True! Gorse everywhere! It was also that the bretons seem keen on having weird spouse effigies around the place. But to be fair, they mostly seem to be at roundabouts!

Looks kinda like Brittany

I also have difficulties sleeping, and if I don’t have access to my various strategies I can’t get to sleep because of over thinking, and waking frequently and immediately overthink and can’t get back to sleep.

My main ‘trick’ is finding the right audiobook and playing that as I go to sleep. It’s a bit of trial and error, to find something that works, but it gives me something to focus on as I try to fall asleep so I don’t think about my day or stress or start getting ideas for some project… And when I wake up in the middle of the night, I turn it back on and I fall back asleep in minutes.

Right book (or podcast or whatever) : for me it needs to be a story I know (so that I don’t care about hearing what happens next, and don’t get too confused if I miss sections by sleeping), not too distressing / dark (especially as I’m falling asleep I find violent descriptions can jar me awake), relaxing narration (no music or unexpected noises, nice voice, not too upbeat). Non fiction can also work really well.

Right method : what works for me is playing audiobook on an old phone that i keep under my pillow, with no other apps or WiFi, just the audiobook app and a redshift app (Twilight). To begin with I might listen to the book normally for a bit to get familiar, then I’ll gradually turn down the volume as I’m getting tired and as it gets quieter I have to keep still otherwise I can’t hear it over my rustling the bedsheets. If I feel like I’m too engaged and alert I adjust down the playback speed, so the Narrator gets slower and slower, and that usually makes me sleepier.

If you’re not used to it, I can imagine it taking a while to adjust, but it’s totally solved my issues, and now serves as a immediate sleep trigger for me. When I put on my book, I’m usually asleep within ten minutes. And it’s even faster at returning me to sleep in the middle of the night. And it’s something I’ve done now for years, so I’ve got loads more tips if anyone’s interested but this is already tldr…

Yeah, I think challenge can be a bit motivator for adhd folks. Once I’ve completed the main part of something, I find it really hard to care about the details, to the extent that the unfinished parts sometimes spoil the bit I had completed.

I feel like it’s the dopamine of the chase is actually what’s motivating, and challenge is a version of that. I’ll get sucked into finding some obscure game and getting an emulator working to be able to play it and all the way I’m super engaged. Then I start playing this game I was so excited about and meh, don’t care.

Maybe you could think about ways to refocus that drive? A therapist told me once that adhd people don’t get satisfaction from completing things, but are excited about new things. So, instead of feeling proud of getting into college try and immediately find the new challenge (now I want to get a prostigious internship!) if you succeed at your fitness goals, maybe you can raise the stakes see if you can beat a friend or a record or something?

Yeah, furthest I ever fit with a fitness program is 5x5. It’s such a small amount of individual activities, they’re always challenging because of the increasing weights, and it feels like there’s a really clear goal that you’re moving towards (not just ‘go to they gym until your fit’).

Focusing on getting the movement right kept me fully occupied during the actual rep and there’s only a few different exercises each day so it didn’t take too long. For getting started, I would just do a intense bounce / dance around the room to warm myself up (I had weights at home so I didn’t need to worry about getting the gym or other people seeing me). With warm and focused reps and a bit of a cool down, I could generally do the whole thing in under 45 minutes, so even if I had spent the day lazing around I could often trick myself into “shit, it’s almost six and I need to meet the guys in an hour, I guess I’ll just quickly rush through my reps” (and then I would be late of course, but that’s normal). A workout buddy would be the other ideal for accountability / motivation.

In Britain lots of beers come on both sizes, and it makes comparing prices #mildlyinfuriating. Is 6x500ml at £7.99 better than 4x440ml at £4.50? What if there’s an 12 pack of 330ml stubbies for £15, but it’s Buy One Get One Free?

Yeah, I feel weird about “imposter syndrome” cause sometimes I know I’m genuinely doing a bad job, forgetting important things, or fucking soemthing up and causing me / others a bunch of stress. But I’m also aware that there are somethings I do well, that not everyone else does, but because they’re easy for me I don’t value them as much as the things I wanted to do right but screwed up anyway.

Something that sometimes helps, and sometimes just disturbs me, is that I think about all my colleagues who are (mostly) “neurotypical” and how often they make stupid mistakes and fuck ups because they are old and computer illiterate, busy with other commitments, slow, or just apathetic. When I spend four hours getting angry at myself until I can manage to finally spend 5 minutes to send an important but straightforward email… Well, it’s obvious that I’m useless / terrible. But what the hell are all these other supposedly competent people doing? Because often they’re as behind with things as I am. Or doing shit job of a presentation because they can’t be bothered rather than because they only have twenty minutes left before the big meeting.

Yeah, I was confused about this… A little sugar won’t ruin your French toast, and you can always salt it afterwards… I genuinely forget that people eat it sweet, I’m a cheddar and bacon boy myself.

As others have observed, a glottal stop on its own is completely silent. But the idea of responding to distinct weird sounds is awesome! I’d like to be able to whistle commands like Alexa is well trained sheepdog!

That’s a really good description. I feel like people focus on the highs and the lows of addiction. But one of the main reason it is hard to give up an addiction is it’s such a comfort. The ecstatic highs are fun, but the real appeal is having something so simple that makes you feel good.

