AJ Vanderhorst

Husband, dad, author. Advocate of kids being kids. Tenacious, funny and true is what I aim for. Substack:

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

https://t.co/38B5sEorB9

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

The Sylvan Spy is back after six months. Bears, raccoons, disc golf, and a jailbreaking villain.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

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.

[Alice Smith @TheAliceSmith]

A message to Hollywood and the narrative media.

Merely race or gender swapping established characters is not innovative or imaginative.

It is an exercise in politics, not art.

It is proof of creative bankruptcy, which will lead to financial bankruptcy.

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Which Casey Grimes character are you? https://t.co/7cPWa74nsY

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

https://t.co/hSVuBsswVt

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

https://t.co/yLSW6TPxFq

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

The Sylvan Spy Answers Your Writing Questions https://t.co/MMQgrzg3Xp

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

I’m old enough to remember when the Sonos app wasn’t coded by marketers and monkeys with the help of AI.

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Putting a book into pictures for film studios to consider was a fun but challenging task.

An Inside Look at the Pitch Deck for Mostly Invisible Boy https://t.co/nQzKcc4lox

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

I approve of this take.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

It blows my mind when I hear from a parent who says they had no choice but to put their 7 year old boy on psychotropic drugs to treat “ADHD.”

“We tried everything,” they always say.

Really? You tried everything? He’s seven. Did you try giving him a chance to grow and mature and come into his own without mind altering drugs? It’s literally impossible that you “tried everything” when he’s still in elementary school. The one thing you didn’t try was giving him time. And that is almost always the solution to any parenting challenge. Keep working with your child, and give him time.

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

If we fell inside a forest
Would it make a sound
It doesn’t seem there’s anyone around

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Rule #2 has arrived.

Writing Advice from a KidLit Rebel https://t.co/zDLcssMj8q

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Probably our most deadly edition yet.

The Most Dangerous Murder Cats... https://t.co/cmN3aaP7yq

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Woke up from dreaming I was fighting waves of monsters. Other people around but I was the only fighter. All I had to fight the monsters with were books. I’d throw the books at them and they’d retreat—then attack again.

I’m a kidlit author.

The dream must mean something…

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

@epaga Didn’t run the numbers myself, but I bet if there was a way to factor for straight white men the percentage would be significantly lower.

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

This is why I, a straight married white dude with kids who writes stories for kids, bailed on the trad lit industry and got called racist for doing so (of course).

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

@wiltokyo Why thanks, they’re on Amz as well as my author store, https://t.co/KMU3fa5fKm

[AJ Vanderhorst @ajvan]

Big changes on the way.

The Story Behind the Casey Grimes Stories, Part 3 https://t.co/AfNP5eiDwk