#it's cognitive and only happens when the adrenaline eases off

[grison-in-space]

Listening to Artificial Condition again, it strikes me how much Murderbot uses empathy reflexively as a survival skill. Look at this bit.

Upon meeting it, ART allows it on board and then announces that it knows that Murderbot is rogue. Then ART threatens to destroy it if it hacks ART's own systems. Murderbot is immediately terrified and shuts down all inputs, gives serious thought to spending the entire three month journey unconscious, and then considers the potential avenues of damage from ART's drones. ART, not realizing why Murderbot had suddenly gone silent, tells it to quit sulking, which understandably pisses off the still-terrified Murderbot. It dumps a bunch of memories of coercive treatment into ART's feed, and ART goes silent.

Then this happens:

Then it said, I’m sorry I frightened you. Okay, well. If you think I trusted that apology, you don’t know Murderbot. Most likely it was playing a game with me. I said, “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to ride to your next destination.” I’d explained that earlier, before it opened the hatch for me, but it was worth repeating. I felt it withdraw back behind its wall. I waited, and let my circulatory system purge the fear-generated chemicals. More time crawled by, and I started to get bored. Sitting here like this was too much like waiting in a cubicle after I’d been activated, waiting for the new clients to take delivery, for the next boring contract. If it was going to destroy me, at least I could get some media in before that happened. I started the new show again, but I was still too upset to enjoy it, so I stopped it and started rewatching an old episode of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. After three episodes, I was calmer and reluctantly beginning to see the transport’s perspective. A SecUnit could cause it a lot of internal damage if it wasn’t careful, and rogue SecUnits were not exactly known for lying low and avoiding trouble. I hadn’t hurt the last transport I had taken a ride on, but it didn’t know that. I didn’t understand why it had let me aboard, if it really didn’t want to hurt me. I wouldn’t have trusted me, if I was a transport. Maybe it was like me, and it had taken an opportunity because it was there, not because it knew what it wanted.

The thing about Murderbot's survival is that it clearly involves quite a bit of negotiating with other constructs and bots. That's how it talks its way onto cargo hauler bots in the first place. It uses empathy--envisioning the emotional and cognitive context of the individuals it encounters--to work out what different kinds of people want, so that it can offer them fair trades. It also uses empathy to consider what humans might be looking for, so it can practice blending in and hide.

Murderbot would never have survived so long if it wasn't capable of assessing the individual desires of the people--human, bot, and construct--around it. It thinks about ART's probable fears and motivations so that it can consider whether ART is inherently an ongoing threat or a potential ally.

When your survival depends on evading detection, you get really good at assessing perceptual biases so that you can shape yourself to fit into them. People talk about murderbot being radically empathetic as a choice it makes, or as a feature of its personality that makes it a good person. But I think murderbot would be the the first person to tell you that this empathy is part of its threat assessment suite, a skill that was developed out of necessity in order to allow you to survive.

It is also a trait that makes murderbot a good person, of course: it chooses very carefully to try to survive by doing as little harm as possible and by offering things, like media, that buy it access to things it needs. But it started as a survival skill. It's part of hypervigilance.

I think one of the strengths of this series is that so many of the things we love about SecUnit are traits developed for survival in an inherently threatening world. The shape of its mind and heart have been changed by the trauma of its origin--but they don't make murderbot less good for being altered, even if that skill was developed in a traumatic context.

I like that.

[burnedbyshoto]

memories

— Shouto loses his memories, and you can’t do anything but watch as your world falls apart. —

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pairing: todoroki shouto x reader

warning: angst, fluff, cursing

word count: 8,459

a/n: so, I promised i had an amazing idea for an angsty angst, and this is it. I really don’t know how to outdo this. good luck, I cried while writing it :) also italics means its a memory

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“You need to get here now.”

There were moments in life where things felt like time had slowed down. Moments where you felt like you were moving at an average pace, and yet nothing else was keeping up with you. As a hero, you had these moments on the field, these moments had saved your life countless times, and it was all apart of the adrenaline corroding your veins, but you never experienced it outside the fact. There was no horror when a villain was shooting at you a hundred miles a second, but those words sent ice down your back. Those words held nothing but fear, worry, and pity.

The landline phone dropped from your hands, and it fell in slow motion, your hands grabbing your things, and the door slamming closed behind you. There was nothing but a clattering silence of the phone on the floor and the shuddering door when you left.

The house you left would never be the same, your home would never be the same.

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“Where is he?!”

Sweat poured down your face, your chest hammering when you entered the waiting room. You hadn’t asked where the room was, or where he was, the call had told you that they were waiting on the eighth floor, ignoring the yells of the nurses you clamored up the stairs like an animal.

There were so many people, people you recognized, people you didn’t, but they were all here for him. It was evident in what they wore, in how they gave you the most regretful look. Your throat tightened, your head shaking when Midoriya approached you. 

“He’s in the OR right now,” he says calmly, a soft smile on his face, but you know Midoriya too well. You see how the smile doesn’t light up his green eyes, nor does his voice speak with his usual tone. This was his hero’s voice, the voice he used to calm down victims who had just gone through trauma. “We got here just in time.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” you whisper, your body quivering. Fear was consuming you, making you unhinged, and ready to attack. “What happened to Shouto?”

With a gentle push, Midoriya sat you down on a leather chair, and he slowly explained what had happened.

Severe head trauma. A villain with a quirk that could manipulate the brain’s functionality had attacked Midoriya, Bakugou, and Shouto with the intent to destroy the hero lifestyle. They hadn’t seen a civilian, and the villain took it to his advantage. Shouto had intercepted what should have been a life-ending attack, and now you were sitting in a waiting room with a blanket on your lap that provided no warmth waiting for the OR light to turn off. He needed to live, he had to live.

One hour of waiting turned into twelve hours.

It was now four in the morning, and everyone in the waiting room had fallen asleep. Fuyumi, who had shown up shortly after her school was out, was leaning her head on your shoulder as she slept. You hadn’t eaten in that time, the water bottle in your hand barely touched, and your eyes concentrated on the light, unblinking, unmoving. 

“Are you okay?” A voice grumbles. It was Bakugou who most likely hadn’t been able to fall asleep as well. It was thick with needed slumber, uneven with the lack of use.

Your head nodded, your attention still on the light.

“It’s been hours,” you whisper, and you swallow a lump in your throat, more tears threatening to spill over your waterline. “I don’t want them to walk out and see looks of defeat. I want… fuck, I didn’t get to see Shouto. What if this is it? What if I don’t see him again?”

“Don’t fucking talk like that,” he snaps, but his tone isn’t as strong as it usually is. It’s filled with pity, and it hurts your heart even more so. “That bastard won’t die as long as you two have a fucking future together. He’s stronger than that, and you know it, so stop fucking sulking. He’s going to make it.”

There’s a weak laugh, and you roll your head to the side, your eyelids feeling heavy.

“You say that like I-I’m his only reason for living.”

“You might as well fucking be with how much he never shuts up about you,” Bakugou groans. “It’s goddamn disgusting.”

Those words would be reassuring any other day, but right now, they pushed the final bits of your emotions over the edge, and you begin to cry again. You sit there, tears streaming down your face, uncaring about what Bakugou would say about it. You didn’t want things to end between you and Shouto, especially not in this way. Not when the two of you spent countless nights talking about your future, planning a life together that seemed disastrously picture perfect. But it was fun imagining the life you could have together, especially since Shouto agreed with every stupid little thing you said.

“I don’t want to lose him,” you plea to anyone and anything that would listen and help you.

The light turned off.

Your body jerked up, your voice letting out a squeak that seemed to remain trapped in your throat. Fuyumi grunted at your side, and through the corner of your eyes, you saw Bakugou stand up too. 

Walking out of the room, a team of doctors walked out. Fatigue heavy in their steps, exhaustion evident on their faces. 

“I’m assuming you’re here for patient Todoroki,” the surgeon you assumed was heading the case spoke; a tired and tight-lipped smile on his face. “He’s going to make it, but there was significant head trauma. We do not know what the boundaries are from it, we are waiting for him to wake up, but he’ll be in his room now.”

Relief flooded your body, drowning you quickly, and you crumbled to the floor weeping. He was okay.

He was alive.

Shouto was still here.

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You sat at Shouto’s bedside.

His eyes were closed, shut to the world around him. His red and white hair was shaggier now, his current hairstyle pressed into his eyelids. The scar on his eye even looked paler on his body, and he looked malnourished. But he was alive, he was here.

Your hand held onto his, your thumb stroked his knuckles. He had been asleep for about a week now, he had been waking up for about two minutes every ten hours to eat and drink something. You had only been here to see it once, the other times you had been at work. You, unfortunately, couldn’t get yourself time off to be here with Shouto, at least not until he needed help at home. 

You sighed, your head pressing into the mattress of the hospital bed. You were bored and tired, the emotional toll of this situation was really hitting hard, but you needed to stay awake just in case he woke up for good. 

“Hi, y/n-chan,” a quiet yet warm voice spoke from the doorway. Your head shot up to see Rei standing there. A basket of fruit in her hands, and a warm and weathered smile on her face. Her white hair was twisted up, her clothes fresh and pressed. She looked much more put together than you were at the moment. 

“Rei-san,” you greeted, you stood up, bowing at your boyfriend’s mother, who then embraced you in a hug.

The two of you talked silently, and you gave Rei the seat by Shouto’s side, her hands gently holding onto his forearm as she spoke. You discussed how things were going on at work. How you were feeling about this situation, and you did the same with her. She explained that Natsuo and Fuyumi would be joining her later, and if you wanted to join them for dinner afterward, that was highly encouraged.

You smiled widely, your body at ease while you talked with Rei, her soothing aura helping you in this time of need despite it being her son. She relayed stories of Shouto as a child, tales you weren’t that familiar with since Shouto had no recollection of them. They helped your aching soul.

“M-Mom?”

The two of you froze, and both your attentions were drawn to Shouto. His eyes were barely cracked open, the grey and turquoise color burning into you despite their attention, not on you. Shouto’s eyes closed, a grunt escaping his lips, and he shifted in the bed. 

“Hi, Shoucchan,” Rei gasped, her mouth filling with a watery grin, and your heart pounded in your ears. He was awake.

Not wanting to intrude on Shouto taking notice of his mom first, you hit the red button to inform the nurses of Shouto being awake and cognitive. There’s a warmth in your body again, happiness leaking into your veins at the knowledge that Shouto was back. Staying quiet, you stood up, seeing nurses and doctors coming towards the room. Charts and data in their hands.

“What are y-you doing here?”

“You’re hurt in the hospital, why wouldn’t I be here?”

You let the medic team in, but there was something that Shouto said that made you freeze. His voice is raspy, nearly unusable from three weeks of no use, but there is no hint of a lie in his tone.

“Because… you’re supposed to be in a hospital, too.”

“What?”

Staring at Shouto, your eyebrows scrunched together, and your head tilted. Shouto finally took his gaze to you, his eyes cold, uncaring, unknowing.

“Who the hell are you?”

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“It’s traumatic amnesia,” the doctor sighed, his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. “We noticed a slight swell in the hippocampus area when doing the surgery, but it wasn’t anything abnormal for concussed patients.”

Your eyes trailed from the doctor to the window in Shouto’s room. A group of nurses was administering a set of tests. Examining where he was cognitively, physically, and emotionally. 

“Despite what you may think, amnesia is rare. There are less than five cases for every 100,000 individuals, and most cases involve patients in higher ages. Patient Todoroki is still young, and a skilled hero at that… there’s no saying in what will happen.”

They spoke, but their words were barely registering in your mind. Your attention was too focused on Shouto. Too worried and stressed about what was to happen from here on out.

Shouto’s face was reminiscent of your high school days, reserved, quiet, and with underlying displaced anger. He was ignorant to the way the nurses stared at his body, the lingering touches, and the most obvious flirting. His shirt had been removed for whatever reason, and while he was still muscular, he was thinner.

“Do you have a sense as to where he is with his memories?” Rei asked, her hands clasping tightly together, worry and discomfort heavy in her features.

“Well, considering that he didn’t recognize Y/l/n-san, I’m going to say that he can only seem to remember up until he was fifteen.”

Fifteen.

You met Shouto when you were fifteen. He was a whole other person, someone that no longer existed. But you were now twenty-three, the world finally being made to your manipulation, not the will of others. So much had changed between then and now; all you knew is that you were a stranger to him.

He was a stranger to you.

“But it is traumatic amnesia,” the doctor smiled, a smile gesture of confidence and hope. “Most individuals will always regain their full memory, and better yet, there are things you can do to get him back into the flow of things.”

“What do we need to do?” Rei inquired, a palpable tension melting off her body.

You froze when Shouto’s eyes locked on yours, his eyes were unwavering, almost challenging you to look away. It made your stomach twist, habits from his fifteen-year-old self were foreign and strange on him now. It made your eyes drop, and you turned towards the doctor and Rei, who were looking at you expectantly. 

“I-I’m sorry,” you apologized, your eyesight falling to your feet. “I didn’t hear that last part.”

“We think that a good thing for restoring his memories is having him go through his normal routine, outside of his workdays at least. Having him stay in his regular space, hanging out with his usual friends, eating the same things. To refamiliarize himself with what he was familiar with. It can help unlock those memories.”

You nodded your head, your throat clearing.

“I can do that.”

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“Welcome home,” you spoke, throwing open the door to the apartment that you and Shouto shared together. Despite everything, he didn’t trust you in the slightest.

He refused to speak to you unless necessary. He didn’t ask you questions, he refused to let you explain anything to him, and he didn’t like walking ahead of you. He was cautious, calculating, and deadly. You weren’t used to having him on the defensive with you, and to be honest, you hated the way he seemed to view you as a threat.

But on the other hand, you didn’t blame him.

He thought he was fifteen years old, it was cruel to wake up suddenly eight years older to people that would never be in his room, to begin with. But even if your rationality told you to not care, it still stung when he refused to be at ease around you. 

“This is our place,” you explained, your hands showing off the decorated hallway. 

The walls were filled with photos of you and him, friends, family, and all achievements. There was no order to it, only uncontrolled chaos because when you first started arranging them, Shouto had messed up. Somehow he had destroyed the lineout you had explained to him, and as you howled with laughter while he attempted to make the disastrous arrangement better, he had also begun to crack with laughter. 

The presentation of the pictures was in no way shape or form beautiful, it was ugly and chaotic, but the two of you loved it. You remember crying into his shirt, your laughter overwhelming you, and Shouto barely keeping you on your feet because he too was weak with laughter. You didn’t stand a chance the second his mouth pressed against yours. That night the two of you agreed to keep the disastrous presentation up, and the giggles of the event could be heard for miles. 

“Is it supposed to look like that? It’s ugly,” Shouto surmised, his eyes focused on the pictures, and you felt your heart drop. 

Oh.

“It was a creative choice,” you smile in response, trying to not ruin the good memory with this one. You placed your bag on the kitchen table, taking out the pills that Shouto was supposed to take daily. “Um, I’ll show you around.”

So the two of you walked around the apartment. You explained where everything was, your hands opening a countless number of drawers telling where plates, cups, bowls, and utensils were. You showed Shouto the cabinets with the food and the closets where you stored winter clothes. The bathroom came; next, you showed him what shampoo he used, the conditioner he had, and the body wash he liked. You pointed out his toothbrush and toothpaste, then pulled out a razor and scissors.

The bedroom was last. 

You pushed open the door to the bed that sat in the middle of the room. It was neatly made, with your things flowing over onto Shouto’s side of the bed. The restless week of not having him here and caused many a night of you curled onto his side of the bed, falling asleep to his scent that was ingrained into his pillow. 

You slept on the left side of the bed, and Shouto slept on the right. It was a decision the two of you made months before you officially moved in together. You both had argued about wanting the left side, and both of you were stubborn as fuck. You remember staring him down, your point of being the little spoon far more often than he was your most strong point. 

~ You both enjoyed to lay onto your left shoulder; with you on the left side, it would allow for the most exceptional comfort for both of you. You remember wagging your finger in front of his face, and him swatting it out of the way, his nose scrunched from your hard jabs to his face. It was then that he grabbed your wrist and pulled you into his chest. You screamed, his body falling onto the mattress, and you landed on his chest. Your hands pressed against his warm chest, and he looked fondly up at you. 

“I’ll take the right side, only if you kiss me goodnight every night,” he whispered, his fingers brushing through your hair. “And if you promise to sleep like this on occasion. Cuddling makes my arm go numb.”

Your face evolved into a face splitting smile, and you nodded, pressing a kiss to his lips.

“I promise.” ~

“I would never sleep on the right side,” he inputted, walking towards the right side of the bed. His eyes taking in every detail presented on the nightstand. “This room is a bit messy, and I don’t like the western style to it.”

Your eyes fluttered, the forgotten memories of the traditional Japanese style he used to replicate immediately popping back into your head.

“Oh, um… if it makes things easier for you, we can put in a futon?” You try to compromise, your chest tightening at the fact that he hated the layout. You knew it wasn’t him saying it, but it was him. It used to be him. 

Did he always hate things like this and just chose not to tell you anything?

Shaking your head, you suppressed the insecurities that ate away at you, there was no point in fretting over his opinions that no longer held. This was him as a fifteen-year-old, he was no longer this person. 

“We decided on that a while ago,” you reasoned, your arms folding across your chest, and you watched with curious eyes when he turned towards you and began walking towards you.

By instinct and pure muscle memory, your arms stretched up, ready to embrace him in a hug. But the look of confusion, distrust, and dislike that filled his face made you retract back into yourself, an acidic taste at the back of your throat. When they said to introduce him to his old routine, you had no idea how much of his old method you were supposed to enforce.

Good-morning kisses? The late-night cuddles? Were you supposed to be intimate at all? Or just some background character ordering him around, erasing and ignoring his autonomy, the autonomy that made him want to be anywhere but here it seemed. 

“What time do I go to bed?” He asks, his hands slipping into his pockets. His gaze was unnerving, a chilling reminder of the familiar stranger before you. “What time do I wake up? Do I still train in the mornings?”

You swallowed the prickle in your throat, your fingers brushing aside your hair, and you nodded your head. “You’re always in bed by midnight when you don’t have work the next day, but the time you actually sleep varies from midnight to four in the morning. You wake up whenever you feel like it, but are always out of bed by eleven. And on occasion, you work out in the morning, although you can’t be doing anything too crazy yet.”

Shouto didn’t seem impressed. 

“If you have any questions, you know you’re more than welcomed to ask me.”

“I know,” he answers, his hand pushing through his hair, his shoulders shrugging. “I just don’t see how I can trust you with anything. Besides, I don’t see how I could be attracted to you.”

There were moments in life where you could feel your soul being crushed to a powder, and this was by far the hardest thing you’ve experienced.

“It’s truly a mystery,” you smile, thin-lipped and stiff. “But I do understand how this can be a complete shock, and that it’s a lot. We all have different coping methods, and that’s okay. You very obviously do not like me, and that’s okay… the regular routine of your sleeping schedule does include me sleeping with you, but since you don’t… l-like me, I’ll take the couch…”

You didn’t wait for a response, your head dropping low so that your hair covered your eyes, and you pulled out your pajamas with no issues. The room was silent, the squeaking floorboards and sliding drawers being the only noise echoing in the room. As you left the room, your voice called out one more time.

“Goodnight.”

The couch was comfy thankfully, and as you changed into your pajamas out in the open, uncaring if Shouto walked out, not that he would, you remembered the night before the injury.

~ You sat on the couch, your knees tucked under your chin, your fingers punching the channel button, desperately trying to find something to watch. 

“You find anything yet?” Shouto asked, and you groaned when he chose to sit beside you, his hands dragging you onto his lap. You giggled, burying your head into his neck, a noise escaping your lips, telling him that you had not found anything to watch. “Mm, that sucks.”

Scoffing, you pulled away from him, your nose scrunched up at him, “It’s not my fault there’s so much on. What if I pick the wrong movie and watch something lame without my consent?”

“We can read the reviews before selecting anything then. To really get a feeling as to what we’re watching.”

You hum, the corners of your lips twitching up into a coy smile. You continued to fondly stare at him, and you brought him in for a sweet kiss. 

The remote in your hand was quickly forgotten, and you rejoiced when he returned your sweet kiss with much more passion than you had asked for. His fingers held your waist, massaging soft circles into your exposed skin. Your noises were breathless, and soon enough, you found yourself being pressed onto the couch, your eyes fluttering open when his intoxicating mouth left yours.

“Fuck,” he sighs, his fingers brushing your hair out of your face. “You’re beautiful.”

“Shouto,” you groan, your face feeling like it was on fire, and you tried to bring him back down to resume kissing. You knew he had work tomorrow, so you wanted to live the best of the dying time together.

