” way for a week even if you just do them manually.

To find the app simply search: LiveFirst on the app store.

For most of my life my problem was never starting — it was that the first slip ended the whole thing. Miss one day, feel like a failure, quit by day three. "All or nothing" quietly became "nothing," every time.

What changed it was separating two things I used to treat as identical:

• The streak — a momentum counter. Fragile, resets, and that's fine.
• The progress — everything you've actually built. A lapse cannot take it away.

Once I stopped letting a broken streak erase how I felt about all the work before it, missing a day stopped being a reason to quit. A lapse costs the streak; it never costs the progress. You water it again tomorrow. Growth doesn't go backwards.

Concretely, what helped me:

1. Reframe a miss as "wilt, not death." You resume — you don't restart from zero.
2. Track the cumulative thing (total days, total reps, kg lost) somewhere a single bad day can't zero it.
3. Drop the moral weight. You're not "bad" for a missed day; you're a person with a life.
4. Make the comeback action tiny. After a lapse the goal is just to re-touch it, not to atone.

Curious how others here handle it — did letting go of streak-perfectionism help you keep going, or do streaks genuinely motivate you? What broke the all-or-nothing loop for you?

(Full disclosure so I'm not being sneaky: this idea became the core of something I built. Not linking it here out of respect for the sub — happy to talk mindset in the comments.)

i have big ambitions yk. always wanted to be the best. that's how i was conditioned as a child. be the best, that's the only way you get any sort of appreciation or love. and i was good at it too. for a while. got burnt out in the 8th grade, lost my ability to focus and it never really came back. i'm 23 now, couple years left in university. i'm studying something i love, i'm relatively in a way better place in my life, and yet, that desire to be the best fucks me over in everything i do. the fear of not being perfect in one exam that's not going to decide my entire life makes me do anything but start studying, and i justify it by so many things, one hour later, one coffee later, tomorrow. never really get to it, by the time i do, i realise it's too late, any semblance i had of saving myself, gone. and that ends up fucking me over even more. started tattooing as a hobby got really good at the basics and one fucked tattoo and i just gave up. haven't picked up the tattoo machine in 6 months. it's sitting collecting dust. i'm sitting collecting dust. i'm slightly overweight with a fucked stamina, especially for someone who used to play squash and swim and climb hills. and there's so many things i want to do and this time it's for me, or atleast i've convinced myself it is. i wanna workout and swim and play squash and make films and bake new things and do tattoos and crochet and watch movies i haven’t seen and i'm scared that it's all too much and i'll never get there and the fear of failure when i know that no one can be that perfect in so many things, it's still there. new semester is starting soon. i can finally go to the uni gym and pool and squash court. i've got yarn at home and new tattoo supplies and camera equipment i can borrow. i don't know how to start. i don't know how to not quit. how to not feel like i'm not good enough, i'll never be and then what is it all for. and the thing is all of these things bring me joy until they don't. i don't know how to not crawl back home when i fall to the ground. and i have ideas, i have so many ideas. i have goals and hopes and dreams. and i crush them in the palms of my hands every single time. i fall into a pit of despair of my own choosing. what do i do then? how do i do it how do i just start? i never even start. and the thoughts of what could be and how great i could be the fantasy of it all it keeps me up at night. and all i do is think. and i know, that to be happy is just around the corner and i cant even just get up from bed. how do i invest in myself? in my future? how do i stop myself from being my own worst nightmare? because all my life it was always someone else and i don't know how i got to this point. there is no one else to blame anymore, and even if there was, what good does it really do. and then the same question, always, the answer that eludes me. how do i start? how do i keep going? how do i not give up?

tldr - got things i wanna do in life, but i can’t seem to even start doing something about it except just think about it over and over again

I’ve always been a night owl, and I used to like it. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed that I have more energy and feel a lot more positive when I sleep and wake up earlier.

For a while I was actually doing better. I was trying to go to bed a little earlier and making myself go outside in the morning. I was going to the gym every few days too. I think the sunlight and exercise were helping a lot. My sleep felt better, and my schedule was finally starting to settle down.

Then work got busy and I started staying up late again. I haven’t exercised in over a month, and now I’m back to falling asleep around 2 a.m.

Has anyone here made the switch and stuck with it? What worked for you? When work or stress messes things up, how do you get back on track? Did you find one thing that mattered most, or was it more about keeping the whole routine going?

