I used to do this with my arms, I’d spend hours rubbing my fingers over my upper arms for pimples or anything similar. The excessive touching would inevitably cause more pimples, more squeezing and picking, more skin damage and scarring.
I stopped eventually in my late 20’s but it takes effort. Awareness is key. Try to be mindful when you do it. When you catch yourself, don’t beat yourself up, just recognise that you were doing it, remind yourself that it is damaging, remind yourself that you want to stop, and then stop doing it. Then do it again when you start doing it again.
You won’t succeed immediately and that is fine. This isn’t about hating yourself for your own behaviours or inability to act differently. This is about taking the active steps to train yourself not to act the way you have. It could take 6 months or a year, doesn’t matter as long as you try. It’s a behavioural addiction like any other that takes awareness and willingness to change.
My wife puts on RyconRoleplays or ChristopherOdd in the background sometimes when she’s having trouble sleeping. Rycon might have the voice you’re looking for; Odd’s narration depends on the game he’s playing, he likes to set the mood in more atmospheric games, and he reads out every bit of lore.
Clarkesworld is a sci-fi magazine with free audio versions on their site, plus on Spotify as a podcast. I’d recommend “The very Pulse of the Machine” personally as an intro. It was adapted into a great episode of “Love, Death + Robots”.
I feel you… For me, it sometimes help, when I notice that I’m doing it, to grab some knitting/stitching project or to grab a Rubix’ Cube. But as others said, a specialist would be a good idea.
When I saw your post I remembered a meme I saw on Lemmy, it’s kind of sad, but also makes me more aware of it…
I’ll echo that this is really something to talk in depth with, with your provider.
That being said, I can relay what I’ve been told by providers along with the anecdotal.
Any antidepressant is going to need to “build up” in your system to keep you feeling better. But any pill is going to have a cycle through the day. You take it, and it needs time to get that pill taken up from your digestive tract. Towards the end of your dosage, the levels will dip slightly.
If you take it when you wake up, you’re having that uptake process happen while you’re trying to get going in the morning. If you take it before bed, by the time you wake up, the dosage is going to be stable. That stability will last through most people’s normal day, when they need the effects the most. Your two times when the support of the medication are the weakest will be when you (theoretically) have the least external stressors, which is while sleeping.
Secondarily, bedtime rituals are easier to remember because there’s no need to rush around getting ready for the day, leading to better compliance with stable dosage. You fall into the habit of bedtime, and there’s less to interrupt that patterm.
Now, my personal experience is that taking the pills before bed is better because the affect on dreams is better. SSRIs are notorious for causing dream changes. I’m already hyperphanstastic (extra vivid dreams and mental imagery). If I take my dose in the morning, then I’m at the low point of the dose when sleeping, which tends to cause less pleasant dreams. Since the kind of dreams I have when I’m not on an antidepressant tend to be the sort you don’t want, there’s no way in hell I’m doing a morning dose as the norm. You really, really don’t want the kind of nightmares I have with the hyper vividness I dream in.
Obviously, that’s not going to be the case for everyone, but it is true that most people will have less dream disturbances if the take their dose before bed rather than in the morning. It’s that gradual uptake minimizing the effects of the meds on dreams, and avoiding the disturbances that can be caused when a dose is falling off.
There’s other little things as well, though they tend to be individual. An example of that is pain relief. If that’s one of the effects you take them for, the pain reduction of a fresh dose is typically more useful while sleeping, and during the early part of your day.
Purge (youtube.com/) is pretty good. He typically posts full, un-cut dota games, and is lower energy throughout. There’s not big volume or tone changes, and they’re long enough that you should always be able to fall asleep during them.
This is their new channel that they started just a short while ago.
It’s really good long form fomat. You don’t have to watch anything and just listen. It’s long enough for me to fall asleep and not hear the whole video so next night I just go close enough to the end of what I heard/remember I heard and just continue listening. I don’t mind relistening at all - I always miss something so I always learn something new.
Edit: the awesome thing is that these videos are told basically like a story. The narrator’s voice is calming, there are no loud noises or anything. He really tells it like a good night story.
I find the Universe one the best one for me. The one for Humankind or Earth can be unsettling sometimes (mostly the intros in my experience) but I don’t have problems with uncomfortable dreams really so I don’t mind. But from my experience if there’s something that could give you a bad dream it’s only in the into.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais is my go-to for just relaxing audio. He does very in depth coverage of game franchises talking about how they evolved and the ways the mechanics support the narrative or run counter to it. Very chill and hypnotizing voice
I was always told to specifically take them in the morning because they give you energy. I’ve been on quite a few different ones and none of them have made me drowsy. If anything I might get a very slight bit of the opposite effect in that they keep me awake but even then it’s barely noticable.
In addition to what others have said already (seriously, see a doctor), it can also help to redirect the urge. If your brain currently demands something to be picked, it doesn’t have to be your skin - plucking on loose threads or fabric fuzz in an old towel until the surface feels smooth again, peeling labels off glass bottles until there is no paper left, anything with “tiny imperfections” that you can remove with a bit of fumbling can help to easen the urge without you damaging yourself in the process.
This is not “the solution” tho - it is only an additional little help to medication and therapy.
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