“No, really,” he insists, his finger gently caressing your cheeks. You felt frozen while you looked up at him, “You’re breathtaking. You’re strong, kind, resilient, an amazing person, and you fuck me up in the best way, y/n. I love how you always eat hot soup and will cry for minutes afterward for scalding your tongue, I love when you come home from a long day at work and just fall on your face. I love when you join me in the shower just to make the worlds longest bubble mohawk, and when you come over for lunch during weeks where we hardly have one on one time… I love you so much.”

There was a small whimper that escaped your lips, tears clouding your vision, and you laughed.

“Kiss me, you idiot.” ~

You gasped for air, silent sobs wrecking your body, and you held your arms around you. The words he used to attack you earlier, corroded your soul and left the taste of bile on your tongue. You had him back, but this wasn’t him. Where was he? 

When were you going to get your Shouto back?

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“WELCOME BACK!”

Your smile grew when you looked at your friends who popped out from behind the wall. Well, at least the ones who would do that, Bakugou and Tokoyami remained sitting on their seats, but they at least expressed their versions of excitement to seeing you and Shouto walk in. 

It was seven days after Shouto had been released from the hospital, but the relationship between the two of you had not improved even a drop. He didn’t trust you, his eyes hardening whenever you attempted to instruct him around. But you knew that the curiosity of who he was had caught up, but he refused to ask you these questions. Shouto asked every question he had online, resulting to gossip tabloids and youtube videos to figure out who he was.

The only thing he had asked you was the truth about his fire: if he actually did use it. You had been sitting on the couch, your blankets and pillows scattered everywhere. The sofa was comfortable, and all, but your body craved to be curled up by his side, not here. You responded with a straight face that he did use his fire. But it wasn’t an answer he wanted to hear, his upper lip curling into a snarl before he turned onto his heel and left.

But it was a week now, a week of Shouto being cognitively functional. The doctors assured you that this was not abnormal to keep Shouto on this routine. However, it was easier said than done, primarily when Shouto had managed to get his body back to normal in six days and now wanted to start training again.

For now, and with the suggestion of the doctor, you brought him somewhere outside of his typical routine. A Class 1-A hot pot dinner!

You embraced your fellow classmates, your smile tight, your answers avoidant when they asked on how your relationship was going. It didn’t matter how it was going; after all, if this was temporary, you could handle this cold attitude. You knew he would apologize for it, but you had to remain resilient. 

You sat down between Mina and Uraraka, the two girls holding your elbows, trying to extract as much information out of you as they could. Their words fall deaf on your ears though, your attention focused on the way that Shouto quickly talks with Momo, Midoriya, and Bakugou. His face is no longer convoluted with that underlying anger; you did nothing to ease, and there’s a small smile on his face.

Just because the man before you wasn’t the same man you knew didn’t mean you couldn’t read him like a book still. He was happy, genuinely happy. There was no fear, no hesitation, no suspicion.

There was something bitter that flashed through you; jealousy and corrupt sadness flooded your veins at the way Shouto stared at Momo, who laughed easily. You recognized that stare on Shouto without a doubt, and your shoulders deflated a bit, your focus returning back onto the two girls beside you.

“Y/n!”

“I’m sorry,” you laugh, your body battling the tears that threaten to pool in your eyes. “I didn’t catch that…”

“We asked if he has fallen back head over heels for you again!” Mina asked, her voice at her usual volume, but worry and pity were biting at her tone.

“Yeah, the last time we got hot pot as a whole group, the two of you had announced you were dating!”

It was as if that unlocked a memory from you, as if you were the amnesia patient and not Shouto, and you recalled that night a few years ago. 

~ “Hi,” you croak with a smile, your hand holding Shouto’s. Somehow the two of you were the last to arrive, and your fingers began to sweat when your nineteen friends zeroed in on your hand in Shouto’s. Despite your instinct to immediately tear your hand away from his, Shouto held your hand tighter, his thumb tracing your knuckles.

“We’re dating,” Shouto announced a smile on his face that was directed at you.

You bit down on your lip, your gaze moving to meet his, and you snort shoving him with your shoulder. But your old class explodes in screams, arms grabbing you away from Shouto despite his best efforts to keep you near. Hands hold your arms, and you’re suddenly sitting down between Uraraka and Mina, who are screaming for details.

But you look up at where Shouto is. He’s talking with Momo, Midoriya, and Bakugou, his cheeks slightly tinted, and there’s a smile on his face. You feel frozen when he looks over at you, his eyes glowing with thoughts only you could understand, and your smile grows.

“Y/n!”

“Sorry!” you laugh, your stomach flipping with butterflies after you break the gaze with your boyfriend. “I didn’t catch that, what did you ask?” ~

The memory played with your emotions, your shoulders tensing when everyone sat down.

‘He’s happy right now, he’s happy right now, he’s happy right now,’ you mentally chanted, your fingers gripping the skirt of your outfit. You sighed, looking at your friends while Shouto took the seat across from Uraraka. 

“Everything’s going well, the heads over heels thing is still a work in progress, haha!”

Fortunately, they don’t press more, Kaminari throwing open the door exclaiming that the dishes were being brought over. But this was a good day, this was a day where Shouto could learn more, and see just how amazing your friends were. You wouldn’t ruin this night because his amnesic ass couldn’t remember who you were and treated you differently due to things not being the same. Eight years changed people, and you couldn’t expect eight years of growth in a matter of seven days. 

Grabbing your chopsticks, you faked a bright grin when Kirishima yelled out praise. And so, for the second time at this restaurant, you watched the servers jaw drop to the ground when they saw the twenty-one accomplished Pro Heroes acting like the children you all were. But despite your best attempt to kid around with your friends, you struggled to remain positive.

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Two Weeks Later

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

You weren’t sure how to explain how things were going.

After the dinner with your friends, Shouto had finally begun to talk to you regularly. He would sit as far away as possible, his arms folded, his gaze averting every few seconds before returning to you. His questions were often surface level and sometimes went more profound than you thought was possible.

He asked about his life outside of you, mostly. Asking for more insight into why he finally decided to use his fire, how he felt towards his family when his mother made a full recovery and particular friendships with the old class. 

You did your best to give him the most honest answers, and sometimes you felt like some all-knowing creature with the way he looked at you. It was reminiscent of a child asking an elder things, curious, challenging, unsure. It made you uncomfortable, you just wanted your boyfriend back, but he wasn’t there yet. 

At three weeks out of the hospital, he could now recall his memories up until the sports festival during your first year. It was a definite improvement place. It helped him to feel at ease, but not enough where you could feel like you had your boyfriend back, much less your best friend back. And it was an improvement that was made not because of you, but because of someone else — Momo and Midoriya in particular. But it was Sunday night, and you sat on the couch, your fingers flipping the page of the book in your hand. 

How you wished your life was a novel, all it took was a love confession, a kiss of true love to break the spell between lovers who had forgotten people. But these novels weren’t written with a lover who had a terrible childhood, who held animosity towards something you no longer knew how to fight.

There was the creaking of the floorboards, and you tore your attention from the book to see Shouto placing a suitcase onto the floor. His face was neutral, and your heart stopped beating when he walked over to you. 

He sat on the couch opposing you, his hands resting on his knees.

“I’m going to be moving out,” he informed you, and your will crumbled like that. “It’s not that I haven’t appreciated everything you’ve done because it’s been a lot… but I don’t see how I became the man you talk about. It’s hard to talk to you or be around you because you look at me like I’m doing this on purpose.”

You watch on silently, your gaze falling, your eyebrows scrunching. You couldn’t think, were you always that obvious?

“I-I’m sorry,” you mumble, your hands placing your book onto the coffee table. “Um… is there anything I can do for you? Are you moving in with anyone?”

Shouto stared at you, his own eyebrows scrunching, but while yours scrunched in the act of sadness, his was in irritation.

“Get mad at me,” he says.

“I can’t,” you respond.

“I’ve made your life hard for an entire fucking month,” he snaps, his eyes raging yet cold. “You clearly are in love with me, or this person I used to be, and I’m not him! Why don’t you speak what’s on your mind? Tell me when I’m doing things wrong?! Why did you take the couch and never once ask for the bed back? It’s your bed, is it not?”

You shake your head, your heart now pounding so quickly you felt dizzy. This was not happening, this couldn’t be happening.

“It’s not, it’s—”

“Ours.” 

He says that in time with yours, and your hands clench into fists. 

“I don’t love you. I’m sorry if that’s harsh, or rude, but I don’t. You’re the only person I haven’t been able to click within the beginning the same way I have with others. I haven’t had an issue being friends with other people, so tell me why you’re the only one I can’t even be friends with? It’s pathetic of you to be so insistent on this passive way of approaching me. Because right now, I don’t even value you as a friend. So it just brings me to question if I really loved you?!”

“You did!” You spat, your chest trembling with suppressed rage and sorrow. He had pushed you too much, he went too far, and now you would not be helpful. Your love was real, even if he refused to see it now, it was real, and it was true. “You loved me as much as I loved you! I didn’t ever want to push anything because I don’t know what to do with this situation! I researched everything I could to help you, but everything I did was useless, it was pointless. I get that I’ve been walking on eggshells around you, but what was I supposed to do?! Would you have let me go up to you and hug you whenever I fucking felt like it? How about kiss you?! Would you have seriously let me just hop onto your lap and make out with you whenever I needed distractions?! How would you have reacted if I asked to sleep curled into your chest when you don’t even like me? Or what if I wanted to shower with you in the morning? Or a casual conversation? Because whenever I tried to be just a friend to you, you rejected me! What about fucking sex, Shouto?! Would you have let me fuck you? No, you wouldn’t have! You think this is so fucking hard because you don’t have your memories, but I don’t have my safe zone anymore. I don’t have the person I need the most in my life anymore! I recognize you, I can still read you like a goddamn book, but there’s no p-point because I don’t understand it.”

Your chest is heaving, tears overflowing in your eyes.

“Well, what was I supposed to do?” He asks, his eyes ablaze. “I woke up thinking I was fifteen years old, and you had this puppy sick emotion on your face from the first moment. How could I say no to you? Whenever I denied you things, you looked ready to cry. You should’ve just accepted that I’m not the same person that I was and tried to work from there. You’re the one stuck in the past, stuck on this person I’m clearly not anymore. I’m not going to pretend to be someone I’m not, so do us both a favor and move on.”

“Go fuck yourself, Todoroki,” you hiss, standing up, tears flowing down your blazing cheeks. “I did this because I love you, there is nothing in this goddamn world that I loved more than you. Yeah, I know you don’t want to hear it because emotions make your fifteen-year-old mindset split. Because you don’t 'deserve love and other bullshit excuses.' You don’t recognize who I know you because it took years of fucking work to get you there. It wasn’t a goddamn overnight process. But don’t let me keep you from going, fucking leave this place. I’ll move on just fine, I’ll be just peachy keen. We haven’t been lovers for more than a month, and even though I prayed to whatever I could that you’d wake up from this bullshit one day, I see that it’s probably not going to happen… I love you, I always will, but I can’t do this. I will not be talked to this way, nor will I be attacked in such ways. You’re a victim of some bullshit, but that gives you no fucking right to be an asshole! I hope that you don’t remember anything so that I don’t have to listen to some bullshit apology from you l-later. So do us both a fucking favor and leave.”

There’s only silence, and then a scoff broke it.

You remain frozen in place when Shouto gathers his things and storms out of the apartment, the slamming door echoing in your residence. You lost it then, your wails pouring out of your mouth as you sank to the ground. You lost him.

Your sobs wracked your body until you passed out on the couch, tears, and sorrow staining your face.

When you woke up, your body was in pain. Your neck screaming in pain from the awkward angle it was in. You pushed up off the couch, your body screaming at you, but you could care less, your heart hurt more.

Staggering to your room, you felt odd when you collapsed onto your bed. It had been so long since you lay here, and the scent of his body on the sheets comforted you in the most bittersweet way. Moving your hand, you felt a weird lump in the sheets.

Grunting, you moved the sheets to reveal a small present made out to you. It was from Shouto, and by the looks of it, it was before the injury. Rolling your eyes, you opened the box that fit in the palms of your hands.

Your breathing stopped when you pulled out a delicate crane ornament. It was two interlinked cranes that you had told Shouto you had absolutely loved when window shopping one day, and there it was, delicately resting on your fingers. It hurt more. You hated this. Your fingers pulled out the next object in the box, and your fingers trembled, you sobs caught in your throat at the sight of the shiny engagement ring.

It was a ring you had described to him during a drunken discussion, and it was perfect. You couldn’t keep from crying more, the realization that this was the reason that Shouto left. He left because he was a coward; you knew that now, but you understood entirely now, even if you didn’t agree with it.

What had you done?

What did you do?

⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆⋄⋆⊹⋄⋆

One Week Later

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Shouto walked around the mostly empty streets of Japan, his hands shoved into his jacket while he strolled. It had been a week since he left, and he could only remember the look of utter betrayal and brokenness on your face. But he had discovered the engagement ring hidden in his underwear drawer when reorganizing his clothes, and he had panicked. His memories weren’t all back. He had no recollection of you, but the idea that he had finally succumbed to someone so lovingly scared him. It worried him how his body remembered you, but his mind didn’t. He knew whenever you needed a kiss or a hug, but his mind kept him from giving you said affection.

That couldn’t be him. 

Midoriya had yelled at him for leaving you, especially with the large scene the two of you created. Now he had no idea if he wanted his memories back or not. On the one hand, he wanted to be the man you had obviously known, he wanted to do all of that stupid shit with you, but on the other hand, had he fucked up too much for you to ever forgive him. He felt guilty without his feelings, with the added knowledge of what you two were, it could be catastrophic.

But he had started his hero work again. A month after hospitalization, he was okay’d to begin working. It had genuinely helped in busying his mind during the day and night. Most days he could go the entire length without thinking of your broken expression. But it haunted him. He felt like he didn’t deserve the love you held for him. So he left.

Stopping in front of a large window, his eyes focused onto a ceramic tree with an extensive collection of glass ornaments on it. 

His eyes focused in on a prominent part of the tree, an ornament once hung but now was gone. His eyebrows scrunched when he focused in on the tree, his head tilting.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?!” A voice whispered to him, and Shouto snapped his head to where the sound was, only to find no one there.

Wait…

A memory crashed through him.

~ Your hands clutched together, your smile wide while you pointed at the delicate glass cranes. They were one ornament forming a heart shape in their elegant and dainty poses; the setting sun of the day made the glass shimmer and illuminate your face. Shouto could barely tear his attention away from your face. He felt like some love-struck idiot who had barely figured out he was in love. 

Your eyes were bright, that love-struck expression on your face that always sent his heart into a soaring mess. He loved the way you rocked on your feet, a small way to show how in love with this ornament you were. But you turned suddenly towards him, and Shouto went unembarrassed when your smile only grew. You had caught him staring, and by the small fluster on your face, he was glad you did catch him.

“Ew, I just caught you staring, how embarrassing,” you tease, wrapping your arms around his neck. 

Shouto snorted, his nose brushing against yours, “No one’s ever embarrassed to look at a masterpiece.”

You groaned, but he felt the heat radiating from your face, and without so much as asking, your lips connected in a sweet embrace. He held you close, your body keeping him close, connected, and needing more. But you pulled away, your teeth pressing into your lower lip, your eyes glazed over in the way they did whenever you kissed. 

“I love you,” you mumbled, shoving him away when he chose to laugh at you instead.

“Ew, don’t touch me!” You declared loudly, moving away from his attempt to hold you. Shouto could not help the loving smile on his face while you walked away, your eyes still darting back to him, making sure that he was following after you. 

He focused on the cranes in the window, the ones you had fallen in love with, and it hit him then.

When he proposed to you, the cranes would be included.

“Catch up!” You hollered, paces ahead of him now.

Shouto sighed, rolling his eyes playfully at you. With his fingers pressing into the box that remained in his pocket for some time now, he went after you. ~

Shouto’s head pounded, memory after memory flooding into him. So many of them having to do with you, with the way that he had become a better person, a person he never thought he could manage to be with your help. His heart hammered, his breathing unstable when the reality of his actions from last week came crashing in. 

Would you forgive him?

His fingers trembled when he pulled out his phone, ready to call you a million times in an attempt to get you to hear him out. 

BOOM!

Shouto’s head snapped around, despite the migraine he was experiencing, the billowing smoke and flames made him freeze. The phone in his fingers was thrown back into his pocket. As all heroes do, he took off towards the destruction. You would still be there when he finished this.

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Your body convulsed, shooting pains slamming through you in uncontrolled volume. Your eyes focused on the downed Momo, Kirishima, and Mina, your ears were ringing still from the loud explosion, and only one villain remained. His eyes wide, speaking volumes of his insanity, and his eyes a near white from the quirk enhancing drug he had taken.

As you stood, nausea slammed into you, and it took everything in you not to collapse onto your knees and throw back up. Your fists raised into a weak fighting position, your vision swimming despite your steady stance. Keep it together. Keep it together.

Your fist wiped your pounding lip, blood smearing across your dirty fist.

This was your fault.

This was your fault. 

“You heroes never know when to quit!” He roared, his arms thrown out in a manically glee. 

You saw the high energy converging back into his hands, the source of the initial blast, and you threw yourself forward, hoping to intercept this explosion with your body.

But before you could, his body was encased in ice, his hands no longer able to control the energy, and it poofed from existence. Your breathing was ragged, and your eyes followed the trail of ice to where Shouto stood, his eyes wide, staring right at you. 

It had been a hard week. With your break up and finding out that he had planned on proposing, you weren’t exactly mentally stable. Your eyes tore from his, staring at the man who had become a jagged ice statue, and you felt uneasy.

“We should be safe,” Shouto told you, and your head nodded numbly, but you didn’t believe him necessarily. “I arrested him months ago; the second you cover his hands, he’s unable to use his quirk.”

You nodded, relief flooding you. You hobbled to your downed friends, checking their pulses, grateful to see that they were alive.

Wait, months ago?!

Your head snapped back at Shouto, your eyes wide, and a broken sob poured from your mouth. 

“S-Shouto shut the fuck up… o-oh my god, do you… do you?”

“I remember,” he responded, and your knees buckled, your body falling to the floor. Relief and stricken sadness flooding your body. It didn’t take long for Shouto to be at your side again, his arms enveloping you into a warm hug. His left side was to the frozen criminal, and his right hand cooled your heated body.

You cried into his white t-shirt, your arms pulling him in, you needed him closer. 

You missed him.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” you sobbed into his neck. “I thought y-you hated me!”

“Princess,” he whispered, his hands soothing you gently, “I was afraid you’d hate me.”

Your head shook, pulling away from him, your cheeks were dirty and wet from your muddied tears. 

“I love you...”

“I love you too, y/n... so fucking much,” he whispered, and your heart soared when his hands found a home on your cheeks and drew you close.

Your eyes fluttered closed, waiting for his lips to meet yours, but a thundering scream stopped your impeding mouths. Your vision snapped over to the villain who escaped the ice, his body blue, but trembling in rage.

His hand raised, a gun in it aimed at you, and like weeks before your world slowed down. Fire exploded from the barrel of the gun, and you swore you could see the bullet whizzing towards you. But your limbs were too heavy, and your eyes clenched closed. 

But it never hit.

Thud.

“SHOUTO!!!!”

There was no call this time, no warning of what happened. All you knew is that the villain was now buried under ice. But that was the least of your worries.

Shouto’s body slumped against the floor, the most heroic save he could have mustered fulfilled. His eyes were fading, his fingers weakly tracing your face.

“No, no, no,” you sniff, your fingers pressing into the bullet wound that pierced through his chest. “Nonononono, Shouto, no! No! Please don’t — fuck! Please don’t close your eyes, baby, please don’t do this!”

Shouto remained silent, his breathing raspy, short, and shallow. The life in his eyes dimming, but the love that you craved to see for so long was there. Glowing brightly despite the lack of energy in his body.

“Baby!” You shriek, your voice growing more and more desperate. Your hands were pressed against the wound, a vain attempt at getting the bleeding to stop. “Don’t! PLEASE! Stay awake! You’ll be fine! I promise! Just please don’t close your eyes! Not yet! Please don’t go! You finally remember, and I fucking love you! I saw the engagement ring! I want to marry you! Please, you need to fight this! I love you, I love you, please don’t do this!”

Shouto’s hand fell from your face, too weak to keep it up, his blood staining your hands and costume.

“I… I love you,” he whispered. “I’m… s-sorry for what I said… you’re p-perfect… I love you.”

Your eyes widened more and more, tears pouring from your eyes as your lips collided with his cold ones. Once, twice, too many times to count.

He was gone.

