The Spyder

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@linadreaamy 98

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@acacia_clement @miguelmclement Mazel Tov!

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@EJXD2 @DougieSal More than me!

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@kiara_whispers 200

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@DougieSal Who you got in wiffle?

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

REP HUFFMAN: “The CEO of Trump’s Freedom 250 flew to Davos, stood in front of a room full of foreign governments and asked them ‘how they wanted to shape America’s birthday’. Then they stole hundreds of millions and committed wire fraud.”

Holy shit.

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@flipfloplisa Sending recovery vibes!

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@DougieSal She likes it ruff

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@NerdyTrail @BaldguyH @DougieSal It was Morte

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

@DougieSal Hey DRugs, great to hear this. You go man, Spyder from SC

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

As good as it gets!

[Bri Gillis @Bgilly13]

Dems have been looking for their message for years, and @AnnieAndrewsMD just did it (in under two minutes). Take note 📝

[DAZEEL @TheDazeel_4]

This is humour......we dont need to be offended by everything said.....absolutely brilliant

[The Spyder @sirfrischalot]

This is really great!

[Anonymous @YourAnonNews]

Shark Tank Billionaire Kevin O'leary says 2 people fighting data centers in Utah are Chinese agents. Turns out its just 2 local girls in Utah, they make a hilarious video calling him the fuck out

[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.