everybody wants to be king of the world

i don’t make the rules, my brain does and unfortunately that bitch is chemically imbalanced

if we could read minds I still don't think we'd understand them.

like I've spoken to people who think in images, who have to translate each thought into words before they communicate. and I think entirely in words, laid out across the void inside my head. my father's thinking is 3d, concepts structured in ways that are incredibly difficult to translate into words. and how would that look to me, if I could see into it? how do I perceive a thought that my mind cannot contain by the nature of their construction?

we all speak a private language to ourselves and we are always translating so we can speak to each other...don't touch me I'm emotional

Man. Murderbot literally rebuilding its brain at the end of Exit Strategy using the power of its special interest in Media is such a deeply and powerfully autistic thing.

Its memories, emotions, self-concept- it's principally organized around its special interest to such a degree that it can use that not just to self-soothe, but as a point of resiliency in the wake of mental trauma. And for Murderbot, as for many autistic people, that's good and healthy for it. Its special interest is a strength.

Sorry but this is the most autistic thing ever. Imagine making the biggest leap in recovering from Cyborg Stroke because your brain, when it was healthy, just connected EVERYTHING back to a soap opera you love. It all comes back to Sanctuary Moon. As autistic brains often do with special interests.

The fact that humans can be killed through physical means is so ridiculous to me

Like this sounds wild but like. hear me out. a person is such a ridiculously infinitely complicated web of thoughts and feelings and beliefs and such an unbelievably huge amount of knowledge and the idea that you can destroy that by holding a pillow over someone's face for three minutes is absolutely surreal. The idea that you can remove knowledge and emotion and memory from the world with a physical object is literally unbelievable. people are literally infinitely huge and complex and the fact that you can kill the person by killing the body is wild. I'm sure this is incoherent but I hope you get it

It's like. Imagine you threw a fist-sized rock at the empire state building and the entire thing and everything inside it collapsed into dust. That's what the existence of human death feels like

Combine this with the horrifying nature of embodiment in general: some clever vertebrate animals fit personalities and memory and compassion and existence in a tiny skull smaller than a chicken egg.

I like your personality, is it made out of meat?

Apparently, the phrase ‘brain washing’ carries a radically different meaning to the aliens.

fuck yeah give it a good scrub babes

I mean i quite like my brain, i’m really very fond of it i just think it’s a design failure that i can’t pop it out of the ole skull basket every night and plug it in to recharge. travesty really

we share one collective braincell and that braincell desires a bath apparently

Soaking my brain seems dangerous. I'd rather gently wipe it down with a soft cloth and warm, soapy water.

you can literally feel your brain become fully developed at age 25 btw. i was dumb as shit before then. i still am but in different ways

#there’s a little beep like on a microwave to announce your brain is done and ready to be a subtly different kind of stupid forever

ask a psychiatrist why someone does something and they’ll smile, close their eyes, sagely bow their head for a moment, and then look up and answer: “it is because of their brains”

Oh man, I'm the same. I do love looking at fanart, reading transcripts, and enjoying the ripple effects of podcasts! But regrettably, speech,

I'm the same because I'm hearing impaired with processing issues listening to a podcast takes like 70% of my brain power

Same, except I need at least 40% of my brain power at all times to generate a perfect loop of the lofi covers of LotR music

I very nearly gave up on listening to narrative podcasts, and even at my highest point, I missed a lot.

no idea if this is true, but it feels true

I heard an interview, can’t remember the psychologist, but he was explaining this idea and encouraging people to stop and take a deep breath and literally drink in small moments like you’re a dryass plant when something is ever satisfactory, positive, mildly successful, randomly joyful so your brain can code and integrate that experience because our natural lizard brain will quickly tape over it with mostly unnecessary negative survival shit. Sounds dumb and dorky but sometimes I remember this when I’m feeling good about a moment because our cave brains are still catching up with modern life without sabertooths. I like that it’s not just a pollyanna gosh just be more positive thing but more of a legit brain wiring phenomenon can be gradually hacked through small behavioral changes.

