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nerdgul · 5 years

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Could you explain the brain receptor thing and unmonitored internet usage?? I wasn’t monitored either and now I’m gay but like what else this shit do

i certainly can

first off ill start by saying the internet didn’t make you gay. it may have opened you up a bit and gave you more info on the subject, but thas you own shit my dude. good shit, but yours

and secondly, its way to late for me to be scouting academic articles n shit so this is gon be more of a long winded rant than anything proper. and even simplifying it down this is gonna get long and be badly spelled so sorry in advance (especially to mobile users who don't gets a keep reading break)

*** now for the tldr; you may not have been monitored but things are significantly different than it was a decade ago. internet addiction is a much more prevalent and real problem. addiction of any kind fucks up how your brain chemistry. today’s tech is essentially heroin for kids and children do not understand the concept of self control.

so children brains are not fully developed when they come out, but we’re learning and making connections from day 1. thing is is that when a connection is made it pretty damn hard to sever. even as an adult unlearning shit is a lot harder than learning it and when ur a kid your learning shit constantly and it gets cemented way faster. so essentially what happens to your brain in childhood will be pretty damn hardwired into you forever. (there exceptions of course but were talking habits and brain chemistry here)

which means it’s super fucking easy to get a toddler addicted to shit. like stupid insanely easy. they're little fucking suckers for some sweet sweet pavlovian conditioning.

but what qualifies as an addiction? a lot of people debate whether or not things like video games/internet can qualify as a legit addiction cause they aren’t chemicals that directly impact the brain but are instead things that cause your brain to produce its own feel good chemicals that still fuck up your brain. but they cause all the same reactions in the end.

basically the internet make you feel good. you want to feel good all the time. you fuck up your dopamine receptors by overloading them with cat videos. it takes more internet to get the same good feel. you start avoiding other less pleasurable parts of life (school, family, sunlight). bam, addiction.

i’ve seen toddlers that had symptoms compared to actual meth junkies, the only difference is that when a toddler has a screaming crying raging fit over not having their fix its seen as ‘kids just being kids’ and many parents will roll their eyes and to get them to shut up will just let the kid have 5 more minutes of screen time… or 50. but thing is, that shits not normal. sure tantrums every now and then happen but it is the responsibility of the parent to help their child regulate screen time because children are not yet developed enough to self regulate shit.

this is especially bad for video games. it might seem harmless enough to hand over some phone game to your kid while your busy running errands to keep em quiet but mobile games are designed to be colorful busy give constant achievements and keep you playing (so you’ll watch more ads or pay more money). its overstimulation and the child doesn’t even realize it, instead they see anything outside the game as being the ‘too much’ and lash out at the parent trying to get their attention instead.

and beyond the part of addiction too much screen time has also been linked to lack of sleep, delayed speech development, and poor social skills.

babies literally need to be touched or they’ll die. lack of eye contact at a young age can fuck up their sense of self and connections to others. so if your a parent looking at your phone instead of your kid it already is teaching them the phone is more important. and when they finally get to the screen they will also start prioritising it over socialising and i cannot stress enough how fucking important regular social contact with children is. they need it to develop right. seriously just look up ‘feral children’ and see what happens (granted those are worst of the worst cases but even self inflicted isolation still isn’t good for anyone).

so what does poor social skills and a fucked up domaine receptor get you??? DING DING DING, LIFELONG DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY!! a slu of mental health issues just waiting to feed on them poor deep fried serotonin nuggets.

now im not saying internet gives people depression. that would be a gross oversimplification of the subject. and in many studies its been shown the correlation (wich is very high btw) between internet usage and depression is because internet attracts people with pre-existing depression but when talking specifically about children who dont already have these issues its a different story.

however if you were born in the 1990s to early 2000s you have a different story than children today. so far i’ve been talking about mostly toddlers who use modern tech (phones, kids tablets ect). millennials and early gen z era were a little special having grown up with this technology but in such a way it was much harder for us to abuse it. sure there were some kids who would play webkinz for 5 hours a day and live in front of the TV, but there would also only be a single computer in the house which the whole family shared, and the internet was probably slow so it was a lot harder for this generation to have these kinds of issues. TVs also had to be shared and had regular commercials and reruns so your get bored and go outside sometimes. no constantly continuous streaming of any new content at your fingers. things just.. didn’t need to be monitored as closely back then.

thats not to say it didn't need to be monitored at all, but more so issues with technology were less likely to happen or developed to a far lesser extent. it’s also why i see a lot of millennials defending the internet. making memes about overprotective moms being worried about video games n shit. They dont relize just how different things are and what that means.

but the reality is technology as it is today is much different. everything wants your attention all the time and growing up in a world where you get your very own touch screen device at a young age to do with whatever you please, that opens the door to a lot more potential issues and they’re things we shouldn’t ignore.

and thats not even getting into the specific types of content children could be consuming or the effects of social media and internet culture has on older children and teens. but thats a whole other rant.

anyway if its requested ill make a more informed fully sourced post to tackle any particular subject with more depth, lord knows i’ve still glossed over about a million other parts of the topic, but for now hope this helps. ps; if anyone wishes to add on/correct me/phrase something better please feel free to doso

#applesauc-y #internet addiction #nerdstuff #asks

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crossfitkodiak · 7 years

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Intensity & Familiarity: The Notion of Home

