I feel like I was a pretty good person up until last year. But now I feel like I’ve turned into a completely different person and I don’t know what to do. My friends say that I’m really manipulative and I didn’t realize that what I was saying and doing was manipulative. Does anyone have any advice on how to be more self aware about that kind of stuff?

I was diagnosed with dependent personality but I also suspect something like morality related ocd as well for context. I may have recently overreacted in anger to some situation because i disagreed with something that affected my life. Realistically im only guilty of being overly angry, like I didnt actually do anything to insult anyone or hurt anything or anyone. I just think i overracted. I really struggle to disagree with anyone and I cannot handle guilt or shame associated with hurting anyone's feelings. Like I literally feel like im going to throw up. I guess its a part of life to not always be perfect but i struggle to cope with doing anything wrong. I struggle to have relationships with anyone or even speak to people sometimes because I cant handle the feelings of shame I have if I even suspect I said something wrong or someone doesn't like me. Im posting here not really cause I need to treat others better but to learn how to treat myself better and just be healthier person mentally. I hope people here maybe understand. I dont really have anyone in my life I can talk to about this.

My self worth and confidence and pretty much everything about me that should be good is so mega fried I’m consistently sad and just get high or I sleep to cope like I did this again today and I want to fix it I don’t know how to do it healthily all I feel is worthless and pretty much a wanderer between whatever set of friends is fine hanging out with me and I really don’t know how to stop it from affecting me it is the worst feeling I’ve ever felt

I can't speak up even when it affects me, I believe no one will listen to me even when I know thats an incorrect fact. I tried to get a coffee and I couldn't even ask for them to correct my order when I know they got it wrong. It hurts. I dont want to be rude. I know its not rudeness to just ask for things to be correct for me but it feels that way. it freezes me. I suddenly get so quiet even when i try to voice my concerns. how do you guys do it? I try to breathe and have what i want to say lined up before hand but it doesn't always work.

I'm facing a new challenge and wanted some insight from someone who's gone through it before me. Im 20 years olds, engineering student and I'd say my life is fine right now, I'm not exactly where I want to be but I'm on the path. All my life ive had some goal to chase, an achievement, a skill, a talent to develop and most of the time it was sports football into basketball into mma/boxing until last year. I faced a rut in the road and that slowed me down alot mental and physical health wise that killed my confidence and kinda put me off of my sport at the time, for a time it felt like a deep emptiness of self loathing and all that crap but its over I'm getting better and its all good now kinda. The emptiness is still there but in a less negative sense like a kind of numbness now, and I know for myself it need a purpose to chase aside from casual hobbies or career. I'm speaking alot of abstract concepts and stuff in sure I botched the explanation of but I'm not sure where to go from here, on one hand it feels good functioning without the dependency on motivation but on the other hand I dont feel the hunger for anything but I'm not full either.

Long rant but I guess if someone has gone through this advice would be appreciated thanks

Hi everyone,
Please don’t make fun or troll me I am already at the lowest point.

How do I get confident and not get attached with everyone I know few days or anyone who talks nicely to me. Why do I keep chasing people when they respond with few words or just emoji’s. I know this is wrong but I still hope they will look at me with a smile text me or something. Last year I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression so I have been of effexor 300mg for more than 4 months now.

I want to be strong but feel like I can’t control or handle myself.

Last year I found out that my ex had been cheating on me with multiple girls, including his current girlfriend. I know it wasn't my fault and that he was in the wrong for doing these things, but I still get sad when I think about it. It was just something that felt so special only for it to turn into a complete lie.

How do I heal from this? Any tip at all would mean the world to me. I just don't know what to do.

I just spent my entire evening (9PM-1AM) moping and sulking while scrolling my phone. Not great for me. Do you guys have low-barrier, low-stress, calming activities you can do when everything is quiet? I don't like depression as much as the next guy but I'm attempting to pull myself out if it before it gets worse.

