âNever judge the future of a person based on his present conditions,
Because time has the power to change the black coal to a shiny diamond.â
â Chanakya
Churchill and Jung understood something modern psychology forgets:
Depression feeds on abstraction.
It weakens when your hands touch something real.
Here are 7 cheat codes to shift your nervous system from depression into momentum:
1. Use your hands to build something.
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.
đșđžđ§đȘOnce, the Pentagon realized it had far too many generals and suggested they retire. It promised that any general who stepped down immediately would receive a pension equal to their salary plus $10,000 for every inch measured in a straight line between two points on the generalâs body. The generals could choose those points themselves.
The first to agree was an Air Force general. He told the pension officer to measure from the top of his head to the tips of his toes. It came out to six feet. He retired with a check for $720,000.
The second was an Army general. He asked for the distance from the tips of his fingers (with arms stretched upward) to the tips of his toes. That came out to eight feet. He retired with a check for $960,000.
When the third generalâa gray-haired Marineâwas asked which two points to measure between, he said: âMeasure from the tip of my penis to my testicles.â
The pension officer suggested that perhaps the respected Marine general might want to reconsider, mentioning the generous sums the previous generals had received. But the Marine stood his ground.
A medical officer was called in for such a delicate measurement. He approached the general and asked him to take it out. The general did.
The medical officer placed a ruler at the tipâand suddenly recoiled.
âMy God!â he exclaimed. âWhere are the testicles?â
âIn Vietnam,â the general replied.
Sir John Glubb, a British Lieutenant General, spent 36 years commanding armies in the Middle East.
He studied every major empire in recorded history and found something he didn't expect.
Every single empire (Assyria, Persia, Rome, the Arabs, the Ottomans, Spain, Britain) lasted about the same length of time.
250 years.
And they all died the same way. (thread) đ§”
Ukraine is likely to emerge as Europe's greatest military power in terms of scale and tech - and will, probably in alliance with Europe's two legacy nuclear powers, form a powerful European democracy bloc that could be contender. It will be the largest War Democracy.
This moment when Ukraine missile / drone technology is being rushed to help Arab powers under Iran attack and when Germany is buying Ukrainian systems is a momentous one - it marks the arrival of a new world power - admittedly one under grievous strain at home.
But when and if it extracts itself from the war, and recovers, it will be the world's greatest those liberal democracies committed to oversized military readiness and technology ingenuity - what I call the War Democracies....