Addicted to Self Help

[soos_mite_ah]

I realized that I was addicted to self help when I realized that most of my interests revolve around it and that I tend to base my self worth on how conscious I am being. Part of me was attracted to self help because I genuinely wanted to be the best I could be but I would be lying if I said that this is the only thing that drew me to it. Another part of me was attracted to self help because I think that there is something inherently wrong with me and that I need to make up for lost time because I have all of this potential that I haven't tapped into yet. While this addiction has helped me grow a lot as a person, I'm starting to see the limitations of it for me personally. I also realize that getting over self help is also a form of self help since I'm working through an addiction I have. It's a paradox lol.

But yeah, how do I deal with this?  

[Thought Art]

How do you define addiction? 

[soos_mite_ah]

@Thought Art Feeling a compulsion to do something because of neurotic reasons and not being able to stop 

[SonataAllegro]

As you've realized, becoming un-neurotic about self help is itself self help. But obviously not all self help is of the same quality. You need to dig deeper into the feelings of lack that are causing you to chase after the right video or book, the right person, the right idea, a high state of consciousness, or a feeling of satisfaction. Get more in touch with enjoying what you already have in the present moment, especially through developing a skill. When you fall in love with the joy of sensation and being itself, you'll stop being so neurotic about PD.

[Dancer]

4 hours ago, soos_mite_ah said:

I realized that I was addicted to self help when I realized that most of my interests revolve around it and that I tend to base my self worth on how conscious I am being. Part of me was attracted to self help because I genuinely wanted to be the best I could be but I would be lying if I said that this is the only thing that drew me to it. Another part of me was attracted to self help because I think that there is something inherently wrong with me and that I need to make up for lost time because I have all of this potential that I haven't tapped into yet. While this addiction has helped me grow a lot as a person, I'm starting to see the limitations of it for me personally. I also realize that getting over self help is also a form of self help since I'm working through an addiction I have. It's a paradox lol.

But yeah, how do I deal with this?  

First, there is nothing wrong with you. The wrongness is something you created. It's false. You are beyond it all and perfectly good as you are.

Second. You are seeking to improve the only thing that can't be self-helped. That's yourself. You can't actually help yourself.

I also had my self-help period. Thank god it's over. That suffering was overwhelming but also very necessary.

[The_Alchemist]

What's the alternative? Being addicted to porn, drugs, food, sex, dopamine, materialism, gambling?

What else should you be doing with your time?

[Aaron p]

Everyone is addicted to something, exercise, self help, vitamins, are very addictive. Addiction isint bad, only bad addictions are bad. Good addictions are good.

My favourite drug of them all, truth. Cum in my pants when I think about finding truth

Edited February 2, 2021 by Aaron p

[LastThursday]

11 hours ago, soos_mite_ah said:

While this addiction has helped me grow a lot as a person, I'm starting to see the limitations of it for me personally.

What you're experiencing is the end of one phase and the start of another. Sometimes its obvious what the next phase is, sometimes not. More often than not there's confusion and uncertainty as your drop one thing, before picking up another. What is life like without being addicted self help? It served its purpose and now you're ready to move on.

Paradoxically, it can be beneficial to just sit with the confusion and uncertainty and ride it out - it's like a kind of grieving process. The impulse can be to try and fix things or find an immediate solution or replacement, but this can be stressful and unproductive. 

[Epikur]

I feel like selfhelp is like exorcism for the monkey mind. It takes time to take care of so many crazy blind spots. It is like laying the infrastructure to be able to build on it. 

Some people don't seem to need it though but I am not shure about it.


 

[Nahm]

The addiction is only to thoughts. 

Meditation.

[Thought Art]

@soos_mite_ah The heat that you curse is summer is the same that you yearn for in winter.

Contemplate this addiction for an hour with a journal.

[soos_mite_ah]

14 hours ago, SonataAllegro said:

As you've realized, becoming un-neurotic about self help is itself self help. But obviously not all self help is of the same quality. You need to dig deeper into the feelings of lack that are causing you to chase after the right video or book, the right person, the right idea, a high state of consciousness, or a feeling of satisfaction. Get more in touch with enjoying what you already have in the present moment, especially through developing a skill. When you fall in love with the joy of sensation and being itself, you'll stop being so neurotic about PD.

I'm starting to move towards more self acceptance/ gentleness/ self love type content. 

10 hours ago, The_Alchemist said:

What's the alternative? Being addicted to porn, drugs, food, sex, dopamine, materialism, gambling?

