Fundamental choice to be made in my life.

[gooseman]

Have you tried making friends with some of your co-workers. From what you are saying, that seems to be the only place right now where you have a steady "base" of people that you see on a regular basis. Maybe, like you said, taking a class or two would help but you have to remember that most of the people in them are going to be younger than you.

I really can't relate that much because I love being alone. Although I'm married (11 years) I still treasure "my time" when the wife isn't around. That's just me though, everybody is different.

 

[Bignate603]

You really need to find some sort of group to join that would involve you with more people. A group that does service, one that goes hiking, heck, even one that sits around and plays card games. Just DO something.

 

[videogames101]

It's not hard to meet people in like WoW, just make sure you have vent.

 

[dougp]

I'm not quite sure where you live, but here are several suggestions for something in a large area.

Group like: http://www.eventsandadventures.com/

Or consider something like this: http://www.llu.com/

Sorry, I live in Houston and those are the things I used when I was single ... you can also look around for local events like meet and greets, we have mingle stuff at the museum here.

Or you could do places like Match.com or something ...

 

[SlitheryDee]

You've got to go do something regularly. Join a gym or something. If you become a regular in any place that has the same folks in it day after day, then you'll meet people. I like to bowl, so if anyone I know at all likes to bowl the I try to get them to join a league with me. That's great fun and you get to meet lots of people like that. Also I've found out that just by being a decent person sooner or later someone you know casually will invite you somewhere, be it a birthday party or a rock concert or just a night out at a bar. Don't get so used to being alone that you turn these people down out of hand. If you can stand their company and think you might like to meet some of their friends then there's no reason not to go hang.

 

[titan131]

I have found that eating oily fish and taking amino acids supplements have helped me deal with stress. Any high quality whey powder will have a large quantity of amino acids in it.

I personally did suffer some mental health problems in my teens, during which time I experienced some strong suicidal feelings. But I found that eating oily fish such as canned sardines or mackerel really helped.

Taking fish oil supplements did not seem to help me and I tried quite a few different manufacturers. There is however quite a lot of information on fish oils and trails that have taken place where the symptoms of depression, bi-polar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia etc have been greatly reduced.

You said computer games made you feel worse, that was just the same with me. Also, drinking anything with caffeine in and smoking made me feel a lot worse, although I didn't realize it until I had stopped.

As far as meditation goes, I think It can be very effective. I went to various Buddhist groups to meditate because I found meditating in a group some how easier than meditating by myself.

There is an easier way to meditate though. There are several companies who produce audio Cd's which actually induce a meditative state using binary beats and change the users brain waves to the desired state i.e. Alpha, beta, gamma, theta or delta.

I bought Holosync's prologue level audio CD and listened to it for about a year and noticed hardly any benefits, but when I meditated after having just taken the an animo acids supplement ( in this case whey powder) I noticed significant benefits i.e. Reduced anxiety, paranoia and other dysfunctional feelings such as, feelings of suicide.

On a side note, I don't think inducing a meditative state while having suicidal, homicidal or thoughts of self harm is a good idea at all because it's probably stress on the brain that coursed these feelings in the first place, and stressing it further is only going to make things worse in the short term.

To summarize and clarify; basically the oily fish made me feel a lot better but if I pushed myself I would still burn out very fast and start experiencing negative emotions relatively quickly. Mediation seems to have greatly decreased this tendency to burn out and greatly increased my torrence to stress. I seem to take things a lot less personally now than I use to.

Sorry you don't like being alone. Your problems are quite different from my old problems, but I am sure that becoming mentally stronger will help you an awe full lot.

P.S. I would not buy a Holosync audio Cd again because they are expensive and you can get a binary beat generator program for free, it's called Gnaural2. http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/ sry I don't know how to make this a hyperlink.

Edit: oh it makes it a hyperlink automatically