ix

thoughts out • web journal

[ix @limerikap]

"may you be happy. may you be healthy. may you be safe. may you live life with ease."

[Troy Onyango @TroyOnyango]

i’m not even joking when i say this instagram post changed my life and i have it all committed to memory.

[​𝐥𝐲𝐫𝐚 @sunnkssdseraph]

Tolerating always turns to resentment. At first, you call it patience, then love. But what it really is, is self-abandonment. Every time you swallow a boundary, excuse a pattern or silence your discomfort, something inside you keeps score. Likes And eventually, the bill comes due.

[ix @limerikap]

this is literally how i got to quit smoking. it's highly effective.

[Electra @Electrarythm]

When you shift from "I want" to "I am the kind of person who," you change the code at the very top of the system, because "I want to quit" or "I want to be fit" is just a declaration of lack, it's telling your subconscious mind that you don't have it, so your brain locks onto that image of you as a person who is struggling and desiring, and it accepts "wanting" as your home base, keeping you perfectly trapped in that loop while sabotaging your efforts to keep your reality consistent with the picture you’ve installed.

But the second you say "I am the kind of person who doesn't smoke" or "I am the kind of person who takes care of my body," you install a hard fact in the absolute present, and the brain cannot handle a mismatch between your identity and your behavior, so instead of using willpower to force a change, your subconscious starts doing the heavy lifting to correct the system error, bypassing the entire conscious debate because the decision has already been made at the identity level, and suddenly you aren't a smoker resisting a cigarette through brute force, you're just a non smoker acting like yourself, no fight, no friction, no exhaustion.

[Electra @Electrarythm]

When you shift from "I want" to "I am the kind of person who," you change the code at the very top of the system, because "I want to quit" or "I want to be fit" is just a declaration of lack, it's telling your subconscious mind that you don't have it, so your brain locks onto that image of you as a person who is struggling and desiring, and it accepts "wanting" as your home base, keeping you perfectly trapped in that loop while sabotaging your efforts to keep your reality consistent with the picture you’ve installed.

But the second you say "I am the kind of person who doesn't smoke" or "I am the kind of person who takes care of my body," you install a hard fact in the absolute present, and the brain cannot handle a mismatch between your identity and your behavior, so instead of using willpower to force a change, your subconscious starts doing the heavy lifting to correct the system error, bypassing the entire conscious debate because the decision has already been made at the identity level, and suddenly you aren't a smoker resisting a cigarette through brute force, you're just a non smoker acting like yourself, no fight, no friction, no exhaustion.

[raj/ravoluzen🐲 @ravoluzen]

just putting this out there cus it genuinely altered my brain chemistry when i was in a limbo

[maja 🔭🍒 @majamediaco]

in a very real sense, we become the stories others tell about us. words actively shape us as much as they describe us

full essay on this: https://t.co/uAxa6LmLF8

[Electra @Electrarythm]

Brainwash yourself

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A young Harvard medical school graduate spent nearly three years stuck in his parents' house, having panic attacks and hallucinations. One evening at twilight, walking into a dressing room, he was hit by what he later called "a horrible fear of my own existence." His name was William James. The diary entry he wrote on April 30, 1870 became the foundation of modern psychology.

The line was this: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." He was 28. He'd given up. So he made one decision: stop waiting to feel okay before doing things. He would do them first, and let the feelings catch up whenever they could.

He spent the next twenty years turning that one diary line into a science. His 1890 textbook landed on a simple split: the things you do are under your direct control, but the things you feel are not. You can decide to swing your legs out of bed and walk to the kitchen. The mood that hits you while you're walking, you can't dial. So you work the part you can work. The feeling side shows up on its own clock, when it's ready and not before.

Brain scanners caught up about a century later. There's a network in your head that switches on the moment you stop paying attention to anything specific. It's the voice that drags you back to something dumb you said in 2014. In depressed brains, this network is overactive. It runs in loops. It will not let go of the negative track about you. The second you start doing something that actually needs your attention, the loop quiets and a different network takes over. Action is the off switch.