There are only a few moments in time where you will indeed hear a sound of utter and complete heartbreak. On this night, this fateful night where Todoroki Shouto was reborn and died, your shattering curled screaming sobs would forever be remembered. Your love was forever, but you would never get to see it last that long.

You loved him, but he was gone.

Now the only thing left of him was in your memories.

[samwrights]

Still Into You - Punk!AU [Makki]

I can’t believe this is the beginning of the “end” of this series. Sorry for the long delay, I tend to go in and out with inspiration. Lyrics that are italicized are sung by you.

WARNINGS: Language, nicotine use

Word count: ~4k

Song Used: Still Into You by Paramore

A complimentary playlist can be found » here

Photo credit @scandeniall​ (I’m still so utterly in love with it, bb).

Everything about Makki’s public announcement of his breakup with Momoka was shocking, to say the least. For the most part, though, it seemed not many paid any mind save for the screams that erupted when he kissed you in front of everyone. New life surged within you well after that, giving you the fire and gumption to flow and sway through the energy of the last song—I Don’t Care if You’re Contagious. The song was a swanky creation of Kuroo’s that involved a lot of to and fro motions and lyrics, lines teetering back and forth between the two of you.

As fun and lively as it was, you were far from able to get your mind off of the song that came before it, the song that Makki had sang and wrote for you. Though it was unintentional, rather it was just a way that created fluidity within the set, it was time you returned the favor for the strawberry-brunette.

There was no little speech or segue-way into the song you’d written for Takahiro Hanamaki years ago, only the slow rolling crescendo of a symbol roll from Terushima before the poignant chime that queued your voice. With practiced performance and ease, the words flowed through your mind without concentration. It allowed your mind to wander, arriving at the question of: is this how Makki felt when he sang on stage to you?

And after all this time, I’m still into you.

Did he feel his heart thrumming in his chest out of anxiety and the rumbling of the drums? Did he constantly feel that he was on the verge of accidentally confessing? Did he feel the pride that washed over himself from hearing the audience cheer over a song that was so personal? You searched for the answer in his steel toned eyes.

I should be over all the butterflies

Did he ever think that the two of you would get to confess to each other in the form of art?

I’m into you

The look in his eyes said yes, said come closer. And without a moments hesitation, you sauntered over with microphone in hand, locking your eyes with his. The glassy, glazed over look that was typical of them was replaced with warmth, with longing. It’s raw and ready, and god damnit, you were going to take it.

Let them wonder how we got this far ‘Cause I don’t really need to wonder at all

A smile tightens over Takahiro’s face, causing a single cheekbone to protrude ever so slightly underneath his slightly sagging skin. His lanky form is relaxed, gaunt fingers slapping over the strings of his bass as he vibes to the rhythm. Minimally, he chimes in with his backing vocals but the serene look on his face unearths the peace he feels. It seems that he was just as lost in your own little world as he was.

And on the drive back to my house, I told you that I loved you

As much as you want to spend the entirety of this song gazing into Makki’s endearing eyes—something you’d already done enough of for the evening—you had a job to do. So rather than indulging yourself, you tiptoe and stretch over during the minuscule intermission between lines to place a kiss on your bassist’s cheek before sauntering off to interact with your other bandmates. There’s a slight swagger to your step, confidence fully fueling your strut as you belt every note.

We sang along to the start of forever

Even pre-confession, this song you’d written many years ago brought you to life. It’s vivacious and uplifting, even if you’d wrote it during the prime of your pining. If there could even be a definitive prime, considering you’d fallen fast and hard for Makki with only months in to knowing him.

And after all this time, I’m still into you

Now that you thought about the last twenty-four hours in a strange sense of peace, a part of you wondered how and when you’d even began falling for the bassist. Hanamaki had seen you at your most vulnerable moments—customer service tended to bring out the worst in you on occasion—when you’d been overwhelmed with menial problems. The strawberry-brunette had always been there to console you, encourage you were on the right path in whichever direction you were going. That even, maybe one day while you felt like you weren’t accomplishing enough, you were going to change the world.

Makki had actually told you that once on a blunt cruise. The proclamation had made you chuckle because, while he was applauding your tenacity and drive, he was also simultaneously rebuking your sometimes childlike wonder and tendencies. It was a game of cat and mouse in which you both loved to play since the very beginning, to the point where you wonder if you had loved Takahiro in a past life. That was the only explanation you had for the natural affection that bloomed between the two of you, even back then.

Some things just don’t make sense And one of those is you and I

No matter how much time you spent pondering a pinpoint in the timeline of when and how it all began, you realize it doesn’t matter in the slightest. What matters is the way his teeth are glistening in the spotlight as he bobs and moves along with his instrument. It’s lax yet prominent, a juxtaposition that is very much Takahiro Hanamaki. Very much your Hiro.

Not a day goes by that I’m not into you

And suddenly, as the song comes to closer and closer to the end, you’re swept and overwhelmed with a fondness for the three men that surrounded you on the stage. Not only for the man that grew up to be your person, but Tetsu and Yūji as well. These men, no matter what happened to the band in the future, were your best friends in the entire fucking planet. Considering you were only in your mid to late twenties, depending on your view, your life with them made up the better half of your cognitive years.

Regardless of the relationship between you and Hanamaki and the potential, unforeseeable future after this show, you needed to acknowledge that before moving forward. This could be the end of it all, this could be a make or break moment. But it seemed Makki acknowledges your sudden silent pessimism, that once severed mental connection stronger than ever tonight, by furrowing his brows. His two eyebrow rings move with the hairs as a pout comes to play.

Even on our worst nights

Takahiro was going to have words with you later, after the show. That much was obvious by the way he seems disgruntled at your onslaught of muted lack of perk. You should be happy, over the moon even, and you were. But recounting everything that you had in the last three minutes, you were slightly hesitant to finish this set. As if, once it were all over, Elixir was going to shatter as opposed to continuing being the remedy of your monotonous reality of life.

But there’s a look on Makki’s face, flooding his steely grey eyes that offers reassurance. It’s full of love and it makes you want to run over and kiss him, but your hand and mouth are a little occupied at the moment with a microphone. Instead, you saunter back over in his direction as you close out with your vocal range going higher and higher. The last word drops in intonation as the band ends their own respective parts, your fingers suddenly clutching at the thin fabric of the bassist’s shirt as you pulled him down for a kiss this time.

I’m still into you

“Thanks so much for hanging out with us tonight—we are Elixir if you’re just joining the party. Come visit us at our merch booth and support your local artists!” With the sound of the audience applauding, your bandmates began breaking down all the equipment to load it back up in the van while you were on merch duty. Running quickly over to your table, you began interacting and engaging with recognizable faces that were looking to grab stickers and shirts. Those recognizable faces melded into three very familiar ones—Momoka and the other two girlfriends—and each of them looking incredibly displeased to say the least.

“That was a cute little publicity stunt,” Momoka remarks. Her arms are folded over her chest as she stares you down. “Did you and Makki rehearse that?”

“Oh yeah. The last ten years were a rehearsal and last night we decided to cry over it and just use the stage to put on a show.” You rolled your eyes, fixing up a couple shirts that no longer laid neatly on the table because despite your sassy comeback, her presence was causing you to fidget. Not out of nerves, no. More so out of restraint because you were certain adrenaline was beginning to pump through your veins as a response to fight-or-flight. Momoka only sneers, hardening her glare as if to tell you she was standing her ground. “I don’t know what you want me to say to you—“

“I’d rather you say nothing,” she snapped, “just stay away from Takahiro.” The way his name rolls off her tongue sounds like nails on a chalkboard; like the sound of a worn down pencil eraser where the metal scratches along the paper.

“Bruh, how embarrassing. He broke up with you publicly in front of dozens of people and you’re still defending your non-existent relationship.” You probably shouldn’t have said that. No matter how good it felt to say it, you probably shouldn’t have done it, probably should have been the bigger person.

But with the way Momoka’s poise melts and her arms unfold are her hands are reaching for any part of you she can reach as she lunges towards you, you don’t really have time to ponder your invisible regret. Instead, all you can do is stagger backwards with hands splaying out behind you to brace yourself against the wall behind you. Though you expected to feel the plastic, painted bricks, you are instead met with a damp warmth that greets your skin. “She has a point, Momoka.”

The rich timbre of Makki’s voice sends your heart into erratic throbbing, completely disregarding the fact that the woman before you had quite literally attempted to lay a hand on you. Even in times of peril, nothing compared to the feelings that the man, your man, behind you brought to you. When you came to your senses, you relaxed ever so slightly at Makki’s gentle grip on your shoulders and the way the strawberry-brunette’s chin came to rest atop the crown of your head.

“Quit fucking around, Takahiro.” Momoka all but spits out, fingers clenching and grasping at nothing but air as if she were just itching to have something between her claws; preferably, probably, your throat.

“I meant what I said up there,” Hanamaki’s gaunt thumb gesture languidly towards the stage, all the while his chin remains rooted atop your head, grinding lovingly into your scalp. “We’re through.”

“And, what, you’re with [name] now?” The way Momoka tosses your name out like scrap paper into a waste basket forces the man behind you into the defensive. He’s no longer slouching or hunched over as he holds you protectively. Instead, Makki is standing at his full, six-foot height with his chin jutting out in pride as he nudges you behind him. The strawberry-brunette doesn’t say anything in response, merely prompts his now ex-girlfriend with his challenging pose. “You were literally making fun of her last night at practice and now—“

“She’s also been my best friend for the last ten years, we pick on each other and we picked each other. Now fuck off, Momoka.” Not wanting to entertain her further, Makki wraps an arm around snugly around your shoulder before all but dragging you outside and away from the merchandise table. Apparently it didn’t matter to him if anyone were there or not—he knew you well enough to know that you more than likely needed a nicotine break after the set and after the altercation. “Hey, I’m sorry about her. I probably should have thought out the breakup better than just deciding to do it on stage—“

“Takahiro,” you interrupt after sparking your cigarette and taking the first drag. Slouching as you stood, your free hand rested on your bicep, closing off the relaxed body language despite responding with, “it was perfect.” His shale stone eyes light up ever so slightly, almost refracting into an olive tone as he stands up straight while looking down at you.

“Really?”

“Yeah.” The two of you fall quiet once again, even as Hanamaki’s lanky arms come to encircle your closed off form. It’s a reassuring gesture, or at least you assume it’s meant to be, as his chin rests atop yours once again, smoking be damned.

“So we’re good?”

“As long as there is a ‘we’, I think so.” Your voice starts out muffled and subdued from being buried in his chest, crescendoing as Makki pulls back and tilts your chin up to look directly at you. That same thin hand guides you further until your bassist melts his lips against yours, pouring every ounce of love that he could into his kiss. Sandalwood and ink fill your nostrils as you pull him closer, tossing your forgotten cigarette onto the pavement to wind your fingers into his locks tickling the nape of his neck.

From an outsider perspective, the two of you probably looked a little trashy, for lack of better term, with the way you were clutching hungrily at each other; with the way the either refused to yield or break apart from the tongue-to-tongue contact. Like desperate lovers that hadn’t seen each other for long due to infidelity—spectators loved to write stories for situations like this.

And maybe one story teller got it right but that idea had gone completely over both of your heads because anyone else’s judgment at the moment just didn’t matter right now. The only thing that did matter was the way Makki held, trying to fuse every atom in both of your bodies as if to make up for lost time. “I love you so, so much, [name],” the strawberry-brunette pants out after needing to catch his breath, “more than anything.”

Those words became the catalyst to the start of forever.

Forever, included you not renewing the lease to your tiny duplex and Makki reciprocating the same action with his small studio in the city. Instead, the two of you took what savings you had and put money down on a cozy, three bedroom home together. It was slightly terrifying, making such a big decision together and not even just on the basis of the fresh relationship. If anything, the relationship was the least of your concerns.

Income was, of course, the biggest worry but, Makki being Makki, constantly reassured you that the two of you would without a doubt prosper. And his unfailing faith always seemed to pay off.

Takahiro, after slaving away as a journalist for the last few years, had finally risen through the ranks at the local alternative magazine he had been writing for and was promoted to editor-in-chief. The lazy guise that he wore daily never fooled you—you always knew he worked smart and hard and it was finally loud and proud for the world to see.

The same could be said for you, excelling in your field while simultaneously being approached to write songs for other artists you had the fortune to meet through Makki’s job. You could say there certainly were benefits to being his plus one to the many gala-type events he had to attend for work, and they most certainly benefitted you as an individual, as a couple, and as a band.

Elixir was still going strong, even with more years passing. The publicity stunt, as Momoka had deemed it, had been blasted through every social media platform known to man. Many found Makki’s public break up humiliating for his ex-girlfriend, but many comments defended the obvious love shared between the two of you on stage. Another vast majority of the comments laughed because whoever the ex-girlfriend was, she had to be shitty enough for that stunt to even be a plausible option for a break up — a treatment you didn’t necessarily agree with but that was your own personal opinion. Commenters also pointed out the dumbfounded look on your face and that you had absolutely no idea that any of that was going to happen.

The videos floating around online had helped the band’s fan base grow exponentially to the point where the four of you were performing at least once a month, as shitty as that may sound. The band that was originally started to just act as a friendly pasttime was growing beyond any of your wildest dreams.

Elixir was still going strong and rather than practicing and disturbing Terushima’s parents, the boys now all gathered in the Hanamaki household. Extra rooms were available for the boys if they needed to crash—namely Terushima who was still struggling to overcome his drug addiction. That was a fight for another day.

The band had bloomed exponentially to the point where Terushima, despite his personal demons, had reprised his role as makeshift manager, much like he had back in college when he was in charge of the underground distribution business the four of you had. In the group chat, he mentioned he had a big announcement for the band, which lead to the very moment of the four of you gathered in your backyard with drinks and respective smokes in hand.

“So? What’s this big news you got for us Teru?” Kuroo asks, languidly lounging in a wicker chair with one arm draped over the back. You and Makki were snuggled into a matching loveseat, a cigarette in your hand and a beer in his. Terushima had one hand around his cellphone, flicking through the screen while waving off Kuroo with his free one.

“Hold on, hold on—found it!” The blonde yells, almost startling you had none of you been used to the way his volume sporadically jumped at random intervals. He clears his throat before reading whatever news he gathered us to announce.

“Mr. Terushima, thank you for getting back to me promptly with your attached demo. We would like to arrange a meeting with all members of Elixir to discuss a recording deal. Please respond with a date and time the four of you are able to meet.

Sincerely,

Semi Eita, Eternal Records”

Only the crackling of the fire between all of you and the crickets chirping off in the suburban distance can be heard—everyone is silent.

“Is this—“ you start, but are immediately lost for words.

“Did we just get offered a record deal?” Kuroo finishes for you.

“We’re doing it, right?” Terushima’s eyes are hopeful and full of light and excitement, like this is the type of news he’d been waiting for. You looked between the guitarist and drummer sitting before you, both of whom looked more than eager, before you glanced upward to your left to gaze at Makki. Stone faced as ever, he was, but there was still that twinge of pride accompanied by the smallest tick of a grin.

“Any objections?” Your boyfriend looks back at the rest of the band. It was a silly question, all things considered, and Kuroo and Terushima made that obvious with the gnashing of their lips as they held back excited screams. “Babe?” The strawberry-brunette locks eyes with you once again, tightening his lax grip around your shoulder.

“As long as it’s all of us, I’ll always say yes.”

“Is that so?” Takahiro muses. The arm around you is removed as the man to your left rummages around the pocket of his old basketball shorts that he typically wore around the house to lounge in. His fingers are fumbling almost clumsily as he pulls back the lid of a small, black velvet box. “It may not be all of us, per se, but if you’ll always say yes, then will you marry me, right?” As he speaks, he sets down his beer bottle off to the side of the loveseat, clambering down to rest on one knee to better present the rose gold, diamond ring to you.

“I—w-what?” You splutter, darting back and forth between the ring and Takahiro’s face. When his face remained as stoic as ever, your eyes shifted between him and your two other friends who seemed just as dumbfounded as you did. Considering the information you gathered from your surroundings and just because that’s how Takahiro is, you figured he was being genuine. “For real?” The strawberry-brunette only nods, offering no further vocal context, and instead grabs your left hand and slips the jewelry onto your ring finger.

“Marry me.” His voice is firm and concrete with the slightest hint of trepidation, though it’s possible that it came from him pushing himself to stand at his full height. Hanamaki holds your hands in his, shale-stone eyes looking down at yours as he awaits his answer.

“I-I, yes? Yes!” In a flash, your arms wind around Makki’s neck, pulling him towards you tightly as his arms anchor around your waist and pull you as close to him as physically possible.

“I can’t believe that worked.” Kuroo deadpans from beside the two of you, shaking his head in amusement before coming over to clap both of your shoulders in congratulations. The statement alone clued you in on the fact that the boys did indeed know about the proposal.

“Makki’s always just full of surprises, ain't he?” Terushima adds, also stepping closer to offer his congrats. The blonde is grinning with his eyes shut as he fist bumps Makki when you broke apart from your embrace.

“Wait, but the record deal is real, right? Like that wasn’t planned out for Hiro’s proposal, was it?” You balk, hoping that the opportunity with Eternal Records was a genuine offer. Terushima gives a nod, opening his mouth to speak only to be cut off by Hanamaki.

“Come on, you know I actually didn’t plan anything.” The strawberry-brunette chimes, as if to try to reassure you that the record deal was in fact real while simultaneously drowning out Yūji’s spiel of how he would never make a fake announcement with such sensitive material.

“Then why’d you have a ring in your pocket?” Takahiro gives a nonchalant shrug, grabbing his once forgotten beer bottle off of the cobblestone floor of your patio and raising it to call a toast.

“Just had a feeling that tonight was gonna be the night. Besides, I’ve had it since before we bought the house.” The four of you clink bottles together in celebration—celebration of your band’s success and your apparent, sudden engagement. But while you’re cheering and drinking merrily, Hanamaki’s words are brewing and stewing in your brain as you mull them over.

“Babe, we’ve lived here for almost three years.” Takahiro tosses a languid, knowing grin at you. It was as if he were applauding you for finally putting the pieces together. “You’ve had a ring for that long? No joke?”

“No joke. I wanted to wait for the perfect moment.”

A perfect moment indeed.

A beautiful, mid-summer evening around a fire with your best friends and getting the announcement of a lifetime? There was no better time, was no better way than to start forever in the Hanamaki household. Yet, you acknowledge that his proposal could have started any time, any where. As long as it was Takahiro, as long as your best friends were there to enjoy the momentous occasion, you would have said yes because it was him.

[ A Part of Me  « Still Into You » In Bloom ]

And that is it for Makki’s route! I was asked to a couple spin-offs so those will (eventually) come about. Thank you all for sticking through this with me, I love and appreciate you all.

Taglist: @takingyouruwus​ @tamcitrus​ @norkinlove​

[spikeymarshmallows]

Favorite nsfw kliego headcanons? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) (or any headcanons in general too! Love your stuff!)

...Anon. Anon. I am scandalised. I only think pure and good thoughts about these pure and good boys. :))))))

I kid.

But.

It depends on the universe!

I will assume you’re talking about, you know, the show universe and not one of the AUs I’ve created in my own mind lololololol.

So Kliego is a really fun and interesting one because... Overall, the Kliego fandom has focussed on smut. Which is fair! 1. Smut is gr9 and 2. The show is pretty balls-to-the-wall >:) about kink stuff.

What has happened as a result though... Is that we have so much smut but not a huge amount of softness. And let’s not even get started on how much we need more longfics!!! [Oh god, I just ran a search on Kliego longfics and guys, I need to stop the oneshots and focus on multiple novel-length fics!!! This is unacceptable!!]

And just quietly, I think a lot of the stuff that aims to be soft is... too soft for them, but until I can write something I deem a perfect balance of their weirdass kinky selves and soft at the same time, I cannot throw stones...

But the “look at me when I hurt you” ‘verse is... the closest approximation to how I imagine them to be. I see Klaus pushing for more, more, more. For more intensity. For more depraved. For more hurt. I see Diego not wanting to lose face. I see him giving it to him, because he likes to give others what they want, and because he doesn’t want to admit that something scares him. I can see Diego doing things he doesn’t necessarily want to do, but not wanting to admit it.

But I can also see them being so fucking softe with each other.

I can see them doing this intense stuff but after, after the adrenaline has worn off, after the emotions that possessed them to do this have eased... That it’s so fuckin’ soft and tender.

Oh god, my mind is running away with me now...

I see Diego as being ~relatively~ selfless in bed, not because he’s altruistic, but because his ego needs it. In the same way that David C said Diego is a vigilante--it’s not just because he’s a good guy. He needs that validation, that confirmation that he’s good and he’s good at something.