Another super important one: Take the time to tell yourself, when something you did or bought or decided works out “That was a good decision and I’m glad I made it! Go me!” 

Seriously, it can have a huge impact. suddenly you go from remembering nothing but bad decisions to adding in a series of Excellent Choices You Feel Good About, and it makes things so much better. 

#we’re all running happiness software on survival hardware and we gotta do our own firmware updates   from @galwednesday 

It is true. This is one of the fundamental tenets of learning theory. That’s why it takes many more positive experiences to outweigh a negative.

In my positive psychology class, I learned that the "optimal" ratio of "positive to negative affect" for a healthy person was between 4 and 5. That is, so be truly happy and healthy, a person has to experience 5 times as many positive emotions as negative ones.

Do this four times repeatedly and you’ll be out. But how does it work? There’s some real brain science behind it.

We’re trying this tonight!

It’s about time someone got around to uncovering all the cheat codes for this “human being” software. It’s only been out for like 10,000 years.

?????????????

I’ve used this technique for about a year, and I can safely say that it has efficiently transformed my sleeping habits from several hours of struggle to fall asleep, to passing out in a matter of minutes.

It’s a form of Alexander Technique. It’s a technique that was designed for actors to keep their body in ready working condition and give it the best way to perform. This is the method used to calm, and center the body. Once the body is at that point it can perform anything you want it to.

Reblogging for later reference after I tried it earlier today to try to calm down. It actually does help a lot, not just for sleep but if you have problems with anxiety.

My default mental setting is “vibrating intensely in the background.” After doing this, I felt noticeably calm and relaxed - I wasn’t as fixated on my breathing, I wasn’t tense, my movements weren’t jerky and I didn’t feel like I had to be as tense as possible to be under control. 10/10 would recommend.

me gonna try it

dont wanna reblog but insomnia is a bitch for some ppl so heres for my mutuals having trouble sleeping.

Pro Tip: If you hate going to the doctor or show up stressed, do this or box breathing before they take your blood pressure. 

This is different than the counting technique I was taught so I will probably confuse the two of them, but reblogging for reference.

The neurodivergent experience is talking about your brain as if it's a separate entity from your self

yeah and it's a BASTARD

I feel like adhd bored is different than neurotypical bored because like. You don’t understand. I have a billion things I could be doing. I turn on the tv. I stare at the Netflix screen for five minutes. Flip through shows and movies for the next thirty minutes. Nothing looks good. I put in a video game. Play for two minutes. Not feeling it. I load up YouTube. Watch half a video before closing the app. Maybe I’ll read a book? I stare at my giant bookshelf. The thought of starting a new book seems too hard. I lay in bed and play phone games for six hours. Nothing has gotten done. Still bored.

I feel like a better term for this experience is “restless.” 

Sometimes nothing sounds good; I have a specific experiential craving or itch that needs to be scratched but I don’t know what it is or how to placate it so I will rapidly cycle through activities in search of something that will provide the level/type of stimulation I crave. Like a tiger pacing in the zoo. 

It’s a really bad, unbearably vibratey itchy feeling. A craving for relief that takes too great a mental effort to overcome.

It can be physical too...sometimes if I don’t walk/pace it feels like my bones are squiggly and it’s as unpleasant as it sounds

I’m not so much the restless stage (no H in add for me) but it’s like I’m looking at this thing I know on some level I really want to do, but I can’t quite feel it, and it’s like the Thing To Do is a puzzle piece and I have to have the right shape hands to grab it and connect to it, but sometimes I don’t have that! And I’ll try several different things, but I’m not the right shape for them either, and then I’m sad and angrily playing a phone game I’m not even enjoying but I can get my brain to click and engage so that’s what’s going to happen anyways! Because brains! Are sometimes the worst!