In 2016, The Lancet published a trial called COBRA. Researchers took 440 adults with depression and split them in half. One group got CBT, the gold-standard talking therapy where you work on your thinking patterns. The other group got something simpler, basically James's idea written into a treatment plan: pick small activities each week, schedule them, do them, see what happens to your mood. A year later, both groups had improved by the same amount. The simpler version also cost about 20% less to deliver, because junior workers can run it. Five days of training is enough.

In 2024, a research team pulled 218 studies together, covering 14,170 depressed people. Walking and jogging produced a real drop in depression scores. Yoga, same drop. Weights, same drop. The authors' verdict: exercise belongs alongside therapy and medication as one of the main treatments for depression.

So that's the answer William James worked out from his own three years in hell in 1870, and that 14,000+ people in clinical trials have confirmed since. Action. Walk somewhere. Pick something heavy up and put it down. Show up at yoga. Schedule one small task and finish it. Any of these works, and they work for the same reason. You move, and the feeling follows.

[Melania Jay @luvmelaniaa]

Physical touch mfs:

[conduct|r @conductr_]

Carl Jung once said that one of the most destructive forces a person can carry is unused creative energy. if you have something in you that wants to be made and you keep refusing to make it, that energy does not just go away. it turns inward and starts working against you.

[ix @limerikap]

the creative power that built everything lives in me

[Mubbu @wizofecom]

Had a wealthy friend tell me that the ability to decrease time to any outcome is the one skill behind every successful person he knows.

A few I apply constantly:

- Decreasing the time it takes you to get out of a bad state will make you emotionally resilient

- Decreasing the time it takes you to go from idea to executive will make you wealthy

- Decreasing the time it takes you to turn a failure into a lesson will thicken your skin faster than anything else

[Isabel🌻 @isabelunraveled]

I keep thinking about this! It’s just wonderful

[Nora❦ @hiscoraline]

girls, we need to frantically and obsessively start reading books and finish them in less than 24 hours again.... remember how happy we were back then??

[ix @limerikap]

hayley williams at a bachelorette party in southeast asia ✨

[Andy Wang🕊 @andysvibe]

It’s the natural law of the universe for everything to work out when you relax about it

[ix @limerikap]

@niyetsel .

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In 1986, a Texas psychologist told 46 students to write about the worst thing that ever happened to them, 15 minutes a day for 4 days straight. Over the next 6 months, those students went to the doctor half as often as the kids in the control group.

The psychologist was James Pennebaker. He repeated the experiment, and so did other labs. Same answer every time: writing about pain in a notebook was changing something inside the body. Follow-up studies found improved immune cell counts, faster wound healing after surgery, lower HIV virus levels in blood tests, and better lung function in people with asthma.

For years the mechanism was a puzzle. Pennebaker had stumbled onto a much bigger pattern than he realized. Making things of any kind does something to the body.

Take painting. A 2016 study at Drexel University handed 39 random adults some markers, clay, and collage paper and told them to make whatever they wanted for 45 minutes. No rules, no skill required. 75% of them walked out with lower cortisol (the main stress hormone) in their saliva. Beginners and experienced artists got the same drop.

Take dancing. Doctors at Einstein College of Medicine tracked 469 seniors over a 21-year period in a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003. People who danced a few times a week were 76% less likely to get dementia than people who rarely did. That was the largest protective effect of anything they tested. Crosswords came in at 47%, reading at 35%. Swimming and cycling did nothing for the brain at all.

Take singing. In 2004, researchers in Germany measured antibodies in a choir's saliva before and after rehearsal. The antibody count (the stuff that fights off colds and flu) rose significantly. A follow-up study on cancer patients and their caregivers found that one hour of group singing dropped cortisol and switched on their immune systems at a measurable, blood-test level.

And just going to see art helps. University College London tracked 6,710 British adults over age 50 for 14 years. People who went to the theatre, a museum, or a concert every few months were 31% less likely to die during that window. Even going once or twice a year dropped the risk by 14%. Wealth, education, and starting health were all accounted for.

The mechanism seems to live in a brain circuit called the default mode network, the part that wanders when you daydream. When you fall into the zone of making something, that network hooks up with the one that holds your attention, and the brain's stress system quiets down. Cortisol falls, dopamine climbs, and the slow-burn inflammation that eventually kills most of us calms down too. None of it depends on the quality of what you make.

The Spanish tweet sounded like hyperbole. 40 years of peer-reviewed data says it's roughly right.