Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Administrator, Family Farms of apples, cherries, & wine grapes in beautiful Washington State. U of I graduate & married to a Coug🐾'
Washington grows over 300 crops, but our farms are struggling to survive. Costs are rising, profitability is falling, and we’re losing 2 farms every day. Here are 3 of the reasons why.
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
This is a MASSIVE box all the way from Pullman, Washington... It's the Cougars of Washington State!!
What a storied program with a long line of great coaches and quarterbacks, even some basketball greats went there!
Thank you Coach Rogers and @WSUCougarFB for sending this box!
🚨BREAKING: J.D Vance says, "Take every square inch of U.S. farmland back from China. Do not leave them with a single blade of grass."
Do you agree with J.D Vance?
A. YES
B. NO
@cb_doge As a Head Start Director for 20 plus years, I cannot agree more. We need to be allowed to put a percentage away for emergencies like HVAC, a flooded building, a linking roof, but it’s spend it or lose it. If my husband & I operated our farms like the government we would be done.
32 years ago today: The Snow Bowl.
Nov. 21, 1992: In what might be the most iconic football game in WSU’s history, Drew Bledsoe led the No. 25 Cougs over No. 5 UW, 42-23.
In the 3rd, Bledsoe hit Phillip Bobo for a snowy slide through the endzone to take the lead for good.
Here are the 15 teams with the best Strength of Record so far this season according to ESPN. These teams are off to a good start on their playoff hopes.
“In one of the most notable moments in sports history, Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped thinking he had completed the race.
A Spanish athlete, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him, and after realizing what was happening, he started shouting at the Kenyan for him to continue running; but Mutai didn't understand his Spanish.
Fernandez eventually caught up to him and instead of passing him, he pushed him to victory.
A journalist asked Ivan, "Why did you do that?"
Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.” The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?" Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win.” The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”Ivan looked at him & replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of that medal?
What would my Mom think of that?”
Values are transmitted from generation to generation.
What values are we teaching our children?
Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways to WIN.”
Calltoactivism