Or, the alternative, you’ll look at the Thing You Enjoy Doing, and instead of seeing yourself doing it in your head and thus reaching out and starting, you see how many hours it will take to Finish and then it’s work instead of Enjoying and if you’re going to work you might as well go try and do the dishes or something.

But then your metaphorical puzzle piece hands are the wrong shape for dishes too and you’re back at crying over your phone because you at least know how to hold onto that!

I uh. May have not been having the best couple months, whoops.

This is why I am constantly in the middle of a lot of books that I really do enjoy! And really do want to read! But there's a hole in my brain that's a particular shape, and on that particular day only (e.g.) a historical romance novel or a fanfic I read five years ago will plug into that space.

I most often see executive dysfunction talked about in terms of not being able to make yourself do things. And that’s one of its manifestations, yes, but it’s not the only one. Another really big one that I see is something called Decision Fatigue. Making choices is an executive function, but each one that you make costs you something. The more complex they are, the more it costs– and if you’re already low on mental resources, even small choices can be completely overwhelming. 

The example used most often is that of a courtroom judge, whose ability to fairly evaluate the cases they’re presiding over deteriorates during the day. Elsewhere I’ve seen the example of grocery shopping– when you’ve got a tight budget, every single item you look at requires complex cost-benefit analysis, to the point that you’re mentally exhausted and not making good choices about anything by the time you get to the register (where, conveniently, you’ll find candy, cigarettes, and scratch-off tickets waiting for you). 

But even smaller things than that count.

I’ve watched my partner spiral into a panic attack when I asked him what he wants for dinner.

I’ve broken down sobbing over someone asking me I want to do on my birthday, and I’ve shut down altogether over something as innocuous as what color I want my bed to be in minecraft.

Even the tiny, mundane, innocent choices just feel like they’re too big, too much, too overwhelming. 

Like with a whole lot of mental health things, it’s incredibly difficult to do anything about this kind of thing if you don’t have the words for it or the means to explain it– and damn close to impossible to explain any of it when you’re in the thick of a bad episode. But once you have that language and understanding in place, things do get easier.

Because then you can get to the point where “I don’t know” and “I can’t make a decision right now” are perfectly acceptable answers that don’t require any further explanation. 

And trust me, that takes a load off your shoulders.

Ann Jones tried everything short of surgery for her chronic migraines, which have plagued her since she was a child.

“They’ve actually gotten worse in my old age,” says Jones, who is 70 years old and lives in Tucson, Ariz.

Jones would have as many as two dozen migraines a month.

Over the years, some treatments might work initially, but the effects would prove temporary. Other medications had such severe side effects she couldn’t stay on them.

In 2018, her doctor mentioned a study that was taking place nearby at the University of Arizona: Researchers were testing if daily exposure to green light could relieve migraines and other kinds of chronic pain.

Jones was skeptical.

“This is going to be one more thing that doesn’t work,” she thought to herself.

But she brushed aside the hesitation and enrolled in the study anyway.

It began with her spending two hours each day in a dark room with only a white light, which served as the control. In the second half of the study, she swapped out the conventional light for a string of green LED lights.

For more than a month, Jones didn’t notice any change in her symptoms. But close to the six-week mark, there was a big shift.

She began going days in a row without migraines. Even when the headaches did come, they weren’t as intense as they had been before the green light therapy.

Some patients in the study of about 25 people noticed a change in just a few days. For others, it took several weeks. Dr. Mohab Ibrahim, the migraine study’s principal investigator and an associate professor at the University of Arizona, says that on average, people experienced a 60% decrease in the intensity of their migraines and a drop from 20 migraines a month to about six.

Researchers Explore A Drug-Free Idea To Relieve Chronic Pain: Green Light

Photo: Will Stone for NPR Caption: Ann Jones has been spending two hours each day in front of a green LED light — an experimental treatment aimed at alleviating migraines and other forms of chronic pain.

@thebibliosphere

Saw someone mentioned to you about using green light to treat migraines. And then this popped up on my dashboard?

I was reading this earlier and was fascinated by it.

Why is the human brain so weird?