The notion of "home" has always been difficult for me to grasp. Folks tend to have something that they find to be familiar to them. I've always struggled with being familiar, with finding that feeling within... well, anything, to be honest. People are often skeptical when I say that, but I have debilitating social anxiety. I don't take to people quickly and it takes me an incredibly long time to begin to trust anyone. When I was a kid, I had a friend who lived across the street from me. I would spend most evenings at his house and before he moved away, we were inseparable. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back, he wasn't safe there. His brother would smoke weed and give it to my friend. He would give him booze. We were maybe seven to nine years old. His father would drink constantly. On several occasions I saw my friends mother hit him. I was a kid. You don't process something as bad or out of the norm until you learn that it's either. I didn't realize for years that my mother never slapped me like that. I didn't put together for years that I had never seen an adult drink as heavily as his father did before. Now, I'm also not against people smoking pot, but we were eight and nine years old. You don't give drugs to kids that age (or you do, because you're an asshole). I tell people that I often times feel like an accident. Like, I was on the conveyer belt being pushed along in the process of being created and I somehow fell off of it early. I've been told that I'm a "people person," and I really don't know what that means. I don't know what that's like. Everything I know about people I've learned from just watching them, seeing how they interact and react to the world around them. Just seeing how humans do whatever it is that they do. Namely: how they live. I'm not sociable. I've just done my reading. Familiarity is a curious thing. The ways it can present itself to people. It can be with another person, place, memory, or... well, what feels familiar to you? Where do you go in your mind when you need solid ground and sure footing? I've never felt familiar with anything. There's always been a screen between me and the rest of the world, at least as my brain reads it, there always has been. I smile and am polite and tend to stay in my own lane as best I can. I try not to veer into anyone else's lane unless they invite me over. I know that reasonably a lot of this stems back to experiences during my upbringing. Getting beat up in bathrooms because you're quiet and overweight will leave it's mark for sure, but there's something else there too. It's not just my anxiety. It's not just my depression. Those are things I carry everyday, but I don't actively FEEL them everyday. They ebb and flow, just like everything else. I don't know what it is, I've just always felt far more inclined towards observation. That I'm just here to observe. Which is one of the reasons I think Coaching resonates with me as much as it does. I can observe and report back what I see, you don't have to explain it to me. I can actively see the flaw within the movement. I've never liked lectures, but I love presentations. Most people aren't entirely content to be alone and to be honest it's kind of weird at times. I'll occasionally realize that I've spent an entire day by myself, doing whatever comes to mind, and maybe even haven't spoken since I got up that morning. And I love it. I love being alone. I love spending time alone. It's a chance to recharge. It's a chance to assess the world I've seen and learn from it. But, you can't do that all the time, right? People are here and you have to see them eventually. My job requires that I spend large chunks of time with big groups of people. In fact, it requires that I be in-charge of these groups and lead them accordingly and safely. And I love it. It's the best job I've ever had and the only one I want to do. Despite all that, it can still be kind of odd to be any kind of figure to people when you feel like you're just meant to hangout in the background and watch life happen. That's what a Coach is; a figure. A lot of my job is comprised of listening to people that need someone to talk to. I can't count the number of times I've sat with a member while they just vented cried for a while. I can't always go to the parties I'm invited to and if I go to a bar (despite the fact that I don't drink), I can't wear a CrossFit shirt. People that are in a position to be in charge or have any kind of influence have to be careful about the way they present themselves. I care about my job and my career. I want to be successful in this field for a long time. If I had to name two things I feel familiar with, it would be my job and training. I don't know why and I feel bad that "people" isn't on that list, but it's just not. I already addressed the aspects of coaching I'm drawn to, but training is sort of a different animal. It's incredibly solitary, which drives me pretty hard. Even if you're in a class full of people, you're still performing the workout on your own. You still have to lift the bar, jump onto the Box, do the pull ups, or sprint to the finish. No matter how many people are in class with you, it's still on YOU to do the work. I think that any kind of physical training, or just using your body in general, feels familiar because it's what humans are made for, right? We're not made to be sedentary. We're not designed to sit around and do nothing. We're built to run, climb, push, pull, lift, breathe, and work. Maybe it sounds dramatic, but the feeling of being completely drained after a workout just feels normal. It carries that, "Okay, here we go. This is what we're built for," feeling with it. My buddy Matt is a fan of saying that I'm "just good at suffering." He's not wrong. I'm not very fast and I'm honestly not very strong for my size, but I'm just good at setting a "bleed from your eyeballs" pace and staying there for a while. For whatever reason, that discomfort feels familiar. It feels normal. It feels like the sort of thing a body is made to do. Hard work. That's what feels normal. When I was a kid, my friend never found it out of the ordinary or strange that he was given drugs and alcohol. He never found it odd that his mother slapped him. That was the environment he knew and had grown up in. It was familiar to him. You could go down a rabbit hole from here about why people go back to abuse and stay around toxicity for as long as they do, but it comes back to the same reason I love the suffering of a workout... It's familiar. If you grow comfortable with the world around you, it doesn't matter what that world is comprised of. It becomes the norm. It becomes something you know. I always tell people that change is fucking bonkers and it really is. Going from obese to in shape is fucking insane. Giving up toxic friendships and relationships is scary as hell. But why should it be? They're not kind to you. They don't treat you well. They demean and undermine you every step of the way. Why would this change be bad? Why is it so hard to pull away from? Familiarity. It's what you know. It's your world. That's why it's so easy on the opposite end to be like, "You really should stop seeing them," or, "Why do you spend time with them?" It's not your world. You haven't found that comfortable position in the mud pit that we have. Which is good. Stand clear. We don't want you getting dirty. That's why the idea of listening and attempting to understand and have empathy is so important. I tend to speak to my old friend every other year, not sure why, just sort of how it's panned out. He's never doing well. He's always struggling and clawing his way around. Trying. He's always trying. We always end up saying the same thing. We have to work harder. We have to work harder than before. We have to be better. Get better. More. More. More. Work. Constant and gnashing. I think that effort should be what looks back you in the mirror. I believe that pushing yourself, in whatever form that challenge takes for you, should be a daily practice. I never tell my friend that he needs to "grow up" or give him some lecture on why he's fucking up. He's human. It's within our nature. We stumble and trip and we're clumsy at times. We have a slip of the tongue or a blank moment that lasts a few seconds too long. I told one of my best friends today that I'm starting to have abs and that it's fucking with my mind. And I know how that sounds. "This motherfucker, complaining about being able to see his abs." Look, they're not cheese graters, but I can see them and that is very, very new to me. It's weird because it's not familiar. For so long my life was as someone that worked hard, but was never the state champion in Speech and Debate in high school. I stayed in my own lane, but people still fucked with me at bars and wanted to fight. I just wanted to relax and be like my friends, but they could all put the bottle down and I went through a long phase where I just couldn't let go of it. I've found that familiarity within the strangest place: physical effort. That physical push everyday. As a friend of mine put it recently, "You're so fucking weird, but in the best way possible." My dad swears I'm one of the most intense people he's ever met. To me, I'm just doing what humans should: giving myself entirely to something. I think about it a lot, honestly. I'm gonna die one day. I'm gonna stop breathing and knowing me, it's gonna hurt pretty damn bad. I want to know what it's like to give myself to something I love entirely. I want to know what it's like to chase something down like a junkyard dog and rip into it. I want that copper taste of blood in my mouth after a workout. I want the heaving, unable to catch my breath. I want the failed reps and the loud PR's. I think that my dad was right to the degree that humans have a certain amount of intensity hardwired into them. I think everyone has something that they'd be willing to hurt for. So, go find it. And it might mean leaving what's familiar. It might mean getting out of the world around you. That's what it took for me. I love CrossFit with every fiber of who I am and people can give me shit for being a fanboy all they want, I don't care. I watch the Games every year and I see people that have found that intensity that lives inside all of us and chased it down and haven't let go. I watching Powerlifting meets and see people with passion and drive, not "What's the point of being able to squat that?" Fuck you, what are you committed to? What do you love? What lights you on fire? The answer for most people is nothing. The large majority of people at the gym I coach at love to run. And I love watching them work. Endurance workouts are some of my favorite days to coach, because when a runner shows up, you can see that for a moment. You can see that push. I don't ever care if I run a half marathon. I don't ever care if I run a 50K trail race. But, I do, with every ounce of who I am, care about supporting those goals for others. I want people to find something and go for it. Fucking attack it. Fuck your mile time. Let's Deadlift. Fuck your Back Squat, let's go run. If you don't care about squatting 500lbs, then don't worry about it. Worry about your splits on this next interval. And if you don't care about your half marathon time, then come lift something heavy. Just find it. Whatever it is. You'll know when you do, because you won't give a shit what others think about it. I don't. I have goals and things I want to achieve. I have things I focus on. And I don't care what anyone has to say about it. That fire is yours. Extinguishers are not welcome here. --- I love spending time alone. I love lifting alone. I love watching others hit PR's and milestones, whether it be on a run or a lift. It's an incredible thing to witness, someone overcoming an obstacle that probably seemed daunting. Let others find what they love and then push them towards it. Give it everything you've got. Because they way I see it, I have one chance. And I have no intentions of fucking it up. --- Set your soul on fire. Set that suicide pace. Turn the knob up to eleven and hold on. Find home. Make your soul bleed for it. Burn it up. ----

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sarahburness · 6 years

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How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing

“Your body is precious. It is your vehicle for awakening. Treat it with care.” ~Buddha

When I went on my first diet in my teens (low-carb, it was back in the Atkins days), I wasn’t even overweight. I weighed less than 120 pounds, but my jeans had started to get a little tight, so I thought I needed to lose five pounds or so. At the time, I didn’t have a bad relationship with food; I just ate like a typical teenager—not the best choices.

About two hours in, I remember starting to obsess over the things I couldn’t eat and being desperate to be skinny ASAP so I could eat them again.

By mid day, I “failed.”

I caved and ate…. *gasp, shock, horror*… carbs.

And something weird happened. Instantly, I felt like I was bad.

It’s not just that I thought I had made a bad choice.

I thought, “You idiot, you can’t do anything right. Look at you, one meal in and you screwed up already. You may as well just eat whatever you want the rest of the day and start again tomorrow.”

I think I gained about five pounds from that attempt.

And I continued slowly gaining more and more weight every year after that—and feeling guiltier and guiltier every time I ate something “bad.”

Atkins low-carb miracle cure had failed me horribly and began a decades-long battle with food and my weight.

See, it wasn’t that I thought my choice was bad and then I just made a better choice next time; it was that I felt like I, as a person, was bad.

And what happens when we’re bad?

We get punished.

I didn’t realize until many years later, but those degrading thoughts and overeating the rest of the day were, in part, my way of punishing myself for being bad and eating the bad things.

The harder I tried to control what was going in, the worse it got and the more out of control I felt.

In my thirties I hit bottom, as they say, as a result of trying to follow a “clean eating meal plan.”

Four days into my first attempt to “eat clean” and strictly adhere to what someone else told me I should eat, I had my first-ever binge.

Prior to that, I had some minor food issues. I ate kind of crummy, had slowly been gaining weight, and felt guilty when I ate carbs (thanks, Atkins).

But a few days into “clean eating,” I was in the middle of a full-blown eating disorder.

The clean eating miracle craze may have made me look and feel amazing, but emotionally, it failed me horribly and began my years-long battle to recover from bulimia and binge eating.

But I thought it was just me. I was such a screw up, why couldn’t I just eat like a normal person?

I saw how much better I looked and felt when I was managing to “be good” and “eat clean,” but within a few days or weeks of “being good,” no matter how great I felt from eating that way, I always caved and ended up bingeing again.

