Talk arty to me B)

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

go on an aimless bike/ride/walk - move your body, do it for as long as you feel like it, discover new places near you weather that is a frog or a cafe

watch a new movie/read a new book/listen to a new album - get inspired, excercise having opinions and longer attention span, break out of consuming content and make a choice about what you want to expirience

create something in a medium i haven't used in a while - get out of a habit, rekindle a flame you haven't been upkeeping, making a friendship bracelet counts

go have a fun new drink/snack - arguably most important, have a little treat without rush, slow down and focus on physical sensations, treat yourself in a way that isn't landfillcore

meet with friends and/or go to a place where you meet strangers - human connection is good for you, (maybe some casual sex if you like that/try something new with your partner)

make some bad art - create for the sake of creating without any expectations

play an instrument - this can be anything that makes you reach a kind of flow state

go see something you haven't yet - get to know the cultural/geographical map of your area, this includes events, places, or just anything that makes you go out of your way to expirience something new, can be like a viewpoint or it can be a museum exhibit, anything you find cool

Simple question, right?

Except… he suddenly got defensive. His tone changed. I could feel tension building, and I had no idea why. So I took a breath and asked, “Wait, what did you hear me say?”

He paused, thought about it, and said, “I thought you meant ‘Why aren’t you doing anything?’ Like you were mad I was being lazy.”

But that wasn’t what I meant at all. I’d genuinely just been curious.

And that moment reminded me how easily things can go sideways when we assume intent. Our brains, especially when we’ve had messy pasts, trauma, or relationship anxiety, tend to fill in the blanks with the worst possible meaning.

But that one question, “What did you hear me say?”, turned what could’ve been an argument into understanding.

It gave both of us a chance to clarify before our brains made up a story that wasn’t true. I was able to explain, and he was able to listen. Understanding what I meant changed his tension entirely.

Sometimes the fight isn’t about what was said. It’s about what was heard.

on being yourself

here is a master list of great art tools that can make your workflow easier! 👇 (consistently updating)

Fear is extra-rational. There is no such thing as irrational fear and no such thing as rational fear because fear is an emotion, an instinct. The fear response happens before rational thought can even start.

Information about a thing can affect whether we feel more or less fear about it. But that is "fear derived from understanding something (which requires rationality)." That is not the same as "rational" fear. That is not the opposite of "irrational" fear.

The video I was going to show you was a video of Coyote Peterson getting stung by a tarantula hawk wasp. In the video, he is holding the wasp above his arm in a pair of tweezers, and he is breathing very hard and fast, and visibly shaking. That is a fear response. He is afraid because he knows he will experience pain, and one of the functions of fear as an instinct is to help the organism avoid painful stimuli. Is he experiencing rational or irrational fear?

My fear of medical procedures is one of those considered "irrational." This is a value judgment. It is not socially or culturally considered correct to have this much fear.

Therapy techniques ask me to describe my cognitive process that accompanies the idea of a medical procedure and find errors in that cognitive process. The exercise is to imagine what I fear might happen, and pinpoint ways that this image is not realistic.

The guiding assumption is that my thoughts about medical procedures must be incorrect.

However, my thoughts are not incorrect. My thoughts are: the understanding/information of what the medical procedure consists of, accurate perception and past experience of coercion, force and manipulation in convincing me to do the medical procedure (because it is good/important for my health, which I understand and accept), awareness of emotional and physical vulnerability in that situation, awareness of some measure of uncertainty about whether I will be treated with kindness or not, and awareness that the medical procedure will be experienced by my body and consciousness and encoded into my memory.

These perceptions are completely aligned with reality. They also inform me that I will experience incredibly intense, unbearable suffering. For some medical procedures, the fact of what is happening constitutes unbearable suffering. Bodily violation is a kind of suffering, unwanted touch is a kind of suffering, unpleasant sensations are a kind of suffering, vulnerability in a situation where compassion cannot be guaranteed is a kind of suffering.

Past memories encode meanings of safety and unsafety, autonomy and powerlessness into these facts. Past memories heighten and intensify these sufferings because they built the neural pathways that feel the suffering. Past memories taught me to feel terror, and feeling terror is itself suffering.

Is it rational or irrational?

I'm going to explain my thoughts with examples, primarily. I have Anxiety, formally diagnosed General Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety. Possibly less relevant, but I'm also Neurodivergent, Diagnosed ADHD, and possible Autism. I see "irrational fears" as generally having two types, with possible overlap or exceptions.

First, there are fears that have little to no basis in reality. There is either no real danger, or an extremely low, negligible chance of danger, and thus no logical cause or reason to be afraid.

