/feels/ - Advice & Venting

For a few months I was eating very few calories, and that turned into a whole mess that made me feel and somatize every single emotion to the extreme.
Sure, that was probably one of the triggers, but what really hit me was realizing how much time I was wasting—day after day—just endlessly scrolling for hours with no purpose. Not even the energy to reply to simple messages, let alone hang out with people. All this while I was still trying to keep up with my university classes, hit the gym, learn a language, and cook my “low-calorie” meals.

I ended up feeling completely paralyzed. Everything I once loved was just gone, and I had no interest in anything anymore. My days revolved around chasing dopamine through dumb reels and TikToks. I couldn’t even finish ten seconds of a video before skipping to the next, or saving it to “watch later”—a moment that never came.

I got totally obsessed with how I looked, constantly thinking about how skinny or “good” I looked. Which was stupid, because in the end, all that worrying left me unable to even look at myself in the mirror or on my phone camera.
I felt empty, dumb, my brain completely fried, like life was slipping away inside a virtual world.

And that’s why I’m here—because “normal” social media eats me alive. It feels automatic, something I do out of boredom in dead moments, scrolling endlessly just to avoid making any mental effort. I literally remember saving long texts to read “later” because they demanded too much focus and brain power.

After all this, I finally went to the university’s psychological services. During the interview, they asked me what I thought a “normal person” was. My answer: someone who’s actually present, who can tell what’s happening around them, and doesn’t have thousands of random thoughts or get lost in daydreaming all the time. Their response? ADHD.
I don’t want to take medication—and it’s kind of absurd to think that all of this gets pinned on something like that.

Honestly, I just want to go back to enjoying and learning from the things I used to love. Very few things spark my fried brain now. I don’t push myself to do anything, though I still try to take on longer activities even if I keep falling back into doomscrolling.
You can laugh, but I know a lot of people are going through the same thing right now.