And every time, I thought it was me. I told myself I was broken and weak and pathetic.

Even later, when I started training other people, my message was “If it’s not on your plan, it doesn’t go in your mouth” and “You can’t expect to get the body you want by eating the things that gave you the body you have.”

I wanted clients to feel amazing and get the best results possible, so I gave them what I knew would accomplish those two things.

But, at the time, I didn’t know that it was actually those messages and rules that had created all my own issues with food, and I most definitely didn’t know they would have that affect on anyone else.

I thought everyone else was “normal.” I was just broken and weak and stupid—that’s why I struggled so hard to just “be good” and “stop screwing up.” Normal people would see how much better they felt when they ate that way, and they’d automatically change and live happily ever after.

Ha. No.

The more people I trained, the more I became acutely aware that food is the thing most people struggle with the most, and I started recognizing the exact same thoughts and behaviors I’d experienced, in the majority of my clients.

And almost every single one of them also had a looong history of failed diets.

Hmmm. Maybe it wasn’t just me.

Not everyone goes to the extreme of bulimia, but the more I spoke with other people about their struggles with food and shared my own with them, the more I realized how shockingly pervasive disordered eating and eating disorders have become.

Binge eating is an eating disorder—one that more people struggle with than I ever imagined. Though, most people are horrified to admit it, and many may not even be willing to admit to themselves that they do.

I get that because it’s associated with lack of self-control and gluttony, and there’s a great deal of shame related to both of those things. But it actually has little to do with either, and you can’t change anything until you admit you’re struggling.

And disordered eating in general is even more pervasive.

Feeling guilt after eating is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

Restricting entire food groups is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

Severely restricting food in general in not normal. That’s disordered eating.

Beating yourself up for eating something “bad” is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

Starting and stopping a new diet every few weeks or months is not normal. That’s disordered eating.

Diet culture has us so screwed up that we spend most of our lives doing these things without ever realizing they’re not normal. And they’re negatively affecting our whole lives.

As I was working on my own recovery, I dove into hundreds of hours of research into dieting, habits, motivation, and disordered eating—anything I could get my hands on to help not only myself but my clients better stick to their plans.

It’s so easy, I used to think; there must be some trick to make us just eat what we’re supposed to eat!

But I learned the exact opposite.

I learned that trying to “stick to the plan” was actually the problem.

The solution wasn’t in finding some magic trick to help people follow their meal plans; the solution lied in not telling people what to eat in the first place.

There are many reasons behind why we eat what we eat, when we eat, and even the quantities we choose to eat; it just doesn’t work to tell someone to stop everything they know and just eat this much of this at this time of day, because at some later date it’ll make them skinny and happy.

Our brains don’t work that way.

Our brains actually work exactly the opposite.

As soon as we place restrictions on what we’re allowed or not allowed to eat, our brains start creating compulsions and obsessive thoughts that drive us to “cave.”

Have you ever noticed that as soon as you “can’t” have something, you automatically want it even more?

That’s a survival instinct that’s literally been hard-wired into our brains since the beginning of time.

In November 1944, post-WW II, physiologist Ancel Keys, PhD and psychologist Josef Brozek PhD began a nearly yearlong experiment on the psychological and physiological effects of starvation on thirty-six mentally and physically healthy young men.

The men were expected to lose one-quarter of their body weight. They spent the first three months eating a normal diet of 3,200 calories a day followed by six months of semi-starvation at approximately 1,600 calories a day (though 1,600 calories isn’t even all that low). The semi-starvation period was followed by three months of rehabilitation (2,000-3,200 calories a day) and finally an eight-week period of unrestricted rehabilitation, during which time there was no limitations on caloric intake.

Researchers closely monitored the physiological and psychological changes brought on by calorie restriction.

During the most restricted phase the changes were dramatic. Physically, the men became gaunt in appearance, and there were significant decreases in their strength, stamina, body temperature, heart rate, and even sex drive.

Psychologically, the effects were even more dramatic and mirror those almost anyone with any history of dieting can relate to.

They became obsessed with food. Any chance they had to get access to more food resulted in the men binge eating thousands of calories in a sitting.

Before the restriction period, the men were a lively bunch, discussing politics, current events, and more. During the restriction period, this quickly changed. They dreamt, read, fantasized, and talked about food all the time.

They became withdrawn, irritable, fatigued, and apathic. Depression, anxiety, and obsessive thinking (especially about food) were also observed.

For some men, the study proved too difficult—they were excluded as a result of breaking the diet or not meeting their weight loss goals.

We don’t struggle to follow diets and food rules because we lack willpower. It’s literally the way our brains are wired.

Why? Because from an evolutionary standpoint, we’re not designed to restrict food. Coded into our DNA is the overwhelming urge to survive, so when food (either over-all calories or food groups) is restricted, our brains begin to create urgency, compulsions, and strong desires that force us to fill its needs—and often, even more than its needs (binges).

We cave because our brains are hardwired to. Then the act of caving actually gets wired into our brains as a habit that we continue to repeat on autopilot every time we restrict food or food groups.

And it triggers the punish mode that I spoke of earlier, which only compounds the problem and slowly degrades our self-worth.

So every year millions of people are spending tens of billions of dollars on diets that are making the majority of us heavier, depressed, anxious, food-obsessed binge eaters, and destroying our self-worth.

Now I know all that sounds pretty bleak, but there is a way out. I know because I’ve found it.

It sounds like the opposite of what we should do, but it saved my life.

I gave myself permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and stopped trying to restrict. The scarier that sounds, the more you need to do it.

As soon as nothing is off limits, we can begin to slowly move away from the scarcity mindset and break the habits and obsessions created by dieting.

When we give ourselves unconditional permission to eat whatever we want, without guilt or judgment, we give ourselves the space to get mindful about our choices.

We give ourselves the opportunity to explore why we’re making the choices we’re making and the power to freely make different ones because we begin to value ourselves again.

When we remove the guilt and judgment, start to value ourselves again, and work on being mindful, we can begin to notice how the foods we’re eating make us feel and make choices from a place of love and kindness rather than fear, guilt, and punishment.

It sounds too simple to work, but it saved my life.

Rather than telling people what they should and shouldn’t eat, or trying to listen to someone who’s telling us what we should or shouldn’t eat, we have to build a connection with our bodies.

We have to learn to listen to them, to learn to distinguish the difference between physical hunger and emotional hunger. To stop eating when we’re not physically hungry, and to start feeling emotions instead of feeding them.

We have to break the habits that drive autopilot eating. We have to be mindful, trust the wisdom of our own bodies, and make choices based on how they make our bodies feel rather than what some diet tells us is the answer to happiness and being skinny.

About Roni Davis

Roni Davis is certified mindfulness-based, cognitive behavioral practitioner and creator of Cognitive Eating, a revolutionary new approach for healing weight & food issues using the power of, and science behind, cognitive behavioral strategies, mindfulness, acceptance and self-compassion. You can join her mission to rid the world of diets at RoniDavis.com or find her free workshop: ronidavis.com/free-training.

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The post How Restrictive Diets Mess with Our Brains and Lead to Bingeing appeared first on Tiny Buddha.

from Tiny Buddha https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-restrictive-diets-mess-with-our-brains-and-lead-to-bingeing/

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ultralifehackerguru-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/what-i-learned-when-i-quit-numbing-my-feelings/

What I Learned When I Quit Numbing My Feelings

I took the month of August to camp and hike and travel alone in Ireland. Part of my intention was to quit smoking weed, which I’ve previously written about as being my go-to strategy for connecting to the sacred, for accessing presence and immanence.

To be clear, I pass zero judgment on anyone who chooses to smoke weed. I’ve mostly used weed in beautiful, supportive ways that expanded my sense of connection with the natural world, and lots of folks can use it without any downsides. That’s just not my experience.

As part of my weed-retirement process in Ireland, I took lots of pictures, enacted rituals to talk to the spirit of the plant, and communed with the elemental forces of magic that I’ve been relying on weed to access since I was 15.

Ultimately, in quitting weed, I discovered that I’ve spent almost 40 years convincing myself, in one way or another, that what I’m feeling in a particular moment is wrong and that I should feel another way.

What I’ve realized is that if I allow myself to really honor what I want in each moment, much of my need for weed seems to dissolve. The desire for it is gone as long as I’m doing other things to access the magic and sense of connection with the natural world that I crave.

So, really, quitting weed wasn’t hard while I was in Ireland. I had moments of anxiety and uncertainty, but I was traveling alone with no itinerary. I was empowered to choose what my body and spirit really wanted in each moment. Since I returned home, however, I’ve been thinking about weed approximately every 23 seconds.