For example: worrying about being hit by a hurricane when you live inland in a climate that doesn't produce hurricanes. the chances of a hurricane are slim to none, yet someone could experience an irrational fear that one will happen. Their fear is real. They are truly afraid and maybe their body is going into flight or fight mode whenever they start thinking about it. For some people, learning about the climates and weather patterns that can form hurricanes, and seeing how those are quite different from where they live, can help them stop having this irrational fear. However, since irrational fears lack a logical cause, logic won't always help fight them. Knowing how incredibly unlikely a hurricane is in their area may not at all effect how often or how strongly they worry about it. Second, there are fears that are disproportionate. As others mentioned, needles, such as for vaccinations, do technically cause physical damage and thus harm to you. As well as causing pain, however, typically that pain is very weak and short lived. For the majority of people, the danger of harm and pain caused by the needle is so low that most people don't even feel any fear of it at all. However, some people feel extreme amounts of fear when it come to needles. even if they understand how low the risks truly are, they still can in some cases become stressed enough to pass out. Logically, such a response is quite over the top. But again, Irrational fears, lacking rational cause, aren't always mediated by logic.

Alright, there's my explanation of the two "types" of irrational fears. Fear is a neurological and physical response from our brain that is supposed to keep us safe. Pain is often caused by damage to our bodies, which is generally not good for survival, so we learned to fear pain as it is a warning that something is wrong. This is, at its heart, a natural, and rational response, that keeps us safe and alive. Fear is a good thing. Fear is healthy, as it helps to keep us healthy.

However, we can become afraid or anxious without a real cause, or become more afraid of something than there is reason to be. Irrational fears usually do not help us stay healthy and alive, because the body's stress response can hurt us if it activates too often, or is active for too long. That is part of why people try to treat anxiety, which is afaik generally accepted to a long term, baseless, or overblown stress response. Without a concrete cause to either avoid or power through, we (those of us with anxiety) just stay stressed, or get stressed again frequently.

As someone with anxiety, I very much believe some fears are definitely irrational. I experience irrational fears myself quite frequently. A stress response that lacks a reasonable cause.

But fear of pain, and physical or psychological harm, are in most cases not irrational.

Fear is real, even if the stress response is activating when it shouldn't, or more strongly than it should.

Doctors should not go telling a patient their fears are irrational unless the patient has fully and clearly explained why they are afraid. OP's dr assuming their fear was due to lack of knowledge is one such case. they should have asked why OP was scared before making judgements on the rationality of the fear. And Doctors shouldn't judge anyone for having irrational fears, but try to help reduce the stress response, with methods tailored to the patient and the reasons, or lack thereof, for being scared.

With the experience of fear, how are cognition and emotion related? This is very hard to answer because there is so much diversity in how humans experience cognition. Many people experience an "inner voice" where, when they have thoughts, they picture those thoughts being spoken in their head. But some people don't experience this at all. Is a "thought" a sentence, an image, a sensory echo in the body? Is a thought different from a feeling?

In many non-Western cultures (outside of the Euro-Monoculture), mental and physical illness are not separate. In fact, I've read things suggesting that people from non-Western cultures tend to experience "mental illness" as more physical symptoms, such as pain, stomach ache, and feelings of heaviness or unease in the body.

But are their bodies behaving differently, in a biological way? Or is it simply a cultural difference in how we perceive the division between mind and body?

Ten years ago, I thought that a stomach ache from anxiety was a physical symptom (in my body) caused by the emotion of fear (in my mind). Fear seemed very thought-based: I had fearful thoughts, and these thoughts perpetuated more fear.

Now, I think that the stomach ache is the fear. But it's not just that my perspective has changed, the way I experience fear has changed. I can feel fear without consciously thinking anything.

I think it's possible that the following things are true about fear, at least sometimes:

fearful thoughts are manifestations of a physiological state of fear in the body (they aren't the origin of the experience of fear, and making thoughts go away doesn't make fear go away)

fearful thoughts potentially serve a purpose of helping you understand and make sense of your instincts?

fearful thoughts don't necessarily reflect what the fear is "about" or what causes it. Like, at all. I think someone in a state of unsafety, who is physiologically in a state of fear, could become "afraid of" something random (like maybe hurricanes, or sharks in the pool like another commenter said) because we have a need to connect our instincts with something in our surroundings we can respond to.

physiological states happen because of something.

So maybe the real problem I have with the idea of "rational" and "irrational" fear, is that it connects fear and cognition too closely.

As a child, I had a lot of fears that seemed to be "thoughts:" If X happens, that means that Y is going to happen. As an adult, I often feel anxiety physically without any thoughts linked to it at all.

I feel that it was potentially a mistake to characterize my childhood anxiety as "anxious thoughts," and to focus on treating/addressing those thoughts, when the thoughts manifested as the following:

detecting threats in my environment,

finding or imagining causal relationships that could allow me to predict the threat,

anticipating potential ways a threat could get at me,

rehearsing my responses to a threat

These thoughts are not themselves the fear. These thoughts are adaptive behaviors of an organism that senses a threat in the environment.

I wish my fear had been addressed using a different approach. Therapy focused overwhelmingly on "getting rid of" thoughts and feelings that were "anxious," but this was an aimless slog of silencing the "wrong" thoughts without any sense of why they were wrong or what "right" would be.

Safety is a fundamental need that humans have. I think addressing fear should always begin with exploring the question: "What is safety?" What does it mean to be safe? What different dimensions are there to safety? What safety needs do I have? What does it mean for my safety needs to be met? What actions do I take to ensure my safety needs are met?