In turn, I see Klaus as kinda... selfish. He wants to not think. He wants to be taken care of. He wants to be taken care of in such a way that it also doesn’t cause cognitive dissonance with his self-hatred. How to balance the two? Increasingly sadomasochistic tendencies. If he suffers enough, does that make him worthy of the love and attention lavished on him?

Um.

So.

....I headcanon... so much. I actually am writing an A-Z smutty headcanons thingo for a few of my ‘verses.... >.>

I see Diego as selfless, not because he’s a Good Person TM, but because he needs validation.

I see Klaus as selfish, as always pushing someone for more.

I see them as sometimes being toxic for each other because they’ve quite high in external self-esteem, but low in internal self-esteem. They’ll push each other too far sometimes. They’ll both hurt, and not in the ways that they want to.

But ... I also like to see them seeing their shitty and toxic behaviours and going “you know what? Enough. I’m... I’m going to try this time”.

And LBR, I’m a slut for trying a hundred times over, and still having that mutual adoration.

[brerediddy]

more than survive - chapter 17

As the teenager made his way towards the epicenter of all chaos, he considered what awaited him. The SQUIP was too powerful to let go, he knew that. But it wasn’t like the city could just throw the villain in jail, either. No cell could contain him. Jeremy wasn’t naive enough to believe otherwise. Which only left him with one option if he truly wanted to stop the man in his tracks.

Could Jeremy kill him? Did he have that in him? He wasn’t sure. He’d only been responsible for one death, that of the super-strong man on the boat. And he hadn’t coped with that well at all. God, that felt like years ago. It was hard to believe it had been mere weeks since the incident. He hadn’t intended to kill anyone, he didn’t know that would happen. But, god, planning to kill someone? That just seemed so horrible. Could he go through with it? He wasn’t sure. Who was he to decide who should live and who should die?

But the facts of the matter were clear: the SQUIP wouldn’t stop hunting him, hunting Michael, until he was gone. And he had made it clear that he wouldn’t spare the city from his plan. He’d even attempted murder in order to get away with it. In a battle of Jeremy vs. the SQUIP, if it was one or the other, then the choice was obvious. He needed to do this. Even if it compromised his values. He prided the safety of his city and his best friend over his own moral dilemma.

When Jeremy approached the Town Hall Center, he could already tell that whatever Michael had done had worked. People were leaving the Expo left and right even though the main event hadn’t happened yet. The “vitamins” were set to be distributed in another hour. The celebrity doctor promised boosted immunities and positive impacts for everyone, all for free. People had flocked in order to be there. However, as Jeremy walked towards the building, tons of people were walking out in haste. A few citizens cast him odd looks but he straightened his shoulders and continued up the staircase.

In an instant, he was aware that the SQUIP knew who was responsible for this disinterest from the public. A piece of brick from the roof of the Center dropped down above him. Jeremy jumped out of the way quickly and looked up to see the SQUIP perched on the edge of the roof above him. So that’s how this was going to go.

He steeled himself and shot a web to the top of the building, landing on the side opposite the villain. Powerlines danced above the roof in the wind and Jeremy made a note to avoid them.

“You told them,” the SQUIP growled, his coat whipping around behind him. His eyes were glowing red, but the color was darker than what Jeremy had seen before. It used to be more of a scarlet, the color of warning. But this. This was blood.

Clouds covered the sky, casting deep shadows on the SQUIP’s face. His shoulders were straight as he stared into Jeremy’s soul. He looked truly menacing, but Jeremy couldn’t be scared away. Not anymore.

“I didn’t,” he called back. That wasn’t a lie: he hadn’t done anything. Michael had stepped up to the plate and accomplished an incredible feat. Nevertheless, he countered with, “Maybe they just aren’t as dumb as you thought.”

“I did the work, Jeremy, I put in the effort. I did what I had to do to get the endorsement of New Jersey’s favorite doctor. I did what I had to do to get the FDA to back me. I worked for this.” He curled his hands into fists at his side. “And then you just had to get involved.”

“You can’t mind-control the population, okay? That’s not a thing I can let go.” Jeremy braced himself for what he knew was coming.

“I offered you immunity, you and Michael both. Why didn’t you just take it? You know how much I hate getting my hands dirty.”

A live powerline zipped past his head. It hit the barrier of the roof behind him and sparked against the stone. Jeremy let out a breath and got closer to the SQUIP. “It doesn’t have to be like this. We could stop everything right now. So your pill didn’t work, who cares? You can still go back to a normal life.”

“Don’t you get it Jeremy? I’ve put everything into that pill! Everything!”

Jeremy had a faint recollection of Sebastian Iscariot’s words. He’d said something about the SQUIP’s cognitive processes and DNA being inside of those pills, right? “What happens if no one takes those pills? All of your power just sits there?”

“It’s already leaving me, Jeremy, I can feel it!” The SQUIP yelled. “It’s all your fault!”

“Even if you kill me up here, you’ll never get people to trust you. No one would ever willingly let you invade their brains.” The SQUIP seethed and lobbed a brick at Jeremy’s head. He held up an arm to stop it, collapsing the stone with his strength. “You’re going to have to try harder than that,” Jeremy boasted with faux confidence.

“If you say so,” the SQUIP shrugged.

Faster than he could blink, Jeremy could hear glass shattering. The windows from the Center burst out of their frames. He couldn’t hear them landing on the asphalt below, though, so he was disoriented for a moment. Then, he could hear everything.

It was all clinking in the air, being pulled together into a large bouquet of sharp glass. The SQUIP’s hand was raised high and he gave a half-hearted laugh. “Surprise,” he murmured. He pushed his palm forward and glass was flying at Jeremy. It was fast, but he was faster. He twisted and jumped and ducked until the debris was clattering to the ground behind him. Jeremy was too caught up in his victory to notice another rather large shard coming his way. He tried to dodge it, but it was too late. The glass collided with his torso, piercing his side.

“Fuck,” the teenager gasped through clenched teeth. The pain was intense, digging into his stomach. He thought he might throw up. Slowly but surely, though, he stood up straighter. His hand put pressure on the wound and he took a few even breaths.

He was fine. This would be over soon enough.

He was vaguely aware of the crowd gathering below. New Jersey’s very own super-fight? Of course people were interested. And now that the SQUIP’s plans had been leaked to the population, everyone in the city was rooting for the good guy to triumph evil. Jeremy risked a look into the crowd and saw a familiar red hoodie.

Oh, no. He’d told Michael to stay away. He needed Michael to be as far from the danger as possible.

“What’s the matter, Jeremiah? Love on the brain?” The SQUIP jabbed, surprising the boy from behind and throwing him onto the ground. He braced himself for the landing but it didn’t do much as he hurtled into the barrier. He winced, clutching his wound. Blood leaked out at a steady pace, but he couldn’t think about that right now. The SQUIP stood above him with a menacing grin. “There’s something you don’t seem to understand, kid.”

“What’s that?” Jeremy coughed.

“I don’t need anyone to willingly take the pill. No one is powerful enough to resist me. They’ll all give in, eventually. When loved ones are in trouble, the human tends to lose all sense of rationale. I mean, look at you.” Jeremy started to get up but was stopped by the SQUIP’s polished shoe on his chest. “The only thing holding me back is you, Jeremy.”

“I won’t let you hurt them,” he countered, struggling against the SQUIP’s force. Slowly but surely, he got a hold on the villain’s foot and pushed him away. It bought him enough time to scramble back to his feet. “You’re going to have to kill me first.”

“I’m so glad we’re on the same page,” the man grinned, levitating an abandoned pole from the powerline he’d used earlier. In the air, he snapped it into three pieces and sent them all at Jeremy.

Jeremy dodged the first one with ease but couldn’t get his bearings quickly enough to avoid the second one. It knocked him off balance while the third one beat into his chest. The pain made him dizzy and his lungs were screaming out for air, but he couldn’t get any. He was vaguely aware of the injury in his side pulsing, but there was nothing he could do about it in the moment. He’d never faced anyone remotely as powerful at this before. He grudgingly rolled the pieces of wood off of himself and stood back up.

“When are you going to learn to just stay down?” The SQUIP enunciated. “None of this would be happening to you if you had just died when I planned for you to.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” he responded before casting a web at a chunk of wood and swinging it at the SQUIP. It just barely caught the man in the side of the head but it was enough to shift his balance. Taking his advantage, Jeremy threw a web at the man’s leg and pulled his feet out from under him.

Not to be dissuaded for long, the SQUIP raised up a few pieces of stone that had crumbled in debris from the battle. He threw them all at Jeremy, who got out of the way. He took only a few hits, one to the nose and another to his arm. He could feel blood running from his nose and he was pretty sure that the bone was broken, but his adrenaline was enough to keep him from feeling it too badly. He’d accrued enough injuries to last him a lifetime. His arm ached, but it was fine. Fine enough to run at the SQUIP and throw a punch directly at his jaw.

The SQUIP avoided the blow and got a tight hold on Jeremy’s wrist. He pushed Jeremy to the ground once more, placing his shoe directly on top of the boy’s forearm. Oh, no.

The villain bent down with a sadistic gleam in his eye, reaching out for Jeremy’s hand.

“No,” he breathed, but it was too late. The SQUIP twisted his index finger, blinding pain shooting up his arm. Next was his middle finger, then his ring finger. Finally, he couldn’t take the pain anymore. He screamed as the man broke his pinky and then his thumb, his voice seeming foreign even to his own ears. “No, stop, please,” he panted.

“You want me to stop?” The SQUIP dictated softly. “That’s sweet. I’ll stop.” In a flash, his hand released the hero. However, Jeremy could feel pressure building against his throat. Damn the SQUIP’s telekinesis. It wasn’t like he could fight against an invisible force. The pressure on his throat grew tighter and tighter until he felt himself being pulled upwards. The SQUIP had both hands raised in the air, directed at the teenager. He lifted him up by his neck, dangling him above the ground, and moved to the side of the building. He positioned Jeremy so that he was directly above the crowd.

Jeremy struggled, his uninjured hand clawing at the crushing force around his throat, to no avail. He couldn’t breathe. He was wheezing and he couldn’t breathe. Is this really how he would go out? Hanging in the sky above the people he’d tried so desperately to protect?

“Is this your hero?” The SQUIP called down to the crowd of onlookers. To Michael, who Jeremy knew was watching. He didn’t need to see this. “This boy who’s so weak he can’t even help his own people? Can’t even take a few broken bones?”

A few people gasped as Jeremy kicked against the side of the building, anything to try to distance himself from the SQUIP’s power. He was stuck.

A familiar voice came from the crowd. “Leave him alone!”

The hero closed his eyes and focused on the voice. It was his best friend, his boyfriend, coming to his defense. Even in a situation like this, Michael had his back.

“Ah, Michael Mell. I knew you must be around here somewhere. He’s been thinking about you, you know.” The villain flashed a toothy smile and lifted Jeremy even higher. He couldn’t breathe for real now, his vision fading at the edges. “I’ll leave him alone if you come take his place.”

“Don’t...touch...him,” Jeremy gasped. He lifted an arm just enough to send a web at the SQUIP’s face. In his surprise from the attack, he dropped the boy.

“Spider-Man!” Someone in the crowd yelled as he became limp and began to fall. In an instant, he regained a sense of his surroundings and caught his unbroken hand on the side of the Town Hall Center. He rested his head against the brick, letting oxygen return to his brain, as he slowly climbed back towards the roof. He could use only his feet and one arm, his muscles screaming at the pressure. His injured hand hung uselessly at his side. He gritted his teeth as he felt the tearing pain in his side, in his ribs.

The crowd cheered. Jeremy wouldn’t let them down. He couldn’t.

He climbed higher and higher until he was back on top of the building, vaulting himself over the barrier and landing on his feet in front of the SQUIP.

“Nice try,” he rasped.

The SQUIP cocked his head and began rubbing his hands together. “Oh, we’re just getting started, Jeremy. Don’t forget, I know everything about your powers. I know that silly little projectiles can’t keep you down.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Jeremy kept his eyes focused on the SQUIP as he relied on his other heightened senses to help him out. He needed to detect this danger before it hit him. He focused on the feeling of the air, making hair raise up on the back of his neck. Oh, shit.

In an instant, a bolt of electricity was flying at him. He flipped in the air to avoid it, landing on all fours. The electricity ricocheted into the powerline behind him, letting off a few huge sparks. He stepped away from the heat and got closer to the SQUIP.

“Electricity? Really? You’ll need more than that to get to me,” he spoke. The wind was really whipping up now and so was the crowd. News stations were arriving.

“How nice,” the SQUIP called. “The news can do a segment about your death. Spread the mourning all through the country.”

“You think some electricity can kill me?” It very well could, actually, but Jeremy didn’t want to think about that right now. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“Oh, yes you are.” Damn it. Jeremy hadn’t taken into account the SQUIP’s mind-reading powers. Of course he could tell how fucking terrified he was. “Jeremiah, this could all be over. It could all end so easily.”

He let out another bolt of electricity, this one shocking the teenager’s legs. They fell out from under him and he collapsed to the hard cement. As he collected himself, though, something unprecedented happened.

The SQUIP lost his balance. He didn’t fall, not completely, but he flinched. His legs were unsteady and he had to catch himself on the stone barrier.

Interesting, Jeremy thought. He could test this theory further. Scientifically minded as he was, he immediately formed half of a hypothesis.

Electricity could hurt him but it also hurt the SQUIP, apparently. So, if he were hit by the energy, then it would be as effective as actually hitting the villain himself. However, a problem presented itself. This wasn’t a hypothesis that he could exactly test out indefinitely. Either he was right or he wasn’t. In order to risk something so big, Jeremy needed to be more sure of the effects.

Braving the incoming bolt, he egged on the SQUIP once more. “C’mon, it’s like you aren’t even trying to hit me.” As he expected, another flash of energy hurtled towards him. He let it hit his arm, crying out at the pain. Jeremy fell back against the roof’s barrier, cradling his arm to his chest.

He observed the SQUIP, who was also rubbing at his own arm. This couldn’t be a coincidence, Jeremy decided. He knew what he had to do in an instant. There was only one way to permanently stop the villain.

But Michael.

He couldn’t do this to Michael, could he? He couldn’t knowingly electrocute himself to death. Not with Michael watching. He chewed his lower lip, heart thumping in his chest. His body ached, his head hurt. He could barely breathe. He needed to end this, once and for all.

The SQUIP had told him plainly: if Spider-Man died, then his evil plans could carry on. Jeremy couldn’t let that happen. Michael would have to understand, he would have to forgive him. This was the only way.

Jeremy picked himself up, brushed the debris from his suit, and sauntered towards the SQUIP. For the first time, he had the upper hand. For the first time, he felt like he could win.

Don’t think about Michael. Don’t think about Michael at the funeral. Don’t think about the promise to come back in one piece. Don’t think about never kissing him again. Don’t don’t don’t don’t.

Jeremy breathed in. Out. He kept walking towards the villain. “You have one last chance to stop. One last chance to give up.”

The SQUIP laughed. “Really, kid? You think you scare me? Look at you! Your suit’s torn to pieces, you’re bleeding, you’re weak. I don’t have a scratch. So, what, now you’re trying to bluff your way out of this?”

“No,” the teen responded. He said in the calmest voice he could muster, “I’m going to stop you.”

“Oh yeah? That’s optimistic of you, Jeremiah.” He tilted his head and his eyes glistened with hope. “Here’s what’s going to happen: I’m going to finish this up. You’re going to die. Then your little friend, Michael, is going to be next. He’ll watch you die. I won’t make him take the pill. I’ll just put him out of his misery.”

Jeremy growled but stayed silent. Don’t think about Michael watching. Don’t think about Michael.

“Then,” the SQUIP continued, “Everyone is going to do as I say. They’ll take the pill. I’ll control their consciousness. They’ll all be able to do my bidding and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Face it, Spider-Man. I won.” He stepped closer to Jeremy, his imposing figure looming. “You lost and I won.”

“I don’t think so,” Jeremy spat. “I know something you don’t.”

“Oh, please, do share.”

Jeremy smiled underneath the mask, and he knew that the SQUIP could feel his pride. “That pill that you gave me didn’t work, not for your purposes. But you know what it did do? It gave me a piece of you. And I think that when you were making it, you messed up. You put too big a piece of yourself inside.” The SQUIP looked like he didn’t quite understand, so Jeremy continued. “And, sure, my powers can’t fight against electricity. But neither can yours. The part of me that’s you gets hurt whenever I do.”

“Sure, let’s say your little theory is correct. Maybe you can hurt me. But I’m immortal. Nothing can kill me.” The SQUIP’s lips curled into a twisted grin but his voice sounded nervous now. On edge. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Nevertheless, Jeremy kept talking.

“You were immortal, that’s true. Until you started to share your consciousness with me. Until those neurotransmitters in the pill started working both ways. I think the problem you’re facing here is that you’re a little bit more human than you were before you made me take your pill.”

“No, that’s not—”

“So, it stands to reason that anything that can hurt me can hurt you. And, of course, anything that can kill me can kill you.” Jeremy could tell from the look on the SQUIP’s face that he had him. He’d outsmarted him. “Mutually beneficial, right? I help you, you help me...I die, you die.”

“What are you going to do, Jeremiah? Kill yourself?” The SQUIP let out a half-hearted cackle. He really thought that Jeremy wasn’t willing to do what was necessary.

“If I have to,” he said. He planted his feet and looked at the nearby electrical powerline. “I’ll do whatever it takes to get rid of you.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Jeremy. Think of your family. Think of Michael.”

“He’ll understand,” he said simply. He knew his best friend well enough by now. The boy would be sad, he’d be pissed, but he would forgive him. He would always forgive him, in the end. No matter how badly Jeremy fucked up. And this? Well, this wasn’t a mistake. It had to be done.

“He won’t,” the SQUIP continued. “I can feel him, down there, waiting. He can’t really see what’s happening. But he’s scared. He’s so scared that you’ll let him down.”

“Shut up,” Jeremy dictated confidently. “I won’t be letting him down. The only one who’s going to suffer is you.”

“Jeremy, wait, let’s—”

The teenager licked his lips, savoring the moment. He felt good. He felt powerful. He was ready. “I’ll see you in hell,” he said.

In a flash, he flung a web to the powerline above and pressed his hands against the cord. He could feel the energy pulsing through his arms and into his body. His chest hurt. His heart hurt. He let out a scream, the pain coursing through his consciousness and tough façade. He gathered himself long enough to glance at the SQUIP, who was on the ground. He was clawing at his face, pain evident in his features. He rolled on the cement, eyes squeezed shut.

Now that he knew his plan had worked, he could rest. He let his eyes close, succumbing to the agony. Jeremy felt himself falling through the air after letting go of the cable, his hands unable to comply any longer. He couldn’t move his body, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t do anything. As he approached the ground, the last thing he registered was his best friend’s voice shouting, “No!” Anguish was evident in the voice, but he couldn’t think about that right now. It was over. It was all over.

Everything went black.

[wallythayer]

How to Reclaim Your Attention Span

Cal Newport, PhD, doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account. He gets news mostly from his local newspaper and National Public Radio. An accomplished academic and author, he provides no contact form on his website, purposefully making it difficult for people to reach him for interviews.

In the age of endless stimuli, Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, believes in cultivating an ethic of “deep work” — focusing on one cognitively demanding task at a time. While his personal commitment to depth poses challenges for journalists hoping to quote him in an article, it’s reaped professional rewards. In the decade since obtaining his BA, Newport has earned a PhD, published four books, written numerous peer-reviewed papers, and earned a tenure-track position at an elite university. 

“The ability to stay steady on one target and ignore everything else operates in the brain’s prefrontal regions,” writes Daniel Goleman, PhD, in his best-selling book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. Specialized circuits in this area allow us to tune in to what’s important (the person we’re having a conversation with in a busy restaurant) and tune out what isn’t (the conversation at the next table). 

While our attention is powerful, it’s also fragile. It “continually fights distractions, both inner and outer,” explains Goleman. 

The way we use our attention also shapes and controls our reality. “If we don’t consciously choose where we want to direct our attention, there will always be something in our path to misdirect it,” writes former Microsoft and Apple executive Linda Stone, who coined the term “continuous partial attention” — the idea that we pay partial attention continuously out of a desire to not miss anything, always on the lookout for something more interesting than what’s before us. 

While paying close attention can be challenging, there are actions we can take to strengthen this capacity and lay the groundwork for becoming more attentive.

Get Emotional Support

Focused attention is a component of cognitive ability, but it also involves our emotions. 

“Emotional cues are not only ubiquitous in our lives and environment, they are also strong distractions, often interfering with our ability to both -accomplish tasks and maintain equanimity,” writes Richard Davidson, PhD, in his best-selling book, The Emotional Life of Your Brain. 