I’ve spent a lifetime policing my emotional landscape, pushing away certain feelings because they aren’t comfortable.

In the past, I’ve mostly used weed to help me tune into a particular frequency of reality where there is no separate self, which I’ve written about in other articles. What I didn’t realize is that I’ve also sometimes used weed to push through the (perfectly reasonable) resistance I feel in certain moments.

Essentially, I smoked weed to force myself to do shit I didn’t actually want to do; to push myself to do things I ultimately wanted to do, but at the wrong times; and—the most insidious—I smoked weed to not feel certain types of feelings that I deemed unsavory. I used it as a way to resist whatever challenging emotional experience I was feeling.

The fact that I’ve spent a lifetime policing my emotional landscape, pushing away certain feelings because they aren’t comfortable, isn’t a new realization.

I’ve used all kinds of strategies to escape my own inner landscape, whether that be snorting heroin, bingeing on alcohol or ice cream or pizza, swallowing prescription opioids, or taking a prescribed SSRIs and mood stabilizers.

I’ve worked hard to heal and reclaim my capacity to fully honor whatever I’m feeling. But I wasn’t tracking the full truth of just how often I was using weed as a strategy for pushing myself through resistance, whether to force myself to do something I “should” be doing or to get away from a feeling I “shouldn’t” be having.

And it’s not just me. We all have our moments of wanting to escape.

People have written extensively on this idea of a “Great Escape,” this very human, biologically hardwired thing we do, pushing away the mundane, resisting the circumstances of our lives, always looking for an “escape” of some kind.

But these implications that we are “hardwired” for anything can be dangerous, and they only tell part of the story. For me, the idea that we’ve got some biologically hardwired tendency to run away from our lives, to escape the contexts we find ourselves in, is a downer that quickly leads me down a disempowering and reductionist path.

I advocate for a wider lens where, when we talk about human tendencies, we include the deep, empowering ramifications of the latest findings in neurobiology and trauma healing, where our brains are neuroplastic and massive shifts and consciousness evolution are, in fact, possible.

A parallel story to the idea that we’re wired for escapism, and one that is more accurate for me personally is this: We receive varying degrees of obedience training from the time we are born.

Truly, deeply, honoring what is true in each moment — for ourselves and for others — is one of the most radical acts we can take to reclaim our inner authority and well-being.

We are enculturated into hierarchical domination. Our cultural institutions create and reinforce systems of oppression where we have to fight and contort and conform to get closer to the center of power (white, male, able-bodied, straight, etc.) in order to get power for ourselves. We all internalize that thinking (including white able-bodied straight males), and we turn those patterns inward, where we begin a lifetime habit of controlling ourselves, doing shit we don’t want to do, sublimating our own impulses and uniqueness in exchange for external validation, status, belonging, love, and survival.

Who the fuck wouldn’t want to escape that?

I’m a white, able-bodied, educated, upper-middle-class person who works from home and has disposable income and no children to care for. Clearly my decision to “stop doing shit I don’t want to do” is easier than it would be for many people. And yet this realization is helping me quit—and stay quit from—marijuana, and it’s encouraging me to stop and listen when my body is resisting my mind’s idea of what I’m “supposed” to be doing or feeling in a given moment.

The difference in how I approach my thinking now, compared to how I approached it with weed, is startling.

For example, if I’m thinking: “I have to do that annoying newsletter and then build that webpage. Ugh, I just wish someone else would do it. I’m so sick of this job.” Weed would suggest I get high, making the annoying thing bearable. But, really, that resistance is my body telling me it’s time for a new client or a new way of making money that is more meaningful or a reality check on things I’ve agreed to that would be done more joyfully by someone else.

Or how about those moments when I’m thinking, “Ugh—I don’t wanna unpack, reassemble my room after putting everything away for the subletter, do laundry and grocery shopping.” Weed would undoubtedly tell me it would all be more tolerable with a bong hit. But, really, that’s me placating the part of my self-critical, drill-sergeant brain that thinks right now is the only right time to do a particular task. And if I don’t, I’m just lazy as fuck.

Instead of grabbing the bong, I can remind myself there will come a time when I’m going to be excited to set up my room and fill the fridge with food. If that time’s not right now, that’s okay.

Whatever challenging thing is happening in your emotional landscape in each moment, there is a perfectly good reason for it — and feeling it is much faster and more relaxing than resisting it.

As for the big one, the “denying what is true for me in a particular moment and making myself wrong for what I’m feeling,” there’s a better way to handle that too.

If I’m feeling sad and depressed, if I’m lamenting how I should be grateful, and convincing myself what I’m feeling has no reason. I wish this feeling would go away, but the answer probably isn’t to escape by smoking a joint. Instead, I need to remember that no one is “depressed for no reason”—despite what my inner voice thinks.

Finding the source of the feelings and then peeking underneath to see what needs aren’t being met is one of the keys I’ve found to building nervous system resilience, inner calm, acceptance, and wholeness.

Truly, deeply, honoring what is true in each moment—for ourselves and for others—is one of the most radical acts we can take to reclaim our inner authority and well-being.

This is the most revealing thing I’ve learned since quitting my weed addiction (and every other addiction I’ve ever had, for that matter), and this realization holds the key to my own sobriety in the long run: Whatever challenging thing is happening in your emotional landscape in each moment, there is a perfectly good reason for it—and feeling it is much faster and more relaxing than resisting it.

After all, we know now from relational neurobiology that those of us who haven’t internalized a loving, secure, warm, and attuned inner parent can find it virtually impossible to “just be with” our feelings. If people lack a resonating, compassionate self-witness to accompany them in times of emotional intensity, they will likely be flooded, overwhelmed, and then shuttled into whatever their go-to distraction strategy is.

Research has shown the vagus nerve controls our fight/flight/freeze responses in conjunction with the emotional alarm system (the amygdala), and 80 percent of the information flow from that nerve goes upward from the body, not top-down from our prefrontal cortex. Without building fibers between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex through warm, secure attachment, our body will continue to react until we can internalize the self-soothing capacity of secure attachment that enables us to actually feel and accompany ourselves in our own pain the way a loving parent would.

fMRIs have shown that the nervous system relaxes a bit once we name and acknowledge the feelings we’re feeling. Research also indicates that the nervous system further relaxes once we consistently name and acknowledge unmet needs that are underneath the feeling. Our bodies are trying to tell us through feelings what is important to us. But we have to listen.

Acknowledging feelings and needs won’t necessarily make the uncomfortable feeling go away, but it does free up our nervous system to relax enough to come to a place of balance enough to ground ourselves to decide what to do about it.

(C)

#Health #Quit Numbing #smoking

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kasl24 · 6 years

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What is Music Therapy?