It is ridiculous that therapy for anxiety doesn't always start with this.

I think that fear is much more elegantly evolved and useful than we give it credit for. Everything I know about my safety needs, I have learned from my fear. Exploring and listening to her, as an adult, taught me about what safety would look like. I paid attention to the things she most jealously demanded for me.

My fear wanted me to live and thrive. My fear wanted me to be free from pain and suffering. My fear wanted me to be treated well by people who would respect my boundaries. My safety needs did not simply encompass physical protection from danger, but also wellbeing and dignity.

In my personal experience, fear gets much more destructive and harder to control when it is treated like a problem to be destroyed. I have had great success making progress on my medical fears by imagining my fear as something that stands guard over my body and protects me, something that enforces my safety needs. Strangely, simple things like doctors and dentists appointments and vaccinations have become much easier when I imagine my fear as the part of me in control. Her job is to protect me, and I put my trust in her to do that.

You would think that this would lead to me running away screaming hysterically, but it turns out that Fear is very content just wrapping around me and growling threateningly until the pharmacist is done giving my flu shot.

I mentioned in another post that I HATE breathing exercises and they have never helped me. I think it is possible that there are negative consequences to anxiety coping methods that attempt to "turn off" the fight or flight response.

specifically: I believe it is possible that many "anxiety coping methods" simply change the fight or flight response into a freeze or fawn response.

when I was around ten or twelve, I had very intense panic attacks characterized by uncontrollable spasms of trembling, hyperventilating, heart racing, and extreme restlessness and terror. They were utterly terrifying while they were happening, but afterward, I felt safe and relieved.

over time, I learned to suppress/prevent these panic attacks, but I still experienced very severe anxiety, which slowly became more and more difficult to locate in my body.

around age 20-21, my anxiety felt more severe than ever before, but I physically COULDN'T have an anxiety attack. I just felt this undefinable, generalized "badness" all the time that manifested in body aches and pains, sweating, and horrible nightmares.

over the past 5 years, I have rejected the stuff i was taught in therapy and worked on getting back in touch with my body, and recently, the more "classic" anxiety attack symptoms have been returning.

maybe that is...good...?...???

The lingering question in my mind is: do anxiety coping skills actually reduce the underlying physiological state of arousal and stress, or do they force it to express itself in the body differently?

Over time, the cognitive/"thought-based" aspects of my anxiety disappeared, and my panic attacks disappeared, but my quality of life and mental health did not improve. Eventually, I was experiencing anxiety all the time, manifesting as vague, unknowable distress, alertness, reactivity, pain, exhaustion, and physical sickness in my body.

The cognitive behavioral methods I used to control my anxiety had a philosophy that the body's responses were wrong and the mind could be used to dominate them.

Psychiatry thinks of fear as antiquated, crude, an evolutionary leftover. Our bodies think we are still being hunted by lions on the African savanna. Our bodies don't know that we are safe in an air-conditioned house in the modern world. Silly, silly. But are we safe? Safety is not just the absence of immediate lethal danger. What is safety? We need to deeply investigate this.

Psychiatry also highlights "panic attacks" as pathological due to how acute and disruptive they are, but I feel that they are proactive, psychologically protective responses.

Long-term traumatic stress is strongly influenced by the experience of helplessness during a traumatic experience. If a person experiences the "freeze" response, they are much more likely to experience long term post traumatic stress. Now, post-traumatic stress happens when the body is stuck in the state of hyper-arousal necessary to survive a trauma. The body cannot learn that the danger is over.

My panic attacks were acute explosions of terror that felt like the worst thing in the world while they were happening, but they had distinct endings. Chronic, non-acute anxiety was so, so much worse and made my body sick. A progression from acute episodes of anxiety to chronic, non-acute anxiety was perceived as progress or improvement. It was not.

We know that chronic stress is incredibly damaging to the body. Is it possible that panic attacks are primarily mechanisms to prevent chronic stress, to alert us that our chronic stress is too high, or to cause us to remove ourselves from a stressful environment, rather than a generic "predator chasing you" response being activated inappropriately?

The "predator chasing you" idea of anxiety assumes that stressors in our ancestral environment were all acute episodes of danger, and our bodies are adapted to escape acute dangers, not chronic stressors.

I believe this is false. I believe chronic stressors shaped our evolution as well as acute episodes of danger. Creatures migrate to new habitats when there is not enough food, when there is too much crowding, or when the environment is not otherwise suitable. This means that creatures need to be sensitive to chronic stressors in their environment, so they can respond when stressors are too high.

Wow. The patience, kindness and calm communication skills. Outstanding.

They recognized that the mother was also expressing a vulnerable truth about herself - that she felt like a bad mother because her child was expressing gender feelings she wasn’t equipped to help with - and met her where she was, a concerned parent with limited information - to point her where she should be heading, research and resources.

love ourselves when we feel

loved as ourselves”

Peer review

The Trans Agenda is to Keep My F*cking Friends Alive — sol rios