Posts Tagged ‘mental health’

Naturally #Human

Posted: January 16, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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Nature trail walks/hikes have been a life saver for me.

During the Covid lockdowns in America, I was blessed to live five minutes by car from a nature trail. I went there early and often during those dark days.

Sometimes I go on walks with my earbuds in, sometimes not. Sometimes I stay for hours, sometimes just an abbreviated loop that amounts to the traditional coffee break. But every time I go, I feel at least a little better than I did before being in nature.

It’s called forest bathing. What a blessing.

I can’t recommend it enough. I live in the midwestern area of the United States. It is currently too cold and too snowy to really even go outside for anything beyond survival essentials.

During these times I find myself watching nature documentaries. Or watching HD nature scenery with ambient music in the background on YouTube. Certainly not the same as the real thing, but there’s a calling to seeing nature that soothes my soul.

When I get off the main trail and am genuinely surrounded by trees, bushes, flowers, plants, grass, weeds, dirt, birds and bugs…I feel…at home…I feel…at peace.

Because humans are apart of nature. Just because we as a species want to poor a concrete layer over the entire planet, doesn’t mean that we didn’t come from nature. The forests are home. Nature is home.

The lessons to be learned from observing and being in nature, I feel, directly help combat the mental and emotional illnesses that are becoming rampant in the modern, developed, first world countries of the world.

Be Aware of #CognitiveDistortions

Posted: January 15, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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Every day I have a reminder of my phone set to go off that says “I am Aware of Cognitive Distortions”. It only goes off once per day. I could probably use another two or three…dozen reminders over the course of the day, as could most people.

Cognitive distortions or perceiving reality inaccurately, is as natural and normal and easy and automatic as breathing. Is it possible for people to not interpret and assign meaning to the things that happen to them? Yes. Is that the normal, commonplace way most humans live? No

Framing what happens to us in a positive way is obviously preferable. But if the majority of people had a positive way at looking at the world, the world we live in would be unrecognizable. We’d be closer to the Garden of Eden than not.

Negativity is natural. It’s part of how we have evolved. It’s how we have survived from hunter gatherers to farmers to the industrial revolution to the information age. Unfortunately the information age has put cognitive distortions on steroids. Social media echo chambers, travel vlog FOMO, influencer sensationalization, hustle culture, face filters and photoshop.

All designed to exploit our tendency towards cognitive distortions; to think less of ourselves, more of the content creators, so that we will spend our time, attention, and emotional reactions on whatever they’re selling.

Being aware of cognitive distortions brings a bit of wisdom to the information age that drowns us collectively and individually. Awareness is the way out after all. No magic pill. Awareness is less than action. But often right action won’t come unless awareness is there.

Positive, productive, beneficial cognitive distortions are preferred to the negative. It is almost always better to frame what is happening to us in a way that is productive as long as it doesn’t bring harm to anyone else.

Today however, as an exercise in having our feet on the ground while our heads’ are in the clouds, lets try to observe the external reality we live in with objectivity first. This is as it is. Acknowledge the is-ness of the moment. Be aware of what is happening without assigning labels. Then take action from there.

This is Eckhart Tolle 101. Practical. Applicable. Real world helpful.

Separated from the spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment practices that Tolle is synonymous with.

People Get These #Ideas In Their Heads

Posted: January 9, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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People get these ideas in their heads.

People meaning me, meaning us, meaning everyone, ever.

We get these ideas in our head that we need or should or could or will.

Good ideas, bad ideas, neutral ideas, beneficial ideas, detrimental ideas.

We know we can be our own worst enemy. Yet it’s solemnly publicly acknowledged outside of college philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology classes.

Self sabotage. I don’t have to explain what that is. We all know it through repeated experience. Both in important and irrelevant things that we’ve done to ourselves over the course of our lives regardless of age.

I could ask an 18 year old and an 80 year old to tell me a about a time they self sabotaged something that could have been a really good thing in their life, and they’re likely to reply; “you just want one example?”

People get these ideas in their heads.

Out of nowhere. Like a meteor. It strikes and buries itself in the land.

Accepted as fact that it’s always been there.

That’s just the way it is, they’ll say. They being the voice in our head.

