UKC

https://www.helpguide.org/articles/healthy-living/the-mental-health-benefit...

I normally train 5 out of 7 days .

But today I've; 

Worked out at the gym for 45 minutes.  

Swam 45 lenghts about 35-40 minutes

Biked 10 miles in 44 minutes

Burnt 1050 calories in the process.  

And now life's not intolerable.

God help me if I was bed ridden .

Well done for showing off. I did all that today too, but I was wearing winklepickers and a smug grin. I think I probably win.

The bad news is that there is a likelihood you will indeed  have to call on God's help (to use your words)

Aw shucks

Your right you would have to swimming in winklepickers has got to be tough.

And that smug grin would definitely burn more calories. 

Well done . 

Hopefully not for a while.  And to be honest he's never answered before. 

Bastards always busy. Or deaf.  Or just don't like me .  

Maybe a mixture 

Good work TWS!

Thank you.  I've been trying hard

Probably on account of your invoking his name frivously.........

I didn't use his real name .  That's 72 letters long  I'd have trouble pronouncing it.  

I probably got it wrong as well.

That's why he didn't anwser.  Damn

You can probably find him on the corner of 1st and Amistad

I currently only seem to do enough exercise to keep my middle from expanding and to stop a lack of exercise from making me gloomy. Good work on doing better than that.

Edit: Am setting my alarm tomorrow to see if I can get ten or fifteen miles in before I start my day. 

I train 7 days out of 7.

Do I win?

I think there is something in it.  First half of the year I did a lot of training for an objective and then the worst happened - I did the route.

Have been struggling to find motivation to exercise and feeling grumpy ever since.

Flippancy aside, I think there is a good chance that a lot of us will end up bedbound. Even Shakespeare knew this.

Even more reason to do it while we are able I say.

I'm of an obsessive personality .  So that helps with motivation .  But it also can feed the depression I suffer if I'm not careful.  

When I'm particularly bad I can easily lock into patterns of destructive behaviour and thoughts.

I try to see my being single with no dependants in its plus side .  It affords me time to create in my studio and build things, train hard and look fitter and stronger for my age than most. 

It's a fine line between being able to cope and starring into a howling void.

Today I choose the good bits.  But I'm aware the center cannot hold.  

You can do it.  Go for it.  It does work.  It may not be the be all and end all but it certainly works.

Tell you what.  You do. 

Certainly at misreading my intention.

Poor charlie must have it pretty tough .

 Charlie "Look at what I've done dad I'm proud of myself and feeling a bit better."

Charlie's dad " I'm better than you , I win"

Peace

Good start. You'll really notice the difference when you up it to 8 days. Not everyone can manage it though, you have to take it pretty seriously. Best to get up and do it early as well, I find waking up a couple of hours before going to bed leads to the best results.

 Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed,  drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing 'Hallelujah.'

And you try telling the kids of today ....

Actually, the centre can hold.  Most people are able to walk life's tightrope with only an occasional wobble; others are forever fighting for balance; others can't take their eyes from the void beneath.  But mostly, folk can stay balanced.

You're aware that you can't, you've spoken of it before.  The obsessive personality bit is a friend and an enemy, a friend as it makes you exercise, an enemy as you then associate the level of exercise you're doing as a 'must do' and doing less will make you mentally beat yourself up, which won't help.  So part of achieving your balance point is working out what amount of exercise is necesssary and what counts as extra, allowing you to award yourself gold stars.  To make matters more complicated, the amount of exercise which is necessary will vary day by day because you vary day by day too.  Think of yourself as having a daily energy budget to spend; you can spend it on exercise, or on other things, mental or creative.  If you don't spend it all then you can have a little more the day afterwards; possibly, at any rate.  Because one of life's obstacles is that our daily budget of energy varies, we might have more tomorrow than today, or a good deal less.  The only way we'll find out is to wake up and see.  If we overspend our energy budget we'll be paying the debt off for a few days afterwards too.

So, balance that energy budget (that's perhaps a good thing to be obsessive about) and see how it feeds back into keeping you balanced more generally.

Good luck.

T.

I knew it wouldn't take long.  

Miserable now.

Been in bed now for 12 hours .  It's all just pointless .

