Shelley MacAllister

Life gets better with every passing year. Hope it stays this way forever!

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@iqrafatma1278 $100 minimum

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@BriannaWu @TrueTeller2024 @CarsonOliver06 @pittparents @ethical_care @POTUS @EpochTimes @realDailyWire @prageru Brianna, that’s not ok.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@ScottJenningsKY Didn’t Trump remove some oil sanctions like 1 month into this “non war?”

[CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil @CBSEveningNews]

Third-grade teacher Neil Lahammer goes above and beyond for his students, teaching them about kindness and character, and this year, he was named Kindness 101 Teacher of the Year. @SteveHartmanCBS is On the Road in Red Wing, Minnesota.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@SeanTrende But, one more thing, the neverending love is also there. ♥️

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@SeanTrende From the mother of a young adult on the spectrum, thank you. My son is “high functioning” so I know it’s not the same, but the birthday parties, reading every night when he was a baby, and struggling knowing I wasn’t always what he needed (often), very much ring true.

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

So much depends on whether our system, and our leaders, speak to what is best in us - or what is worst in us.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@bpjauburn @BriannaWu I understood what you were trying to say. I suspect she meant to reply to a different comment. What you said supports how she talks about this, too. Thanks for speaking up and for your kindness.

[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.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@amyklobuchar It’s nice to hear this from a foreign leader.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@Microinteracti1 I vote in all elections, donate to causes that matter to me, contact my elected officials, volunteer, and I’m a good neighbor. Instead of calling everyone who voted for Trump racists and fascists, I keep a bridge open to hopefully prevent this from happening again. It’s awful.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@gtconway3d @fred_guttenberg They gave him a very significant prize. 😂

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@Microinteracti1 This is what happens when the U.S. president is surrounded by nobody who tells him no. When everyone is constantly inundating him with hollow praise, he thinks he’s always right. There are zero consequences for what comes out of his mouth. He thinks he’s always can bully anyone.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@gtconway3d Who helped him write this? Better vocabulary (“tenor”) but horrible speller (“witch” instead of “which.”)

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@BriannaWu Have you watched this? It’s really good and touches on what started to change around that time. I think everyone should watch it. The Coddling of the American Mind https://t.co/3qmjsHSMqp

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@RonFilipkowski @MeidasTouch Dear god

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@BriannaWu @triggerpod @TheFP So happy for you, lady! To see you being embraced by your family is wonderful. 🫂💖

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@BriannaWu 🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂🫂

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@RoKhanna @mercnews That’s a successful message to take to the midterms. Spot on.

[Shelley MacAllister @s_macalli]

@RpsAgainstTrump Is Vance nowhere to be found because they’re working on the 25th amendment??