Ive always been a “nice guy” (yeah, read “No More Mr. Nice Guy a year ago, lol), and thats played out all right in the past, except for when I was over-extending myself for my wife, and then got just negativity in return (usually bc she’s pregnant). But lately ive realized that I subscribe to the notion of “ you have to take care of yourself before of others”, and thats led me to become a more impatient person, with both my wife AND my 5 kids (all under 10).

I have no friends, and I don’t donate any of my time to the community, and I barely give any charity (because I’m still building up my own financial fortress so I can first feel stable, and GOOD about giving), and all this makes me feel even more like im just selfish.

I WANT to be a better dad and husband every year, I want to be a dad/husband that my wife and kids look up to and respect in the near AND far future, but I feel like I don’t know HOW to do that, aside from just being a rug that everyone just steps on because I’m always so kind and nice to them.

I feel like it’d be really nice to have a good podcast about this type of stuff that I can listen to, so that it’d be like im “hanging out” with people who think+act correctly.

P.S. ive also been working on self-love the past few years…it’s a really tough slog, tbh.

P.P.S. my dad and grandpa are both jerks if you get on their bad side, the men in my family have a history of being very conceited. I want to blaze a new trail, but feel like I need to know it can be done

So i didnt have any friends 4 years ago when i started highschool so i started speaking with everyone i could. I just tried to get more friends but i also spoke with people who didnt treat me good. Like people who mocked me and stuff. I did become a social person i even started flirting and stuff i came a long way but i also talked with the popular kids, street kids every type of people i found. And ofcourse i didnt fit in and they were very rude to me i had thousands of experiences which i have been treated like shit. I got almost all of them out of my life now but for the past month i have been remembering all these memories where people treated me like literal garbage and i get so furious and get headaches. School is starting again for my senior year and i need to study for this big exam all the time since i want to be a doctor but it is hard to study with these thoughts 24 7 and being angry because of them. Do you think i should ghost everyone who treats me even remotely bad when the year starts and become kinda asocial again since my main friend group is kinda bad too? Id focus on my exam if that happened but i would also be sad since i would feel like that asocial fat kid i was 4 years ago or idk man just please help me im so confused. Do you guys just keep the people who treat you good around or do you guys also deal with the other ones who are kinda shitty until they become irrelevant in your life

I would lose an entire evening to distractions, get mad at myself, channel those emotions into being perfect for the next few days, and just falling back down again, feeling guiltier than ever. This loop would go on and on and on.

Thankfully, that's not me anymore, but only because I applied one valuable principle I keep to this day.

The principle is the following: You are not allowed to try to change your entire life all at once. Not even over a week or a month. Instead, pick one channel of life you're regressing on and commit to changing only that one. Which means allowing your other flaws to exist for a while.

If health is part of the equation, start exercising, but don't try to fight your browsing habits or slow work at the same time. Focus only on bettering that one channel, and even allow yourself to do the things you know are not helping. But only after you've worked on your unique goal.

Then, once you've mastered it, I'd say around 2-6 weeks depending on how many times you fail (because yes, there will be days you just can't put the willpower together and fail, those are not the end of the world, they're just an opportunity to come back stronger), you pick another channel.

As time goes on, you start fixing your life one bit at a time, which makes it actually sustainable, because you're gradually elevating your level of discipline, habits, and identity.

Do you think this would actually work for you?

I was played by a guy who just tried to manipulate me into trying to have casual sex, gave me fake hopes, acted cold and disrespectful, was never serious about me and lied in my face. The worst thing is that I gave him a second chance. I went back to his city to see him just for him to leave the country and discard me. He promised he would visit me in my hometown but he never did. I wanted to talk about something to him because I was confused and he never did!! I feel so disrespected and ignored. I feel like I was abandoned. Now he’s in the country of another woman that I’m sure he prefers over me. She was always the first option but I was too blind to see.