Music is used by different people, for different reasons. Some people use it to dance, to relax; to relieve stress. Others use the background music to help them concentrate on their jobs or other challenges. Crisis and trauma victims use it as well, but for the healing of their minds. This is called music therapy. The victims would use a specific type of music to help cope with what happened to them, but lots of people still have questions about this type of therapy. It’s so mysterious, it’s made us question the discovery, and accuracy of it; do all patients accomplish their individual goals throughout the process? World War I and II were devastating to nations across our world. Many died and many more were injured. During that time, musicians would travel across battlefields, to different hospitals to play music for the injured. “The patients' notable physical and emotional responses to music led the doctors and nurses to request the hiring of musicians by the hospitals.” (“American Music Therapy Association.” History of Music Therapy | History of Music Therapy | American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), www.musictherapy.org/about/history/.) The theory of it, had been around for a long time, since “the idea of music as a healing influence which could affect health and behaviour is as least as old as the writings of Aristotle and Plato.” (“American Music Therapy Association.” History of Music Therapy | History of Music Therapy | American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), www.musictherapy.org/about/history/.) However long the idea’s been around, the first actual reference of it, was “In 1789 in an unsigned article in Columbian Magazine titled "Music Physically Considered.”(“American Music Therapy Association.” History of Music Therapy | History of Music Therapy | American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), www.musictherapy.org/about/history/.) We “humans are hardwired to respond to music”(Mannes, Elena. “'The Power Of Music' To Affect The Brain.” NPR, NPR, 1 June 2011, www.npr.org/2011/06/01/136859090/the-power-of-music-to-affect-the-brain.), simply because “music stimulates more parts of the brain than any other human function”(Mannes, Elena. “'The Power Of Music' To Affect The Brain.” NPR, NPR, 1 June 2011, www.npr.org/2011/06/01/136859090/the-power-of-music-to-affect-the-brain.), and “it affects emotions, intelligence and physical well-being”(PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/independentlens/musicfromtheinsideout/mind.html.), along with”affect the way it works.”(Mannes, Elena. “'The Power Of Music' To Affect The Brain.” NPR, NPR, 1 June 2011, www.npr.org/2011/06/01/136859090/the-power-of-music-to-affect-the-brain.). “Music therapy is used to boost individuals’ physical and mental well-being” (PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/independentlens/musicfromtheinsideout/mind.html.) and it doesn’t necessarily solve our problems in crisis, but it helps us “to cope with events surrounding a crisis and its aftermath”(“MUSIC THERAPY IN RESPONSE TO CRISIS AND TRAUMA.” American Music Therapy Association, Inc., www.musictherapy.org/assets/1/7/MT_Crisis_2006.pdf.). There are so many different diseases and diagnosis’ in the world, but which ones do music therapy treat? There are many cases that music therapy can solve; “Music therapy can benefit many individuals. The diverse nature of music means it can be applied in the treatment of concerns both physical and psychological.” (“GoodTherapy.org.” GoodTherapy.org - Find the Right Therapist, www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/music-therapy.) Populations of “Acquired Brain Injury, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Critical Care, Developmental Disabilities, Emotional Traumas, Geriatric Care, Hearing Impairments, Mental Health, Neonatal Care, Obstetrics, Oncology, Pain Control, Palliative Care, Personal Growth, Physical Disabilities, Speech Impairments, Substance Abuse, Teens at Risk, Victims of Abuse, and Visual Impairments” (“American Music Therapy Association.” What Is Music Therapy | What Is Music Therapy? | American Music Therapy Association (AMTA), www.musictherapy.org/about/musictherapy/.) can all be treated with music therapy. “The scientific evidence supporting music therapy is one of the largest reasons why this alternative is becoming more accepted as a treatment for a range of disorders and diagnosis.”(“The Science of Music Therapy.” Peterson Family Foundation, 1 Nov. 2016, petersonfamilyfoundation.org/music-therapy/science-music-therapy/.). We know that music therapy is using music to heal our minds, but what exactly is the type of music used? Is it classical music like Mozart? Or 60’s rock music like, The Beatles? What about pop music by Taylor Swift? Mainly, the music used is instrumental, but to heal, they mustn’t only listen; they must participate as well. In a therapy session, they would sometimes be “Responding to music, such as through dance or the analysis of lyrics.”(“GoodTherapy.org.” GoodTherapy.org - Find the Right Therapist, www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/music-therapy#What Happens in a Music Therapy Session?) Other times, they might participate a bit more, and “Create music, compose a song, drum, improvise on instruments, or sing.” (“Music Therapy Techniques.” Music Therapy Techniques and Interventions, www.allpsychologycareers.com/topics/music-therapy-techniques-interventions.html.)Sometimes, the therapist would be active in the music playing part, and start “Playing a tune him or herself, and then invite the client to join in or respond with their own instruments.” (“Music Therapy.” Health & Wellness, 23 Dec. 2015, www.unh.edu/health/ohep/complementaryalternative-health-practices/music-therapy.) Participating is an important thing when you’re using music therapy. “Music also releases a chemical in your brain called dopamine, which improves your mood and reduces your anxiety”. (https://www.facebook.com/ScienceNaturePage/videos/128489 1671643088/) Endorphins are also something released, and it’s kind of like a pain killer that’s installed into our brains, and it makes us happy too. The way you can tell how the music is affecting us, is our blood pressure and heart beat rate. The different types of calm music leads to the chemical releases, and our pain and stress are released. There are many ways, we react to different genres of music, and “the ability to affect your emotions is one reason why music therapy was first used in a medical setting.” (“The Science of Music Therapy.” Peterson Family Foundation, 1 Nov. 2016, petersonfamilyfoundation.org/music-therapy/science-music-therapy/.)Which makes sense, because if it didn’t affect our feelings, how exactly would it help heal the mind? The entire process is mental, which is why music therapy also has the “Ability to help patients cope and accept their diagnoses.”(“The Science of Music Therapy.” Peterson Family Foundation, 1 Nov. 2016, petersonfamilyfoundation.org/music-therapy/science-music-therapy/.) Other than the psychological side of this, “not everyone knows that it generates positive physical effects, too.” “recently, studies have shown music therapy aids in helping the body recover quicker and reduces the pain a patient feels through releasing chemicals in the body.” (“The Science of Music Therapy.” Peterson Family Foundation, 1 Nov. 2016, petersonfamilyfoundation.org/music-therapy/science-music-therapy/.)So with different processes, music therapy does not only heal one’s psychological scars, but it also heals physical scars. Knowing more about music therapy, we come to the question of; does it actually work? The well-being of the patient affects the outcome, and “in addition, a bidirectional association between depression and neurological disorders may be possible being that depressive syndromes may be considered as a risk factor for certain neurological diseases.” (Raglio, Alfredo, et al. World Journal of Psychiatry, Baishideng Publishing Group Inc, 22 Mar. 2015, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4369551/.) Hypothetically, if you have cancer, “patients often experience a variety of physical and psychological symptoms and side effects…” “due to the extensive procedures surrounding treatment…”. (“Effects of Music Therapy on Positive and Negative Affect and Pain with Hospitalized Patients Recovering from a Blood and Marrow Transplant: A Randomized Effectiveness Study.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, Pergamon, 6 Feb. 2014, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197455614000197.)Sometimes, these side-effects may “negatively impact their quality of life and ability to cope with and manage an illness.”(“Effects of Music Therapy on Positive and Negative Affect and Pain with Hospitalized Patients Recovering from a Blood and Marrow Transplant: A Randomized Effectiveness Study.” The Arts in Psychotherapy, Pergamon, 6 Feb. 2014, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0197455614000197.) which isn’t a great outcome, because that threatens their lives. There are negative outcomes to this method of therapy, but the positive products possibly outweigh the negative, since they continued to use this. Music can make us feel emotions; discover multiple different genres of new music that can cause healing; be healed both physically and mentally. There are endless wonders to what music therapy can do, but there is also only so much it can heal. Your well-being affects how well this process is efficient, and although in some cases, no statistics really prove how well this might suffice, a greater percentage is likely gained in order for people to continue use it. Many people perhaps won't need this if they don't have trauma, they might just simply like listening to music for the enjoyment.

Of all my pieces, I think my research paper about music therapy was probably one of the top 3 best pieces, probably because it was recently written, and I've learned so much different techniques this year. However, there are a couple word choices I might've changed. In the second to last paragraph, I wouldn't say "possibly outweigh", I'd probably say "must've outweighed". In the last sentence of paragraph 6, "The different types of calm music leads to the chemical releases, and our pain and stress are released." doesn't really make sense, however i'm not sure if there's another way to explain it. If I worded it differently, it would've ended up having a bit more sense in it. I think another reason that I thought the piece was one of the best is because of my word choices. I was really proud of myself to be able to describe such things so thoroughly and still have plenty left to say.

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lessonslearnt · 8 years

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Something to learn from ? Maybe you're meant to read this.

The lessons on mental health/relationships/life I’ve learned so far from my personal life experiences.

16. I remember my mom driving me to an urgent appointment at children’s mercy hospital downtown the day i returned from week long summer camp. My little sister, who had joined me at camp, had “ratted me out” to my mom.

I felt the way a drug addict would feel when being escorted back to rehab after returning from a week long bender.

All while being driven there by their cold, unaffectionate, un-empathetic, un-sympathetic, authoritarian mother; screaming at them for the duration of the half hour ride to the hospital.

In some ways, I WAS a drug addict. An addict for death, if death was symbolized as my “drug” , like a heroin addict returning to the the heroin, both myself and the heroin addict searching for the “high”, the release, the numbness, the sleep, the death.

Her words communicated: Disappointment. Shame. Black, deep, heavy self hate for what I was doing.

Face right up to mine. Screaming with angry passion. Flecks of spit on my cheek. Crying. Me. Always crying. Because I had a demon in me, and I had no control over what I was doing. Why didn’t they understand or believe me when I told them “I can’t help it…”?

She didn’t know how to handle me. I wasn’t an easy child, emotionally. She didn’t say or do the healthy or right things for me, and usually she actually exacerbated all of my hardwired mental dysfunctions.

But it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t have known based on HER own life experience how to be what I needed. She did her best. And I love her for that.

