[fao_]

There is a difference between being free of mental fog, and being beholden to mental fog. There are times where the viewpoints from one view cannot be fostered onto the other view without drastic changes.

Sure, this advice might have worked for you, but only because the fog had lessened enough for you to be susceptible to the advice.

It is not the fault of people within the fog that the advice doesn't work.

All I was doing was telling you about the viewpoint from within the fog. Just because it looks like a lie from the outside, does not mean that that is so.

Anyway, to answer your first question: I spend most of my time taking care of other people. I spend very little time taking care of myself. This should, of course, change; but that is difficult to do.

The answer your second question: I lack enough memory right now to answer this question.

[fao_]

Because I feel that that answer was long enough, but I have more to add, I wish to say also:

During puberty I had a lot of problems: depression, low self-esteem, difficulty with social problems, some social anxiety.

When puberty ended, the fog lifted and I was granted new insight into my life, and many of the problems severely lessened to the point where they do not bother me as much now.

It wasn't that the problems did not exist, it was that I needed a widefocus lens on my problems when I only had a macro lens. The ability to see more context helped me deal internally with those problems, and see that much of the stuff that I was hyper-focused on, didn't really matter in the long-run.

There isn't a way to force someone to change this, and stating that those problems were not real, is of very little help to people with those problems, especially when I distinctly remember it taking most of my energy keeping them at bay.

If you're lucky (and to continue the analogy), the person might have the right lens so that they can pull it closer and see a bigger picture, and slowly drag themselves out of it.

But assuming that everybody is capable of that is extremely harmful, and can feed those problems. Example: Telling someone with a low valuation of themselves that they need to 'just try harder' is both callous and can feed the beast that says that "see, you can't do it because you're worthless".

It is both unsympathetic to the problems that are faced, and puts you in severe danger of making the problems worse.

[RobertRoberts]

fao, read my other comment here. I really didn't mean to make it sound like anything is anyone's fault, or that it's their "problem" and they just aren't facing it.

If I didn't get help from some people, I would never have recovered. I didn't make my life better in a vaccum. I hope any issues you have in your life get better, and that at the very least I can offer some small amount of encouragement.

If things are not well with you, or anyone, sometimes that is just life, and life can be hard. But if you go and look for someone who has it worse than you, and somehow is still happy, we have to ask why and how, otherwise we may miss an opportunity to gain it for ourselves and those around us.

My mother treated my father very poorly, and she consistently blamed him for her unhappiness. But I found that if I make the people around me happy, even when I am not, sometimes it comes back around to me.

Do you take care of other people happily or out of duty alone? Just taking care of others may seem like a selfless act, but it can also be because of emotional abuse coming home to roost. I also took care of my mother, and she taught me as a child that being abused was normal, and that I should take care of her more than anyone else. So that is not what I meant simply by "worry about others more than yourself". I meant that sadness for your own problems makes you more sad, but sadness for other peoples problems causes you to act to help them. This was a barometer I used to determine which kind of sadness was affecting me, and which I should reject, and which I could do something about.