How to build a Social Life as an Adult!!

⤳ Accept that it's going to feel awkward and do it anyway. Adult friendship has no built-in structure the way school did. You have to create the conditions manually. It will feel strange first, and that's normal; not a sign it's not working

⤳ Be the one who suggests things. Most people are waiting for someone else to initiate. Be that person. Yes, sometimes you'll be the one always reaching out. Do it anyway until you find the ones who reach back

⤳ Go to the same place consistently. A class, a coffee shop, a running group. Regularity creates familiarity and familiarity creates the conditions for friendship. Show up repeatedly before you expect connection

⤳ Be slightly more honest than feels comfortable. Deep friendships don't form over small talk. At some point someone has to say something real. Let that be you. Most people are relieved when you go first

⤳ Follow up after a good conversation. "I really enjoyed talking to you, we should do this again" is a complete and sufficient message. Send it. Most people feel the same and neither person says it

⤳ Quality over quantity, always. Two people who genuinely know you are worth more than twenty acquaintances you perform for

How do you deal with feeling behind in life?

Realise the timeline you're comparing yourself to was invented.

There is no actual schedule. The idea that you should have a career by 25, a relationship by 27, a house by 30, that came from a specific era, a specific economy, a specific set of circumstances that no longer exist for most people. You're not behind. You're on a different road than the one you were told to expect. Write down what you actually want your life to look like. Not what you were supposed to want. What you actually want. Then ask whether the timeline you're panicking about is even moving toward that. Most people are behind on a life they never chose.

How to figure out what you actually want to do with Your Life!!

✭ Ignore the question of what you want to do and ask what problems you want to solve. Purpose almost always lives in the answer to what makes you angry, what you wish existed, what you'd fix if you could

✭ try things badly and without commitment. You don't need to be sure before you start. You need to start in order to get sure. Most people find their direction through accumulation of experience not through thinking

✭ Notice what you return to when nobody is watching. What you read, what you watch, what you stay up too late doing. Your genuine interests are visible in your unsupervised time

✭ Talk to people who are doing things that seem interesting, not to copy them. To understand what the actual day-to-day feels like versus the version that exists in your head

✭ Stop optimising for impressive. The question is not what sounds good. The question is what you can sustain, what you find meaningful, what you'd still do if nobody clapped

✭ Give yourself permission to want something unconventional: the pressure to want a normal, legible, respectable career is enormous. underneath that pressure is often a much more specific and personal answer

A List of things that will actually Help your Anxiety!!

✭ Limit how much news you consume in the morning. Seriously. starting your day with everything that's wrong with the world before you've even eaten anything is not helping you, it's just making you feel guilty for being okay when everything isn't

✭ When you feel a spiral starting, name it out loud. Literally say "i'm spiraling right now." Sounds stupid, works anyway. It moves the experience from your emotional brain to your logical brain and interrupts the loop

✭ Stop googling your symptoms. I mean it. Whatever you have it's either nothing or the worst possible thing according to the internet and neither outcome is going to make you feel better

✭ Drink water before you catastrophize. I know. I know. but dehydration genuinely mimics anxiety symptoms and you might just be thirsty

✭ Reply to the message. the longer you leave it the bigger it gets in your head. it's never as bad as the version you've been imagining for four days

✭ Move your body in a way that doesn't feel like punishment. not to lose weight, not to be more productive. Just because your nervous system needs somewhere to put all that energy

─ · · Do the thing before you feel ready. Confidence is not a prerequisite for action. It is a consequence of it. The feeling of being ready almost never arrives before you start. It arrives after the first attempt, or the third, or the tenth. You have been waiting for a feeling that is only generated by the activity you've been waiting to feel it before doing. Break the loop. Act first. Feel capable second. Every single person you find intimidating got there by doing things before they felt qualified.

─ · · Stop letting failure be the story. You tried something and it didn't work and now you're treating that as a permanent piece of evidence about your capacity. It isn't. It's one data point. It tells you what didn't work this time in these conditions with this approach. It tells you nothing about what's possible with a different approach or more practice or better conditions. The most capable people you know have failed more than you, not less. They just stopped filing it under identity.

─ · · Collect evidence deliberately. Your brain defaults to remembering the times you fell short and glossing over the times you came through. This is not neutral. This is a bias that compounds over time into a deeply inaccurate self-image. Start actively noticing when you do something well. When you handled something difficult. When you said the right thing or made the right call or got through the thing you thought would break you. Write it down. Your confidence needs a record to draw from. Give it one.

Neuroplasticity and why your brain is NOT a fixed thing!!

─ · · The idea that adult brains couldn't change was the dominant view in neuroscience for most of the 20th century. it was wrong. completely wrong. and overturning it changed everything

─ · · every time you learn something, practice something, or even just think something repeatedly, you are physically altering the structure of your brain.

─ · · london taxi drivers who memorize the entire city map have measurably larger hippocampi than non-taxi drivers. the job changed their brain. their brain changed for the job

─ · · stroke rehabilitation, learning disabilities, trauma recovery, addiction treatment... neuroplasticity is the engine under all of it

─ · · hebbian theory: neurons that fire together wire together. four words that explain habits, trauma, skill acquisition, and why you can't stop humming that song

─ · · there are critical periods (windows of peak plasticity, especially in childhood) but plasticity never fully stops, the adult brain just requires more repetition and intention

─ · · sleep is when consolidation happens, which is why neuroplasticity and sleep science are basically in a relationship

Signs you are starting to put Yourself first!

─ · · You book the appointment you've been putting off for months.

─ · · You eat the meal that actually sounds good instead of the one that seems like the better choice.

─ · · You leave the event early because you were genuinely done, not because something went wrong.

─ · · You protect your mornings, or your evenings, or your Sundays like they matter.

You get good at being fine. So good that when something is genuinely wrong your body doesn't know how to signal it anymore.

Things that feel Ordinary until You Grow Up

─ · · a summer that feels infinite

─ · · not knowing what things cost

─ · · being completely absorbed in something for hours

─ · · having your biggest problem be a social one

─ · · the specific freedom of a friday afternoon as a teenager

─ · · being driven somewhere and just watching out the window

─ · · not yet knowing which friendships wouldn't last

─ · · believing that the future was something exciting rather than something to manage

─ · · adults who seemed to have everything figured out