was being too nice and ended up in the cardiac unit fr — be a bitch when your boundaries are crossed because people love to take a good heart to hell with them.
So this is known among older corners of the autistic community as "exposure anxiety," a term coined by Donna Williams, iirc, and I believe it is one of the most under-researched reported experiences of autism for how much stress and inertia it causes.
I have a deep trust issue with friendships. I'm constantly unsure if people mean well for me, so I find myself constantly dangling between having friends and being a loner. Like, is it worth it when your biggest supporter today can be your meanest antagonist tomorrow, and they'll use every vulnerability you shared with them to get at you?
Women love resting. It’s one of their favorite things to do. Reading, laying under the sun, painting their nails, writing, journaling, taking baths, drinking a cup of tea in silence, sleeping, doing nothing. And there’s nothing wrong with that, they need it for a reason, it’s medicine! ♥️
how to induce neuroplasticity for manifestation purposes and a more enjoyable coexistence with your brain, as a daily practice:
• attach a physical gesture to a mental state you want to access more. for example, to access creativity, use a specific smell (a candle, a perfume) only when creating. do it for weeks consistently, and eventually the smell alone will drop you into creation mode before your brain even tries. smell bypasses rational thought entirely and connects you to memory and emotion.
• sit with discomfort instead of avoiding it. notice negative self-talk and reframe it, no matter how uncomfortable or how little you believe yourself as you're doing it.
• when something good happens, pause and let yourself physically feel it for 20 seconds. jump around, let the excitement build in your chest. your brain needs that to encode positive experiences into long-term memory, and that is just as important as sitting with your negativity. it cannot reshape around positivity without actual positive input. stop glossing over your achievements.
• write your problems in third person when you need answers. your prefrontal cortex engages differently because it creates cognitive distance, and solutions just kinda show up.
• anticipating good things grows the same neural pathways as experiencing them, so start by mentally telling yourself you expect good things to happen to you, every morning before you leave bed. even 5 daily minutes of holding that thought in your awareness is enough to restructure the brain.
• replace "i have to" with "i get to". it literally changes the gears in your brain from threat to creation mode. deliberately look for exceptions to your negative beliefs, over and over. creating new, positive associations is key
• the brain learns from behavior first, so act as if you already are who you want to be, no matter the actual circumstances around you. being delusional will literally change the way your reality responds to your thoughts.
Are you depressed? Or are you just sitting indoors all day, not exercising, sleeping horribly, eating hyper processed foods, getting 4000 steps a day, and not working on anything important to you?
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.
Hi, so the woman who carried and gave birth to me was 13 years old, celebrated her 14th birthday only days before I was born. I should’ve been aborted. It’s really terrible that she was made to carry and birth a baby while she was a child herself.
Am I happy to be alive? Yes. Absolutely. Very happy to be here. Would I be mad had I been aborted? No, I wouldn’t exist, I wouldn’t feel anything. I shouldn’t exist. She was a child. The lives of girls/women are more valuable than fetuses.
Idk if it counts bc im all mental but like I do genuinely want to work out, finish college, and generally be successful and more independent but my mind just wont let me. I would kill to have a normal person's mental health so I could just do stuff lol
I feel like Ive died internally like 5 times and each time I think I couldnt get more dead inside somehow something horrible happens that makes me go "Oh wow, that wasnt rock bottom????"
“𝗠𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮 𝗮𝗸𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘆𝗼𝗻. 𝗞𝗮𝘆𝗼 𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝘆 𝗮𝘆𝗮𝘄 𝘀𝗮 𝗱𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘆𝗼𝗻 𝗸𝗼… 𝗗𝗶𝘁𝗼 𝗻𝗮 𝗮𝗸𝗼 [𝘀𝗮 𝗡𝗮𝗴𝗮] 𝗺𝗮𝗴𝗿𝗲-𝗿𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗿𝗲.”
After saying she’s done with national politics, Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo urged the public to end the "savior" mentality and look toward a new generation of leaders. | via @punongmhistrado