This hits close to home.
I've had a few really intense meltdowns including twice where I ended up in the hospital for trying to kill myself. Apart from my meltdowns I'm a pretty chill guy.
When a meltdown hits, the first thing I do is breathe. I've survived the last ones, I'll survive this one. I acknowledge that I'm having a meltdown and that I need to deal with it before anything else.
Then, the hard part is trying to seperate yourself from your emotions. A meltdown isn't quite you. It's your body telling yourself something is wrong and that you need to do something about it. So take a breather (you're not going to get anything else done anyway) and let your bodily functions happen. If you need to cry, go ahead, if you can get some fresh air that often pretty good.
To finish calming down I try to bring some humor and lightheartedness to my emotions, althought its not easy to do.
On the medium term what helped me the most was getting a healthier life style. I tried meditating a bit but it asked a lot of effort to take the time to do it so regularly. On the other hand, exercise helped me a lot.
On the long term, even if you seem to be against it, the best solution seems to be therapy. I understand that you may be against it, however finding a good therapist can really help.
If you all the answers here haven't convinced you to go the psychotherapy way, I'd suggest finding the next best thing. Talk about your issues to some friends or people you trust. This is not easy either. It requires being really open and transparent about extremely complex issues that you keep bottled up even to yourself.
What helped me most was not judging myself for being emotional. Which is absolutely easier said then done. However small issues could spiral out of control because I didn't handle them well, and then I'd hate myself more for not handling them well, and then I'd hate myself for being so negative about myself and being just a liability to myself and the people around me which was just a vicious circle which ended up in huge meltdowns.
For context, a bunch of this advice I got from another answer on HN and really worked wonders. Not everything is better but I'm in a much better place than several years ago. As I said, mental issues need a lot of time to solve, and accepting that is one of the hard things to do.
This piece started pretty nasty.
>I smiled and introduced myself as I sat down beside her. She handed me her MacBook silently and the look on her face said it all. Fix my computer, geek, and hurry up about it. I've been mistaken for a technician enough times to recognise the expression.
'I'll need to be quick. I've got a lesson to teach in 5 minutes,' I said. 'You teach?'
'That's my job, I just happen to manage the network team as well.'
She reevaluated her categorisation of me. Rather than being some faceless, keyboard tapping, socially inept, sexually inexperienced network monkey, she now saw me as a colleague. To people like her, technicians are a necessary annoyance. She'd be quite happy to ignore them all, joke about them behind their backs and snigger at them to their faces, but she knows that when she can't display her PowerPoint on the IWB she'll need a technician, and so she maintains a facade of politeness around them, while inwardly dismissing them as too geeky to interact with.
The amount of contempt for this person because she just looked at him feels absolutely huge.
> All through their lives, I've done it for them. Set-up new hardware, installed new software and acted as in-house technician whenever things went wrong. As a result, I have a family of digital illiterates.
In my opinion this feels like a huge part of the problem. Of course most people aren't passionate about software and all the inner workings of computers. For the mainstream and general population, the better way to have them learn about computers is to educate them.
The way to do it is to make them learn to solve their own problems, understand what went wrong and guide them to handle it themselves for next time.
"Just making it work" whilst considering the other person a fool because they don't know much about computers creates this "us vs them" mentality. The geeks vs socially adept people.
When a meltdown hits, the first thing I do is breathe. I've survived the last ones, I'll survive this one. I acknowledge that I'm having a meltdown and that I need to deal with it before anything else.
Then, the hard part is trying to seperate yourself from your emotions. A meltdown isn't quite you. It's your body telling yourself something is wrong and that you need to do something about it. So take a breather (you're not going to get anything else done anyway) and let your bodily functions happen. If you need to cry, go ahead, if you can get some fresh air that often pretty good.
To finish calming down I try to bring some humor and lightheartedness to my emotions, althought its not easy to do.
On the medium term what helped me the most was getting a healthier life style. I tried meditating a bit but it asked a lot of effort to take the time to do it so regularly. On the other hand, exercise helped me a lot.
On the long term, even if you seem to be against it, the best solution seems to be therapy. I understand that you may be against it, however finding a good therapist can really help.
If you all the answers here haven't convinced you to go the psychotherapy way, I'd suggest finding the next best thing. Talk about your issues to some friends or people you trust. This is not easy either. It requires being really open and transparent about extremely complex issues that you keep bottled up even to yourself.
What helped me most was not judging myself for being emotional. Which is absolutely easier said then done. However small issues could spiral out of control because I didn't handle them well, and then I'd hate myself more for not handling them well, and then I'd hate myself for being so negative about myself and being just a liability to myself and the people around me which was just a vicious circle which ended up in huge meltdowns.
For context, a bunch of this advice I got from another answer on HN and really worked wonders. Not everything is better but I'm in a much better place than several years ago. As I said, mental issues need a lot of time to solve, and accepting that is one of the hard things to do.