What helped and what did not, honestly

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What I say to anybody in one now is that you are still here, still on treatment, still doing the thing. That is the whole of what a flat stretch asks of you.

My prescriber was completely unbothered by mine, which annoyed me at the time and turned out to be the correct response. She said bodies do this and asked me to come back in eight weeks.

Something I had to unlearn: a plateau is not evidence that I did something wrong. I spent six weeks auditing my own behaviour for a mistake that was not there.

I found that keeping a two-line diary through a plateau was the only way to see that anything at all was happening. From inside the week it looked like nothing.

Not a solution, just company.

I nearly stopped during mine, and the only reason I did not was that I had promised to come to a circle call on the Thursday and did not want to arrive having quit on the Tuesday.

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.

Shade — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

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.

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.

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.

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.