Has it always been this way? Have I always lived this way? Is this helping or hurting me? Well it’s how I’m living. It’s how I’m thinking. It’s how I’m perceiving. It’s how I’m feeling. It’s how I’m acting.

I wouldn’t think, perceive, feel, and act in ways detrimental to my own existence, surviving, or thriving would I?

People get these ideas in their heads.

There’s Value in Just Getting Through

Posted: January 2, 2024 in Stimulus Space Response
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You have to survive in order to thrive.

Crawl, walk, run.

You can’t pour from an empty cup.

We all want to be better people. We all want to do better.

But sometimes, some days, we just need to survive.

External factors show up.

Internal factors bubble up.

There is no instruction manual.

There is no such thing as normal.

As long as you’re not negatively effecting other people, it’s okay to just do what you have to do to make it through to the next day, the next hour, the next minute, the next choice, the next breath.

Physical #Fitness is Mental #Exercise

Posted: October 22, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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ssrlogo2ajclogo2@anarchyroll
10/21/2014

The paradigm of physical exercise is false. There is no such thing as just exercising the body. The mind, heart, and spirit are always worked out and remolded just like biceps and abdominals.

When the Centers for Disease Control is listing the mental benefits of physical fitness, then there is more to the topic than just a series of rah-rah, feel good statements and slogans.

In America, where there is an obesity epidemic, any excuse to exercise is a good excuse. Pushing the limits of one’s physical fitness is hard, very hard, if it wasn’t then more people would do it. It should come as no surprise that those who battle depression also are less physically active than the average person.

Working out really is hard. Fitness models, bodybuilders, athletes, and supplement salespeople would love it if you believed that you are just an unmotivated sloth. But, show me an insanely fit man or woman and I’ll show you a person who is dependent on supplements like a crack addict. To work out completely naturally, with nothing but water, food, and sleep is a difficult proposition. Add a full time job it’s that much harder. Add in family, friends, hobbies, and the human condition and it is no wonder that the entire developed world isn’t dealing with an obesity epidemic.

The sick joke is that fitness inspiration through imagery of unrealistically, aesthetically in shape men and women can have an inverse effect on the desire to even get started. After all, how much time, effort, energy, money, ambition, and sacrifice is going to be required to become as fit as those Instagram fitness celebrities?

This is where a paradigm shift is required. Paradigm shifts take as much time, energy, and effort as all the crunches and clean eating required to get a ripped 6-8 pack. BUT, a paradigm shift can be as simple as seeing something differently and taking action differently based upon a different vision/way of thinking. The paradigm shift in this case is to see exercise as not just exercise for the body, but as exercise for the heart, mind, and spirit as well. A way of becoming more fit as a whole person. Not just as an aesthetically pleasing narcissist. But to be healthy, literally from the inside out.

Anxiety and depression are the thick thieves of living life. I can attest that from experience. If doing some push ups, squats, crunches, weight lifting, yoga, jumping jacks, and jogging can do it’s part to combat these twin towers of terror in daily living, why not? It’s cheaper than a Prozac prescription. But self-mastery is hard, and that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about the need to exercise for the benefit of mental health.

Self mastery is hard, very hard. If it were easy then everybody would do it.

I can’t pretend to have all the answers. I can only speak to what effect physical exercise had on me while I was in the throes of my depression as an adolescent. I used exercise as a distraction. I used it as an excuse to not deal with my larger, more encompassing mental/emotional problems and disorders. I would go to the gym after detention during my high school years. Rather than seeking advice from educated, trained personnel I would pump iron and run laps. As time went on I found yoga and meditation.

Lifting weights, doing cardio, practicing yoga, and meditation were/are all wonderfully helpful distractions from “getting help”. But any singular or combination is infinitely better than watching television, surfing the internet, spacing out, laying in bed awake, remembering past negative events, and/or imagining future confrontational events; all of which I am guilty of doing repeatedly if not habitually.

We are all flawed beings. We all seek to be perfect, if not at least better. We’re all doing our best, even if our best is not good enough. If physical exercise can improve our mind and our spirit, then why not set aside ten minutes, to a half hour a day a few times a week to becoming more whole and making a good faith effort to fill the hole in our soul?

The effort required to expand my comfort zone to putting the effort in there, fuels my effort to expand it elsewhere, and I hope it does for you too…

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