The power of emotion to affect our ability to focus led the neuroscientist to include attention — along with resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, and sensitivity to context — as one dimension of what he calls the brain’s “emotional style.” Our emotional style dictates, with some consistency, how we respond to our experiences, and it is governed by specific, identifiable, measurable brain circuits.

Like all the factors comprising emotional style, attention lies on a spectrum, with narrow focus on one end and distraction on the other. If you tend to be hyperfocused, you might find yourself so involved in a project or one side of an argument that you miss the bigger picture. If you land on the unfocused end, you may find when you read the final words on a page that you’ve forgotten what was written at the top. 

There is also more than one type of attention. Davidson describes selective attention as the capacity to focus on certain features of an environment and ignore others. It’s a key building block of self-awareness. 

Another type — open, nonjudgmental awareness — involves the ability to recognize signals from the external environment, as well as any thoughts and feelings that pop up in our brains, without getting stuck on any one stimulus. 

Fortunately, even if we tend toward hyperfocus or distraction, the brain’s plasticity allows us to adjust our style of paying attention.

For example, Davidson advises the überfocused to keep their office doors open, place photos of loved ones on their desks, and scatter books and magazines around as temptation to pick one up. Those who are more easily distracted can try keeping the office door closed and removing extraneous stimuli. 

You might also try these attention-building practices:

• Daily mindfulness meditation, Davidson explains, can help improve concentration. “We have found that long-term meditation practitioners, when engaged in the simple practice of focusing on an object, show higher levels of activation in the prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex,” he says. This -“executive” part of the brain also governs self-awareness and decision-making.  

• Body-scan exercises can improve self-awareness, he notes. Because your focus moves across your whole body, scanning trains your mind to move from detailed attention on one spot — such as your big toe — to wider awareness. This can be helpful to people who struggle with either distraction or hyperfocus.

“Investigating physical sensations is one of the best ways for us to learn to be present with whatever is happening in the moment and to recognize the difference between direct experience and the add-ons we bring to it,” says meditation instructor Sharon Salzberg, author of Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation.

• Breathing exercises are another good tool for boosting self-awareness and dealing with strong emotions. To help stressed-out kids stabilize their thinking, connect more deeply, and refocus, actress Goldie Hawn’s MindUP program integrates deep-breathing exercises in its pre-kindergarten-through-eighth-grade curriculum. The program shows teachers how to lead students through three-minute “brain breaks.” These breaks, taken three times a day, calm the brain’s amygdala, which plays a primary role in emotional response. This helps improve students’ capacity to focus and retain information.

• Monotasking allows for and strengthens focused engagement, Davidson explains. Continually switching between tasks, on the other hand, saps your attention. Doing one thing at a time enhances focus and boosts your short-term memory. Multitasking causes your body to release more stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, which can lead to health problems when chronically elevated. (For more on the impact of stress, see “Hormonal Harmony.”)

Go Deep 

Cal Newport exemplifies the attention-strengthening benefits of monotasking. In addition to helping him make significant career advances quickly, his deep-work ethic has personal benefits, too. 

“For the most part, I don’t touch a computer between the time I get home from work and the next morning when the new workday begins,” he writes in Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. 

“This ability to fully disconnect, as opposed to the more standard practice of sneaking in a few quick work email checks, or giving in to frequent surveys of social-media sites, allows me to be present with my wife and two sons in the evenings, and read a surprising number of books for a busy father of two.”

Studies have shown that reading books improves cognitive function, working memory, and the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions. So by spending time reading, Newport is doing the kind of focused work that enhances his ability to pay attention. (If it feels like you don’t have time to read books, reconsider the time you spend on other activities. For example, Americans currently spend about four hours per day watching television.) 

To strengthen your ability to focus, try to minimize “shallow work,” those activities we often perform while distracted that don’t demand deep thought — mindlessly scrolling through email or social-media feeds, for example. Like Newport, you might consider avoiding social media altogether or scheduling specific time periods when you use the internet instead of randomly checking it throughout the day. 

In fact, Newport recommends scheduling every minute of your day. “We spend much of our day on autopilot — not giving much thought to what we’re doing with our time,” he writes. “It’s difficult to prevent the trivial from creeping into every corner of your schedule if you don’t face, without flinching, your current balance between deep and shallow work, and then adopt the habit of pausing before action and asking: What makes the most sense right now?” 

And when it comes to email, Newport suggests sending and responding to only those messages that really matter. 

Manoush Zomorodi, host of the technology-focused podcast Note to Self and author of Bored and Brilliant: How Spacing Out Can Unlock Your Most Productive and Creative Self, agrees. “People confuse productivity with responsiveness,” she says. 

To help workplaces become more focused, Zomorodi suggests they purposefully and thoughtfully use collaborative platforms, such as Slack. “The idea is that you have channels where you can talk to your colleagues, so you aren’t on email as much,” she says. “But what happens is that we spend so much time updating that we don’t have the opportunity to do the harder thinking.” 

Cutting down on needless communication reduces stress. Zomorodi notes that her readers and listeners are often seeking ways to handle workplace burnout, much of which relates to consistent demands on their attention. “The pinging and constant updating is driving people crazy, and making them feel like they don’t have time to do their actual work.” (For more insights from Zomorodi, see “Creative Inspiration: Manoush Zomorodi.”) 

To ease employees’ work-related stress and improve focus and productivity, some companies, including Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom, have attempted to change the “always-notifying” workplace culture by limiting after-hours and weekend email use. You can do this for yourself by removing the email app from your phone or turning your phone off on weekends and evenings, and by disabling notifications and alerts. 

Take Breaks

A few years ago, while on a sabbatical from Silicon Valley’s daily distractions, futurist and researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, PhD, decided to study the habits of Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Stephen King, and other productive people. Although these legendary creatives designed their lives around their work, they didn’t spend long days toiling away. 

Instead, they organized their days to include intensive blocks of concentrated work — typically around four hours — followed by a period of intentional rest, and then another shorter bout of less-intense work. 

 “Deliberate rest and focus complement and reinforce each other,” says Pang, author of Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. “Not only does rest give you time to recharge the energy you spend at work, but improving your capacity to detach from work deepens your ability to concentrate and be present on the job.” (For more on this concept, see “Deliberate Rest.”) 

Rest is an antidote to attention fatigue, a collection of cognitive symptoms that occur when the brain’s inhibitory system — which tunes out distractions — gets worn down from use. And resting doesn’t necessarily mean napping, although Churchill’s afternoon snooze was a nonnegotiable part of his daily routine. 

Since concentration is demanding, active restorative breaks can also help your body refresh the oxygen and energy your brain needs. Pang cites a group of scientists who relax by rock climbing as an example of “deep play” — an activity that provides many of the same psychological rewards as work. 

Scientific experimentation and rock climbing require the same kind of cognitive problem-solving, Pang explains. “They both involve seeing the big challenge and then breaking it down into little parts.” 

The absorbing and challenging nature of deep play provides room for finding yourself in flow — the intense state of concentration that leaves you feeling energized and that benefits both your work and your well-being. (For more on the connection between flow states and happiness, see “Go With the Flow.”)

Smooth the Transitions

Increasing your ability to transition between tasks is another key to improving attention. Failure to disengage fully from one task before moving on to another can leave your mind spinning in loops of chronic anxiety. It can also impinge on your performance at work and in relationships. 

In the late 1990s, while working as a consultant, Sophie Leroy, PhD, began seeing many employees struggle to pay attention during meetings. After conference calls, she noticed that distracted participants would often express a desire to have spent more time on a topic that had been discussed for several minutes. 

In a 2009 paper, Leroy outlined the phenomenon of “attention residue” — remaining thoughts about one task that distract us from our present one.

Now an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Business, Leroy maintains that strong performance depends on an ability to successfully transition our attention. For example, when we glance at our phones, go to a meeting, and proceed directly to an important conversation with a significant other without taking a break, our brains never get a chance to process information, integrate ideas, or find temporary closure.

“It’s like windows staying open in our brains, and it makes it hard to focus on the intervening work,” Leroy says. “If I am still thinking about task A while trying to do task B, I don’t have the cognitive capacity to process those two tasks at the same time and do a perfect job on both tasks.”

To help manage shifts of attention, Leroy suggests making a “ready-to-resume” plan — a routine to close the task you’re stepping away from and free up your attention for a new activity. This is as simple as taking one minute to write a list of what still needs to be done to complete the unfinished task. When you close that list, you’re ready to move on to the next thing. 

In Leroy’s studies, participants who switched tasks without a plan remained distracted and their performance was inhibited. By contrast, those who made a still-to-do list showed improved performance on the next task and less stress from attention residue. 

Pausing between activities is a gentle way of bringing awareness into the present moment. It allows us to reflect on what we value and how we want to use our attention. We can mindlessly give it away or direct it toward something with intention. As Linda Stone notes, it’s a powerful choice we get to make, every moment of every day. 

This originally appeared as “Play Close Attention” in the September 2018 print issue of Experience Life.

Get the full story at https://experiencelife.com/article/reclaim-your-attention-span/

[it-will-not-last-the-night]

Fracture-Chapter 1 (Rough)

Fracture:

Of course a fracture and a break were essentially identical, they refered to the same thing, fracture was merely the more precise, and wider, term. Fractures could be simply hairline or severly compound, but either way they mended with time. Of course, that didn’t mean they were ever completely restored. 

Hairline Fracture: The evening of the 12th of December.

Ann let out the deepest, most contented, sigh of her young life, a noise pulled straight out of her depths and ushered into the artificial light of the Shibuya Diner she was in, as she eased herself against the leather exterior of the Diner’s seating, sliding down somewhat, stretching her arms out wide on either side as she tipped her head up to gaze at the ceiling above.

They had done it, they had well and truly done it, and Ann’s sigh communicated that sheer sense of relief in ways words might struggle to. It was the sort of expression that would be difficult for anyone to understand, anyone who had not travelled into the mind of a would-be Prime Minister of Japan to foil his nefarious schemes for political domination, that is. For, unbeknownst to it, the small Diner in Shibuya was playing host to a victory party, of sorts, the two boys, four girls and one cat (who would strenuously object to being called such a thing) celebrating their triumph.

“Feeling tired? It is getting a bit late,” Ann lazily rolled her head to her right, where Makoto sat with a soft smile, not minding Ann’s arm basically wrapped about her shoulders, as on the other side the blonde was vaguely aware of Futaba ordering yet another round of drinks for the table. In truth she felt exhausted, they all did, the combined fatigue of stress and their close call with death in the Cognitive World, when Shido’s Palace had almost collapsed on top of them, had left all of them more drained then they seemed, particularly now that the high of escaping the Palace alive had begun to ebb away. Still, though she was aware that she felt ‘tired’ she also still felt that same frenetic energy fuelling her, maybe leftover adrenaline still pumping through her body? The important part was that she still had enough in her to give Makoto a wan smile as she answered;

“Tired? After these two weeks I think I sort of forgot what tired even means, I’ll need to get a whole new definition for it, something even worse then ‘I spent two nights not sleeping cause I had to cram for the exams’ ya know?” Ann said, with a languid shrug of her shoulders, enjoying the sensation of knots unwinding in them. Makoto, in all honesty, didn’t really know, but gave a small nod, understanding where her friend was coming from at the least, as she added onto Ann’s statement; “I’m guessing you weren’t sleeping very well either then?”

“I don’t think any of us were getting as much rest as we needed, honestly,” Haru’s voice, sugary sweet as always, joined in from across the table, the brunette clearly looking for conversation from the other side of the table, as Yusuke and Futaba beside her bickered about something. It was all Makoto and Ann could manage not to chuckle at the rather comically contrasting pair; Futaba short and squatting on the seats of the Diner, Yusuke tall and elongated, folded like some elegant Praying Mantis along side her.  

“Well…we’ll have time now, after all we’re in the waiting period again,” Ann turned to her other side, to give Ren a smile, drawing her arms away from Makoto and Ren’s shoulders to instead stretch them above her head, waiting for that satisfying ‘crack’ noise to come; “You hear Joker guys! New orders are to sleep in and sleep long, so I think we should all take a leaf out of Futaba’s book and fall into one of those mini-hibernations,” Ann leaned forward, onto the table, resting her head on her arms and giving Futaba a cheeky grin, the bespectacled girl haughtily crossing her arms as she spoke;

“Sleep? Nah, I got way to much energy to do that now, ‘sides, I’ll be up all night refreshing the news sites, wanna make sure I catch it the moment they report on that asshole’s confession,” the look on Futaba’s face instantly reminded Ann that, however committed she’d been, this had still meant more to Futaba than it had to her, and the blonde straightened herself out again, even though there was really no need to.

For a moment a silence hung over the table, not out of awkwardness or anxiety, but a genuine silence of fatigue, the sound of Yusuke munching on something small and flavourless, and of Ren’s fingers doing something on his phone, the only noise in the brief vacuum.

“Well...it probably won’t happen tonight Futaba, remember there is normally quite a wait before the Change of Heart really sets in,” Makoto said, one hand rubbing at the back of her neck, trying to work the stiffness out of it.

“Indeed, in all the prior cases there has always been a d- “Yusuke tried to begin, before Futaba simply spoke over him;

“I know, but its an imprecise art, isn’t it? You can’t say for sure something won’t happen tonight, now can you? Right Morgana?” Futaba ignored the irate glare Yusuke shot her, as the scratching sound of Morgana’s head poking out was followed by his answer, bright blue eyes watching them all carefully; “Its true we can’t say for sure it can’t happen in a night but…considering its never been like that, I think we shouldn’t count on it or anything, besides, staying up all night isn’t healthy for a growing girl! Why, do you think Lady Ann achieved such beauty by not getting enough sleep? They call it beauty sleep for a rea- mppphhhffff! “

“Whatever else Morgana had intended to say was lost as Futaba quickly, and rather roughly, pushed him back down into the bag, hiding him from the waitress approaching with a platter for the table, much to the most diminutive of the Phantom Thieves’ displeasure. Once she was gone his sullen head stuck out, giving a half-hearted glare at Futaba; “You could have just warned me,” he grumbled, whilst Futaba, for her part, gave a nonchalant shrug; “Had to make a split-second decision, we aren’t exactly meant to have cats in here, remember?”

Makoto didn’t need to pay attention to know what happened next, and she turned her head away from the overdone business of Morgana protesting he was not a cat, as Futaba snickered, the strategist of the Phantom Thieves instead returning her attention back to her blonde friend, noticing Ann was looking rather distractedly at her phone;

“What’s the matter? Did you get a message from someone?” 

“No, no, I just…” Ann pocketed it, waving the question away with her hand, “…was checking something, nothing major though, don’t worry about it,” Ann certainly sounded convincing enough, and the grin she put back on her face appeared genuine to Makoto. Before she could ask anything else from her, Ann had already joined in on Futaba’s teasing, leaning over the table to waggle a finger at Morgana. It was all so familiar that Makoto would have no reason to concern herself…except for the way she now noticed Ren staring at his phone, in a different, but no less intense, manner than Ann had.

Nothing should be able to ruin tonight…so why did both Ann and Ren seem bothered?

There wasn’t really a single, firm, point he could pin down as the point at which he woke. The boundary between full consciousness, and only being half-so, was nebulous, a liminal thing, and by the time he realized it was his eyes staring out at night shrouded city, he’d already been staring for some time. 

One blink, two, and slowly thoughts reorganized themselves from simply accepting stimuli to actually formulating coherently inside his mind, bringing with them the sudden awareness that he was awake, lying against a lamppost, head propped up against it and-

*Bzzzt* a buzzing from his pocket, his phone, interrupted his thoughts, he felt it vibrating in his pocket, and instantly reached a hand for it, trying to shift up as he did so, to get up off the ground, but before he could manage anything like that…

Pain, fresh, shot through him, his leg the origin point for an arcing bolt of it, traveling through nerves and synapses, using them like a ladder, all the way up to his brain, where they delivered their white hot package. He grunted, a grimace straining his face as, instinctively, both hands shot out and gripped around the meat of his leg, the phantom spot that had once been fractured, his phone forgotten for now.

“Fuck,” Ryuji cursed, rubbing his fingers against the leg of his pants, as if he could knead the pain out of it somehow, as he slumped back again, deciding to give the pain a few seconds to work itself out.  He was, of course, far from unfamiliar to pain, particularly of this variety, but being familiar with it didn’t mean he was immune to it, and the throbbing currently taking up residence was stronger than normal. He presumed it was because of his hasty effort to get up, he’d tried to push down with just the injured leg, put all the weight on it for a moment, and then experienced the consequences of his rush.

Getting beat up certainly didn’t help, dripped bitterly in his mind, accompanied by an ugly, messy, flash of something in him, a brief feeling which made his stomach knot…

But it left as soon as it had come, leaving his brow furrowed and knuckles clenched, somewhat confused where such a vehement thought had come from. It took a few seconds of the quiet night’s near lack of sound, before he remembered what had made him stir in the first place, the blonde boy’s hand fishing out his rather outdated phone, to see who, or what, had left him a message. He clicked, the screen lighting up, there to display;

Ann: Hey? You okay? We’re at the Diner, we’ll still be here a while…

…

…

…

Relief? Well, there was definitely a sort of excitement, or, perhaps, something more like smugness? Ann being the first to contact him seemed about right, after all she’d instigated the reason he was still stuck here too, so maybe this was her way of giving an apology?

She still sucks at those then, is it really okay for her to just get away with this? He sat for a moment, staring at the message. Reasonably speaking he should have responded by now, it was the polite thing to do, after all, she was inquiring if he was alright;

If she actually cared about that would she have left me here to begin with? His finger hovered over the button, a click to get into his phone, a password away from sending a response, from letting her know he was alright, or anything else that might be in his mind and, oh, how his mind was churning right now, a frenzy of thoughts and feelings fighting for dominance. But, he knew, he should respond, he should, even if he felt angry, he should respond.

He should.

He should.

Just send a message. Just one word if he wanted. Just a Yeah. Just something. He should.

Shouldn’t he?

Ryuji wasn’t the sort of person to contemplate the meaning of words, their origins, or the difficulties their conceptual frameworks might pose but, here, now, it did occur to him that the word ‘should’ was applied a lot more liberally than it probably ought to be. How many times in his life did he do things because he felt he ‘should’, even when he, if he actually thought about it, didn’t really have to. 

But no. Ann was a friend, it was late, she was worried, he had to let her know, he should do so, it was just decent. His finger hovered over the phone;

And somewhere there was the sounds of chains rattling. 

Ann stared at it, which, in this case, was referring to the noted absence of any text message, call or audio message by Ryuji. 

What’s he doing? By the two ticks next to her message, greyed out as they were, she could tell he’d seen it, but he’d sent no message of his own, no attempt at communication. Even as she sat on the train, hunched over like so many other youth, the little image in the corner, next to his name, seemed rather out of place right now, a photo of the blonde smiling broadly, a group shot of himself with the others…

She looked up just long enough to confirm her location, she’d have to get off soon, and for some reason that idea disquieted her tonight. Ann couldn’t be sure, but she put it down to the fact that she was making the trip alone, something she used to be accustomed to but, for most of the last year, she’d almost always made this trip with someone else; Ren, Makoto, Ryuji, Yusuke or all of them even, the point was that she had grown used to having company. Already she missed the Diner and the lively conversation there, but they’d had to call it a night, make the last trains, and Sojiro would worry if Futaba was out to late-

Ren: Anything yet? 

She glanced at the message for a bit, as if waiting for Ryuji to somehow butt in just as he answered, to undermine her, but it was a silly impulse and she ignored it;

Ann: Nothing yet…he hasn’t contacted you has he?

It wasn’t exactly a dumb question, personally Ann assumed that, if Ryuji was going to contact anyone of his own volition, it’d be their fearless leader and his best friend. Of course, tonight was a bit different, Ren had…left with them.

Ren: No…

Ren: I’d tell you as soon as he did, if he did. Hmm. 

Ren and Yusuke were the only people she knew who’d actually type out ‘Hmm’. Normally she might have had a go at him over it but tonight wasn’t normal.

Ann: Can you try sending him a message, please?

Ann: I think he’ll respond to you. 

I hope he’ll respond to you…

Ren: Of course, I actually just did send one already

Ann: Do you think he’s okay?

It was a lot more frank than she’d been intending her question to sound but, in her defence, she was pretty exhausted. 

Ren: He’ll be okay Ann, he’s probably just pissed off…

Ann: Yeah

“Understandably” went unsaid between the two.

Ren: Anyway, I’ll let you know if he contacts me, but I’m sure we’ll get an earful tomorrow, so try not to worry too much, okay?