It's not pointless. You're actually doing really well, you've had a bit of a wobble, that's all. Don't get back into that spiral, be kind to yourself and just ease off a bit.

No it isn't; you're just banking energy.  Now that you've got some saved, go and spend it.

T.

I feel awful.   I hope I feel better soon as at the moment I don't see any point in anything .

It's just a jumbled collection of sense impressions that amount to nothing .

Why does anything exist ?

I don't see why anybody bothers, everything we do , everything is reduced to frozen endless blackness.

“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

? Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

We may live as we dream, but dreams can be enjoyable.  There is pleasure in just being you, here, now, scrambled sense impressions and all.  Sometimes words can't express it, but if your were to paint your feelings, how would that look?  If music were to encapsulate how you feel, how would it sound?

The state you're in reminds me of something in chemistry, a super-saturated solution.  Just as you can sometimes cram more of something into a solution than chemistry says you should be able to, so it is with you, there's too much trying to come in and you're overwhelmed.  What you do with a super-saturated solution is usually just tap the glass of the flask it's in and suddenly, everything crystallises; there is order where once there was too much to deal with.

So we need to find a way of tapping your flask, to make a bit of calm and order where now there is a feeling of being overwhelmed.  That painting or piece of music; try, either to look or hear and find something that expresses for you what words cannot capture; or even do it yourself if you can.  Then take a step back; you've done something that no-one else could do.  Bank that good feeling, you've done a tough job that nobody else could do, you've earned it.  Then mentally put that picture or piece of music in a box, you've tapped the flask and all the feelings, all the bad stuff, that's crystallised into that picture or piece of music.  Later on, in months or years, you're going to come back to that but for now, that box has captured where all the bad stuff sits and you're free of it.

And breathe.  If tomorrow brings the same feelings, do it again, then mentally box everything up and leave it be.  

That help?  FWIW, the music in my box is Tangerine Dream's Zeit album.

T.

Thanks that makes some sense.

I am doing to much . Plus I was to miserable to eat since yesterday dinner.  

I've rectified that now.

I have been in my studio over the weekend .

The recordings I made were several 13 minute pieces of phasing white noise generated by a  Bruel and Kjar 1027 Sine random generator pushed through a  virtualizer . 

I plan to add more layers to them using a psychoacusic exciter when I feel capable .

I keep trying to work on my studio projects to finally get them finished.   But its not the sort of thing that you can do routinely given the nature of the experiments.

I also had my paints out and cleaned up some old work.

" I don't see any point in anything[....]everything is reduced to frozen endless blackness."

This is why life is, in fact, beautiful. Its very transience, its fragility, is its tragedy; but also its beauty. Consider the alternative: eternal life. In an infinite existence every thought, sensation and emotion must, of mathematical necessity, be a repitition. The eternal being is doomed to an infintely repetitive life in which every conceivable permutaion of circumstance and action is repeated ad infinitum. 

"[...]always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves.'

Huxley was flat wrong to invoke even a limited solipsism. There are at least three reasons why. Firstly, the semantic: natural languages have semantic content ('meaning', loosely) in virtue of agreement in useage. When I say "mackeral", you will have clear idea of what it is that I'm talking about; that idea will be a perfect match of my own, and this match represents a powerful unity, much more than a mere connection between us. Secondly, the psychological: joint attention-- two subjects' simultaneous awareness of an event which is external to them both-- is a marker of higher consciousness and a very real pyschological phenomenon. Its relevance here is that, again, it represents a fleeting moment of perfect connection. Functionally, while joint attentionn persists, we have become a single consciousness, but without losing our identities. We are thus not alone. Lastly comes the experiential counterpart of joint attention. Earlier today I read Lord Tangley's account of his friendship with T. Graham Brown, of Brenva face fame. In the acount he relates an incident  which occured on a fine morning, high on Mont Blanc: 'I ventured to comment on the beauty of the sunrise. Receiving no answer[...], I asked him if he was all right[...]. "Yes, perfectly, except that I object to your conversation". Sometimes, it seems, we are all too plainly not alone.