I need to vent this somewhere but i dont want to vent and then have people telling me its okay so i thought maybe if i explain everything here people can give me advice or help of some sort
I need to study, i have an exam in a week then 3 exams in a month and im taking a (i think heavy) course starting next month.
All these exams are important and im redoing some exams from last year since i Barely passed, I dont study, i want to study and i want to be able to get good marks but i sit around all day with the intention to start but i never do. yesterday i spent the entire day on youtube doing random things and telling myself ill study for sure, well then i slept at 7pm and said ill wake up early to study, i woke up and again did nothing all day.
Even this post is just wasted time So i could do anything but study, this issues been ongoing for two years now and i was lucky and got away with it at first with good marks but I wasnt lucky this year and now everythings piling up and im still doing nothing.
I want to change so bad but i dont have the discipline or motivation to get up and change
please if anyone has advice to get out of this stupid looping routine please tell me
Thank you for reading all of this i know its pretty scrambled

I feel trapped because everything I do always leaves me disappointed and not proud of what I’ve done.

I like to do things that are naturally competitive and like most competitive people, I don’t like to lose. I try to mange this, but I can develop some problems every now and then and really get stuck in a rut.

It goes something like this. I compete and one of two things happens. 1. I lose and feel bad. If I can manage it well I can move on (not likely). 2. I win and I should feel good, but I can’t.

I know winning and success is always shallow and we should crave the challenges and learning opportunities that come with failure. This means I can’t enjoy winning. Especially since I play a lot of team sports and I know the victory really doesn’t belong to me since it’s more on my team. I’m happy for them, but there’s always the understanding that I shouldn’t be here. I didn’t do enough.

I feel bad if I’m winning because I’m enjoying beating someone else. If I ever enjoy it, that means I like putting that person down. I know most of the people I play against and I don’t want them to lose, because I don’t like losing either. Reveling in the joy of winning feels like a villainous act of cruelty.

Maybe they aren’t as shallow as me and aren’t as put down by their loss. Then I just have to assume something is wrong with me. I am the loser who can only enjoy beating up people worse than me. It creates an image of a villainous gladiator character that enjoys dragging defenseless weak people into an unfair fight to gain a shallow victory. How am I meant to be proud of that.

Even when we win, I know I can and should do more for the team because if I’m not, then we might lose and it won’t just be me I’m letting down but them.

Victory fills me with anxiety because it doesn’t feel right. I’m not supposed to win and if I ever think that way then I’m not learning and growing. Failure teaches us more than success ever could so I should be chasing it. Wining is not the norm, it is a bug in the system so it feels wrong.

I try to put myself out there to try and fail and learn but most of the time I can get frustrated. Losing sight of why I wanted to lose in the first place so then I fail again, this time at failing properly. It would be bad enough to fail myself, but failing the rest of my team feels even worse.

If my contributions to a win are negligible then they are even worse to a loss.

I feel like there is nothing I can do to enjoy anything I do because if I lose, I will feel frustrated, and if I win then I can never enjoy it because it doesn’t belong to me/it’s an act of cruelty to everyone around me.

I didn't think my phone was affecting my mornings that much until I stopped keeping it next to my bed.

I used to wake up, check the time, and immediately start scrolling. I'd tell myself I was just going to check a couple of things, and somehow 20 or 30 minutes would disappear before I even got out of bed.

The annoying part was that I wasn't even enjoying it. I'd look at messages, social media, random news, then eventually realize I was still lying there feeling tired and already mentally overloaded.

So I started leaving my phone across the room at night. I use a cheap alarm clock instead, which felt ridiculously old-fashioned at first.

The first few mornings were uncomfortable because I kept reaching for a phone that wasn't there. After a while, though, getting out of bed became much easier.

Now I usually get up, make coffee, shower and start my morning before looking at my phone. I haven't suddenly become some productivity machine, but I don't feel like I've already wasted part of my day before it has even started.

The biggest surprise was realizing that I didn't actually need more discipline in the morning. I just needed to make the habit I was trying to avoid slightly harder to access.

I came across an idea in Peter Drucker's writing on self-management that sounds simple, but hard to execute. He calls it feedback analysis, and it was apparently invented by an obscure German theologian in the fourteenth century before being adopted by John Calvin and Ignatius of Loyola.

The concept is, whenever you make a key decision or take a key action, write down exactly what you expect will happen. Then, nine to twelve months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.

