"working on yourself" for people exactly like me
everything I've tried to feel better in my brain
The first self-help book I read was “The subtle art of not giving a f*ck” at 14.
That’s the earliest I can remember trying to consciously change the way I was acting.
Around 17, after my brother gave me a wakeup call for being an arrogant asshole, was the first time I started trying to work on changing the way I was feeling. How I went about the world and the energy I presented, which, for me, felt way more esoteric and confusing than just simply choosing different actions.
Some days I think about how I still have so long to go, how I still keep f*cking up and give so much of a f*ck about so many things even though I read that book 10 whole years ago! I keep feeling like I should have it down by now.
But then I remember how much I used to beat myself up in my head, how I’d self-isolate for months at a time, how rattled by indecision and self-doubt I was, and decide to take the advice I often give my friends and “give myself some grace”.
I have a long way to go, yet I feel that I’ve come a long way still, so I think all the work I’ve put in is worth it when I think about how I used to be.
Some of the things I’ve tried over the years are probably really obvious, some may feel overly childish and prescriptive, and I’m not saying I’ve mastered all these methods and am 100% flawless now. It’s literally just some stuff I’ve tried to go from loving myself 10% most days to about 70% consistently now.
Trying to appease my 2 inner wolves
I tried therapy a few years ago. During which, I felt reluctant to admit that sometimes I feel like there’s 2 versions of me in my head out of fear of being diagnosed as bipolar or with some other condition. So it was pretty surprising when my therapist replied, “Yeah, basically everyone has that.” I later learned that managing the relationships between these 2 versions is sometimes called inner child work, but I refer to this concept as my ‘higher and lower selves’.
My higher self knows what I should do. My lower self knows what I want to do. Doing too much of what I want to do might have me acting on impulse too often, and sometimes leads to selfish, short-term thinking. But doing too much of what I think I should do means I’m not actually myself, and what I think I should do is arbitrarily based off what I’ve recently been exposed to. It leaves me feeling inauthentic, and it’s so mentally draining to be anything other that myself.
I try to have my higher-self in control of the decision-making as often as possible, but use my lower self as an advisor and make both feel part of the decision-making process. If I don’t, I just feel fake, and that clash leads to mental pain.
And higher doesn’t mean necessarily mean better. He just sees more from a taller vantage point, and takes all the factors of a scenario into account. Whereas my lower self has eyes on the ground, and represents the voice of the people — what they’re thinking but are too afraid to say. In this case, the people is me and my heart. Analysis and intuition, thinking and feeling.
Negotiating between these 2 sometimes feels automatic, especially in situations I’m comfortable in. Like figuring out what to eat or what to wear, both selves pretty much always agree. For me, creating a habit involves aligning these 2.
But when I’m trying to actively enact changes in my life and improve, it takes some very manual talking to myself in my head. When I wanted to get my ears pierced, lower-me was like '“FUCK IT LETS GO”. But higher me was thinking about what my parents would say, the possibility of an infection, how much it’d cost, and how much time it’d take to clean everyday.
There’s 2 major unlocks here. a) Accepting that I may have multiple versions of yourself in your head, and that’s okay. I don’t need to hide or think more or less of each version — they all have valid things to contribute and their own objectives when it comes to making my life the best it can be, even though it may feel annoying in my brain to have them conflicting.
That brings us to b) I can actually resolve a lot of inner conflict by separating my different selves and having them talk to each other to achieve consensus. And consensus is pretty much always achievable, since it’s just me in my head and what I say, goes. And if all the MEs agree on something but I still feel tension, I usually need to communicate to myself more. I journal whatever’s in my stream of consciousness without judgement and once it’s out on paper, all the perspectives sometimes feel more malleable.
Just like in the physical world, most disagreements between 2 reasonable people can be solved with communication. If you’re a reasonable person, the same can be said for the dissonance in your own head.
Feeling physically good
I’ve always been more brains over brawn, mind over matter. I was a “big-boned” child til I was a teenager. Had back pain since 17. Got sick all the time as a kid.
But wow. Feeling good in my body has changed my entire life.
I’ve realized feeling good physically and mentally are so connected that nowadays, immediately when I feel stressed or anxious, I try to think of making some physical change to sort it out.
Some quick fixes:
When I’m nervous, I try making myself as big as possible. Arms and chest out, gorilla mode.
When I’m anxious, I try to breathe as deeply as possible. In with my mouth, all the way through my esophagus, down to my stomach, really feeling it all. Then I force all the air out when I exhale and repeat a couple times.
Whenever I have mental tension, I stretch out my back and hips with a few yoga poses. Frog, downward dog, and cobra are all great.
But for longer term fixes, I’ve experimented with a bunch of different activities, and tried to stick with what makes me feel good in my body. Overall, everything contributes to feeling strong, loose, and smooth.
Feeling strong is kind of obvious — some form of resistance training. Currently lifting weights, but for a while it came from rock climbing a lot and resistance training sometimes.
Loose is still mentally tough for me because I’ve spent so much time trying to ignore body tension and just brute forcing through. But stretching in the mornings and doing physiotherapy has helped a ton. Just lying on a lacrosse ball with the muscles along my upper and lower spine for 10 minutes a day helps so much to treat all the damage I’ve done sitting at a desk for 10 hours a day.
Smooth is just feeling fluid. Moving a lot in general, trying to play sports, making sure I use all of my body. Basketball, walking a lot, and dancing all fall into this bucket.