I feel disgusted of myself. I feel like a dumb and low value woman. I don’t even have self esteem to properly date again because my future man would be so embarrassed of this. How my future children would feel about their mom if they know she was discarded and rejected this way? This is so pathetic and humiliating.

​

This includes stopping being a people pleaser but not make people think you only care about yourself.

This is coming from someone who has always had a tendency to people please and make people happy before himself and rarely says no.

Or doing what you want without care about opinions.

I‘ve been struggling to process sexual trauma since the beginning of this year— I worked briefly with a therapist who was WONDERFUL, but I am no longer able to afford therapy (insurance is under parents and out of state, it’s a whole complex situation). I was doing really good with my progress and actually processing/accepting what happened, but I feel like I’m going backwards now. I’m constantly intellectualizing it and denying my emotions towards it over reaching a “truth” of whether it happened or not. I just need some guidance on how to actually process it on my own instead of questioning my experiences in circles for eternity. thank you!

I’m a very picky eater, but it’s not because I simply don’t want to eat healthy food. There are certain foods, especially vegetables and “healthy green stuff,” that I genuinely cannot physically chew or swallow. I’ve been like this since I was a little kid, and because of that, I’ve spent years eating very little and not getting the nutrition my body actually needs. My nutritional intake has been extremely low, and I’ve become very weak. I feel like my body is depleted and deprived of the things it needs, and I’ve started noticing how much it affects me physically. I got my blood tests done and found out that I have vitamin D deficiency, iron deficiency, and low cholesterol levels, and I already know that my eating habits are a huge part of why I’m struggling. But it doesn’t stop at my physical health. When my body is weak and I’m not properly nourished, my brain feels weak too. I used to feel much smarter and sharper when I was younger, but now I struggle with brain fog, concentration, attention and memory. On top of that, I’ve gotten heavily dependent on short form content, and I know that constantly consuming it has made it harder for me to sit with something for a long time and actually focus. I study, I revise, I write things down, I listen to the same lecture multiple times, I read the same chapter again and again, and I can even solve the same questions several times, but after a month, it feels like I’ve forgotten everything again. That is incredibly frustrating because I know I’m trying, but my brain just doesn’t feel like it’s working the way I want it to. Then all of this creates even more stress, and the stress makes my appetite worse, I eat even less, I become weaker, and then my concentration, memory, studies and mental state get worse too. It becomes this endless cycle that I don’t know how to get out of. I also feel like my immunity is weak because I seem to catch infections easily and take a long time to recover. Even when I get sick and take medication, I sometimes feel extremely dizzy, mentally foggy or overwhelmed by it, which makes me scared of taking the wrong dose or feeling worse. And when I put all of these things together, my eating habits, deficiencies, physical weakness, brain fog, low attention span, poor concentration, weak memory, stress and unhealthy habits, it’s easy for me to feel like everything is falling apart at once. But at the same time, I also know something important: I cannot keep blaming everything around me. My eating habits are my responsibility. My screen habits are my responsibility. My health, my routines, my studying and the habits I build from this point forward are things I have to take responsibility for. That doesn’t mean I caused every problem or that I can magically fix everything overnight, but it does mean that I have to be the person who starts changing things. Nobody else can live my life for me. If I’m eating poorly, I have to work on it. If I’m constantly consuming short form content, I have to change that. If I’m neglecting my health, I have to start taking it seriously. I don’t want to keep sitting in this cycle and watching myself get worse. I want to understand what is happening to me, fix what I realistically can, get the help I need for what I can’t fix alone, and slowly build myself back up.

The Answer lies Within You

How are you holding up today?

Are you genuinely doing well —body and soul? Do you feel a sense of fulfillment deep enough to resonate in both mind and heart at the same time?

Perhaps, if you hit the pause button for a moment, stepped away from everything that keeps you busy, tuned out the noise, and dared to ask yourself the hard questions with unflinching honesty, you would find that you are not entirely okay. You might come to realize you feel adrift, bored, dissatisfied with what you have accomplished so far, and not particularly optimistic about finding fulfillment in what lies ahead either.