I've been where you are; and I will be there again, I'm sure. The answer is to realise that there is no answer because the question is meaningless. Once you realise this everything will be clear. It's a bleak sort of clarity, to be sure, but beautiful.

You're right. It is pointless.

This gives me great solace. It means that doing something essentially meaningless - like climbing, surfing, fell running, etc is fine because it is ALL pointless.

Don't take it so seriously. None of us are getting out alive.

Just hang on in there, there will be bad days and good.  

Aldous Huxley was 'a soda hied' - soda head/air head as my Scottish maternal grandma used to say (about more or less everybody ). 

When people are sitting together and talking with people they like or feel comfortable with, something special can happen where everybody has a nice time and feels better. People might experience it from their own individual perspectives, but it's still a shared positive experience, created by each person there to make it unique in that moment. We have the ability to affect and change how one another feels - which means we're not essentially isolated IMHO. 

We do view and experience life from our own individual, and at times isolated feeling perspectives, but we can come together to experience warmth and togetherness too.

Depression is very good at making us want to be alone and to isolate ourselves, as somebody who needs to take medication for it I know that very well, it's message that life is dark and meaningless (and that we're isolated) needs to be ignored. 

I'm currently listening to this. youtube.com/watch?v=INAv0jmTmC8&

My 3am insomnia is back.  So hello to anyone who is up.  TWS hope you are OK.   

Thanks.  Been sleeping a fair amount on and off. Feeling a bit better this morning .  Going to train this morning before work and I have talking MH calling at lunchtime with some hopeful offers of help.

Are you a Rick or a Jerry?

youtube.com/watch?v=fZR2sdimrng&

According to this presentation (looking at two characters from the Rick & Morty series), if you have an IQ>130 you have a hyper-brain and can comprehend the world’s problems, uncertainties and possibilities more easily than those with non hyper brains and at times will experience a deeper depression than the intellectually average.

I hope you have a good day and that the MH call is useful.

I like it

I was assessed a week ago and now today offered some CBT sessions to improve my outlook and coping strategies.

I've some books on it but I think some one on one would be more useful.  

So now I wait for up to 10 weeks, but it is nice to know that something is  in the works.

Thank you 

Good to hear!!

I've had CBT in the past for health anxiety, it was quite gruelling but the improvement to my life was huge. It's not all talking, you set yourself tasks and analyse how your mind responds to them, as I remember. Maybe you can make a start before the ten weeks is up (seems like quite a long time to wait!). Maybe someone with professional knowledge on here can advise a good book or online course as I'm no expert.

CBT worked for me and, though impressions given here can often be wildly off the mark, from what I can gather from the way your mind works from what you've posted here, I suspect it will suit you.

It requires you to be many things, but two most of all: able to look honestly at your behaviours and open to discussing them confidentially with someone else trained to understand how minds that are otherwise strong can go wildly off-piste, and so help you back to an appropriate state of mental balance; and a willingness to change.

The first is I hope not a problem for you, given your honesty in posting things to a group of people that are largely anonymous to you and will forever remain so.  The second requires you to take a mental step and embrace the process.  It's easy when we're so off balance as to require help getting back to view the deep walls of the rut we're stuck in as our safe place and not to want to leave, even to resent people offering to help us so that we can still feel the comfort and shelter of the place that we're stuck in.  I understand that, but you'll get more from it if you see this as help from a critical friend rather than a challenge from an outsider.

At the end of my CBT, my therapist said that she thought I'd progressed faster through the process (even so, six months; but worth it) than many others she saw because she thought at the start that I was ready to change; and I was, I was fed up being this depressed person who I knew wasn't the real me, but I couldn't see how to stop me being that depressed person.  CBT was a real help, and the tools of critical thinking it gave me to challenge the thinking processes to which I am still sometimes prone has helped me innumerable times since.  They are now a valuable part of my life skills tool kit.

Also, one of the reasons I try to offer help on here where and when I'm able is that people here, without asking for anything in return, offered the same help to me when I needed it.  In future, I'm sure that's something that you'll be able to do, want to do and will do, and I look forward to seeing it when you do.

T.

I thought your intention was very clear; virtue signalling?

Woosh over your head.

You seem to have missed the context and the ongoing conversation.  

I suggest you bow out.

Chill big man.