And it’s all ok, because it was all a part if the plan. She played a role in getting me to where I am today, at this moment in time.

Lesson: I will make mistakes in my loved ones’ lives, it doesn’t mean I love them less. And if I keep loving them, they will hopefully see that. And vice versa for those that wrong me. True love. Gods’ love. Not YOUR definition of love.

I forgive my mom, and I hope she forgive me too.

I remember the EKG machine in the doctors’ office suddenly beeping numerous, loud alarms from a box on wheels connected by wires to adhesive patches on my chest and rib cage.

The tech putting her head down, eyes to the floor, ever so slightly shaking her head in almost a ‘disappointed’ manner. My mom glaring at me with a cold side glance, simultaneously giving me the same exact slow, disappointed, shake of the head that the EKG tech was expressing.

The Doctor calls my mom into the hallway outside the exam room, alone.

Low, concerned, serious muffled voices.

Doctor returns, without my mother or anyone else, looks me in the eye, tells me that if it was up to him, he’d have me hospitalized right this second.

I am at high risk for dying at any minute, he tells me, but my mother is refusing inpatient treatment. “you have to be serious about wanting to live, or no body can help you”, a line that stands out in my mind. I have to want this and participate in aggressive rehabilitative treatment, outpatient.

I nodded my head slowly, shamefully, head tilted and eyes down to the floor, can’t make eye contact with him.

And he says “you might want to say farewell to those you love…” as he exits and closes the door.

That’s heavy shit, right?

But I didn’t care!

This meant my plan was WORKING! I was content, though, not even that. I don’t really understand what I felt.

Driving home, sitting at a red light, mothers’ face has been a wrinkled ball of tight, hot anger. Knuckles white and clenched over the top of the steering wheel. Horrible silence. Hot, muggy car.

Although, the enveloping 90 degree oven the car became in the roasting July parking lot of the doctors office felt wonderful to me, given I had 1-2% body fat.

My mother started in on a slow, aggressive, anger filled response to the events that had just transpired at the hospital.

Then a crack in her voice, she stopped talking, I looked over…

I saw her crying.

A wet trail leading from her right lower eyelid, sliding right on down off of her jaw line; a tear had just fallen from my mother’s eye.. I don’t see my mother cry. I don’t see my mother express sadness, Especially not for me!

I had seen my mother angry. I had seen mother disappointed. I had seen my mother express contentment with her surroundings. I had seen her have moments, just minute long moments, of flitting joy; usually just a false high before the crash. My mother wasn’t somebody you talk to about your problems. My mother wasn’t kind, nice, empathetic, sympathetic, warm, expressively loving, a hugger, a kisser, a “let’s do this together!”, let me put myself in your shoes, saying “I love you”,

Type of mother.

It’s not her fault. It’s not my fault. It was all a part of the plan.

The emotion that rarely surfaced to the outward character of my mother, was that of which I was witnessing in the car this very moment. Sadness. Not just sadness though, empathetic grief for what her daughter was experiencing. A broadened mindset in regards to what another human benign could potentially be tolerating in their mind, outside of their control. A realization that not every hurtful action towards you by other people is maliciously carried out. That people aren’t perfect. That people have real, raw, loss of control. That mental DISORDER, caused by genetic predisposition and environmental conditions, is a dysfunction of the brain ORGAN, at times out of ones control.

It appears through her actions to follow that she realized her child had essentially been suffering from a chronic health condition, no different from say, type 1 diabetes (dysfunction of the organ, the pancreas), one that her child could not control, and one that needs just as much intervention as any other bodily disease.

She couldn’t think this way about all of my “quirks” and “behavioral issues” until this moment, until JUST now.

At least, that is my perception based on her reactions and expectations of me I observed going forward.

Prior, she couldn’t think of me as anything but 100% in control of my thoughts, actions, and decisions; not trying hard enough to “get better”. She didn’t realize that the demons that she learns about every Sunday in church could manifest so blatantly in her picture perfect life!

Until this moment.

She loved me in that moment, that is, showed me that she felt sad for what I was experiencing; told me that she loves me.

Told me that she loves me.

Told me that she wanted to support me in any way she could, and that she didn’t blame me for all of my actions, and that she wants me to feel better because she…wants ME to feel BETTER.

No strings attached, no other motives or fake prayers at the dinner table that I’d “magically be cured overnight”.

She still didn’t take me to inpatient treatment out of fear of all the people in her social group “finding out” about the fuck up that they had so clearly produced. But hey, I get it. I really do.

That was the right decision, it ended up working out beautifully. It got me to where I am at this moment in life. The perfect moment.

Lots of intensive outpatient psychiatry and psychology appointments, as well as starting the medication Paxil, helped to jumpstart some recovery and motion forward.

In addition to those interventions, experiencing the communication of love my mom had just given to me, helped me return to a functioning level of mental health. Without that, no other intervention would have helped me.

The OCD voices were quieter. I learned therapeutic thought interventions to help with rational thinking. I felt…numb.

I know the medication made me feel a bit numb, and I’ve seen this side effect on many forums where people are sharing their “reasons for stopping an anti-depressant”…“it just made me feel numb…like a zombie, man…”

Yeah, see, I don’t understand that. At THAT time, anxiety and depression physically HURT my mind, body, and soul, so badly that feeling any sort of NUMB was a reprieve from the alternative option.

I started school, junior year of high school. I made friends. LOTS of friends. And a couple very, very close ones. I experienced the closest, most honest, and truest loving relationships with friends I had ever experienced on that level prior.

These RELATIONSHIPS were the real anti-depressant at this time. This still holds true as a fact, to me, that healthy, honest, mutually loving relationships are the best remedy for a depressed mind.

I feel that maybe…God let’s us get just the right amount of depressed in order to force us to expand our life and reach out for other relationships. Sometimes. It depends on the story he has for you.

But what do I know?

An overwhelming euphoria overcame me, the best feeling I had felt to date. Friends. Deep, connected, loving people in my life. I just wanted to give love and be loved. And my new friends wanted the same. We were high off love, I stopped using all drugs (after using them pretty frequently, especially marijuana), and never drank or “partied”. Just experienced life with like minded, loving human beings.

My creativity and passion, soared on the wing tips of my new found relationships.

But some relationships don’t last forever.

People rapidly change at 16. My new found friends found new found interests in drugs and/or new “boyfriends”.

Shit happens to everyone, I suppose.

But me, being hyper emotional and feeling as though losing my friends was like losing romantic love partners, my mind started to be clouded slowly, but fiercely, by depression.

Ugh, then the cycle! Depression leads to OCD, leads to anxiety, leads to depression, around and around and around…just takes a spark of something to start the demons’ cycle.

Sleeping through class all day. Back to marijuana. Reaching out, but now there really was NO body there, or so I perceived. Alone. Panicked. OCD thoughts returned with a vengeance.

People don’t ever have, In my opinion, a clear picture of what OCD looks like in ones’ mind.

The world views OCD as:

Weird rituals, sometimes due to anxiety about germs or disorganization; likes things organized to reduce anxiety; neurotic <well THAT can be true, haha.

A more realistic description, IMO, of OBSESSIVE AND/OR COMPULSIVE thought processes, for me and most others I’ve talked to with similar minds/diagnosed OCD, is that of my mind at this time in my life:

All of my actions and the thoughts I would willingly produce in my mind were determined by whether they met a set of guidelines, based off of the doctrine of Christianity, mostly, but also some arbitrary rules I’d created for my self.

Everything was “good” or “evil”, “right” or sinning".

I thought to myself, “maybe if I do everything God asks of me, he will grant me internal peace at last…”.

I rule followed and ritual abided my way with false purpose through life, irrationally believing that living this way would please God and grant me “a real life”, free of the mental burden.

I reached out for and tried to foster a couple relationship/friendships with other people, but they didn’t feel right. I just wanted to be alone.

My new escape from life, OCD. Plans, lists, cleaning, organization, exercising, every calorie and micronutrient counted for. Carried out the exact routine, every day. So much time devoted to the drive for the routine, no real relationships being fostered or created at this time.

The routine… the one I thought would grant me peace from God.

I punished myself heavily for “sinful” or “impure” thoughts.

Journal entries from this time are eye opening because you can see the conversations I had with, what I then and now call, the “demon”…

Thoughts the demon would produce and attempt to force me to carry out include but not limited to:

Feel like I wanted to be done, feeling tired, unable to produce one single more thought. feeling like I wanted to cut myself. feel like I wanted to kill myself in order to just…be done, be asleep, as simple as that sounds?

feeling like I wanted to starve myself to death, for the same prior reasoning.