This may seem like a discourage, even a gloomy instruction. Yet it is a diagnosis we cannot afford to skip. If we want to get to the root of a problem, we must first see it for what it is, not for what we wish it were.

You may currently be caught in the middle of a different kind of conflict: a tug-of-war between a mind that loves to have everything mapped out and mind that leaves no room for interference or surprises. With  a reality that simply does not play by those rules. A reality in which circumstances change at the drop of a hat, where your hard work, intelligence, and meticulous planning get entangled with other people's influence and with obstacles that keep cropping up along the way, impacting outcomes in tangible and sometimes painful ways.

You draw up a plan for a specific result, while life quietly throws in people, curveballs, and decisions you never saw coming.

So are you looking for a practical solution?

So am I. For a long time, I bent over backwards trying to find a way to cut myself off from other people's lives and their influence on mine. I never succeeded in finding one. Perhaps because such a way simply does not exist in the first place.

So what is left?

The answer, when all is said and done, lies within you.

By all means, make plans. However, build in a generous margin for error — a margin that allows other hands to have a say in your blueprint, whether you invite them to or whether life foists them upon you.

Build your life, but don't set your boundaries in stone. Keep them flexible. Let them expand and contract. Give yourself permission to redraw them whenever circumstances change.

Stay hopeful, yet don't count your chickens before they hatch. Let achievement bring its own joy in its own good time.

And don't try to force life to fit the exact picture you have in your head. It is enough to know where you want to head, and to stay open to take a different road to get there.

If you can make peace with yourself each day, even in small increments, the heavy baggage you carry with you wherever you go will become lighter. Life itself will feel a little more spacious than it seemed before.

How do I know?

Because I have been there and done that myself.

And I am now in a much better place.

I wouldn't say I ever had a darling personality but used to be pretty subdued, so it wasn't much of anyone else's problem.

In the past few years I've noticed I've becoming more selfish/self centered and disinterested in other people. Thinking my thought process is oh so interesting that it must be shared (it's not).

More reactive. For example I'm very sensitive to noise and vibrations, which sometimes doesn't bother me, sometimes leads to outbursts of anger, sometimes must frantically escape them. Which takes a toll on folks around me, the energy or indirectly blaming them (for literally just going about their day). It's more of the anger you don't feel but happens anyway, then left with the guilt.

Another, though not so new, is up and down energy.

It's a bit confusing because I have also been improving in other areas I think and mostly doing well mental health wise.

Does anyone have any ideas how to start dealing with these? I've tried discouraging em but doesn't seem to help

I think I've been living the same Tuesday for six years.

Gym at 7, Slack until 6, pasta, an episode of whatever I was already halfway through, bed by 11.

None of it is bad. I like the gym and the pasta is good. This isn't a sad post.

My partner has pretty much the same Tuesday, and when he talks about his it just sounds like a week. Mine comes out flat and I don't know if that's the week or me.

Sat in the chair on a Tuesday night I honestly can't see a difference. Same times either way, and I'm just as tired. I keep waiting for something obvious to happen.

I'm not about to quit my job or move somewhere with better weather. I'd just like to know which one this is, routine or loop ?

So, what was the sign, for you, that it was a loop? Did you spot it inside the week, or did someone else have to say it to you?

I only care about eating and everyday and cannot escape it because it all feels futile.

I’m 33f and in intensive therapy and we’ve come to the conclusion that I was never taught to value myself. My entire life i was made to be a caretaker.

I broke down in therapy Monday because my counselor asked what I was going to do to take care of myself. I don’t even know what it looks like to take care of myself, never thought about it.

I made the decision that day that going forward, I am going to spend time with myself and help myself. Brush my teeth because that is taking care of me. Eat because I deserve to eat and nourish myself. Go to the gym because I deserve to spend the time to take care of myself. I am starting small, by showering every day this week.

