Sibina Simon

Movies, Art, Books, Spirituality, and Love.

[Sibina Simon @sibinaaaaa]

@ADHDForReal I feel seen

[AFRAH @Thereal_afrah]

شاكيرا وعدت أطفال أوغندا الي رقصو على أغنيتها بالتيك توك انهم بيرقصون معاها في حفل ختام كأس العالم ونفذت وعدها وجابتهم شوفوهم الأولاد الصغار يهبلون ياناس كبرت بعيني شاكيرا
عسل مره 😍😍😍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

I’m convinced that the most underrated trait in a romantic partner is that they bring peace into your life. Days are filled with enough chaos and uncertainty. Being able to come home to someone who defaults to emotional consistency, who creates a peace, is massively underrated.

[Nathan ✰ @Just1Nathann_]

Nah. 27-33 aren't your humbling years. They're your awakening years.

So many people misunderstand this phase of life.

That's when you start seeing things clearly. Everything suddenly dawns on you. You realize what you want, what doesn't matter, and how much time you've wasted.

Some people mistake that clarity for failure because they wish they had figured it out earlier.

But if you're determined, you can build more in those few years than you did in your entire early twenties.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

I love people who are intellectually omnivorous.

The kind who can discuss folklore, black holes, bird migration, poetry, and grocery store pricing in a single conversation without getting lost.

[yimika. @yimikaaaa]

obsessively reading a lot of books when you fell back in love with reading again after years of not picking up any books is the realest thing ever 😭

[raj/ravoluzen🐲 @ravoluzen]

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

[Mark Hyman, M.D. @drmarkhyman]

Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic.

Joy is a biological necessity.

[Dr Omar @dromr__]

من فترة جاتلي بنت عندها 27 سنة وحست بـ كلكوعة في الثدي .. وأنا بفحصها مكنتش مبسوط ، كانت الكلكيعة مُقلقة شوية ومتشعبة ، طبعا كان في نسبة شك عالية انها تكون بؤرة سرطانية ، المهم وهي قاعدة في العيادة قالتلي ان معدتها تعباها عشان بتاخد مسكنات كتير ، سألتها بتاخدي ليه مسكنات كتير ؟؟

قالتلي عشان ضهري بيوجعني جدا بقاله شهر طبعا انا شكيت أكتر ، بعتها تعمل الفحوصات اللازمة طلع عندها

[𝑫𝒖𝑲𝒆! @whotfisDuke]

its important to remember that your goal is to do well, not to convince other people that your doing well.

[M @girlpov]

#goodnight

[milo |-/ @crosshairlvr]

finding out the artemis ii astronauts talked with poets and studied poetry so they knew how to properly convey what they were seeing in words and saying that the arts played a huge role in their time in space. oh my god

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A psychologist at the University of North Carolina spent 20 years proving that a single 20-second hug rewires the human cardiovascular system, and the experiment she ran is so simple you can replicate it tonight at home.

Her name is Karen Grewen.

She works inside the UNC School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. The paper that made her famous was published in 2003, and almost nobody outside her field has read it.

Here is what she actually did.

She recruited 183 healthy adults living with a long-term partner. She split them into two groups. The warm contact group sat together for 10 minutes holding hands while watching a romantic video. Then they stood up and hugged each other for exactly 20 seconds.

The control group sat alone in a separate room for the same amount of time doing nothing.

Then she made every single one of them give a public speech in front of a panel.

Public speaking is one of the cleanest stressors in psychology. Heart rate spikes. Blood pressure climbs. Cortisol floods the system within minutes. It is the laboratory version of every stressful moment you have ever had at work.

The people who had been hugged for 20 seconds before walking into that room had measurably lower blood pressure responses to the stress. Lower systolic. Lower diastolic. Lower heart rate increases. Everything was the same.. the speech, the panel, and fear. But this time completely different physiological response.

The hug had not made the stress disappear. It had changed how the body was allowed to respond to it.

Two years later Grewen ran the follow-up study that explained why. She drew blood from 38 couples before and after the same warm contact protocol and measured what was actually changing inside them. The answer was a hormone called oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding, and orgasm. It is the same molecule that makes a mother feel calm holding her newborn.

Grewen's data showed that 20 seconds of physical contact with a trusted partner triggered a measurable spike in plasma oxytocin in both men and women, and the size of that spike directly predicted how much their blood pressure dropped.

The mechanism turned out to be older than recorded history. Oxytocin binds to receptors in your heart, your blood vessels, and the part of your brainstem that controls how aggressively your nervous system reacts to threat.

When the hormone shows up, the entire fight-or-flight machine downshifts. Your blood vessels widen. Your heart slows. Your cortisol production gets suppressed.

This is not a feeling. This is a chemical instruction your body sends to itself that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff.

The detail Grewen kept emphasizing in her interviews was the duration. Three seconds is the average length of a hug between two humans. It is too short.

The hormonal cascade does not have time to start. 20 seconds is the threshold where the oxytocin actually crosses into the bloodstream in a quantity large enough to do something measurable.

A follow-up study tracked 59 premenopausal women over time and found that the ones who hugged their partners most frequently had lower resting blood pressure and higher baseline oxytocin levels than the ones who did not. The effect compounded. Daily hugs produced a permanent shift in the cardiovascular baseline.