Ann: Worried? I’m not worried, just wanna make sure the idiot doesn’t get himself in trouble with his mom, if he’s out by the time she comes back, trust me, she’ll panic. 

Ren: Right, noted, let me know if his mom contacts you then as well, okay?

The stop was approaching and Ann got up, fingers typing away;

Ann: Will do, good night

Ann: Oh, and tell Morgana and Futaba I said goodnight too!

Ren: I will, if Futaba ever actually goes to sleep…

Ren: Anyway, night!

Offline, his image read, and she looked back at Ryuji, their chat log, just one last check to see if he’d responded yet.

He hadn’t.

Nothing was supposed to be able to bring them down today, they’d defeated their own arch enemy. So why was this happening?

He beat his mom home, luckily, one of the few times in his entire life he could say, with all honesty, he was glad she had to work so late. 

Shoes were kicked off unceremoniously into a pile beneath a shelf of irrelevant trophies, jacket was shrugged unto the back of a chair, and his face was buried in a pillow in a matter of moments, his phone still gripped in one hand.

He didn’t understand why he hadn’t responded, he knew he ought to of. Even when Ren had contacted he’d still just…just not done it. He’d thought to, intended to, but…but…

He sighed, giving up on yet another attempt at understanding, turning over onto his back, bringing the phone before him, its blue light sharp in the darkness of his room, hoping, somehow, swapping positions on the bed physically would change his thoughts.

It didn’t work.

His eyes blinked in the darkness, the sharp light from his phone, two notifications glaring at him from it, keeping the rest of the room from being recognizable as anything more than a series of dark blobs. He breathed in, mouth open, feeling the air rushing in…and then rushing out again as he exhaled open mouth. The tightness in his chest receded somewhat, although that just brought up the question of why his chest was tight to begin with.

One last time tonight he brought his finger up, intending to respond, it was better not to let a wound fester, better to confront it soon, better not to make one’s friends worry.

But are they your friends?

He let his arm grow slack and the phone fell to the floor beside his bed, softly, as one arm rested over his face, as if to stop his eyes looking up and he tried to let sleep take him.

That was when the real nightmare began. 

[gethealthy18-blog]

33 True Facts About Love

New Post has been published on https://healingawerness.com/getting-healthy/getting-healthy-women/33-true-facts-about-love/

33 True Facts About Love

33 True Facts About Love Harini Natarajan Hyderabd040-395603080 December 23, 2019

When you stop to think about love, you most probably picture couples cuddling, holding hands, or simply walking off into the sunset together. In fact, you may picture yourself falling in love with that special someone of your dreams. You may even have a list of things you want in your perfect partner. What’s interesting is that there are a lot of biological factors that occur during “falling in love.” In today’s era, love is overly romanticized. Hence, you most probably aren’t aware of these scientific/true facts about love.

Falling in love can be exciting. The sky is bluer. Colors look brighter. Obstacles vanish. The whole world seems to be a more beautiful place because of the new-found love. Although all of this is true, it is also true that some of those feelings are occurring because of chemicals released in the brain. Although the science of falling in love isn’t very romantic, it is actually quite fascinating. Let’s take a look at these lesser-known facts about love that prove that love is no lesser than a super.

33 Love Facts That Will Amaze You

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1. Love Facilitates A Longer Life

Along with love and marriage comes a longer life. According to a study that was published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, married individuals were 58% less likely to die over an 8-year period, compared to the ones who never got married (1).

2. Love And Lust Affect Different Areas Of The Brain

One-night stands do not automatically result in a fairy tale romance. Studies show that being in love activates those regions in the brain that are connected to empathy (2). However, lust is connected to different areas of the brain – mainly those associated with motivation and reward.

3. Red Roses Are The Official Flowers Of Love

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Have you ever thought why roses are the chosen flowers for lovers? That’s because roses are considered the absolute favorite of Venus, the Roman goddess of love.

4. Love Really Makes You Do Crazy Things

Like making scenes, escaping from jail to see the person you love, or just acting plain silly. Do you know what happened to Joseph Andrew Dekenipp, who was a prisoner in Arizona? He broke out of jail just so he could meet his girlfriend for Valentine’s Day.

5. The World’s Longest Marriage Was For 86 Years

If you often complain that true love doesn’t exist, just look up Herbert and Zelmyra Fisher. This couple holds the record for the longest marriage in history, having been married for a staggering 86 years, 290 days.

6. Love Makes You More Empathetic And In Tune With Your Emotions

When you find the one who makes you strive to be the best version of yourself, your brain also responds accordingly. According to a study published in Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, a science journal, the social connection that comes with being in a happy relationship activates those parts of the brain that are responsible for emotional processing and selflessness (3).

7. Love Develops In Phases

Anyone who’s ever experienced love knows that it develops in phases. It increases in intensity gradually. It begins with an obsession that gradually mellows out into a more mature and understanding love.

8. Love Lowers Your Blood Pressure

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Those who have high blood pressure, also known as hypertension, know of its association with everything from stroke to heart disease. Fortunately, according to a study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, being happily married can lead to lowered blood pressure (4). Go and kiss your partner for keeping you healthy!

9. Love Helps You Heal Faster

Having your hubby by your side when you are injured or sick doesn’t just get you emotional support. When partners share a close bond, injuries heal way faster when compared to those who are in an openly aggressive relationship with each other.

10. Men Fall In Love Faster Than Women

A study published in The Journal of Social Psychology states that men take the first step when they fall in love (5). They are mostly the ones who say “I love you” first in a relationship. This may be because females are more scared of being heartbroken.

11. Being In Love Reduces Headache Frequency By Half

If you have chronic headaches and have never found something to ease the pain, love might be what you have been looking for.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine found that 50% of participants having a headache reported their pain to be cut in half after around four hours when they were administered a nasal spray with a dose of oxytocin, the love hormone (6). An additional 27% stated that there was no pain at all after the same duration.

12. Love And Laughter Go Together

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If you want to be closer to your partner, watch a new comedy series together. In a study published in Personal Relationships, researchers stated that couples who laughed together were more satisfied in their relationship and more supportive of each other when compared to those who were sharing a serious relationship (7).

13. Long Distance Can Strengthen A Relationship

People often say that long distance relationships can’t and don’t work, but research says otherwise. According to a study published in the Journal of Communication, long-distance relationships are not only as successful as regular relationships, but they are also better at building trust between partners (8).

14. Being In A Relationship Can Shape Your Personality In A Positive Way

Pessimistic people are known to change for the better when they find a little bit of love in their life. A study published in the Journal of Personality observed 245 young couples for around nine months (9). The scientists found that neurotic partners in a relationship became more self-confident and optimistic, thanks to all the positive experiences and emotions that come with being in a relationship.

15. Love Can Ease Chronic Pain

Love isn’t going to replace modern medicine any time soon. However, it can come in handy if you ever experience serious pain. In a study conducted by the Stanford University School of Medicine, researchers found that the warm and fuzzy feeling that love creates has the same response in the brain as strong painkillers do (10).

16. Cuddling Is Actually Good For You

There’s a good reason that couples love those snuggle sessions so much. Cuddling triggers the release of oxytocin, the happiness hormone, that betters your mood and increases your feeling of well-being. This phenomenon is so well-known that oxytocin is actually referred to as the “love hormone” or the “cuddling hormone.”

17. Love Is Chemically Addictive

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Romantic love is a very powerful addiction. This is because the hormones that your brain releases when you fall in love or are in love are euphoric. In fact, you may get so high that it can make you feel addicted to love as well as to the person you are in love with.

18. Love Is The Number One Reason Why People Get Married

More than 60% of the world’s population cited love as the reason they got married. The rest stated that financial stability was also an important factor.

19. The Heartbeats Of Couples Synchronize

When you and your partner gaze into each other’s eyes, what’s really happening is that your heart rates are syncing up. This has been stated by scientists at the University of California (11). The researchers have found that the couple’s heart rates were almost identical. This may be because of the strong link between couples on both physical and emotional levels.

20. Animals Commit To Monogamous Relationships As Well

Humans are not the only species in the animal kingdom that have monogamous relationships. Wolves, seahorses, beavers, otters, and barn owls are just a few of the other species that mate for life.

21. Hugging Your Partner Can Be An Instant Stress Reliever

Feeling extremely stressed? Hug it out with your lover. According to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina, psychiatrists found that when couples hugged, they had increased levels of oxytocin in their bodies (12). As mentioned before, oxytocin lowers stress levels and boosts mood. If you are having a rough day, doctors prescribe a long, tight hug!

22. Falling In Love Feels Like Being On Drugs

According to a study, that feeling of joy and euphoria you experience when you fall in love is essentially the same feeling that drug users experience (13). Both incidents trigger the release of hormones like adrenaline, dopamine, and oxytocin, giving you a real high.

23. It Can Only Take Up To 4 Minutes To Feel Attracted To Someone

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If you wish to make a good impression on a person, you only have about 4 minutes to do so. It is believed that it has more to do with the tone and speed of your voice and your body language than what you actually say.

24. Both Guys And Girls Must Have Required Testosterone Levels For Sexual Attraction

Yes, even girls have small amounts of testosterone in their bodies. Testosterone is responsible for creating desire as well as aggressive behavior – which actually pushes the person to pursue the object of this desire.

25. Being In Love Has Neurological Effects Same As That Of Cocaine

Being in love is almost like taking a dose of cocaine. Both experiences affect the brain in a similar way and trigger a similar sensation. Researchers have found that being in love can result in the production of several euphoria-inducing chemicals, which stimulate 12 areas of the human brain at the same time (14).

26. Couples Who Are Very Similar To Each Other Are Not Likely To Last

As everyone knows, opposites attract. Research also proves that this is at least partially true. Partners who are too similar or too different don’t last very long. There must be similarities, but there also have to be differences so that the two of you can learn from one another.

27. Heartbreak Is Real

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There is evidence that severe traumatizing events, such as a divorce, death of a loved one, break-up, physical separation, cheating, or betrayal, can cause real physical pain in the area of the heart. This condition is known as Broken Heart Syndrome (15).

Intense emotional distress triggers the brain to release certain chemicals that weaken one’s heart, leading to shortness of breath and chest aches. The condition is so intense that it is often misdiagnosed as a heart attack. It affects women more often than men.

28. People Who Are In Love Have Chemical Reactions Similar To People With OCD

People in the early stages of love have lower levels of the hormone serotonin, which is directly associated with feelings of well-being and happiness. They also have higher levels of cortisol, which is associated with stress. This is very similar to those people who have OCD or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

This explains why we don’t behave like ourselves when we fall for someone. It works the other way as well – people who have lower levels of serotonin tend to fall in love and get involved in sexual relationships quicker than others.

29. Butterflies In The Stomach Are Real – They Are Caused By Adrenaline

When you fall in love with someone, you can feel the butterflies dancing, flying, and fooling around in your tummy every time you see your special someone. They are caused due to adrenaline, which is released in your body as a flight or fight response.

30. Dilated Pupils Show That You Are Attracted To Someone

Darwin has stated that pupils expand during heightened focus and attention. This is true indeed, as this mostly occurs when people gaze at a beloved one or an object of desire, even if it is only a video or a picture. Moreover, people who have dilated pupils look more attractive to others as well.

31. People Are Attracted To Those With A Different Immune System

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If this isn’t weird, we don’t know what is. This was observed during a study run by Claude Wedekind of the University of Switzerland. He had female test subjects smell worn T-shirts of men (16). They consistently preferred the smell of those men’s shirts whose immune systems were different than their own.

32. Some People Can’t Feel Love

Some people who claim never to have fallen in love or felt romantic love are affected by a condition called hypopituitarism, which is a rare disease that doesn’t allow people to feel the high of love.

33. Your Body Has A “Vein Of Love”

Why are engagement rings worn on the fourth finger of the left hand? That is because the ancient Greeks believed that that finger has the vena amoris, or the “vein of love,” that connects straight to the heart. So romantic!

Love and attraction are complex things and, at times, frankly weird. It can be difficult to navigate through the early feelings, so why not jump in totally and experience the high? When looking objectively at your love life, note the things you dislike, make plans to change them, and move forward. You have only got a single chance to live life on your own terms. You already have everything you need to achieve complete happiness and love in your life, so don’t be afraid of it. You just need to reach out and grab it. All the best!

16 sources

Stylecraze has strict sourcing guidelines and relies on peer-reviewed studies, academic research institutions, and medical associations. We avoid using tertiary references. You can learn more about how we ensure our content is accurate and current by reading our editorial policy.

Cohabitation and U.S. Adult Mortality: An Examination by Gender and Race, Journal of Marriage and Family, Semantic Scholar. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7cce/ccabae943fe2d4822891b0f865f72981f924.pdf

The neurobiological link between compassion and love, Medical Science, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3524717/

The neural correlates of social connection. Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24984693

Is There Something Unique about Marriage? The Relative Impact of Marital Status, Relationship Quality, and Network Social Support on Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Mental Health, Annals of Behavior Medicine, ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5504344_Is_There_Something_Unique_about_Marriage_The_Relative_Impact_of_Marital_Status_Relationship_Quality_and_Network_Social_Support_on_Ambulatory_Blood_Pressure_and_Mental_Health

Women and Men in Love: Who Really Feels It and Says It First? The Journal of Social Psychology, Taylor and Francis Online. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.2010.522626

Oxytocin and Migraine Headache, Headache, The Journal of Head and Face Pain, Wiley Online Library. https://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/head.13082

Putting Laughter in Context: Shared Laughter as Behavioral Indicator of Relationship Well-Being, Personal Relationships, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4779443/

Absence Makes the Communication Grow Fonder: Geographic Separation, Interpersonal Media, and Intimacy in Dating Relationships, Journal of Communication, Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jcom.12029

Recent Decreases in Specific Interpretation Biases Predict Decreases in Neuroticism: Evidence From a Longitudinal Study With Young Adult Couples, Journal of Personality, Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopy.12102

Viewing Pictures of a Romantic Partner Reduces Experimental Pain: Involvement of Neural Reward Systems, PLOS One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0013309

Assessing cross-partner associations in physiological responses via coupled oscillator models, Emotion, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21910541

Oxytocin and Social Bonds: The Role of Oxytocin in Perceptions of Romantic Partners’ Bonding Behavior, Psychological Science, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5734372/

Addicted to love: What is love addiction and when should it be treated?, Philosophy, psychiatry, & psychology, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5378292/

Neuroimaging of Love: fMRI Meta‐Analysis Evidence toward New Perspectives in Sexual Medicine, The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1743-6109.2010.01999.

‘Broken-heart syndrome’… Be aware.., Indian Journal of Anesthesia, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4800929/

MHC-dependent mate preferences in humans, The Royal Society. http://www.coherer.org/pub/mhc.pdf

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Harini Natarajan

Harini has over 12 years of experience in content writing and editing for online media. She specializes in the areas of business, health and wellness, and lifestyle and is proficient in Medical Sciences (Biology, Human Anatomy and Physiology, and Biochemistry). As the Chief Editor, Harini ensures that her team delivers interesting, engaging, and authentic content. Her background in Biomedical Engineering helps her decode and interpret the finer nuances of scientific research for her team. Harini is a certified bibliophile and a closet poet. She also loves dancing and traveling to offbeat destinations.

Source: https://www.stylecraze.com/articles/facts-about-love/

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One Simple Solution to Reduce Stress and Anxiety in Minutes

Since Neurodivergent conditions often come with an unwanted dose of anxiety on the side, this article has been also been published on Planet Neurodivergent, from a slightly different perspective.

Job Interview Stress

For the past year or so, I’ve been delivering a training session, Interview with Impact: First Impressions Count, for the Department of Education’s Leadership Institute. One thing we focus on during the session is quelling interview stress. Since most people have had a job interview, I’m sure you can relate to how stressful it can feel.

In this article, I’m going to give you one simple solution to control stress. This not only works for the type of stress that occurs in a high stakes situation, like an interview, public speaking or exams, it also helps reduce ongoing anxieties and high blood pressure when practised over time.

As a side note, I’m launching a similar online course, on Interviewing with Impact, soon.

I’ll show you how to control stress, instead of stress controlling you. 

The Effects of Stress

If you let it, stress can get so out of control that you lose the ability to think clearly–negatively impacting your performance. At worst, your mind goes completely blank–you either can’t speak, or ramble comes out, sometimes as a high pitched squeak. Have you experienced this? Share your story in the comments. It’s good to hear how common it is because most people believe it’s just them experiencing it. Guess what? I work with executives, leaders and influencers and many of them battle the same thing.

Here’s my Story

Before I went full-time as a Body Language Specialist and before I knew all the tricks and tips that I now use regularly, I was delivering a presentation to almost a thousand people, on a topic that I’d had little experience with–social media. I researched my subject well but was still out of my comfort zone because I’d had a short time available to prepare.

As an introvert, preparation for me is crucial. It’s the difference between me being able to perform, or not. If I don't feel prepared, my stress levels hit the roof. Add to that almost a thousand hundred pairs of eyes–all on me. Enough to send me spiralling out of control. And that’s precisely what happened. Two lines into my presentation, I blanked.

Fortunately, those first two lines were positive, and the audience assumed my ‘pause’ was their cue to applause. I let them, as I regained my focus, remembering what I had planned to say. The whole thing went unnoticed. Phew–I was lucky.

Before we get to how to reduce stress, there’s a lesson we can learn from this–identify the things that can exacerbate your stress and minimise them where you can. Prevention is better than cure.

What happens inside the brain and body during stress?

Fear as the Cause of Stress

If we take a job interview as an example, the interview lies between you and your success. You can have the best track record and success stories behind you. But if you fail to impress your interviewer, you’re less likely to win the position that brings you ’success’. Whether that’s an increase in pay, career progression or simply a job that fits in with a lifestyle need, this opportunity for success comes with a risk of failure. It stems from the emotion of fear–that’s why we sometimes call it anxiety.

Different emotions, such as sadness, also put stress on our body, but generally, when we say we’re stressed, we’re talking about the type of stress which comes from the emotion of fear–fear of failure and the consequences surrounding it. What if I don’t get the job? What if I don’t get my assignment in on time? What if my boss doesn’t like my presentation? What if my team doesn’t accept the change? What if I blank on stage? What if I’m not capable of achieving this?

Stress and the Brain

While your cognitive brain can process this rationally, “it’s not the end of the world”, “something else will come up”, “maybe it’s not the right job for you anyway”, your limbic brain, the primitive part of the brain which is designed to keep you safe, perceives this risk of failure as a threat. It fears the potential negative consequences of failure.

Not getting a job, not getting your assignment in on time, performing poorly, etc. are not threats to your survival, but the brain is going to deal with the perceived threat the only way it knows how–in the same way it has done for thousands of years. It’s going to prepare your body for the freeze, fight or flight response. This is your body's survival mechanism at work. If like most people you feel emotion, it is absolutely normal to feel stressed in these kinds of situations.

Stress and the Body

When your body goes into its emergency response system, physiological changes occur within your body. These are changes in your autonomic processes–processes that you don’t consciously control–for example, your heart rate, blood pressure and breathing increase. Blood is pumped to the large thigh muscles (in case you need to run), your vocal cords tighten, and adrenaline is released. These are just some of the physiological changes which occur in your body.

Most people are not consciously aware of these changes taking place inside them. Some may be more sensitive, consciously noting their heart rate and breathing increase. However, what many people are aware of are the physical feelings created by the physiological changes. These physical feelings can be shaky legs and hands (from the adrenaline release), a higher-pitched or squeaky voice (from the vocal cords tightening), gasping for air (from the breathing rate increase) and butterflies in the stomach (from changes to digestion and possibly the gut-brain connection).

Stress Management

The key to controlling stress is in your breath! Breathing is an autonomic process–you don't have to think about it consciously, and you still breathe. However, it's unique as an autonomic process, because you can control if you want to.

When you start to control your breath, by focusing on it and slowing it down, something incredible happens within your body. It starts to regulate all the other autonomic processes that have gone into overdrive as a result of the stress. It’s that simple. Control your breath, and the rest will take care of itself. 

I use this solution whenever I need it–for me, that's before I present to an audience, before I'm being interviewed and at night in bed to help me get to sleep. It’s incredibly relaxing. It hasn't let me down. Oh, and it also works, for me, to get rid of hiccups.

Researchers have found that slowing down your breathing can:

Improve your mood and ease depressive symptoms

Reduce anger, pain, sweating, muscle tension and temperature

Improve asthma, oxygen saturation and heart rate variability

Lower blood pressure

Leaving you calmer, healthier and happier.

Slow Breathing Exercise

Slow Breathing

Most people breathe on average around twelve to eighteen breaths per minute. When we are stressed, this can increase from about twenty to forty-five breaths per minute. I slow my breathing down to four breaths per minute, to prevent or to reduce stress. It feels great.

