I work 10 hour days

To me, a complete stranger not knowing more about your situation, this was the first thing that jumped out at me. If you’re working more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week, I think that’s bound to take a toll on your physical and mental health. I know that the economy and the job market are not good right now, but if you think that there might be any possibility of you finding a better work situation, I think that that would help you a lot. Weigh all the pros and cons of any job change very carefully though, so you don’t end up in a worse situation.

I’m 45 and that feeling has always appeared as the impetus and precursor to change. The thoughts and feelings you are having feel bad but trust that feeling. There’s sort of phases of self awareness that develop through adulthood. Maybe you’ve heard people talk about getting a “fuck it” attitude going into 40. This is probably something similar, but it’s like an urge to take things more seriously. We can’t really get to the “fuck it” phase without going through the phase where we learn what our priorities actually are and aren’t.

My advice: trust yourself and listen to yourself. You can’t change everything all at once, but you can make incremental changes which will amount to real change in less time than you realize. My 30’s were a period of incredible personal growth, and it started with some of the feelings you’re experiencing.

As someone who just passed 30, the major issue is almost certainly working full time.

In my experience, therapy is often better than venting online, but worse than venting to a trustworthy friend. But it’s kinda unfair to make that your friends responsibility

around 30 seems to be the age when it’s most allowed to settle into a life of incurious stagnation. the bosses and banks don’t care if you learn anything new or try to develop mastery in a skill.

i went back to finish school around 30 in a completely different discipline, so honestly my timetable has consistently been off the rails (dropped out at 20, changed careers/quarter life crisis in late 20s). i found higher education and retraining in my 30s to be much easier.

i don’t put any weight into western “studies” about cognitive decline happening before like 60, because our society does not reward curiosity or edification. they want almost all of us to be incurious treat seekers. the brain is an adaptive organ in an adaptive body that will do its best to adapt to and survive the conditions it is subjected to.

if i could distill my advice into a directive for people at any age or stage of life: cultivate curiosity.

I said this in a reply comment but I’m redoing it because I want to make sure you see it: get enough sleep. Self-discipline is a mental resource that depletes with exhaustion. So is emotional regulation, which can be another motivation for seeking out easy physical comfort, like sugar and fat-rich food, as a method of self-soothing.

Granted, this is my first 5 years of working full-time,

I’d guess it’s much more this than anything to do with age

~40 y/o vegan checking in: What you’re describing sounds like burnout. I got it around age 35 after failing to establish good professional/personal limits, and using food and pot as pressure valves.

For me, I had to make a bunch of lifestyle changes that weren’t easy, but were necessary. The first one was quitting my job. If you change your situation, then fix your food, get moderate regular exercise and sleep your brain will indeed still work. For many decades in fact (or so I’m told).

Now I will stray further into ‘what worked for me’, so I risk telling you things that are tuned for my personal situation, but you still may find them useful. A therapy recommendation: just read Feeling Good by Burns and self-service. Therapy doesn’t need to be a lifelong subscription service and, outside of severe cases, anti-depressants mask and delay dealing with depression. Meditation is similarly a free tool that can be quite useful. As are walks outside looking at trees.

Good luck!

This was from online studies, so take it with a grain of salt, but from https://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-peaks-at-different-ages-0306 :

• raw speed in processing information appears to peak around age 18 or 19, then immediately starts to decline.
• short-term memory continues to improve until around age 25, when it levels off and then begins to drop around age 35.
• the ability to evaluate other people’s emotional states, the peak occurred much later, in the 40s or 50s.

Mostly, I would guess what you’re feeling is the grind of full time work. I remember hearing that mathematicians peaked by 30, but a quick search suggests that was always a bias for rewarding people early in their careers and is not backed up my more recent data.

If you are constantly exhausted from work then that will impact your capabilities in all facets, and can lead to mental stagnation and even degradation. No amount of therapy can fix that.

If you want an easy trick to work on your food habit while being chronically exhausted: meal prep food that you actually like to eat after a long work day. Let it be less healthy than you’d ideally want, if it’s even a little bit better than what you’d order otherwise then it’s a win.

Trying to rely on self-discipline is equivalent to just trying to will yourself to be better. You’re much better off trying to change the environment so that it’s easier to behave in the way you want and harder to behave in a way that you don’t. An easy example is that you shouldn’t shop for food when you are hungry, and you should only buy food that you think you should ever be eating (even if only sometimes). If you have less food lying around that is bad for you, and especially if it’s not lying out but up in a drawer or something while other options are lying out, it often becomes much easier to make better choices. Certainly it’s helped me a lot.

This sounds like depression and that’s not meant to be dismissive in any way. There’s a lot of self blame in your comments, avoidance-goals, hopelessness, defeatism, lack of control etc. Environmental factors play a large part of course, but the brain can absolutely fuck up your perception of things and how it react or protect itself from that stress.

I dunno how titles and medical licenses work in your country, but in my country a “therapist” isn’t a protected title. Anyone can do “therapy” so talk to an actual “shrink” at the hospital instead, assuming that’s accessible to you.

Ask about medication and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s not about ignoring how you feel or “numbing” yourself, the opposite actually. Also, reduce your doom-scrolling as much as possible.

Death to America.

Is mental stagnation and unhealthy habit forming just part of turning 30

No. If anything I think I’m stagnating less in my 30s than I did before; same for the unhealthy habits. I sometimes wonder how much of that is due to my regular psychedelics use, mind you. In fact I hesitate to suggest it but if you have no counter indication at all exploring such a use yourself (if you never did) might be valuable.

I work 10 hour days and then I’m too exhausted to eat healthy

I prepare gigantic meals on Sundays that last me and my partner all week. Even if you like diversity during the week this isn’t necessarily a problem if you have freezer space (I don’t): make several such gigantic meals and freeze it all in portions; unfreeze what you need/feel like eating when needed.

This is both better for your health (including your mental health), and the environment. Got to like cooking though.

I used to be vegan, and I still think vegans are basically correct, but I no longer have self-discipline.

This is genuinely weird to me. Been vegan for close to a decade and it doesn’t take discipline at all to not consume animal products (well it did for perhaps the first initial six months I’d say); it doesn’t even register as food anymore - pure disgust. This includes smells of cadaver parts being cooked that I remember I thought attractive before switching. Didn’t you get disgusted by cooked flesh after a few months ? I assumed this was universal (it certainly happened to my partner as well, switched together).

It does take incredible discipline to be around people that do consume them, though; seeing people you sometimes appreciate actively participating in the greatest act of continuous, industrialized exploitation, torture and murder in the history of the planet is depressing.

I feel like this if I stop exercising

Alienation is real. Can you change to shorter, nine or eight hour shifts? Or is that not an option? It would make you less exhausted and give time for exercise and hobbies.

The 10 hour days are imposed in you by capitalism. You’re not deficient, this is something that is mostly happening to you. I will say that eating better and exercising consistently can be self-maintaining, same as eating junk and collapsing in a pile can be self-maintaining. If you can regain the good habits then it becomes easier to do, but just like someone who’s on medication of basically any kind, there’s a risk of stopping the habit because now you feel fine lol. But this has to be qualified against the fact that you’re facing a class oppression, at minimum.