A separate review of long-term partner contact research found that married adults with frequent affectionate touch had significantly lower rates of heart disease and all-cause mortality than equally healthy adults without it.

The American Heart Association now cites this body of research when explaining why social isolation is treated as a cardiovascular risk factor on the same level as smoking.

The most haunting line in Grewen's research is one she said in an interview after publishing the second paper. She pointed out that the average American touches another human being less than they did 50 years ago. Phones replaced eye contact. Texts replaced visits. Hugs at the door got shorter.

The thing that used to regulate our cardiovascular system multiple times a day quietly disappeared from most adult lives.

Your body still expects it. The hormone receptors are still there waiting. The system was designed to be reset by physical contact with people who feel safe, and the reset takes 20 seconds.

You can run the experiment yourself tonight. Hug someone you love for 20 full seconds. Count it out. The first 10 will feel awkward. Around 15 something shifts. By 20 the shoulders drop, the breathing slows, the chest opens.

That is not in your head. That is your bloodstream changing.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Pixar hired a chef with three Michelin stars to design the dish in Ratatouille. Then they built the scene around the neuroscience of how taste triggers memory, and got Peter O’Toole to deliver one of the great monologues in animation history.

What you call “taste” is mostly smell. When you eat, molecules rise up the back of your throat into your nose. From there, smell takes a unique route. Every other sense (sight, sound, touch, even the actual taste your tongue picks up) gets filtered through a kind of switchboard in your brain first. Smell skips it. The smell heads straight to the parts of your brain that handle memory and emotion. Which is why one bite of food can drop you back into a moment from 30 years ago.

Ratatouille’s director, Brad Bird, built the entire flashback around this. Anton Ego takes one bite, and Pixar zooms the camera through his pupil into a childhood kitchen. The dish itself was Thomas Keller’s. His restaurant The French Laundry in California has three Michelin stars. He took a 1976 recipe by French chef Michel Guérard called confit byaldi (paper-thin vegetables spiraled over a tomato-pepper sauce) and adapted it for the film. Keller even had Pixar’s producer intern in his kitchen for months to get the look right.

Anton Ego is voiced by Peter O’Toole, the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. He was nominated for Best Actor eight times. Never won. He holds the record (tied with Glenn Close) for most nominations without a win, and once called himself the Academy’s “Biggest Loser.” He was 75 when he recorded the Anton Ego monologue. He died six years later, and it became one of his signature performances.

The speech was Brad Bird’s. In the review he writes the next morning, Anton Ego turns on his own profession. Critics risk almost nothing, he writes. They thrive on tearing strangers apart. The only risk that matters, he writes, is defending new talent when no one else will. He ends with the line everyone still quotes: “a great artist can come from anywhere.”

Ratatouille won Best Animated Feature at the 2008 Oscars, plus a Best Original Screenplay nomination on the strength of Bird’s speech. The film grossed $624 million on a $150 million budget.

In 90 seconds, a cartoon rat and a fictional food critic turn that science into something you can feel. Your best memories live in your stomach.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Make yourself easy to root for. Be kind. Be reliable. Celebrate other people’s wins. Work hard without complaining. Carry good energy into rooms. You'll be shocked by how many doors open for you by making life better for others.

[Mr PitBull Stories @MrPitbull07]

Eight years into studying whales, Nan Hauser believed she understood their size and strength. Then one afternoon off Rarotonga she felt a pressure she had never felt before — a 40‑ton humpback whale pressing its head against her body and lifting her toward the surface. At first she thought the animal was playing too roughly. She tried to push away, but the whale kept tucking her under its pectoral fin. For seven and a half minutes the great creature nudged and nudged, even raising her clear of the water on its flipper.

Only when she glimpsed a second silhouette did she understand. The “whale” moving side to side was actually an 18‑foot tiger shark, arched in attack posture. In that instant the humpback positioned her on its head and raced toward her boat, shielding her with its massive body. Within ten minutes she was safely back on deck, shaking with shock and gratitude.

Hauser, a lifelong marine biologist, had never experienced anything like it. “I felt love, concern and care from the whale,” she told The Guardian. She had spent her career filming these animals quietly, believing the best way to understand them was to let them be. Now one seemed to understand her vulnerability and acted. Scientists note that humpbacks have been documented interfering when predators attack other species, behaviour some call “mobbing”. Whether the whale’s act was true altruism or an instinct honed by eons of kin‑selected behaviour, Hauser felt the encounter as a deliberate choice.

The story didn’t end there. A year later Hauser was back in the Cook Islands when a familiar tail surfaced. She recognised the whale by the notches on its fluke and the scar on its head. As she slid into the water the whale approached, looked her in the eye and extended its giant fin. She rubbed its face and began to cry. The whale lingered near her boat for twenty minutes before swimming away.

There is no moral to pin on a whale’s fin, no proof that a giant mammal meant to save a human. There is only a moment when a life hung between a predator and a protector and something ancient stirred. Perhaps this is what happens when we spend enough time listening rather than dominating: another being may recognise us as kin. In a world where we often assume only humans are capable of compassion, a humpback whale carrying a scientist to safety suggests the ocean itself may be watching over us.