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The plateau

How do you stop refreshing for a change that is not coming

Started 23 November 2024 · 19 replies · 212 hearts · read 3.7k times

TavitaApia, WS · 23 November 2024
1.7 years ago

How do you stop refreshing for a change that is not coming — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

Writing this partly to ask and partly because writing it down usually tells me what I think.

What I would find most useful is not advice. It is somebody describing what their version of this stage was, and how long it went on for before it changed.

I have read the guides here, which were more useful than anything else I have found, and I still have a question about the timing that they do not cover.

The thing that has surprised me most about this stage is how much of it is about other people rather than about me.

Thanks all. Genuinely. This circle has been better company than I expected to find anywhere.

71

GwennoPwllheli, UK
#1

The bit that was hardest to say out loud was that I felt cheated. Not sad, not discouraged. Cheated. It helped enormously to name it accurately.

12

NyalaAddis Ababa, ET
#2

I stopped weighing anything during mine, entirely, for three months. It was the single kindest decision I made that year and my prescriber was fine with it.

7

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#3

Two things, both boring. None of us can tell you what schedule to be on. The conversation you want is with your prescriber, and we can help you write it down before you go.

22

LulaBournemouth, UK
#4

Ada, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

Honest experience: mine did not break. It became the level I stayed at, and after about four months I stopped calling it a plateau and started calling it where I live.

9me too 3

BramberSteyning, UK
#5

Building on what Lula wrote rather than answering the original question.

The most useful thing anybody said to me during mine was that maintaining is not nothing. It sounds obvious and it did not feel obvious at the time.

13

PolaGdańsk, PL
#6

I am eight weeks into one now and reading this thread because I need to hear that other people got through theirs. That is all. No question attached.

10

NikitaYerevan, AM
#7

What helped was giving the flat stretch a job. I used mine to sort out sleep, which had been quietly terrible for a year and had nothing to do with any of this.

10

NyreeChristchurch, NZ
#8

Mine broke without me changing anything. I had changed four things by then, obviously, so I have no idea which of them did it, and I suspect none of them did.

8

SindriReykjavík, IS
#9

Gently disagreeing with Nyree, or rather adding the other half of it.

Mine ended the week I stopped keeping a spreadsheet about it, which is either a profound insight or a coincidence and I genuinely do not know which.

8

OrvalWinnipeg, CA
#10

The practical thing I did was set a date twelve weeks out to review it properly, and then deliberately stop thinking about it until that date. It gave me the fortnight back.

13me too 9

TanviMumbai, IN
#11

My flat stretch coincided with a genuinely difficult period at work, and I now think the two were related in ways I will never be able to separate out.

12

RuaridhFort William, UK
#12

If you are in one, the thing I would ask is whether you are still doing the things that were helping before it started. I quietly stopped several of mine and only noticed in hindsight.

9

NadjaBelgrade, RS
#13

Somebody here described the plateau as the part where you find out whether you are doing this for a number or for a life, and that landed harder than I wanted it to.

10

Obi OEnugu, NG
#14

Building on what Ruaridh wrote rather than answering the original question.

Mine went on so long that I forgot it was a plateau and just got on with things, and I think that is genuinely how most of them end — not with a change, but with you stopping watching.

5me too 6

TamarPlymouth, UK
#15

Every plateau thread here has somebody saying theirs lasted longer than they thought possible and then ended. I did not believe them. They were right.

8

TorKeswick, UK
#16

Reading Nadja, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

I asked at my review whether a long flat stretch meant something was wrong and was told, gently, that bodies are not linear and the assumption that they should be is the odd bit.

13

LeifTrondheim, NO
#17

Picking up Tamar’s point rather than starting a new one.

Reading back through this circle's older threads was what got me through mine. Dozens of people, all convinced theirs was the permanent one, all still here.

8me too 3

AdaFacilitatorManchester, UK
#18

I am pleased with how this went and I want to say so. Not every thread needs a facilitator and this one mostly did not.

28

OrphBath, UK
#19

I want to add the unglamorous version: mine was boring rather than distressing. Weeks of nothing, mild irritation, and then it moved. Not every plateau is a crisis.

7