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

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

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.