Maybe my comment wasn’t clear enough, I have a job that I find satisfying, teaching at a university. The five year job I had that forced repeatedly forced me off sick was as a health professional in a hospital, and it was very interesting, challenging and satisfying. But the repetition (not of the work with patients, which was endlessly varied) but just turning up at the same building every day, seeing the same collegues, keeping on top of paperwork, etc. was mentally exhausting.

The advantage to being a lecturer is that the commute, paperwork and stress is seasonal, so it doesn’t just feel like an endless Sisyphian task. In a sense, it’s less challenging and less satisfying work than my time in health (teaching a student something interesting isn’t the same as saving someone’s life!) but the work pattern works much better for me. I think that what the OP was describing about cyclical burnout might be something similar. There are lots of careers (many self employed) out there that are intensely busy for a block and then time off or starting a completely different project. When I start finding teaching too much (and I’m sure it’ll happen eventually, but at least it’s longer than a year!) I’ll probably move into freelance coding or seasonal event management type stuff. Stuff where I can use my strengths of picking up stuff quickly and dealing with problems, but don’t need to worry about the long haul.

I don’t know, I feel like it sounds a lot like burn out (or at least how I understand the term, which might be wrong!) I would manage alright at a job for a year or so, and then the combination of repetitiveness and lack of interest (for more low level jobs) or the accumulated stress and exhaustion from trying & failing to keep on top of everything (for more professional jobs) would bring me to a point of anxiety, depression and ‘mental shutdown’.

Mostly I’d walk out on jobs when it started happening, but I’m my longest job (5 years) I just kept getting signed off work for increasingly long periods, and then I’d come back and be okay for another 12 months and fall apart again.

But I don’t think it’s cyclical depression or something. I had a two year period where I was fortunate enough to not have to work and I was in good form for the whole two years. Now I’ve moved in to academia, and the university schedule with four months off in summer seems to be enough that I don’t hit that point. The end of each semester has me worn out and approaching burnout, but then I get plenty of time off to recharge.

You mean Christopher “that’s not the sound a man makes when he is knifed in the back” Lee?

How do you think it would hold up for someone who didn’t play back in the day?

I got my Trekkie mom the Star Trek 25th Anniversary game for christmas, but I defitnely ended up playing it more myself!

My parents grew up in working class 1950s Britain. My dad’s parents slept in the kitchen (with a curtain round the bed for privacy), which was also the room that most “living” was done. The three kids shared a single small room, with both teenage boys sharing a double bed, their older sister got her own single bed, and she stayed there until she married and moved out in her early twenties. I remember seeing that room and even as a child it seemed cramped, no space really for anything else once the two beds were in it.

While the whole the family was living, eating and sleeping in two small room, an immaculate “front room” / parlour was kept solely for the two or three days a year where they had “company” (a family event like a wedding or funeral, or the priest visiting or something). The front room was bigger than both the others. It’s hard to comprehend the priorities that led to this sort of thing, but it was apparently extremely common in that time and place.

Interesting… Going to have to try it drunk!

I’m totally the same, but star trek fan, love all the older stuff and have given the new stuff a try but only really love SNW. So many friends are raving about LD but I could get through more than a few episodes. I just didn’t like the characters, or find the plots interesting, and most importantly found it completely unfunny.

I’m super jealous of all the people who love it, and I’m not criticising it. But I just didn’t connect with the humor, and like most comedies, if you don’t find them funny then characters and plots seem dumb.

I’m going to persevere and try to make it through the first season, just because I WANT to like it. But humor is personal, and even a good show can’t connect with everyone. I wish I heard more comments saying “it gets better after…” but the people who like it seem to just like it, so I’m not hopeful.

Only way I manage it is to use my phone or something that I have with my all the time anyway. And the planner / to-do / calendar or whatever has to be right on the front of my screen so it’s not an app I have to go check, it’s just visible all the time.

Adding stuff is hard, until you get into the habit where it becomes pretty automatic (as long as your planner/phone is always right at hand - if I walk away thinking “I’ll add that in later”, I won’t.)

My one tip is to put everything in it to begin with, it’s more effort but it gets you in the habit quicker. So if you a morning routine, you can have “make coffee / brush teeth / read lemmy” as three separate tasks, and complete them all quickly. Or if random thoughts pop into your head during the day stick them on (“put a spare USB cable in my bag / Google terrapins”). Not only does it help me remember to do stuff, but it stops rando tasks distracting me. If I feel it’s really important to check how much laundry detergent I have left, I can add a task, not stop in the middle of cooking somehting and rush off, only to come back and find dinner burnt.

For me, to-do lists work much better if I have to add and complete dozens of tasks a day. Because then it’s something that feels like it’s working and helpful, while if it’s just “remember to do that big scary important thing” it just stresses me out and I ignore it. Obviously, ymmv, and some people find having lots of tasks distracting or hard to sort (or go down the rabbit hole of categories and color codes). But if it’s something that I get regular dopamine hits from (by completing many small goals) I pay attention to it, while if it’s something that just makes me anxious or feel guilty I won’t.

Tbh, a stoned discovery that I still enjoy is chocolate chip cookies dipped in hummus.