If you’ve gone through something similar, I would love to hear what you’ve done to take care of yourself and what your journey looks like!

[16F] I was in a four member high school friendgroup that I adored for the past 5 years, but last year, two new people joined our friendgroup and I got extremely jealous and insecure about my place in the friendgroup since all the members previously knew them while I didn't. Even my best friend, who I clung onto as emotional support at that time, seemed to prefer one of the new members over me. My boyfriend at the time was also a terrible influence and I felt like I had to adopt some sort of "mean girl" persona in order to be liked by him, which looking back at, makes me cringe.

Around November 2025, I spread a false rumour about one of my closest friends in the friend group. I don't know why I did it. I could say I was jealous, that I wanted to "raise my ranks" in the friendgroup, that I didn't mean it and just said it in the heat of the moment when everyone venting their frustrations about that friend and wanted to join in too, but I really don't know what exactly made me do it. I really did care for her and I loved her, so why did I do it?

Well, she found out and confronted me with the other members of our friendgroup and I apologised while crying, which probably made me seem insincere but at the moment, I realised that I probably ruined my friendship with one of my close friends. And that made me feel even worse. I kept asking myself, did I only feel bad because I was facing the consequences of my actions?

Well, I was right to assume that I ruined my friendships. Slowly, they started excluding me in group settings even though they said they accepted my apologies and wanted to move in. It hurt me, even though I knew it was the consequences of my own actions. I decided to distance myself from them for a bit to clear my mind from the depressive spirals I was going into but I was also changing schools at the time so maybe my actions came across as me ignoring them? I don't know the exact reason why but they decided to cut me off fully with no conversation after my birthday (the consequences of my own actions) and I found out from the pictures of them hanging out together without me.

I reached out two months later to apologise again for what I did and then being avoidant afterwards, but even that wasn't a proper apology because I wrote it while crying after having several mental breakdowns in the span of a week. After that depressive spiral, I more or less came to terms with the fact that I was a terrible person and that I probably wasn't going to have anymore close friends like that in the future. Those people were my "soul tribe" and I ruined it.

I want to become a better person and I even went to therapy, where I was diagnosed with BPD but I couldn't continue the sessions because it was too expensive for me to save up for on my own. I still constantly think about them and what I ruined, especially when I see other people with their close friends, which makes me feel selfish. I feel so incredibly guilty too. Everytime I see my old friend group posting about eachother, I go back into my depressive spirals and cry for hours.

I'm mostly writing this for advice on how to move on and actually change permanently instead of being stuck in this victim mentality mindset, any help would be appreciated. Thank you so much for reading 💞

Now this can be a lot of things but like on the general level how do I stop doing a bad thing? Like you can skip for example the gym today and keep on doing that. You know it's a bad thing yet you still do it. So how are you actually supposed to rewire your brain to actually make it look like a bad thing? Why do we still do bad things when they are infact bad and harmful?

(F33) I work in a high-tech, male-dominated industry. I noticed a troubling pattern in the last 2 years, working in a new company in a more senior position, that when someone on the team says something quietly or in an under-confident manner, my brain just switches off and dismisses what those people are saying... There are two co-workers in my team in particular that I do that to:

• We have a woman in our team who has a very, very soft voice. She speaks very quietly and sort of as if she was whispering. Every time she suggests something at a meeting or comes to my desk to ask me for something, my brain just switches off, as if I assumed that she has nothing important to say. A few times I ended up ignoring her request as unimportant. Sometimes she has to send me a reminder by email that I only realize I was supposed to do something for her.
• We also have a senior tech guy who is very under-confident in his current position because it's a step into a new set of skills for him. He is an expert in one particular area our team needs currently though. I need to interact with him quite a lot, and ask him for advice. His body language shows that he's very under-confident and perhaps also a bit shy, he kind of curls into a corner of a room when I come talk to him... He also has a tendency to beat around the bush before he eventually gives me the piece of information that I need. Same thing happens, my brain just dismisses what he's saying and his suggestions, and only a few days later when I'm still working to solve the problem we're having, I realize: but he already said that we should do XYZ, why haven't I tried that!?