While there are many breathing exercises, I'm going to teach you my technique–the exhale is twice as long as the inhale. I use this technique because it also helps strengthen vocal power–that's a whole new blog post, but in a nutshell, it helps you to avoid running out of air mid-sentence.

Don’t go lower than four breaths per minute as it can have adverse effects. Five or six breaths per minute are also very effective. At first, it may feel like a challenge if you aren’t used to slow breathing. If you find it too much of a challenge, or if you have asthma, try breathing slowly but at a rate that works for you.

I usually set aside ten minutes for this before a speaking gig. Often, I do it on the train, and then as I get off, I feel like I'm floating on a bed of calm. Life feels wonderful, even though I’m about to go into a situation, which otherwise, would feel stressful. Some people take drugs, I breathe.

I try to maintain slower than normal breathing once I'm there, without counting the pace. If I find my stress levels start to increase, which sometimes happens when I'm early and have to wait around, I take myself to the bathroom to breathe (and power-pose). 

If you only have two minutes to spare, breathe like this and you'll still gain the benefits.

The breathing technique and patterns are explained below.

How to Breathe Properly–Breathing from the Abdomen

Get comfortable, relax your shoulders, straighten your back and make sure your head is aligned, over your body. Make sure your arms aren't across your body. All this will open your airways and help you to breathe correctly.

Breathe from your abdomen instead of your chest. With abdominal breathing, the diaphragm extends to fill the entire lung capacity for efficient respiration. We breathe from the abdomen while we sleep, and babies breathe this way too–it's the correct way to breathe. Chest breathing is what most adults do while they are awake. However, it's a bad habit and is associated with anxiety. It also creates tension in the shoulders and neck.

Try this–take a deep breath in and then exhale. Did your shoulders rise and fall? If they did, you're breathing from the chest. Try to get into the habit of abdominal breathing instead. You may find it easier to practise (initially) lying down.

Place one hand on your abdomen and the other on your chest, to ensure your chest isn't moving, but your abdomen is. As you inhale, feel your abdomen expand like a balloon as your diaphragm pushes it outwards. As you exhale, feel your abdomen slowly sink back towards your body. Once you think you're breathing from the abdomen, you can begin.

The Slow Breathing Exercises

I’ve created some follow-along animations of the breathing exercises so you can follow the pace without counting. These are located below, as well as on my SOS page for quick access. I prefer to follow the animations because it also relaxes my eyes, as I allow my gaze to lose focus–this is my meditation. Of course, if I’m out and about, I usually just count the pace (see pattern below).

Four Breaths Per Minute

If the four breaths per minute breathing exercise is too much of a challenge (it should feel somewhat challenging initially), if you have asthma or other breathing issues*, scroll down and try the five or six breaths per minute exercises instead.

*Check with your doctor before trying any of these breathing exercises.

Use the time that you have, if it’s only two minutes, take two minutes. The videos last for ten minutes–if you have ten, breathe for ten.

Always breathe in through your nose. In this exercise breathe out through pursed lips.

Straighten your posture, get comfortable and feel your abdomen rise as you breathe in, and lower as you breathe out.

There is no sound on these videos, feel free to add music or sounds that are soothing to you.

Breathing Pattern: Inhale over 5 seconds, exhale over 10 seconds

Five Breaths Per Minute

Breathing Pattern: Inhale over 4 seconds, exhale over 8 seconds

Six-ish Breaths Per Minute

Breathing Pattern: Inhale over 3 seconds, exhale over 6 seconds

Learn • Develop • Succeed

Need one-on-one help in this area?

Shoot me a line.

As Always…

Book a half-day (or more) training session for your organisation and get two free, one-hour coaching sessions!

Quote “train to gain offer” as you book. 

[dmaaweightloss-blog]

What is yohimbe used for?

For a product that has five-star reviews on the treatment of erectile dysfunction and as a weight loss supplement, you can trust in theYohimbine. In this article we will tell you aboutYohimbine benefits, Yohimbine reviews, Yohimbine dosage, Yohimbine usesand all other necessary information regarding this insanely helpful drug.

Yohimbine Tree-History

The history ofYohimbine rises from West Africa where it was used as a traditional aphrodisiac that improved sexual performance. Though the natives used the bark ofYohimbe in numerous ways, its primary use has been in curing impotence in men. The natural remedy was used as medicine where the Yohimbe bark would be crushed and mixed with other herbs to form a powerful plant remedy. It was also known as the “love tree”.

Description–What Is Yohimbine HCL?

Yohimbine(146-48-5) is a fascinating dietary supplement that has numerous potential benefits where it can help one maintain a healthy weight as well as enhance sexual vitality. Despite having been on the shelves longer than Viagra, it is crucial that you gather all the information there is about the supplement before taking it. Lucky for you, this article embarks on providing you with all the details you need to know.

Today, yohimbine has found a deserving place as a prescription drug that is used to treat erectile dysfunction. Though most skeptics place it as one of the aphrodisiacs, scientific studies give evidence that shows that yohimbine Hydrochloride (Yohimbine HCL) is one.

Doctors prescribe the standardized forms of yohimbine to patients who need a little help in their sex life.  The modern product contains active ingredients that are extracted from the bark of the evergreen Yohimbe tree. As a prescription drug, it is commonly referred to as yohimbine hydrochloride (CAS 65-19-0) and is said to be an alkaloid. You can also find Yohimbine in tablet and capsule form and is sold as 98% pure powder. Yohimbine is marketed on its ability to treat erectile dysfunction and also to help in weight loss.

The active ingredient in theYohimbe bark is believed to block alpha-2 adrenergic receptors which play a role in inhibiting erections.  It also promotes the release of nitric acid which causes blood vessels to dilate thus increases the blood reaching the sexual organs.

It is also a great fat burning compound especially for eliminating stubborn fats. The product is used to aid in the loss of weight within a short period.  The herbal supplement simply increases the adrenaline levels in the body. It also works against the regulatory process that inhibits fat burning.

What Is Yohimbine Used For?

Used to treat Erectile Dysfunction

A failing sex drive can cause a man to lose his self-esteem thus affecting the quality of his life. Prompted by many reasons, this condition affects very many men globally. A large number of people suffering from this condition get caught up in the web of schemers who only rip them off or worsen the situation. However, today there is a natural remedy that allows them to rest easy as it’s not only safe but also effective. Most health food store promotes theYohimbe bark extract as a functional aphrodisiac that boosts sex drive and the remedy to erectile dysfunction.

Encourages Weight Loss

Could you walk as fast as you could ten years ago? Run with the same speed as you could a while ago? If your response is no, then you’ve possibly gained some weight. While you may be trying to train and eating right, the Yohimbine results may prove to be better. It is an excellent way of getting rid of the extra weight without having to spend all your time at the gym or starving yourself to death. Yohimbine HCL(65-19-0) can help one achieve and maintain a much healthier weight.  This natural weight loss supplement has alpha-2 adrenergic receptors found in fat cells.  Taking it leads to increased fat and weight loss. When consumed before or during exercise it increases fat breakdown. It also suppresses hunger and appetite and as a result, reduces the level of food consumption. Yohimbine is incorporated into weight loss programs as part of a healthy diet and exercise routine for a more efficient effect.

The advantage of losing weight is that it does not only improve your appearance but also prevents you from conditions like high cholesterol, sleep apnea, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease and many more. Once you take Yohimbine, you now start the journey to a healthier and fitter version of you.

Get Health benefits from Yohimbine

Treats Erectile Dysfunction

Men who have erectile dysfunction have a tough time in their sexual life — however, the Yohimbe extract deals with this by promoting the flow of blood to the sexual organs. It helps relieve symptoms of erectile dysfunction, increases one’s fertility and also enhances the sexual drive.  So, if you have been experiencing problems in your sexual life, thenyohimbine might be the best solution for you. Though men commonly use the pharmaceutical aphrodisiac, women with low libido levels can also benefit from its use.

Boosts blood circulation

If your blood circulation system is slow, then you are probably faced with slow healing rates, low energy levels, and cognitive cloudiness.  In such a case then you probably need a vasodilator. Yohimbe is the perfect vasodilator not only because it’s natural but also because it’s beneficial.  It expands the blood vessels which in turn increases the flow of blood thus delivering the necessary nutrient and oxygen to all the organs and cells. All you need is to add a little amount of yohimbine to your herbal supplement to improve your healing, cognition and improve your energy levels.

Reduces Hypertension

When tension in the blood vessels is eased, your cardiovascular health is much better. If your blood vessels are tight and constricted, it means that your heart has to work twice as hard in pumping blood through the body which can cause the blood pressure to rise. This situation can eventually lead to stroke, blocked blood vessels and heart attacks.  When you add yohimbine to your diet, you may be alleviating the chances of coronary heart disease.

Weight Loss

Another valuable use of Yohimbe is in its effect when it comes to losing weight.  If you have been working out and are still not able to lose weight then blocking some adrenoreceptors in your body may be the solution to your successful weight loss. Use of the Yohimbine supplement allows for higher levels of norepinephrine which inhibits fat mobilization from happening and also leads to fat breakdown in the body.

Improves athletic performance

On top of helping with weight loss,Yohimbe also increases muscle mass and reduces the feeling of fatigue. It helps to increase the amount of energy one uses thus promoting your energy levels.

Relieves Depression

Dopamine is the hormone that helps keep the human brain active and efficient. When the dopamine levels are low one is likely to experience fatigue, mood swings and in the last case leads to depression. Yohimbine features unique properties that are known to increase the dopamine levels thus alleviating the feeling of being miserable.

Treats dry Mouth

Yohimbe increases the flow of saliva. If you are taking medication that causes your mouth to be dry, then yohimbine would help you deal with the condition. Dry mouth or xerostomia is a situation whereby the salivary glands are unable to produce enough saliva to keep your mouth wet which is usually a side effect of some specific medication.

It decreases blood clotting

Excessive blood clotting can result in heart attacks, kidney failure, and stroke. Studies done have led to the conclusion that yohimbine can reduce blood clotting where it blocks certain adrenoceptors and also works on converting epinephrine into norepinephrine.

It reduces anxiety and fear

Dealing with an anxiety disorder can be quite a task. Having a strong feeling of fear even when there is the absence of any danger makes one feel uncomfortable and may be the most frightening moment of your life. At this point, you may not know how to deal with it while any efforts you make may even result in the condition getting worse than before. Yohimbine supplement has proved overcome phobias and panic attacks effectively. It does this by increasing the norepinephrine levels. Once this happens, your mood is uplifted, and the sudden feeling of anxiety and overwhelming fear will not have any place in your life.

It treats type 2 diabetes

It is no secret that diabetes is now one of the most prevalent conditions affecting people in the world. One of the Yohimbine benefits is that it decreases blood glucose and increases insulin levels. It is a great way to treat type 2 diabetes naturally, and studies show that it is as effective as prescribed medication in the treatment of the condition. Even better the Yohimbine weight loss effect improves the blood sugar levels thus keeping type 2 diabetes at bay.

Itmay improve cognitive performance

Sometimes, you may find yourself in a situation that needs better thinking. Perhaps working on a project that requires a lot of thinking, studying for a tough exam or when you are just trying to learn something new. Any tedious task may need some extra focus and intelligence, and that’s where Yohimbine hcl comes in handy. Studies done have shown that Yohimbine makes you smarter and your brain to work more efficiently. As a result, you can tackle any cognitive tasks and even be able to multitask without having to wear out your brain.

It improves on your memory

Have you in the past wished that you could improve on your memory? You know that your memory is low when you keep forgetting on the obvious stuff like where you placed your keys or forgetting an answer to a question that you just revised for. As hard as it may appear, you can improve on your memory and reduce on forgetfulness. One of the Yohimbine uses is to help improve on your memory. It does this by increasing the norepinephrine levels. With its constant use, you can always get the most out of your memory and remember almost every segment of information that you need to.

It protects the kidneys

Kidneys are a very critical organ in the body that filters waste, i.e. toxins, salt, excess water and gets rid of it. If the waste were left to accumulate, it would negatively affect our bodies. Kidneys also control blood pressure levels and blood acidity. With kidney diseases being on the rise it is good to take care of this organ. For patients who take Yohimbine, it has proved to reduce inflammation and improve how the kidney functions. You could also take Yohimbine and improve on your kidneys’ working capacity.

It may help in the treatment of arthritis

Though many people take it as a normal part of aging, arthritis can be very uncomfortable and even very painful. While it may be frustrating to deal with this condition and the devastating symptoms that come with it, you are not helpless. Yohimbine reduces joint inflammation while at the same time it prevents joint damage and increases the antioxidant levels. The Yohimbine effect may help you live a normal life by keeping your joints in check.

It may be used to reduce pain

Pain can happen to any of us at any moment. It could be through illness, accident or injury. Of the many positive Yohimbine reviews that people have given, one of them is its ability to relieve pain. If you are interested in a natural way of reducing pain without having to take synthetic medication or seeing a doctor, then Yohimbine is the way to go.

It may help with clonidine overdose

Clonidine is a drug that is prescribed in the treatment of high blood pressure, withdrawal symptoms (from smoking, opioids, and alcohol), anxiety disorders and ADHD. Once overdosed it could lead to nausea, dizziness, and drowsiness. No need for you to get scared; Yohimbine will handle that.

Yohimbine together with other compounds

In combination with Naloxone, it helps treat PCOS

Dealing with PCOS can be quite a challenge. From the many painful symptoms to having difficulty while trying to conceive, the condition might make you give up on ever getting well. Because hormonal changes cause it, almost every woman could suffer from it. Fortunately, Yohimbine(65-19-0) can eliminate or minimize the unwanted symptoms caused by polycystic ovary syndrome. And since this condition is linked to other health conditions like endometrial cancer and cardiovascular disease, the faster you take Yohimbine, the quicker you prevent yourself from other complications.

Together with Berberine, it prevents organ damage caused by Sepsis

Sepsis is a health condition where tissues get harmed when the body is responding to an infection. Berberine and Yohimbine(65-19-0) prevent the immune cells (neutrophils) from damaging multiple organs and also reduce the inflammatory messenger molecules.

How should I take yohimbine?

Like all other goods taken into the body, it is good to note that taking too much supplements is not also good for your health. It is therefore crucial that you know the right Yohimbine dosage for you. Traditionally, the bark of the Yohimbe tree is used by drinking a brew that is achieved by boiling strips. In other cases, the bark was crushed and used in powder form. However, today Yohimbine is available in capsule form which is much more convenient. The recommended dose for Yohimbine fat burn is 20mg which are divided into two daily doses for better effect. For erectile dysfunction, one should take as much as 42mg per day.

The supplement yohimbine is said to be much more effective when it is before or during meals since it can potentially cause the insulin levels in the body to increase significantly.  Caution should be taken because different brands contain varying amounts of Yohimbe. It takes close to 45 minutes to absorb and should be used 3 hours before sex.

Who should not take Yohimbine?

Before taking this supplement you ought to ask yourself, is Yohimbine safe for you? Various reasons could make you not fit to take this medication, and they include;

A history of heart disease

Kidney disease

Low or high blood pressure

Mental health conditions

Liver disease

Another thing that could make you not be fit for this supplement is pregnancy. In case you are on this supplement and planning to conceive, you should seek the doctor’s advice. Any individual who is under the age of eighteen is asked to refrain from the use of Yohimbine.

Potential dangers of taking Yohimbine

Yohimbine products may cause potential risk due to incorrect labeling. A study done showed that among 49 yohimbine products that were studied only two provided the correct information on the label. The supplements had 0-12.1mg of yohimbine, whereas just a dose of 5.4 mg is recommended.

The actual doses of the products that listed inaccurate quantities ranged from 23%-147% of the amount of Yohimbine that they stated. The disadvantage that comes with this is that you are likely to take a higher dose than you should and this could make you suffer from harmful side effects.

To protect yourself from the Yohimbine dangers, ensure that you buy the supplements from a brand that you can trust in. Also, go for a product that is tested for safety and quality.

Yohimbine

Side effects

Generally, with any supplement, there are side effects. The Yohimbine side effects are either severe or mild. Those that have been reported most are high blood pressure, anxiety, increased heart rate, and gastrointestinal distress. The rare side effects include acute kidney injury, seizure, and heart attack.

However, you should note that these side effects were as a result of taking products that contained other ingredients together with Yohimbe and therefore they could have also contributed to the effects.

Yohimbine is one of the safest supplements but comes with some potential dangers like severe effects and incorrect product labeling.

Yohimbine user reviews

The Yohimbine benefits may sound very good on paper, but you may want to know if it works. Here are some of the Yohimbine reviews that we have gotten from our clients.

Ree says `Being an emotional eater, I have struggled with weight gain. From different diets and supplements to saunas. I had to seek help from a bigger person regarding the eating habit, and fortunately, I got help. What about the weight I had already gained? I needed to lose it like yesterday because none of my clothes looked good on me. I have been combining Yohimbine with working out, and I can’t list all good things I can see in myself. I am down to 130 lbs all the way from 178 lbs. I would advise anyone who would like to shed some weight to try the Yohimbine.’

Yu Yan says, `I bought this product for my husband as his birthday present after reading its benefits on the internet. His energy level and stamina have changed dramatically in and out of bed. Surprisingly his hypertension has reduced too. He keeps thanking me because for the past three months our love life is back to where it was twenty years ago. I will recommend this to everyone.’

Fad says, ‘Never feel like you’re losing your money while buying this supplement. At first, I felt the same but ever since I started using it things are now different. I have realized an increase in the drive for the first time since I got to my 40s. I started feeling the difference after the first week of use, and my libido is now at the peak. What more could I ask for? Thank you Yohimbine.’

Wang says, ` I had lost hope of ever bearing a child. For the past eight years, I have visited many gynecologists in vain until the last one recommended Yohimbine to me. I always envied colleagues who went home early to look after their children. I missed the cries and the laughter that came with having children, and I was almost falling into depression. Yohimbine has brightened up my life, and I can’t trade anything for my daughter Yu. I am now a father and my marriage life is the envy of many. I wish I knew about this miracle supplement eight years ago. It is worth every penny.’

Dr. Khalid says, ` I have been asking most of my patients who suffer from erectile dysfunction to use Yohimbine supplements, and it has not disappointed them. For anyone who is tired of using synthetic medication for the same will appreciate the fact that Yohimbe is natural and its side effects are mild. Additionally, they are chock-full of health benefits and will, therefore, be useful to your body all around.’

Yan says, ` I am very excited about the Yohimbine herb because it is so far the greatest weight loss product I have ever taken. Everyone looks for a clean and natural way to shed the extra pounds should consider going for this.’

Becky says, ` For the whole of this week, my husband has been on this supplement, and the word fabulous is just an understatement. I am 35 and married to a loving husband, but the problem is that work and kids have taken the better part of him. He no longer gets in the mood, and if he does, it doesn’t last long. He takes it before we get intimate and it has worked. I was almost giving up, but this one has turned out to be very helpful. We can now enjoy ourselves as much as we like. I know he’ll be a repeat customer.’

Yohimbine supplements for sale  

Perhaps everyone at one point in life uses one or more supplements. Whether it is for weight loss, increased muscle mass or any other that improves the quality of life. However many will admit that not all supplements are as effective and it goes down to where you bought the supplements? Some may be useless concoctions that will not benefit your body in any way. In today’s market, many suppliers are still selling expired or dangerous counterfeit supplements. The fake supplements masquerade as the real products, and you might fall for the lie only to get duped. Some may not just be fake but may have an ineffective amount of the active ingredient. Even worse some may have none of it.

That is why finding the right seller for your supplements is very important because you will not get ripped off. A legitimate seller or manufacturer is always very responsive to any questions or concerns on matters quality, price or effectiveness. Any uneducated, vague or unrealistic answer about the product should act as a red flag when you are planning to buy supplements. Luckily for you, we can help you get the best supplements when it comes to price, output, and quality.

At Phcoker.com you can easily buy Yohimbine online at a fair price and get it delivered at your location. You don’t have to keep wondering where to buy Yohimbine; we ensure that you enjoy the buying process and get precisely what you ordered for.  So how do you buy from us?

Here are the steps of the online purchase:

Go to Phcoker.com website

Search “Yohimbine(65-19-0)”

Fill and submit the application form for the purchase

You might be requested to fill in a short medical questionnaire; fill it in and submit. Our specialist will review and possibly approve your order.

Once your order is approved, you’ll pay for the product and then wait for Phcoker.com to deliver it to you.

Order from us today and start taking the supplements to enjoy the Yohimbine sex drive, weight loss, and all the health benefits that it comes with.

