231–240 of 243 posts
Descartes and his duality strike again.
I also think it is silly that people don't think that "your body == your mind". It is simple to discard neurons that are scattered through the body, but those are also neurons.
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Same story here, and when the physical symptoms get bad enough to induce fear (am I having a heart attack, is this constant pain in my stomach a bigger medical issue, etc.) you just also accept it because you can’t change it. “It’s probably not a heart attack, but if it is... oh well, worrying about it won’t help”
Last year my heart's AV nerves progressively stopped working, causing my ventricles to slow and decouple from my sinus node. Before figuring that out, I was getting panic attacks from relatively benign technical disagreements with coworkers. It was very much a visceral fight-or-flight response. A few days before I ended up in the hospital, I tried playing a level of Tomb Raider and 5 minutes in I had a notable feelin…
"Too bad my brain is doing that thing where my thoughts are not useful due to that thing (that I didn't yet think of as anxiety), but how nice of my father to spend some time with me."
For anyone interested in this, I highly recommend the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who studies PTSD. He writes about this clearly and elegantly—must read for those dealing with anxiety, and certainly with any traumatic stress.
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If there's something sacred to me it's music (or harmony). It's weird because it's not as foundational as smell or vision but it revives my soul like nothing else. That's the closest substitute to drug I know of. I have no idea why our emotions are so tangled with it and how comes it can untie knots in our minds like this.
I rely on music for emotional regulation. Not only does it help push me towards moods/states i want, like focus, energy, calm, etc - but it helps me manage moods i don't want. If i'm feeling sad, embracing the sadness with music can be enriching in a unique way. Almost like "having a good cry", but far easier to achieve, and with application for almost all moods and circumstances. Music really is the center of my lif…
I wish I had a piano, weighted keys are so sweet. Another fun thing is large congas.. the depth of the sound is surprising.
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I started to get stressed out when my sister got cancer. I had headaches, back pain, panic attacks, developed agoraphobia and so on - all the spectrum of mental issues. I tried to approach all of them with weeding them out one by one(and did not look on all of that as a whole picture), so I tried medications, that were meant to cure my insomnia, then headaches(some of them made it even worse), got brain scanned etc.…
They're not talking about anxiety that makes sense here. You being scared of your sister dying makes sense. They're talking about irrational anxiety, like having a panic attack, because your stomach feels slightly funny, or because you slept weird, etc. Those irrational anxieties are often times hard to pinpoint to an actual cause. Like your sitting at home on a sunday and suddenly have a panic attack, without any im…
Learning that you can calm your body down separately from wanting to think about the actual issue at hand is a good lesson.
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Side note, alcohol also does things with GABA and that (plus its easy availability) is probably why so many people self-medicate with it for anxiety-type issues.
Yes, and that is a very bad idea as it often makes it much worse over time. Many people I have talked to who were or are drinkers, talked about their hangover as a certain weird feeling they can only stop by drinking. When asked a more detailed description, they describe full blown anxiety attacks. And they need more and more drink to stop them. I got many people to see a doctor and to stop drinking to attack anxiety…
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Microdose mushrooms. Seems silly but you can break your thought patterns by disconnecting your brain from well trodden paths. I think Michael Pollan is onto something
This makes me curious, can you elaborate a bit please? How exactly would it work on anxiety? Does taking stuff produce a temporary relief or does it change the structure of your brain for a longer period? There is definitely things we still don't know about this, and it seems promising.
Psychedelics can open up your senses to new experiences and methods of thinking. Over time this MAY help with troublesome thought patterns, which is prevalent in the depression/anxiety cycle.
There are therapies involving this if you dig around, or if you're brave you can experiment on yourself. Don't dive in too deep to start off :)
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> if you do mediation, you also need yoga Not sure Gautama Buddha did yoga? Don't get me wrong, i am not against yoga, but wondering if great saints who never did yoga also attained greater heights including moksha..
Haha, i don't know right now. but from the point of view that yoga is a systematiztion of techniques that is useful for connecting to energy, correcting the flow of and balancing the energy in the body, and opening the channels in the body to allow it to handle higher bandwidth of different sorts of energies safely, I suppose that perhaps these great saints already knew how to do that on some level even if they weren…
ya, I too have read about that..