how much thought do you waste "controlling 'yourself'"

ballpark figure

consider perhaps conceptualizing "the self" may in some sense be "control"

Do the long sleepless nights of anxiety, regret, and jaundiced life reviews count as "controlling 'yourself'" activity?

Not half enough, I feel

i don't care i'm nuts i'm out of control idgaf

I have terrible impulse oh look there's a leaf blowing past

i'm shitting ceaselessly rn

It is impossible to walk, eat, speak, type on this keyboard, or aim my piss into the pissoir without controlling myself. If pissing my pants is freedom, I don't want to be free!

I'm controlled by the media

No "Pasting a smile on my face as I wish flaming death on the universe," no credibility.

running open loop rn

Is this about r/nofap?

yeah, i need more info here

i'd like to vote in this but i'm not sure i understand the question

play it pretty for atlanta

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"All brain activities require at least some glucose. Self-control processes, which involve the complex process of overriding a strong impulse, consume a relatively large amount of glucose...Self-control may therefore be considered a metabolically expensive process.

feel like this thread could have been a place for some heavy reflection

define "waste," qualms

recently i lost composure in a meeting at work and yelled at a few people (for good reasons that nobody here would care about). this was the first such outburst in my tenure at my job. in a sense i was glad that when push came to shove, i could respond to confrontational people in their own language. in another sense, i was bummed to be so affected by a job i like to think i don't really care about.

as i understand it, this is often the way conflict is resolved in type-a corp/competitive professional america (an environment i never wished to feel at home in). really, it was a reminder that my hold on composure is more tenuous than i had previously considered

the yellees were all way above me on the food chain, just to be clear. i feel like they're the more acceptable targets generally since the only job that is endangered in these confrontations is my own

my steady state is doing nothing at all

i guess i "control 'myself'" by generally going to work and otherwise functioning in society? i don't think of it that way, though -- i don't have to restrain myself from doing things

by "waste" i sorta mean behave in conformity to an overdetermined sense of identity

i scream a lot on subway platforms now

also, tonight, suggested I take the train back home ~3 hours after arriving at familee Xmas camp

so probably when my control DOES slip, i hit a home run

^^^kong

I work retail, and yesterday I was helping a guy find some stuff, and it was like I was on speed and I couldn't slow down and I was sweating and trying to bring it back.

The guy did me a huge favor and realized I was losing it and talked directly to me and thanked me and let me go, and I got off the sales floor and used some breathing and reality checking and was able to get back out there.

Time spent ahead of time thinking about this isn't wasted. I have to be ready for tomorrow starting tonight. If I'm fucking feeling awesome, I barely have to worry about controlling myself. If I'm feeling terrible it is worth it to spend some thought and time controlling myself. Drinking too much the night before quadruples the burden.

i post here so obv not enough

ZT makes the excellent point that if you want to minimize time spent on self-control, you have to HAVE TO have to do it in advance of the stressful situation. The fatigue that results from an unplanned exercise of massive self control usually means that you'll lose it later that evening.

Brain time spent reigning in impulses: 0.1%
Brain time spent feeling guilty about not reigning in impulses: 70%

Heh

I know the impulse/guilt thing pretty well. Been doing counselling the last few months and I feel like I've let go of the controlling part a bit, though I still think knowing when to be hard on self and when not to, and when to just be, is some kind of existential question that I can't ever answer. I find it hard to do any one thing without thinking I should be doing another, or getting distracted.

Feeling guilty about inability to rein in poor spelling impulses btw

I am super bad at e.g. reining in the impulse to read the internet when I ought to be working, doing housework, anything other than reading the internet; always following a chain of minor instant impulses for hours on end with no thought to time passing or any kind of overarching goal, also always letting my emotions get the better of me (have always cried easily, tend to snap at merest inconvenience)

I am p. bad at saying the wrong thing to people without thinking or even when I've thought "I shd definitely not say that thing" and yet I also often don't express entirely innocuous opinions for fear that someone will disagree, so that's I guess a different kind of impulse control miscalibration

if New Yorkers didn't 'control ourselves' we might kill ~5-20 people a day

About 95% of my life is me carefully controlling every thought, action, and reaction based on how an imaginary audience would judge me.

It's like being Catholic but without the communion wine

This thread title gets at what I find hard about my job and have trouble expressing about it, that it requires me to constantly corral myself into keeping track of the dozens of different small to medium sized tasks that come up with no particular order or regularity or schedule, so I am constantly expending energy just to get myself to keep on top of them.

It's like being Catholic but without the communion wine

there's no communion wine in catholicism - think you may be confusing it with old men molesting children.

I am super bad at e.g. reining in the impulse to read the internet when I ought to be working, doing housework, anything other than reading the internet

i get this for sure - i have been trying to write fiction and drama stuff for the last few years and doing some little bit, but it haunts my every other activity. i spoke to my counsellor about watching a movie and spending the entire thing feeling nagged by myself about the fact i wasn't writing. this was during a long writer's block. weirdly, as soon as i acknowledged i was doing this, and decided i was going to just watch a movie every night for a week, and not nag myself - after like two days and two movies i wandered into my room and wrote.

so i sort of want to say i learned to go with an impulse - but i also know if i went with all my impulses i would just slide into total entropy of drinking, eating badly, doing nothing and neglecting to do things which i know lead me to be happier.

i guess maybe it's a case of not being too hard on yourself - it doesn't seem worthwhile in any way.

This time of year there's also a lot of control effort wrt all the sweets that vendors send to the office. I'm not good at that. I just ate a terrible cupcake that said "From the Jared Simon Group" on the icing. And some caramel corn from some sort of data service provider.

always trying to improve the quality of the impulses I immediately indulge

I'm at work right now. While here I probably spend more time willing my self to evaporate completely, rather than spending any energy controlling the remnants of whatever's left.

flappy bird

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