temo4ka

If you’re already doing therapy, consider complementing it with meditation. Meditation, if done right, can be equivalent to years of therapy.

The benefits are great, and for your situation the most relevant are reduced/eliminated anxiety, more willpower, energy, clarity (to see through depression for example); but there many others.

However, there’s a catch: meditation is hard. It requires consistent effort and dedication, just like any practice involving a complex skill (e.g., going to the gym or swimming pool).

For a completely secular practice, I’d recommend “The Mind Illuminated” by John Yates [1], a neuroscientist and a master meditator, whose aim with the book was to create a modern manual for meditation by making old Buddhist teachings accessible to an average westerner. The book is a synthesis of those teachings complemented with both his experience as a master meditator /and/ as a neuroscience Ph.D. This means that along with detailed instructions on how to actually meditate the book contains theoretic chapters explaining in popular scientific terms how your brain works and what meditation has to do with it, by first introducing a simple model, and then gradually building upon it as you progress through the book and develop your skill.

  hash foo &>/dev/null || { echo "foo command not found blabla..." >&2; exit 1; } 

It’s similar to progressive JPEG rendering. Your first pass is pre-processing resulting in fuzzy understanding of the whole that you then refine in the subsequent pass(es). Progressive way is more natural and effective.

I highly recommend reading Adler’s “How to Read a Book” [1]. This exactly the guide you want to read if you want to know how to learn well from books.