What else should you be doing with your time?

Idk, living like a normal person my age. Having hobbies, focusing on my social life, watching netflix, being a normal person. It doesn't have to be a new kind of addiction. I just want to do what is healthy and normal. 

7 hours ago, modmyth said:

How does this work out exactly? Like how do you judge this and approach it within your own experience?

It's a vicious cycle. I see something that is not very conscious of me, say judging other people, and then I beat myself up for that and go introspect / contemplate about what I just did and where that stemmed for, and then I beat myself up for beating myself up. That's an example. I also tend to feel really down about myself when I'm not mentally in the best place or if I'm depressed. There is a part of me that feels toxic and manipulative for suffering. 

5 hours ago, LastThursday said:

What you're experiencing is the end of one phase and the start of another. Sometimes its obvious what the next phase is, sometimes not.

I believe my thing is that I had this huge phase of inner work/ contemplation/ figuring out what I want and now I'm dying to put myself out there, socialize, make strides in my career, etc. I suppose it's a new phase of self development, one that is more externally focused rather than internally focused. 

4 hours ago, Nahm said:

The addiction is only to thoughts. 

Meditation

Yeah I have been meditating like crazy and have built up a habit. For me personally, it's becoming a source of escapism in a way. 

 

[Nahm]

@soos_mite_ah

Might be helpful, if you haven’t consider this yet...medi means middle. Meditation is ‘the middle way’. Establish ‘it’, and ‘bring it’ to whatever might be thought to be escapable or escaped from, and it is realized it’s only the thoughts that seem to be the catalyst or call for the escaping. (Not perception or feeling). Eventually being ‘in the middle’, if you could imagine being halfway between asleep and awake, I’m pointing to something similar. Not engaged, not disengaged. Free. Presence. Relaxed, aware. 

On the ‘beating up on yourself’ front, have a laugh about it. You’re not serious. There aren’t even two of you such that one of you could beat up on the other. It’s not actually possible, it’s hilarious, let it be funny, light, silly, nonsensical, and you’re free of it. Every time, anytime you notice it, chose to relax and laugh. It feels ‘off’ because it’s absurd, not because a single one of your thoughts are true (no offensive I hope). It’s a set up, the punchline is it’s just thoughts, which aren’t actually even about you. When we start recognizing our own thoughts aren’t even true, the body starts releasing the conditioning for the ‘years’ of believing them. Liberation. 

“Self help” is a thought, not anything in feeling or perception.

[Advocate]

@soos_mite_ah Congratulations for your realization! I guess at some point everyone goes through this phase. Counterintuitively, once you stop being neurotic about personal development (or at least less neurotic), you may expect real growth and feel a lot happier.

I’d recommend you slowly cut out all self help content that you usually watch. Im pretty sure eventually it will feel amazing like a smoker who stopped smoking. (Of course a couple of months later you may start taking in a limited amount of content.)

(Honestly, my impression is that the majority of the people who regularly post on this forum practice a highly neurotic and unsustainable form of self help - which of course includes myself in some instances. It may be lots of mental masturbation, taking excessive psychedelics or cutting out all social contacts. A healthy balance really is key in personal development in my experience.)

Edited February 2, 2021 by Advocate

[hyruga]

 

 

[blackchair]

you want to heal yourself, that's ok, be gentle with yourself.

[soos_mite_ah]

Thought I add onto this thread upon watching Leo's most recent 2 hour vlog. 

I find a lot of shades in myself in his video. He mentions pursuing self help for the last 8 years and how he needed a break from it so that he can integrate things more and deepen his understanding because rest helps you create more distinctions (after all learning= making distinctions). He also talked about how he was taking care of his health more and how he was doing things that made him forget about actualized.org for a while and how that is helping rejuvenate him.

Now, granted I'm only getting a pea sized version of this  experience. After all, I'm not pumping out new high quality content every week or taking psychedelics. But I have really thrown myself into self improvement since I was 15 (so for the last 6 years). That has been my main focus. 

I see a lot of benefits from taking a break from self help. I take breaks for about a couple months out of the year so that I don't feel like I'm on a hamster wheel. But my problem is that I have trouble unplugging completely. Currently I have been more relaxed with the self help where I'm not meditating super regularly, I calmed down on the shadow work, (and Leo taking a break for the last couple months has also been immensely helpful for me to take a break from actualization work as well so thanks @Leo Gura, even your break and your insights in your recent vlog has helped and resonated with me). But I have still been working on my health, on being more gentle with myself, on building more sustainable habits, and reflecting to find my life purpose. It's like even when I do take a break from self improvement, I still find myself doing other forms of self improvement.