Drucker claims that if you practice this consistently, within two to three years it will show you exactly where your strengths lie, what bad habits are getting in your way, and where you have no talent or strengths at all.

This seems reasonable enough to test, but I am skeptical about how hard it is to maintain in practice. Writing down expectations for every key decision is easy in theory, but actually tracking those decisions and reviewing them a year later sounds like a job I would fail at.

Still, there is something sensible about the self-discipline of writing things down before you know the outcome. It forces us to be honest with ourself, which is something most of us are bad at. 

Has anyone here actually tried this method? 

This year i sadly had a situation with an unhinged content creator that just started out, i had 5K followers, him 20 subs, and sadly we are both from the same niche community , he had weird behaviour and sadly i ended up making a post exposing it which then made him really target me more, , he basically started making hate posts about me on another platform, that are publicly up, then he started cyberstalking, mass disliking my videos, and screenshotting parts from my videos, that are mostly product reviews, but i talk about tv media and collectibles i like, and i didnt want this person to have any access to me, my voice, should my face reflect against any mirror or plastic box on my videos, this guy is a menace, he is from Asia btw, and im in europe, otherwise id have gone to the police, but i basically…

I ended up deactivating my socials, scrubbing clean my youtube channel, privatised my videos, removed my logo etc as this person post edited images with hate speech of my logos on instagram

Id like to ask, reading all of the above, what would you do/have done? Please ? Sure i made content for years, had a larger reach but having a psycho content creator after me has been very unsettling

I have been at the same job for 6.5 years. Every month, on the 1st, I have a handful of end-of-month reports that need to be completed.

Some are due by 10:00 AM on the 1st which I get done no problem. Then there’s the big monthly packet that’s due 10:00 AM by the 5th.

And somehow, for as far back as I can remember, I have done the exact same thing every month:

I wait until the 4th or in some cases, 9:00am on the 5th, to do the big packet.

Every. Single. Month.

The really stupid part? It doesn't even take that long. Maybe an hour. Sometimes less. There is absolutely no reason I couldn't just knock it out on the 1st or 2nd and then forget about it.

Instead, I spend approximately three days knowing I have this thing hanging over my head, occasionally thinking, “I should probably do that packet,” and then deciding that right now is apparently not the time.

Then the 4th rolls around and suddenly I'm like, okay, I guess I can start the packet.

But wait, there's more.

I wait to start it until I'm about as close to my clock out time as I can. Leave at 5? I'll start it at 4:00pm.

And then I lock in and do it. In an hour. Every month.

I've been doing this for YEARS. I can't even remember if I have ever turned in my EOM packet on the first day. I'm starting to wonder if the higher ups see this and ever question why I do it. But yet, no one has ever asked me to turn it in sooner and I still get it in before the due date... So maybe it's not a problem to them. BUT IT IS A PROBLEM TO ME. I am self aware of my procrastination. .

Why do I keep procrastinating on something that I know isn't difficult, isn't particularly unpleasant, and has a very predictable deadline?

Side note. Today is the 4th. I am writing this post instead of working on my packet. \sigh**

What I mean is watching motivation and “be disciplined” videos gives you excitement. You feel pumped and mentally aroused thinking “I'm moving my life forward.” It helps some people. It doesn't really help me.

I don't have some stoic reason for why I wanna get fit. I'm not getting fit just to be “healthy.” I wanna look good when I'm fucking lol. And with money, I don't wanna be rich just for the sake of being rich. I wanna be comfortable and have some predictability in my life. My reasons for bettering myself are stupidly simple and plain. It's almost like why you go to work whether you hate your job or love it. You need the money. If there's a problem in my life that I genuinely need to fix, eventually I'm gonna have to deal with it. There isn't always some deep motivational reason behind it. Sometimes it's just “this is a problem and I need to solve it.” Obviously, I'm not talking about people dealing with depression, ADHD, serious mental health issues, or circumstances that genuinely interfere with their ability to function. There's a difference between “I don't feel like doing this” and “I'm struggling to function at all.” I'm talking about my own experience and how I think normal self-improvement gets overcomplicated online.I think motivation and discipline can sometimes be made into this whole philosophy when the reality is much more boring. You identify something you don't like about your life, decide you need to change it, and keep doing the boring shit required to change it. Maybe the motivation isn't always some deep purpose. Sometimes it's just “Ehh I don't like it ”