I’ve done many other self-help routines. I meditated regularly for over years and actually “disappeared” myself and also grew to understand that the only point of meditation is to develop mindfulness in the current moment. Many people get hung up on self-medicating with meditation and while it does have some good effects, that approach is merely more escapism.

Ultimately, what all that work missed was the set of lies that are sold to men to make us work for the good of humanity instead of ourselves. Until I realized that my entire sense of worth was being given by how successful I saw myself as a provider and protector and worker and father and husband and lover etc – my point of mental origin was all wrong. In this way, the Red Pill was like the final puzzle piece on my journey of developing an authentic, self-loving self.

It also helps that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in magic, I don’t think I’m going to be saved, I don’t think anything better is coming than this life, so for me, I’m out to be as grounded in reality as one can be. I have often described Buddhism as developing a profound relationship with reality – and then laughing at it. Humans are quite silly when you take a good look at us from a distance. We are just another animal, running around on the planet looking to dominate it, eat and fuck. We are the most successful by far and also have developed social structures and language in ways that no animal ever has – but we are just animals nonetheless. And this animal likes to fuck hotties – which is finally a-okay with me.

It took about a year for my nervous system to recover.

And I’ve had periods of needing anti-anxiety medicine. Moving to SEA fixed that – the pace here is easier, and you can get by on less, so there is less stress of what happens if things fall apart financially. Oh, and the regular sex with young women helps more than I can explain. For everything. That’s huge.

Ya, I was mostly normal, except for very minor OCD, up until puberty as well.

You mentioned studying Buddhist material. Did you also regularly practice a meditation, such as sitting still and following the breath, or mantra, or similar? My gains in wellbeing took an extra-ordinary and long term effort. I’ve met very few people who have put in similar hours. Doing that was also of course not without risks and side effects. At one point I was seeing the guru pictures in 3-d and thought they were embodied by the presence of real gurus. He he. And I was very hard core about not caring about worldly things. I took it all quite seriously, and really did my very best.

And some of the most extra-ordinary gains were temporary or came back in fits and spurts.

And it took years just to even begin to get a real vipassana style formless meditation of just resting the mind.

And much of the meditation was truly arduous.

But none-the-less, some dramatic personality and wellbeing changes did happen. I am nothing today like the troubled teen I was. Nowadays my inner voice spontaneously proclaims “I’m so happy”. That’s what I just said to myself not 5 minutes ago. And I wasn’t trying to tell myself some self improvement story. I really am so happy that those words just naturally burst out of my mind.

So ya, neuroplasticity is real, and great and lasting long term changes are possible. It can be a long grueling process that requires intense willpower though.

We seem to be cut from a similar cloth. I dropped out of college after having a nervous breakdown and spent the next few years reading Buddhist texts, meditating on Zen koans, reading the Bible (I’d forgotten all the doctrine I’d learned growing up and wanted to read it as a spiritual text from my own perspective), and just reading everything I could about spirituality and psychology to get my head in order. Also intensively independently researching nutrition — that was a key player too, if not first and foremost.

I’ve pretty much struggled with suicidal thoughts almost daily since I was 12 or 13, major mood swings, OCD as well, intrusive, incessant thoughts about horrible and mean things that I didn’t want to be thinking about.

Anyway, especially over the past couple years I developed some skills with instrument building and repair. I have a lot to learn but even though I don’t have a regular client base yet, I’m definitely light years ahead of the routine guys working at music shops, in terms of what I’m capable of doing and the quality of my work. The only thing that’s lacking to get me off the ground is my confidence in myself. I would work with my friend once in a while, who’s renowned in the area, but he likes working alone and more or less left me to my own devices after showing me the basics, and I have yet to make my own way in the world with that.

Though like it said in that ‘confessions of an incel’ article, confidence comes from experience. Just like I need to start getting with girls, I need to get more work in and get paid and praised for it regularly — and that will build the confidence. I’m extremely proud of the instrument I built myself, it’s excellent, looks very unique, and everyone who’s played it loved it — but the confidence isn’t there because it’s not consistent. I look at it and pick it up and feel proud but I built it over a year ago. The feelings fade with time — atrophies like muscles you don’t use.

The hardest part is that with no sex life and no immediate prospect of having one, and having gone so many years in isolation like this, my motivation is wearing thin. The lack of human companionship and a feeling of any real, genuine bond has taken a very heavy toll on me.

I’ve only learned a little bit of qi-gong and might get back into that. Although it was just watching videos online about how to do it. There might be actual classes around where I live. I’d have to push myself but there could also be the benefit of meeting like-minded people there.

Mantak Chia had a lot of cool stuff and I used to read some of his work, but it’s been a long time. On the physical side at least, I’ve been doing gymnastics as well as weightlifting and that definitely helps to keep me centered. The gymnastics especially. There’s a site, Gymnastic Bodies dot com, that has the best bodyweight training program I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve been doing it for 6 months, have made a lot of progress and my overall feeling of strength and well-being have magnified exponentially. And I’m not even 1/4 of the way through Foundation One yet.

It’s reassuring to me that you feel the meditation was more beneficial to you than working on a career. I feel the same way when I stop and think about my own experiences. What I’ve learned about managing my emotions and being able to find at least some peace within myself despite the massive storm of memories and emotions inside my mind — and so much more that I can’t put into words. You know what I mean. I think about dying a lot and it feels good to feel conscious and like I can be at peace with how my life has played out so far — that is to say, that I can choose to be at peace with it.

Of course I still want to move forward and have a better life, but I think it’s important to accept ourselves for where we are right now, including where we came from.

As an investment in my future, the meditation was far superior to working on a career.

Later I worked on building up my own businesses, and that took decades to get off the ground. But the foundations for me were really worth the investment – taking the time out to just focus on meditation. I did that for several years.

It was the meditation that had the strongest effect on all of that, and all of that, including the worst of the social anxiety, went away by about the age of 21, after many long meditation retreats.

While hypnosis is very useful for dealing with beliefs, meditation can deal with mindfully re-training ones direct momentary experience.

It was at 16 that I also discovered body the body centered meditation including hatha yoga. Also some of the self-hypnotic routines I did were body centered meditations; especially feeling love physically in areas of the body.

Later in life I learned chi-kung, which is another body-centered meditation, which I found to be very powerful and important, and practice to this day.

For self improvement and getting over old habits, you may want to look into these other approaches. Beliefs are important, but there are other approaches that will help a great deal in other ways.