Another mis-conception: Every person with an eating disorder, is doing it to “look” a certain way or because of poor body image, although our culture gives girls/women a good reason to have one for those reasons.

The mind of someone diagnosed and almost killed by anorexia:

I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t know any other way to do it without upsetting those around me too much. I thought, if I just don’t eat, I will die. I can blame it on…some sort of illness. I’ll deny I did it to the end, so they won’t KNOW that I killed myself. And I will suffer in the meantime, I thought, since I’d be starving and dizzy and wasting away..

I liked suffering, you see, very fucked up stuff, yes!

To this day, after reaching what I consider to be the healthiest place I have ever been in my entire life, and after having studied all mental disorders exhaustively, I am not exactly sure why I obtained pleasure from hurting myself, all the time, in all sorts of ways, at that time in my life.

The thoughts that lead to THOSE (self harming) feelings, were and are SOMETHING else, not me.

Call it a demon, as I’ve labeled it, or whatever, but it’s not ME controlling them…and well…

We all know that thoughts lead to beliefs leads to actions, leads to REALITY.

Philosophers could argue what the demon was and IS…but it’s not ME, it’s not what I ever wanted to be…

You don’t have that perspective of mental health at seventeen or eighteen years old. Thoughts are you and you are your thoughts,

Good or evil,

And let me tell you a secret…

The demon, OCD, whatever you label it, puts a lot of evil thoughts in your brain without your permission.

A lot of “worse case scenarios”.

But not just thinking them, experiencing them! visualizing them! playing them all out, one by one, from least worst case scenario to best worse case scenario (following?)..just like a detailed movie.

And watching that movie makes me anxious. It makes me feel a great desire to engage in a cycle of “action checking” in order to prevent the movies from becoming reality.

“Action checking”. Basically just anxious thoughts running through your mind, making sure you’re abiding by “the rules”, again, to make sure your visions never become reality.

My rules waxed and waned and came from no where in particular. The demon himself, perhaps!

Unfortunately, my SELF was not given mercy by the obsessive-compulsive nature of my mind.

Self-hate. Lots and lots of self-hate, brought on by obsessive thoughts about my imperfections. External, internal, and otherwise.

I knew I was different and “troubled”, but my internal will told me that I wanted to be “normal” more than anything, so I could be, so I thought, happy. Finally.

The depth of disordered thought processes and the depth of my mind remained secret; I maintained appearances; never quite “normal” per society’s standard, but flying enough under the radar to get by unnoticed most of the time.

That wasn’t healthy what I did, stuffing down and hiding symptoms that would occasionally, semi-frequently, drive me to suicidal ideation.

Suicidal ideation: something for me that I became aware that I would do during depression, mostly, but sometimes for not that much of a reason at all.

I “learned” to not act upon my impulses by sleeping. I could dream of being dead all I want, in bed, in my dreams, which would wet the appetite of the demon and take the urge away long enough to go away.

17. Senior year. My parents allow me to finally start taking Ritalin for ADD, something I was diagnosed with a few years prior.

I don’t blame my parents for not giving me medication sooner. They had their valid reasons, namely that I was born with a heart condition known as SVT, something thats could “flare” up, even silently, for the the rest of my life. It’s basically a fucking fast and out of control as hell heart beat that if not returned to normal within a certain amount of time, can cause death.

Stimulants + rapid heart condition = not a great mix. Totally get that.

But starting Ritalin changed my life.

My grades go from at most B-, mostly C’s, a couple D’s as the norm… to straight A’s my senior year, including advanced placement Spanish, Art, and anatomy/physiology. What the hell?

It really was a wonder drug for me academically, socially, emotionally…essentially I realized that whatever I have going on in my head to encourage and produce my actions (perhaps, ADD? But I hate definitive labels..) is calmed by this medication.

I don’t care about anyone else’s argument for or against the medication, for me, it changed my life TREMENDOUSLY, and if that puts me at greater risk for dying of a heart condition, so be it.

During this time I continued to maintain my anxiety levels (thoughts) through rituals and organization.

I returned to a fly-under-the-radar functional state my senior year of high school, in most part due to (I think/believe): Ritalin, Paxil, recent graduation from therapy, the ease at which school came to me at that point, the endorphins from running constantly for cross country, and having hours to decompress every day in senior placement art, where I could create whatever I could get my hands on, releasing TONS of negative emotion.

I was feeling so good, I stopped the Paxil cold turkey, mistakingly thinking, like many people do, that I was ‘cured’ and that I could handle things on my own without medication.

Most would, as I did for so long, call this a mistake, as it is true you should never stop an SSRI antidepressant without weaning from it per doctors direction. It actually can be life threatening to stop it in this manner, which I didn’t understand at the time. However, I don’t regret that decision, because it was a part of the matrix of decisions that I have made to get me to the current place I am in my life, with you. But I would never advise someone do this, just a quick call to the dr if you want to wean from medication.

I did ok. I went to college. I did what my parents recommended, which is actually wise for a young adult searching for direction and guidance for the future. They are highly successful. They claim to be happy. Copy, paste. Yeah, I’ll reach for that. Goals arbitrarily decided.

18-26 was a blur, just moving towards the aforementioned goals.

Roller coaster of emotion, dissociated from it with humor, no talk of emotions to ANYone. Not one single person knew even a twentieth of the capacity at which my mind could function “normally” under dysfunction. Private life. Secret life.

Lonely life.

What is true to me is my reality, and no one else.

Therefore, I’ll use the word true to describe the feeling of having a real, understood, raw connection with another person. Something I can not explain to you, only I know.

There was no one true. There was me on the “surface” to all of those around me, people only received glimpses when i fucked up at hiding myself. Reaching out, not sensing what I need. Who I need. Who did I need? What did I need?

In private, there was crying on the bedroom floor, crying until my pillow literally dripped with tears, heavy emotion brought on by everything, nothing. Everything just feels like too much. I can’t keep up with this life. I don’t have the energy. I can’t appease the demon. I can’t live up to his standards.

cutting my body, hiding my cuts, loving the pain when my sleeve brushed up against the cuts, hating myself for being so “fucked up” to do such a thing, chugging vodka, gin… or really anything intoxicating…as much as I could, often alone.

Feeling my body for imperfections.

Finding them.

Disgust.

Barely keeping myself from cutting at them. It would feel so good…but why?

This is confusing.

Moment of clarity: why am I doing this? Why do I want to CUT MY BODY? Why does it feel so good to hurt my self?

8 years, always had my finger on the mouse button, cursor on the “submit appointment request” button on the website offering free mental health services to students/young adults.

I knew that my mind was not operating healthfully, but I knew what getting help meant.

It meant that they would recommend I stop the things that comforted me the most. The addictions, the things that numb, the obsessions and compulsions. You see? The demon is self preserving, it makes you think you can’t exist without it.

If I couldn’t get to the bottom of why my mind functioned the way it did, I felt no one else could either.

(It’s ok, because now I know why it functioned/functions the way it did/does, and it was all for the purpose of getting me to the moment I am at today, with you.)

I lived during this period of time feeling as if I was living a life “not worth living”, and I was, in a way.

Life was torture. And that leads to guilt; you see what everyone else sees, a lucked-out-at-life girl in the least bit of tortuous surroundings.

You don’t know why, exactly, that life’s torture.

It’s like your true self in the depth of your soul is looking for an answer to a question that can’t seem to ever be fully answered. You can’t quite grasp onto what the question is, so you damned well don’t know the answer.

But some thing is telling you to ask and seek with insatiable thirst. A thirst that leaves you depressed and strung out, ready to give up, if not attempted to quench.

Mind expanding, opening to what the question, what the answer, could be?

At this time I THOUGHT I had expanded my mind to its max capacity of being “open minded” (don’t we all usually think that?), but the quench was still there; anxiety and overwhelming fear creeps in. This is it? This can’t be it, the thoughts are still there!

I’ve expanded and opened my mind! I don’t understand, what do I want? What is my goal and purpose in life? Who is God? Does God even exist?

Wait!

These are..

The Questions.

Ok, now I just need the answers.

My arbitrary goals as previously mentioned, start becoming met, each without any increase in my subconscious goals of peace and happiness, or answered questions.

But with the hope that they were part of the answers to my questions, I kept going.

In retrospect, It seems a root of my anxiety was perhaps having an extremely philosophical mind? Brought on by a tremendous volume of thoughts and rapid thought cycling? Perhaps.