Unplugging 100% is a challenge for me and I really want help with that. 

[Origins]

@soos_mite_ah it seems like you have a life filed with chasing content as opposed to personally deriving truths in a sophisticated manner and creating, so your problem is not actually addiction, that’s just a consequence of not yet learning how to move to self truth and life lived around your creative productions. Ask yourself instead of anyone telling you, what are are the patterns that I need to discern in order to move to that kind of way of life?

This forum for example is a hub of advice asking and giving, but how much do people actually act from a place of self truth? Is this forum everyone’s “self truth”, really? Your (mostly everyone) content doesn’t come across that way. I think most people need to have more honest conversations with themselves, put their own simple lives in contrast with the trillions of lives that have come before them, will come after them and the centuries of time and change humanity has gone through to reach this point. Who lives this way? Only self actualised people. How many people on this site live that way? I’d say the number needs to increase a lot.

So I hope that many people read your post @soos_mite_ah are honest with themselves and come to terms with avoiding the same problem.

We have to evolve culture @soos_mite_ah and we need all people taking a serious perspective on how they can play their part. 

(starting to sound like a cult leader now so I’ll just slide off into the distance)

Seek higher sophistication and less effort, not more effort and less sophistication.

And the best way to do that is to follow what you intrinsically are, which is your awareness, and very slowly putting together existence yourself taking the worlds ideas as things that can help that process and then slowly actualising that understanding a little bit more each day.

You have to organise all that content in your mind though, like an encyclopaedia. For this we have memory techniques that the wisest people grew up using. 

Start listening to yourself @soos_mite_ah but start doing it from the smartest lens from the ground up.

(1) expand your perception

(2) differentiate the vital ingredients that make up your existence then slowly further out from there

(3) avoid making assumptions, assumptions can destroy a human beings life in 2 seconds flat 

Edited February 6, 2021 by Origins

[hyruga]

21 hours ago, soos_mite_ah said:

Thought I add onto this thread upon watching Leo's most recent 2 hour vlog. 

I find a lot of shades in myself in his video. He mentions pursuing self help for the last 8 years and how he needed a break from it so that he can integrate things more and deepen his understanding because rest helps you create more distinctions (after all learning= making distinctions). He also talked about how he was taking care of his health more and how he was doing things that made him forget about actualized.org for a while and how that is helping rejuvenate him.

Now, granted I'm only getting a pea sized version of this  experience. After all, I'm not pumping out new high quality content every week or taking psychedelics. But I have really thrown myself into self improvement since I was 15 (so for the last 6 years). That has been my main focus. 

I see a lot of benefits from taking a break from self help. I take breaks for about a couple months out of the year so that I don't feel like I'm on a hamster wheel. But my problem is that I have trouble unplugging completely. Currently I have been more relaxed with the self help where I'm not meditating super regularly, I calmed down on the shadow work, (and Leo taking a break for the last couple months has also been immensely helpful for me to take a break from actualization work as well so thanks @Leo Gura, even your break and your insights in your recent vlog has helped and resonated with me). But I have still been working on my health, on being more gentle with myself, on building more sustainable habits, and reflecting to find my life purpose. It's like even when I do take a break from self improvement, I still find myself doing other forms of self improvement.

Unplugging 100% is a challenge for me and I really want help with that. 

Actually, everything in life is a self-help if you put a thought into it. For example, today if you are walking a little slower. You are observing the surroundings more and then think of what you are feeling. So that's a form of 'self-help' in itself.

And all the books, audios, youtube videos, blogs, facebook help group, podcasts, seminars, courses you attended are actually not real self-help. The teachings are all from a teacher or guru. So they are actually 'Teacher-help'.

So depending on your definition of self-help, it might be extremely hard for you to stop 'self-help' altogether because the mind is always thinking of something.

There's also the problem of let's say 'You are thinking about Eckhart Tolle's words' so is this a form of 'self help' just by thinking? Are you being neurotic? Why are you always thinking about self-help? 

Edited February 7, 2021 by hyruga

[Conscious life]

@soos_mite_ah yes. self help can become addictive. I myself addicted to self help most of the time. having a long horizon of time to do it, will help. 20, 30 years plan will resolve the solution. it is a life time commitment, not a camping.