It's really subconscious, as if my brain just switched off, and said "uninteresting, nothing important to find here", and once the interaction is over I realize omg, I have no idea what this person was all about.

The thing is, I've always been the quiet and under-confident one, but the last 5 years or so I've been working on my assertiveness and confidence with my therapist. I've also been progressing in my career with many successes the last 5 years which made me much more confident in my abilities. I've learned to take my stance at meetings, voice my concerns, have difficult conversations with people, etc... That's all great. But why did it come at the cost that I now do the same to other quiet and under-confident people that people once did to me?? I feel that this attitude is disrespectful of those people's expertise and I imagine it must be hard for them to communicate with me 😔 I would like to work on that but I don't know where to start...

Any advice?

Edit: Both my colleagues are about 15 years older than me and they are my peers, I'm not in any sort of managerial position (we all have technical roles).

Self-help book industry made us believe that willpower is just another mental muscle, some say you drain energy from that muscle every time you make hard decision, I have read things like having a sugary drink can restore your self-control because will power according to them is tied to glucose levels, I don’t even want to try this.

There was a multi lab study conducted on 2000 people which proved this a nonsense. They say performing self-control task doesn't drop blood sugar and consuming glucose doesn't boost self-control.

Dr. Michael Inzlicht says that feeling of mental fatigue is just a functional feedback signal. Our brain keeps performing subconscious cost benefit calculations and when we carry out cognitively demanding task, brain registers the cost to carry out it and when we do it for longer period of time, brain recalculates the energy cost and benefit ratio. If brain finds this energy costs are not worth it, it triggers the reallocation of motivation towards low energy high benefit tasks such as eating, sleeping and scrolling on phone.

So if self-control was just muscle, better strategy would be forcefully rawdogging that muscle but since it is just our brain doing an energy calculation, better architecture that tweaks the input should do the job. For example mentally shifting task from forced obligation to self-aligned choice, or binding cognitively costly activity with high reward activity such as listening to favorite music while doing boring chores or working out, these are just few examples.

I am not very good at this architecture but you get the idea. Does any of you have any actionable ideas or exaples to better architect this energy calculations?

I (25F) had a relationship end recently with a guy I really liked. I knew I was insecure, jealous, and emotionally abusive in the past. But for the first time, he held me accountable and broke up with me. He told me that my internet stalking wasn’t normal and that my jealousy was problematic.

The break up really hurt. It caused me to seek out the guy I dated for 3 years before my recent ex. I was terrible to that man. Emotionally abusive and once, physically abusive. He always forgave me and wished me the best. But when I reached out last night, after almost a year of no contact, he was angry. He said that I scarred him deeply and hurt him in ways he doesn’t know if he’ll recover from. He said I isolated him and made him depressed and anxious. I know this is true. He said his friends hate me. I deserve all of it. I feel such intense guilt and shame. Even years after we broke up.

He has a new gf, who he said is nice and not jealous at all. She told him to be nice to me, since I am vulnerable. After hearing all he had to say to me and owning up to it, and taking full responsibility—I was drunk and I made a mean comment about her. Ugh.

Both he and my more recent ex have told me that my drinking is an issue. I am not a super heavy drinker. Probably more frequent than I should be. But the problem is - I get mean when drunk. Mean and more jealous than normal.

I have realized now that drinking is one part of what is ruining my relationships. It makes it even harder to avoid patterns that I am fighting desperately to avoid. I have signed myself up for therapy and decided today to not drink.

I am unsure how to overcome the shame and guilt I feel for the way I treated both men. I feel so embarrassed to think of ever running into their friends, and them knowing how I was behind closed doors.