If you could think about a facet of life, I felt I had thought it, especially compared to those around me. My mind was on overdrive, I couldn’t Intake enough stimuli to wet my appetite for answers and knowledge.

I knew deep down that having my mind had to be a positive energy for the world somehow, I could sense others pain and emotion, after all. I had pain when others had pain, and found pleasure in expressing empathy and helping others reach a positive energy and mindset. I started to feel an ounce of self worth, for the first time ever.

I started to wonder if my purpose was revealing itself slowly? Could the fucked up mental health cards I had been dealt, been dealt by God on purpose in order to experience what I had experienced, so that I could have the capacity to truly and completely empathize with others?

Maybe. God’s purposes are all in love, after all.

At some point in college:

After one of the many times I felt I could not handle the internal me, when I realized I hadn’t found answers..

I think, so let’s try to fix this “mental instability” issue one last time. Let’s step back. What piece of knowledge or eternal truths or WHATEVER will take away the anxiety, the compulsive thoughts and actions, the depression, the desire to leave this lifetime…….away? Let’s get to the bottom of the questions.

I want to be normal. There’s something I’m missing. A piece to the puzzle. I’m going to try to get better. I’m going to try harder.

25. Insert mass amounts of knowledge intake. Every subject I could think of, googled, documentaries galore. I had to find the answer before I lost all control. I explored answers to every question I had about life. I practiced yoga, meditation, vegetarian dieting, positive thinking practices, sleep hygiene, effort, effort, effort…. not working…..anxiety exponentially worsening because I felt like I just gave all my energy into last ditch efforts to be “normal”, and even my greatest efforts could not set me free me from who I was.

26. Depression creeping back in. The weight of the world.

I now know so much more information, but it’s only worsened my state. The more information I obtain about the world, the more depressed I become.

I can’t change it, I’m growing tired of trying and putting SO much EFFORT into life. I gave myself one last chance to “get better”…now what?

To be fair, I feel like through deep meditation during this time I had briefly understood, for a moment, that the point to life was to do and think everything in love, even to yourself. That is all. Nothing else.

God is love. We have God inside of us. Happiness is bringing out and remaining in Gods presence, love, as much as and as often as possible.

God doesn’t even have to be how you describe the one that can bring you happiness. Spirit, Creator, or just simply, Love. Call the force whatever it means to you.

I felt bliss for a couple days following this revelation, I had answered my question! I felt it! I really, truly, felt i had, at least part, of my questions answered.

But the bliss sharply faded as I quickly realized that even though i had the answer, not a single other person in my life did; Not that I could SENSE, anyways. Not in the way I understood it. Not it the way others expressed/claimed they understood it. It was like God had spoken to me, but I couldn’t share the experience with anyone, because the lock and key just didn’t work. If others truly understood what I felt, I could tell them anything about myself, and they would love me anyways. I couldn’t sense this as an outcome with anyone around me.

The actuality and depth of my revelation left me alone, feeling different, feeling frustrated with the world and God.

Why give me the answer with no one to share it with?

Depression. Hard. Fast. I’m 26.5, and suddenly I’m a different person, but I don’t know this yet. This hasn’t been revealed to me. I stop taking care of my appearance. I stop exercising. I couldn’t hardly make it work on time, getting late points for the first time ever. Calling in “sick” a few days because I couldn’t get out of bed. I mean, my body wouldn’t let me. There was no point. Suicidal ideation is strong now, but I’m experienced with my mind at this stage in the game. I don’t take the demon too seriously this time, I just know he’s there, and it hurts every part of me.

It actually frightens me to have such a clear perspective of the demon vs ME in my mind. This made possible because of the experiences and maturing I’d gone through at this stage in my life and, naturally, more matured mental capacities vs the last full force encounter with the demon with a teenagers mind and brain.

Cliche truth: The demon isn’t you. It can tell you to think and do things you don’t want to. Everyone’s demon is different in its manifestations, but the demon is real. Your mind CAN control you, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

I heard it. Just nudging, nudging, pick up the pill bottle. Dump them into your hand. Feel them. Imagine them all in your stomach. Imagine the sleep. So amazing. It would be over, complete.

August. Springfield Missouri for a friend’s wedding. I feel done. I feel so, so, tired of opening my eyes each morning.

Drive there: praying a car would hit us on the highway and kill me. Praying hard.

Wedding venue: a very tall skyscraper in the downtown area; I can’t stop imaging bodies falling from the highest windows. I imagine myself falling. I calculate the likely hood of landing on a different balcony, of how long Id be suspended in air, free-falling before instant death?

Train tracks behind our hotel. I’m suddenly out there, on the tracks, eleven or so at night.

I don’t know what I’m doing, I just wanted to BE there.

Train is coming, my mind is telling me to play chicken with it.

I sit on the tracks. The train is coming. It’s headlight blinds me. It’s horn vibrates my entire body through the metal and wood of the tracks.

It’s exhilarating. I feel alive. I’m excited.

Suddenly: I’m worried I’ll ruin our friends’ wedding tomorrow. What if I don’t die and I just end up a vegetable? This isn’t going to definitively kill me, this isn’t thought out. This isn’t planned well enough.

Sat two feet from the tracks as it went by. Felt the sparks from the wheels grinding the tracks hit my legs. Felt numb from the sounds of the horn enveloping my entire body in sound vibrations. It hurt my ear drums, and I liked it. I think I still have some hearing loss from this experience.

But that’s ok, it all turned out OK. It was all supposed to happen.

If I had killed myself, I would have never been on earth long enough to know what I know now.

I felt ashamed about the train, but no one knew. I felt ashamed because that is not ME, that is not a decision I would make! The control, the power, someTHING had over me.

And then, one day, a few months later, clarity.

I was filled with empathy for all those who have experienced suicidal thoughts and attempts in the past, and for those who continue to experience them every DAY.

I have an advantage over the demon. Mental strength from fighting it since I was seven years old. Such an advantage.

I am filled with love when I think of all the individual souls, people, who couldn’t help but fulfill the viciously tempting will of the demon, at the time of their death. Their “suicide”.

For many people, the demon comes into their mind out of no where, full force with no prior experience for a person to use against it. They listen, because they do not know better.

See, rather than making the decision to kill themselves, they were walking a plank on a pirate ship, blind folded, stumbling to their death. They didn’t decide to do this.

Organisms are innately and subconsciously self preserving.

The pirate commanding them off the plank was the demon, of course.

Each person carrying a different demon, using different tactics, usually through thought of the mind, to carry out THEIR will. That is, to make a human end their own life.

This encounter-realization of “hearing” someone, someTHING, else, in my mind, scared me enough to call my psychiatrist and set up an appointment with a psychologist.

But at the exact same time, I started going on breaks outside a couple times per day at work with the “smokers group”. Mostly because I was so depressed I couldn’t focus on work. I couldn’t give less of a shit about anyone, anything, myself.

I was possibly facing the worse depression I’ve ever faced in my life. In the past, finding honest, true, loving relationships was the key to suppressing the demon. And this time would be no different.

In fact, the love that came from a relationship, is what would ultimately give me my answer to my questions. By changing my routine, influenced by depression, I met a person that would change my mind and life forever. A person that God used to communicate His answers to my questions for me. At 26.9 years old, I can honestly say, I have peace. I am not normal, at all. I am me.

When you’re depressed or suicidal, you may hear those around you say, “just hang in there, it’ll get better”. Bleg. Means nothing to a depressed mind.

But let me tell you, you do have the ability and power to find peace, even with your mental “differences” (experiences as I like to call them). Just be you.

This takes loving yourself for who you are. And to love yourself you must be and aspire to be who you love .Once you do that, you will attract people to you that love you for who you are. People that can know you better than you know yourself, sometimes, but that still love YOU.

The first step if you’re struggling with any mental health disorder, is to seek psychiatric help. Sometimes you need some help clearing the cloud, the demons directions, so that you can get back on the path YOU want. You may not need medication or therapy forever, but they are amazing tools, and are just interventions for an ill mind like anyone would do for any other ill organ in the body. Secondly:

Connections with other likeminded and loving people. Hate to say it, this may or may not be your family and/or current friends. Be open to making connections with anyone one around you, especially if they’re reaching out. You never know who is meant to be in your life.

Love in all you think and do. But it’s ok to not think or be lovingly at times, because that’s the balance of life, but just try. Can’t hurt to try.

I love you. I can honestly say that. To know God is to know Love.

#mental health #mental disorder #ocd #suicde #love #anxitey #self help #life #testimonial #anoreixa #mental illness #mentally ill #mindset #addiction

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