I used to feel like a brain piloting an exoskeleton. Now I just feel like a human.
Negative visualization
At some point I learned that the brunt of what causes anxiety is just not knowing.
As in, anxiety triggers when you have some vaguely scary scenario that your brain and body try to prepare for by tensing up so you’re ready to fight or run away.
And this was useful millions of years ago when our problems were genuinely uncertain and required us to summon superhuman abilities all at once to beat them.
But now, most of our imagined danger scenarios don’t actually imply anything close to death.
For me, I’ve had social anxiety for years and didn’t know why.
But once I started thinking about what my anxiety might be trying to tell me and how it’s actually working to keep me alive, I realize it stems from rejection. Which makes perfect logical sense. Humans are more likely to survive attacks from predators when travelling in tribes, and more likely to carry out the core evolutionary objective of spreading their genes if they’re better socialized.
So my anxiety is signalling me of the danger of rejection and trying to keep me alive. As in, not getting rejected means you could potentially be allies in the future, whereas rejection now = death. Avoid rejection at all costs to stay alive now. Then later, feel anxious about being lonely, because being lonely also = death. Perfectly logical.
I’ve found that if I play the scenario forward, and visualize all the possible things that could go wrong in the social scenario I’m scared of and how I feel in them, I actually feel better about it. Maybe it’s the logical part of my brain realizing that my scenarios just aren’t realistically very dangerous. Then the anxiety goes away once it realizes that in all the danger scenarios I’m still alive, so there’s nothing it needs to signal me to stay alert for.
My cue whenever I feel social anxiety now is to ask myself “Where are the tigers?”
An extension of this is visualizing a scary scenario, and thinking about what Aadil 2.0 might do there. Here I try to focus more on how I’d move and feel in my body rather than what exactly I’d say. Then thinking again about 4-5 ways that scenario could go wrong and playing those in my head like a movie. Then, thinking about how Aadil 3.0 would want to feel in even those crappy scenarios. Maybe someone throws a drink in my face after hitting on them. I’d probably want to feel happy that I had the courage to try and that I have a funny story to tell my friends later. Importantly, really trying to feel that happiness in my chest and arms, no matter how ridiculously terrible that scenario sounds.
This is hard as hell to remember to do in practice, but has gotten me to approach strangers in public way more over the years after having it running as a background process for a while. Just another tool in the toolkit.
Unfolding (as opposed to goal setting)
When I was 21, I realized that I’d accomplished so much of what I’d set out to do as a teenager, and still wasn’t very happy most of the time.
The unofficial promise was “I’ll sacrifice feeling good now, work hard to get somewhere else, and once I’m there, then I’ll feel good.”
Imagine my surprise when I was still sad. Like what was all the suffering for?
I eventually decided that I’d start from feeling happy first, then figure it out from there. So I moved to San Francisco with no plan since that’s the place that good things always just happen for me, and figured I’d sort it out from there. The 2 years since that move have been the best in my life so far.
I later learned that some famous substacker had written about this phenomenon already.
If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.1 Put simply:
I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.
I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.
Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.
I never planned to move to SF. It just happened that all of my friends ended up there. I never planned to even make those friends, they all just came from Twitter, where I started posting everything that came to my head during the pandemic. I just DM’d who I thought was interesting, I wasn’t trying to build a network or brand.
I started writing on the internet because I kept giving the same advice over and over to my friends. I continued because if I didn’t write and offload my thoughts to a page, my head would explode. Who knew one of my best friends now would come from us reading each others blogs for the past 5 years.
When I dropped out of college, my parents were worried about how I didn’t have a plan. I couldn’t justify it in terms that made sense to them, but it was just something I had to do. I felt a scrunching in my chest every day at my part-time corporate job. Frustration that what I was learning in school was antiquated and useless since the world was changing so fast. What had a 0.1% acceptance rate and looked great on a resume to the world felt like a prison to me.
It made way more financial sense to stay in Toronto. It made no sense to drop so much time, money and effort into acquiring a US work visa to live with people I’d only known virtually. But I didn’t actually feel like I was losing that much, because while my friends and family in Toronto are wonderful, it felt like my time there had come to an end, and I had something waiting for me in San Francisco.
The past 2 years have led to a lot of firsts, and I remember it all so much more vividly than when my life was dictated by what I’d plan to do in the future rather than pursue day-to-day. Some months I could barely get out of bed, other months it felt like I could bend metal if I tried. Sometimes my life feels like a movie, other times it feels like the intermission.
It’s exactly what Henrik said. My life is nothing like I imagined it to be.
But it truly is mine.
Thank you for reading! Sometimes I feel a little weird writing posts like this, since again, I’m by no means perfect at all this, and also the people who are the most mentally healthy probably don’t think about any of this or write Substacks about it, so it feels a bit vulnerable to admit a weakness like this publicly.
Thank you to all the people who tell me they like reading my writing, you keep me going. I do it for the 1 person that might need to hear something in this post. And if you enjoyed this one, please tell me I have no idea how I’m doing otherwise.
Special shoutouts to Heather for recently reading all my stuff + talking about it with me (sometimes a bit too much), and Jacky + Grace for always being sounding boards for me.
I like your posts! including this one! yes it's a vulnerable thing to admit publicly, but it's also a wonderful thing to be able to go from generally not-happy to generally happy :)
Amazing read, thanks for taking the time to write this.