Biography

Yohimbine: Everything You Need to Know about the Natural Aphrodisiac Used to Treat Erectile Dysfunction, Increase Libido, and Increase Sex Drive and Make You Be the Man You Always Wanted, Hilary Tony, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, page 1-34.

Yohimbine, Jesse Russell, Ronald Cohn, Book on Demand, 2012, page 1-88.

Encyclopedia of Dietary Supplement(Print), edited by Paul M. Coates, M. Coates Paul, Marc Blackman, Marc R. Blackman, Gordon M. Cragg, Mark Levine, Jeffrey D. White, Joel Moss, Mark A. Levine, page 567-593

Phc14@phcoker.com

[chocolate-brownies]

It’s there when I wake up. Something’s wrong. I haven’t opened my eyes yet. A minute ago I was sleeping. But now I’m awake and it’s there, lurking: Something’s wrong. My breathing tightens. I stretch my legs beneath the sheets. I feel my heart beating. The sense of creeping fear is diffuse, elusive, hard to pin down. It’s like catching sight of something from the corner of my eye. Something’s wrong.

Only nothing is wrong. I know that. I’ve experienced these bouts of dread for as long as I can remember. It’s familiar, which does not help me hate it any less. 

Explaining chronic anxiety to someone who doesn’t experience it is like trying to describe a color they’ve never seen. I have friends who are surprised I suffer from anxiety. After a lifetime of learning to compensate, to push myself beyond my six-year-old fear of joining the Girl Scouts, I do not come across as a nervous Nellie. I am outgoing, talkative, adventurous. Last spring, I planned a Class IV whitewater rafting trip with my husband for three days in the summer. I started dreading it the minute after I booked it. 

I go for long periods when anxiety leaves me alone, and I forget the tightness of its grip. But when it comes back, triggered by stress or worry about an upcoming challenge, it sticks around, greeting me every morning like some noxious troll who won’t shut up. Something’s wrong, it insists, or more accurately, something is about to go terribly wrong. I know this thought is irrational, but that doesn’t stop the spiral of anxiety that ensues. Nerves twitch under my skin. I scroll my list of things to do and feel uneasy, even about the tasks I’m (supposedly) looking forward to. When days begin like this, happiness is not on my agenda.

Too Much of a Good Thing

All animals react when confronted with danger, and that’s a good thing. The so-called fight-or-flight response, also known as the stress response, helps animals either move away from a threat or fend it off. Anxiety—the ability to anticipate danger—is even more of a good thing. Anxious humans who avoided areas rife with predators or saved food in anticipation of crop failure had a better chance of staying alive to pass on their genes. And make no mistake, that’s all evolution cares about. It doesn’t care that we exquisitely anxious humans might survive but be miserable a lot of the time, massaging our worry beads down to nubs. Let’s face it, in the modern world, with far fewer real threats in our environment, many of us are suffering from too much of a good thing. 

Too much anxiety robs you of your capacity for joy. When everyday worry becomes chronic, it can flip over into one of several flavors of debilitating emotional disorders. Some sufferers develop specific phobias—agoraphobia, claustrophobia, social anxiety. Others, like me, suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, a free-floating emotional malady. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that one in five Americans have had some kind of anxiety disorder in the past year. In turn, anxiety can lead to sleep disturbances, panic attacks, hypochondria, depression. 

With so much misery at stake, it’s a relief to learn that lots of smart people have figured out how to ease anxiety. Whether you suffer from occasional worry or have a full-blown anxiety disorder, it’s possible to become fully engaged in life again. In the last three decades, scientists have decoded the spiral of reactions that, over time, build an anxious brain. Turns out, I’ve wired my own brain to be anxious. The good news is I’m learning to rewire it—and you can, too. The more we know about how anxiety actually works, the better we get at beating back the troll. Or at least making it behave. 

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

To understand anxiety, you’ve got to start with fear, because anxiety is like fear run amok. Neuroscientists now know there are two distinct pathways in the brain that trigger the fight-or-flight response. Here’s the most direct one: You encounter something in your environment—a man running toward you with a knife, a car veering into your lane on the highway—and a part of your brain called the thalamus sends visual information directly to an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. That’s the control center for the fight-or-flight response. When the amygdala detects a threat, it triggers a surge of adrenaline and an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension—to prepare you to act. A few weeks ago, as I rode my bike home, I suddenly braked, turned my handles sharply to the left, and barely avoided being hit by a car that had run a stop sign. I never saw it coming. But my amygdala did, and it may have saved my life.

To understand anxiety, you’ve got to start with fear, because anxiety is like fear run amok.

Here’s the modern glitch in that evolutionarily brilliant response: “We don’t go into fight or flight just when we’re being chased by a bear,” says Adrienne Taren, a neuroscientist and emergency-room physician at the University of Oklahoma. “We’re getting it every time our email pings or we’re sitting in traffic. Our amygdala is just going and going and going.” That constant barrage of low-level alarm is what we call stress.

So where does anxiety come in? Because we’re such imaginative creatures, we can get stressed out by simply thinking about something that may go wrong. The part of the brain that worries about a future event we’re anticipating is the prefrontal cortex, and that’s where the second pathway to anxiety starts—the one that creates that flurry of anxious thoughts you can’t seem to control. Worried thoughts in the cortex trigger a stress response in the amygdala, which explains why we can freak out about things that aren’t even happening. “I think of the amygdala as sitting there watching cortex television,” says Catherine Pittman, a clinical psychologist and coauthor of Rewire Your Anxious Brain. “You can be on your back porch, looking at the beautiful trees, but you’re thinking, ‘How am I going to pay my mortgage with these medical bills? They’re going to take my house away!’ Your anxiety spikes even though nothing around you is dangerous.”

It’s important to realize that the cortex can’t create anxiety on its own. It can only activate the stress response when it gets the amygdala involved. The amygdala, on the other hand, can bypass the cortex, detect threats in the environment, and react, quickly. When I swerved to avoid being hit by that car, my amygdala took over while my cortex was still figuring out what was happening. Similarly, when a veteran feels anxious at what sounds like gunfire, it’s because his amygdala has gone into overdrive. The amygdala is constantly sweeping the scene, comparing our current experiences with associations learned long ago and some that are probably hard-wired. When it finds a match, it compels us to react, even if the current situation really isn’t all that threatening.

The cortex is like a parent who intervenes to prevent a child from acting on his or her impulses. It acts as a check for when the amygdala overreacts, recognizing, for instance, that what sounded like gunfire was actually a car backfiring and promptly tamping down the anxiety. Sometimes, though, the amygdala’s response is so overpowering that it drowns out the voice of the cortex. That’s anxiety in overdrive. 

The neuroscientist whose work led to the realization that anxiety arises from two distinct neural pathways is Joseph LeDoux, the director of the Emotional Brain Institute at New York University. His discovery of a direct neural pathway to the amygdala overturned the conventional wisdom that the cortex played the starring role in creating anxiety and instead placed the amygdala at center stage. This revolutionary development has enormous implications for why some anxiety treatments work better than others—and for why mindfulness approaches are now getting so much attention.

Getting to the Amygdala of the Problem

In the 1960s, people who suffered from anxiety would have been advised, taking a cue from Freud, that they needed to uncover the unconscious forces driving their fears. By the ’70s a more pragmatic approach had taken hold: Learn to change the thoughts and behaviors that lead to anxiety. Cognitive therapy has proven successful in helping people interrogate the negative thoughts underpinning their worries: Are people really judging me so harshly when I give a presentation? And what’s the worst that can happen if they are? Patients learn to question whether their thoughts are realistic or if they’re catastrophizing based on scant evidence.

We now know that cognitive therapy is effective at tackling anxiety that originates from thoughts in the cortex. But it does nothing to tackle anxiety that arises from reactions in the amygdala itself. “Your thoughts can’t change the way the amygdala reacts through using logic or reasoning with it,” says Pittman, who is also a professor at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. “The amygdala only learns through experience.” 

So where does anxiety come in? Because we’re such imaginative creatures, we can get stressed out by simply thinking about something that may go wrong.

So how do you target the amygdala directly? One way is through behavioral, or exposure therapy, which helps the amygdala “unlearn” associations it’s made between danger and particular experiences—like encountering strangers, loud voices, boarding a plane, or driving a car. Behavioral therapy uses the gradual, repeated exposure to whatever’s causing anxiety as a way to help the amygdala learn a more neutral association between the experience and our reaction to it.

Another way to treat amygdala-based anxiety is to simply calm down that part of the brain. Medications are one option. Xanax and its other incarnations are members of a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines. “They basically put the amygdala to sleep,” says Pittman. And that works. But if your goal is to lessen anxiety over the long haul, taking benzodiazepines will impede your progress. “What is learning?” asks Pittman. “It’s neurons firing repeatedly so that new connections form. Neurons have to fire to rewire. So if you give someone a medicine that prevents neurons from firing, how is the amygdala going to learn?” Alternatively, the reason that another class of drugs—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors known as SSRIs—have proven helpful for anxiety is that they appear to help neurons form new connections. “SSRI’s promote more communication between neurons,” says Pittman. “People start to be able to think outside the box a little.”

But drugs aren’t the only—or the best—way to calm down the amygdala. There’s also the so-called relaxation response. It’s the “rest and digest” antidote to “fight or flight.” Using MRIs, scientists can now see how, just as the amygdala revs up during stress, it calms down when people employ the deep breathing exercises that prompt the relaxation response. 

And that’s part of the reason that mindfulness shows so much promise for treating anxiety. Sitting quietly and focusing on the breath activates the relaxation response. But mindfulness-based meditation combines relaxation with something more: a nonjudgmental attitude toward emotions that arise, an acceptance of whatever happens. What the new brain research suggests is that, by combining the relaxation response with a cultivation of paying attention to our thoughts, we can address both of the pathways that lead to anxiety at the same time. 

How Mindfulness Changes the Brain

Adrienne Taren began studying mindfulness because she was interested in stress. Studies have shown that mindfulness makes people less reactive to stress and better at regulating their emotions. But as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon back in 2012, Taren wanted to know what was happening in their brains. Her first study compared a group of people—not meditators—who exhibited mindfulness as a personality trait with another group with high stress levels. The results were striking. People who scored highly for mindfulness had smaller amygdalas than those who reported high stress. “The assumption is that a larger amygdala is more active,” she says. “If you have a smaller amygdala,you aren’t so stress reactive.”

The next question: Can people who aren’t mindful by disposition rewire their brains to become less reactive to stress? Taren enrolled high-stress, unemployed people in a three-day retreat, where half were taught relaxation strategies. The others were trained in a condensed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. “We wanted to find out if there’s something specific about mindfulness that’s causing these effects,” says Taren, “not just that stressed-out people relaxed and felt better.” Taren measured the amygdala size of both groups, and after just three days of mindfulness training, the meditation group had smaller amygdalas. That suggested they’d actually made their brains more resistant to stress. 

Perhaps even more significant, Taren found that the mindfulness training had weakened the connection between the amygdala and an area called the anterior cingulate cortex, a frontal region responsible for executive functions like decision making and paying attention. Decoupling the stress center from the logic center allowed people to feel more distance from their anxiety, which made it more manageable. “You’re able to just observe those emotions, which dampens the stress response that keeps the front of the brain from working,” she says.

Taren’s work echoes a growing body of research from neuroscience labs across the country suggesting that mindfulness causes brain changes in both the amygdala and the cortex. Neuroscientists are the first to say that they don’t completely understand the significance of these changes. But for now, they do know that breath-focused meditation seems to help people’s amygdalas become less reactive to their own self-critical beliefs. It also makes them less likely to see social encounters as threatening. When people with generalized anxiety disorder are shown pictures of emotional faces—happy, angry, or neutral—their amygdalas react to the neutral faces more fearfully than to the angry ones. “They perceive them as threatening because they don’t know what the person is thinking,” says Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. “So they go on high alert.” Lazar found that, after mindfulness training, their amygdalas became less dense—the neurons were like trees that had been pruned—and no longer reacted to neutral faces as threatening. 

Mindfulness training also changes the way the prefrontal cortex responds to anxiety.  “Anxious people have that voice in their head 24/7, going:  ‘What if? What if? What if?’” says Lazar. “Normally we completely identify with that voice, but mindfulness helps us step back and change our relationship to it.” Mindfulness works differently from cognitive therapy, which aims to change thought patterns to short-circuit worry. Instead of trying to eradicate anxiety, mindfulness gets you outside of it so it’s just an experience you’re having. That distance helps you endure experiences you find stressful or scary so your amygdala can learn a new way to react. 

Adrienne Taren became interested in mindfulness from the perspective of a stress researcher. But when she saw the changes it evoked in the brain, she began a practice of her own. “I’m the Type A kind of overachiever who developed an anxious personality,” she says. 

Mindfulness has helped her in the emergency room, where she needs to stay in the moment and make good decisions. It also helped after a painful bike accident. Taren is an off-road cyclist who rides on gravel for hundreds of miles, for fun. After healing from her extensive injury, she panicked when she tried to mount the bike for a competition. Her natural reaction was to suppress her anxiety. But her mindfulness training helped her see another way. “I started talking to my anxiety. I was like, ‘Hello, we’re going to be together for the next 20 miles.’ I was able to picture my anxiety as this little bubble of emotion floating along beside me,” she says. “It was almost comforting.”

A Little Fear Goes A Long Way

Around the same time my fear of joining the Girl Scouts was keeping me up at night, a little girl was born in a Midwestern town with a rare genetic disease. By the time she reached adulthood, the disease had entered her brain, destroying her amygdala. That woman, now known as Patient S.M., helped scientists discover the key role the amygdala plays in anxiety and fear. S.M. feels no fear from external threats. 

To me, that sounded like a dream come true. When I first developed a mindfulness practice, I secretly hoped I could shrink my almond-shaped amygdala down to a peanut. To live fearlessly, able to take risks, pursue adventures, connect with other people without holding back out of worry that my body’s nervous system might betray my uncertainties? Sign me up. 

But over the last year or so, my goal has shifted. Extinguishing anxiety is no longer what I’m after. Instead, when anxiety arises, I simply pay attention to its physical manifestations, and slowly—not because I’m wishing it away—my worry recedes. It sounds crazy, but having started on this journey to do everything I could to obliterate anxiety, I’ve learned to value the role it plays in my life. It helps me be more compassionate with myself. It reminds me to trust other people. And that leads us back to Patient S.M. 

She has no fear, so her curiosity knows no bounds. She is aggressively social and wants to interact with every stranger she meets. “She has zero personal space,” says Justin Feinstein, a neuroscientist at Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, who’s studied her extensively. “There’s no bubble. She has no discomfort looking you in the eye even if you’re a total stranger.” When Feinstein took S.M. to an exotic pet store, she held a snake and closely examined it, rubbing its scales and stroking its flicking tongue. She wanted to touch a large dangerous snake—asking to do so 15 times—despite being told it might bite her.  

S.M.’s story offers a lesson in the crucial balancing act between letting our curiosity lead us to new encounters and heeding the fear that makes us avoid them. She’s been the victim of assault many times—had a knife held to her throat, been held at gunpoint—because she is unable to recognize threatening situations. To be sure, living without an amygdala is dangerous. But for those of us with the opposite problem, whose amygdalas see threats all around us? We might benefit from paying more attention to our curiosity, the antithesis of fear. 

In the weeks before our rafting trip, my greatest anxiety was of fear itself. I worried what I’d do if my body betrayed me, gasping for breath and panicking. I’d prepared for months, with daily meditation, but even so, my anxiety as we drove to the meet-up point was high. I used every tool in my box: I sang songs on the radio to distract me. I awoke at our campsite by the river the next morning and meditated. Then I took a half tablet of Xanax. 

That first day on the river, I bonded with the four Hawaiian men in our boat. As we crashed over the rapids, I observed “me” in the boat, too busy to feel anxious as we paddled like crazy. My vantage point had shifted: Instead of feeling buffeted by each rapid, I just saw myself paddling down the river. I didn’t once panic…even on one particularly gnarly rapid when we crashed into a boulder and my husband somersaulted out of the boat. He was OK. And—I realized—I was too. For the next two days I meditated in the morning, but I didn’t reach for the Xanax. My amygdala was learning there was nothing to fear. My sensations of anxiety had changed to excitement. By the last day, I felt like I could paddle on whitewater every day. 

I won’t lie: I’ve awoken anxious many days since that trip. But there’s a distance to my angst that wasn’t there before. I’ve noticed that the physical experience of anxiety doesn’t have to spiral out of control, that it can even make me feel more alive. I call this the Anxiety Paradox: By allowing myself to feel anxious, to not succumb to the desire to “just make it go away,” anxiety somehow lessens its grip on my psyche. And that opens up a space to let joy in. 

The post Make Peace with Your Anxious Brain appeared first on Mindful.

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This Is What Happens To Your Body After You Drink A Cup Of Coffee

You are a coffee person. So am I. Can you think of starting your day without a steaming hot cuppa? What is it with this coffee high? Inquisitive, aren’t you? Some of the best things in my life have happened either over coffee, in a coffee shop, or because of coffee. The aroma of the beans is enough to stir me and get me going. If you know exactly what I mean, you should know why coffee makes you feel the way it does. Read on to know what happens in your body after you drink one cup of that hot coffee.

Let’s chalk the timeline out – starting from 10 minutes after you drink the cup to, say, 6 hours.

10 Minutes

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That is all it takes for the caffeine in your coffee to enter your system. Within the first 10 minutes of gulping the espresso down, the coffee is absorbed into the bloodstream. In fact, the absorption into the bloodstream starts right in the mouth the moment you start sipping. The minute it enters the system, caffeine is broken down into theobromine, theophylline, and paraxanthine. These substances immediately start affecting certain functions of the body.

20 Minutes

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The next change you sense is that you are more alert than before. This happens because the caffeine in your coffee mimics the substance called adenosine. This neurotransmitter adenosine, in fact, signals your brain that it is time to sleep. Since caffeine successfully mimics adenosine, it binds to the adenosine receptors. Now, the brain doesn’t recognize adenosine and hence makes you more alert and awake than before. This is why you crave for a cup of coffee when the feeling of drowsiness stops you from performing your best.

30 Minutes

By now, caffeine is already provoking the body to secrete adrenaline – the fight or flight hormone. You feel even more energized and are physically and mentally ready to face threats. However, some of the other effects of caffeine are that it dilates your pupils and hastens your heart rate, all of which cumulatively make you feel vigilant and vigorous.

40 Minutes

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So, this was the coffee high I was talking about. In a matter of about 40 minutes, caffeine affects the release of the “feel-good” hormone serotonin. This hormone makes you feel elated and happy. Also, caffeine is known to ease depression and anxiety. However, when you consume too much caffeine, it makes you restless and irritable. In fact, it not only increases anxiety but also makes you sleepless (1). Mild amounts, i.e., less than 400 mg a day (2 cups) can give that feeling of wellness. Also, it helps you focus better and heightens your cognition temporarily.

4 Hours

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What happens after 4 hours of drinking coffee? One, there is a release of hydrochloric acid in the stomach. Generally, the moment you drop food in your stomach, there is a release of this hormone. In fact, sometimes, even when you think of food, there is HCl release in the body. However, when you drink coffee, the body anticipates that there is some food that is being given, and the stomach has to digest it. This is why it promptly releases the acid. Alas! Unfortunately, there’s no food. Your gut might feel acidic a few hours after the consumption of coffee, more so if you don’t eat anything after that.

On the brighter side, caffeine promotes the breakdown of fat cells. This is why caffeine is a popular fat burner because it increases fat metabolism (2). The process of breaking down fat in the body is called lipolysis, and caffeine helps in initiating this process. It releases free fatty acids into the bloodstream that eventually get converted into energy. So, it not only burns fat but also boosts energy.

6 Hours

Didn’t you already visit the restroom a couple of times by now? Yes, this is because coffee is a diuretic. It affects the kidneys and increases your urine output. This is exactly why you must stay hydrated because this diuretic effect of coffee makes you lose too much water and some essential vitamins and minerals along with it. Make sure the body is replenished with the water and minerals that are lost because of caffeine.

Your brain absolutely loves the buzz it gets when the caffeine hits. However, what you should remember is that the high is temporary and gradually wears off after 6 hours of consumption. Also, when you go overboard and consume more than 400 mg of caffeine, you tend to build what is called the “caffeine tolerance.” This means that you require more caffeine than before to get that same buzz. In this process, you invariably consume more caffeine than the prescribed amount. If you are pregnant or have a chronic heart disease, it is better you refrain from this ‘magic drink.’

Ready for that second coffee cup, I suppose? What do you feel after your espresso shot? I’d love to hear all about it; please write in the comments section below.

The post This Is What Happens To Your Body After You Drink A Cup Of Coffee appeared first on STYLECRAZE.

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