@autofuneral asks: how did you regain mental clarity?
in early 2025 i was living in a moldy room, i was suffering from oral estradiol thyroid-binding hypothyroidism, i caught long covid, i was exercise intolerant, i wasnt eating well, i was addicted to smoking tobacco and cannabis. I was not sleeping well at all. all my systems were fucked up. I exerted herculean effort to try to figure out and then address the problems one by one. I moved out. i made my doctors do more careful thyroid hormone tests. i switched to patches. i was really careful with my health. I started eating better. I started meditating. trying to do intellectual work as a grad student while my hormones were outta wack, while my immune system was fucked, while i was inflamed to hell, while i was brainfogged up, was a nightmare, yes, but it was also like training w rock lee weights. I don't reccomend it but that's what happened. Very recently, i passed my previous high water mark on mental wellness. It was nightmarish last year though. i'm not saying effort can solve invisible disabilities -- i'm saying it partly did for me. I was also very materially lucky -- i had a community to fall back on. that's also important. what i am saying is that addressing the root causes can stop disabilities from compounding. I was also very lucky that i didn't keep getting worse. I'm very lucky that i recovered and am thriving. Don't look at my blog from november 2024-july 2025. i was sufferingggggg.
What i'll say as advice that i havent seen enough: Take environmental health concerns deadly seriously. they can fuck your whole shit up Real Bad and you won't notice that you're fucked, because your brain that you use to tell how fucked you are is fucked. Corrollary, establishing a good material and social environment is critical and will make everything sooo much better. environment is the difference between enjoying every day and wanting to kill yourself. people do not take this seriously enough. think about lead in your pipes, mold (water damage), ventilation (high CO2 brainfogs you like crazy and poorly ventilated buildings are everywhere), diseases of course but it's so much more than that. Your material-social environment determines what substances you end up consuming, if you exercise, how well you eat. what's in the air you breathe in while sleeping. if you can see any reason to keep going. It's much more environmental than it is willpower or rational choice. one of the highest leverage rational/willpower choices you can make is to change your environment. Where you sleep. where you live. if you're brainfogged up, panicked all the time, you need to change locations. it's partly psychological environment, yes. It's definitely partially social environment. but a large part of it is material. you have little way of knowing by direct sense if the environment is poisoning you -- i couldn't smell the mold that was destroying my immune system. The poisons you can sense are easy to avoid, you need to be wary of and knowledgeable about the poisons you can't directly sense. if you are insane all of a sudden and there seems to be no obvious psychological reason for it, consider if you moved or if something sus moved into your space.
Also, of course, and i'm also deadly serious about this but it's secondary because other people say it and it's also heavily influenced by environment: Do a careful audit of the chemicals you're consuming, and how. i know the cognitive tendency to avoid hearing bad things about the drugs you're taking. i know. you have to push past that and do the research. if it's really not that bad it'll stand up to scrutiny. I love drugs. I love choosing the drugs that minimize the harm to my ability to live a meaningful life.
Also, literally exercise. I'm so serious. Also Exercise should be hard but literally feel good. if exercising makes you feel awful consistently, there's probably something that's making you exercise intolerant. that's not healthy. Don't ignore that. pay attention to your body! it should feel good to move. maybe it's unsolvable, but maybe it's not. maybe there are ways to mitigate it. for me it was acid reflux exacerbated by cigarettes and low lung health from smoking and sickness. it's gross, i know, but whenever i would try to vigorously exercise, my sick lungs would not inhale properly and would stimulate my esophageal sphincter, which would not cinch properly due to nicotine muscle relaxant properties and acid would splash up into my esophagus, and it would aerosolize and i would inhale it into my lungs. it would burn. i could feel it. it was awful. so i didn't exercise. so my muscles atrophied. and my connective tissues tightened from disuse. Now i'm off nicotine and on a stomach acid reducer, and exercise feels so freeing. don't discount how small harms and irritants can compound and combine.
Did you know that the cartilage in your joints is avascular, nourished by sinovial fluid? this means that the cartilage that cushions and scaffolds your joints doesnt have blood vessels. It is fed absolutely everything, including oxygen, via the sinoval fluid that lubricates the joints and serves as intercartilage medium. this sinovial fluid needs to get pumped so that nourished fluid can enter the joint and feed the tissue, and old fluid can be renutrified. this pumping only happens due to the movement of the joint. it only happens well along the axis of the joint. this means that if you want to keep all the joint surfaces well fed, you should aim to move all your joints through their full range of motion every day.
There's a protien called BDNF. it stands for brain derived neurotrophic factor. BDNF is a brain superhero. it's an enzyme for critical neuron functions, i don't remember specifics. the important part is that it is critical for neuronal maintenance, plasticity, growth of new dendrites, and neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons, in the hippocampus. As far as we can tell, the more of it there is, the better for brain health. Aerobic exercise is the single most reliable way to spike BDNF release in the brain. A moderate intensity aerobic session for just 20-30 minutes -- jogging, swimming, whatever -- has been shown to spike endogenous BDNF by anywhere from 5% to 30%. Exercise is really, really, materially good for you, even if all you care about is your ability to think well.
And eat well. at the very least take multivitamins. eat lots of food, and eat good food. eat diversely. that's all i have to say on that at the moment. brains need energy and nutrients.
And finally meditate. that is how you train your mind to be more workable, and more aligned with you. DBT is meditation, so is ACT. Mindfulness practices are everywhere these days. find what works for you. but mental practice is of limited use to address serious material environmental factors. that's why i put it last.
i dismissed my environmental and physical health for too long, thinking it only mattered to superficial people. i was horribly wrong. These things are load-bearing, not aesthetic. they're not something to throw away if you don't like the vibe. they are the foundation to a meaningful life.
