Ask HN: How did you rebuild yourself after having hit rock bottom?
First, comments saying you haven&#x27;t hit rock bottom because it could be far worse are missing the point, and I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re helpful. Rock bottom is relative to your experience up to this point. You could reach lower lows, and that would give you a new perspective from which to judge what is truly &quot;bottom&quot;, but that&#x27;s not your perspective now. If this feels like rock bottom, it&#x27;s rock bottom.<p>I&#x27;m mid-rebuild, and I can confidently say that beyond finding a good therapist, I believe the #1 and #2 most important habits I added to my life are meditation&#x2F;mindfulness (look up &quot;Vipassana&quot;), and Yoga (I&#x27;m just using the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel [0] - she&#x27;s got some great stuff).<p>There are lots of other things you can&#x2F;probably should do, but when I made meditation a cornerstone habit, it made me realize I was frequently not feeling like part of my body. Adding Yoga started to really integrate my mind&#x2F;body connection (a concept I couldn&#x27;t even imagine before I started the practice), and these two habits make everything else I&#x27;m doing feel easier.<p>The bottom line is that you see things more clearly and stop identifying so directly with thoughts, and this in turn makes it far easier to modify other aspects of your life that need addressing. Those could be external factors (I was doing a bad job of keeping my apartment clean) or internal factors (I was also frequently telling myself stories about my experience that upon examination were untrue, or at least not the whole truth).<p>Everything else I&#x27;m doing stems from a cascade of events that started long ago:<p>- Abusive childhood<p>- Led to overly pouring myself into external things, anything but myself, mostly work (with great success)<p>- Led to problems in my relationship and lost a partner of 15 years<p>- Shortly after this, lost two family members, a dog, got in a car accident, someone broke into my apartment, etc. etc.<p>- Burned out, quit my job, went on sabbatical to figure things out.<p>Obviously everyone&#x27;s story is different, and not everything I&#x27;ve described will be relevant to you, but my broader recovery path has involved:<p>1) Finding a good therapist. As others have said, if you feel stuck, look for someone new. But don&#x27;t expect therapy to be a quick fix, depending on the nature of what you&#x27;re dealing with.<p>2) Physical activity. Getting my body moving (beyond just Yoga) has had a hugely positive impact. I convinced myself that I can go for a 10 minute walk no matter what, and eventually that turned into 3-4 mile walks every day or two. If you can do cardio, great, but don&#x27;t feel like you have to go join a gym and sweat every day to get the benefits of moving your legs.<p>3) Getting out in nature. I never saw myself as an outdoors person. Then I went on a road trip, and visited various national parks. There&#x27;s a certain kind of perspective you gain if you take in the grandeur of nature mindfully. I ended up extending my road trip and roving for over a month.<p>4) Realized I had to stop assuming any one thing is &quot;the cure&quot;. Getting out in nature was healing and wonderful. For a short time, I thought &quot;this is what I need to do with my life&quot;, before I later realized that this would be just as unbalanced as the no-nature version of existence. Mindfulness is what helped me move beyond all-or-nothing thinking. It&#x27;s not that I believed this kind of thinking was a good way to be, but I just wouldn&#x27;t realize I was even thinking that way.<p>5) Realizing that I need to fundamentally change my relationship with myself. I realized that I had lived my life as if I was orbiting around it with work and relationships at the core. Building a strong morning routine that is for no one but me, and rebuilding my life around that, has given me the feeling for the first time in my life that it is <i>me</i> at the center. I didn&#x27;t realize how stark the difference was until work and my relationship with my ex were no longer the dominant factors in my life.<p>I had kind of shrugged off the importance of core habits and routine as something for other people. But I&#x27;ve learned that there is pleasure in the path of improvement itself, and when I started to embrace that, things started to truly change for the first time.<p>Some books &#x2F; apps &#x2F; resources that have been really helpful for me:<p>- Sam Harris: Waking Up [1] (book) sent me on a consciousness rabbit hole, and this turned into a really beneficial exploration and now I use the Waking Up <i>app</i> to practice the mindfulness techniques described in the book. There are other books&#x2F;apps, but seek out mindfulness, not just some form of concentration meditation.<p>- Robert Wright: Why Buddhism is True [2] (book) is first and foremost not a religious book, but a book that explores evolutionary psychology and how our growing understanding of the human brain maps cleanly onto some aspects of Buddhist philosophy. If you&#x27;re curious about meditation, but don&#x27;t know what you&#x27;ll get, this book tries to give you a glimpse of that. The 2nd half of the book honestly kind of peters out a bit, but<p>Resources:<p>- [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@yogawithadriene">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;@yogawithadriene</a><p>- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waking_Up:_A_Guide_to_Spirituality_Without_Religion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Waking_Up:_A_Guide_to_Spiritua...</a><p>- [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Why_Buddhism_Is_True" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Why_Buddhism_Is_True</a>