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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I just didn’t know how to deal with someone like that.

    You tell them the truth. That means if you think their stories sound crazy you say “I think your stories sound crazy”.

    I know that steps outside of the typical path of politeness, but telling the truth is the only way to help someone in that state.

    She wasn’t asking because she didn’t know. She was asking because she knew they sounded crazy, and she wanted to give you an opening to discuss that.

    Trust me. When a person is having paranoid delusions only the truth can help them. Saying “No that doesn’t sound crazy to me”, if it does, only makes it worse. That’s because people can detect when others are lying to them. If that person is so far out there that everyone puts on a mask around them, it will reinforce the idea that people are shifty assholes. If nobody ever tells them the truth then they can’t calibrate their sense of what’s real and what’s not.

    It may seem rude, but if you truly want to help them, you need to be truthful with them. That includes saying things that might not be polite, such as “I think that sounds crazy”. They will not interpret that as rude. They will interpret that as honest, and it will be an enormous relief to them to have found an honest person.




  • Probably best to start with a small amount of exercise then. Like one to five minutes.

    You certainly don’t want to deplete your resources to the point of making the rest of your life undoable.

    One thing I’ve found useful is to study the different resources that the body uses. This can be abstract concepts like “willpower” down to concrete molecular energy reserves like “glycogen”. Both the concrete and the abstract concepts have been studied by science, and there are models of how they work.

    In my own day to day, I pay attention to:

    • Willpower
    • Hydration
    • Sleep
    • Mental conflict such as results from unresolved moral conundrums
    • Potassium
    • Glycogen
    • Total calories

    It’s also a fact that exercise will, over time, tend to increase the capacity of the various “energy” stores one has access to. It will improve willpower, concentration, flexibility, glycogen, oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, mitochondrial health, etc.

    But doing too much (which at the beginning can be just a little bit) can definitely cause problems. Especially if that willpower budget is small.

    If I were in your situation, where exercise was likely to push me over the limit and deplete my willpower budget (and other resources) to the point where I failed in other parts of life, I would start extremely small with the exercise routine. Like one push-up. I mean tiny.

    People ask “what’s the point” to something that small. The point is that it’s a stepping stone to being able to do more.

    Of course, you also gotta make sure you’re eating enough, getting plenty of sleep, getting all the nutrients you need, etc.

    Also (and I know this comment is all over the place) meditation can increase willpower budget over time.

    Big, drastic changes can be overwhelming and can set a person back. This is why baby steps are recommended. “Baby steps” means basically tiny steps. Tiny changes. One push-up per day. Maybe curl 1 lb, once a day.

    Baby steps are steps that, themselves, don’t change one’s life. But what they do is they open the door for larger steps that can change one’s life.


  • That may indicate HPA axis dysregulation depending on the timescale.

    When you exercise, how long is the miserable period afterward?

    I had a dysregulation of my HPA axis that resulted in a cause-effect function like “ten minutes of vigorous exercise results in a week of insomnia, headaches, panic attacks, and muscle rigidity”.

    Is it like that? Or do you just mean exercise isn’t fun during the exercise? Or something else?





  • Exercise.

    Cardiovascular and resistance exercise both release a chemical called BDNF, which causes hippocampal neurogenesis, which causes a decrease in depression.

    After being on medication and in therapy for years, I basically lost my medical care and has to figure out a fallback strategy. Learned about this exercise connection, and changed my running habits from:

    • About a mile
    • About once or twice a month

    To:

    • About five miles
    • Three times per week

    The effect on my depression was profound. It was far more powerful than the medication and therapy