#1 Taln Fan

That is part of the point I'm afraid. Having a person IRL who knows and can help is gonna have way more potential benefit than someone online. Is there a strong reason you need the knife? If it's not super essential, better to lose a knife forever than to keep hurting yourself

Is there a specific reason why not? (If you’re willing to share) or is it just not wanting to tell parents and have that convo? (Which is very fair)

It’s something that’ll somewhat ease with time, but it’s kind of a natural part of the process of a romantic relationship. I’d say to just try to regulate those emotions and to share them with her/communicate (and that it’s not the fault of something she’s doing, if that’s the case). It shows you care, and it’s likely she feels some of the same

Not a great answer, but to some extent it's just gonna be hard, since opening up in person is hard. My recc is to think in the moment, "why am I here?". As I've said before, if you're not opening up fully in therapy, there's only so much they can do. So to some extent you kinda just have to go for it. One option is you can try writing it on a note or letter beforehand. I think that writing it out and then handing it to someone is often easier than formulating the words in the moment, so you could try that? Sorry if that isn't the most helpful advice

I can help with that! @Fizz9

Yep that's great, and it's important step in helping battle the self verification stuff. That's part of why in the field of mental health, we use specific language that emphasizes that. E.g. "Person with autism" rather than "Autistic person", or "Person with depression" rather than "depressed person". I'd say in some cases it's even better to say "Right now I feel sad/depressed", rather than "I have depression"/"I struggle with depression", because it emphasizes that you can improve and overcome those struggles

Not making stupid decisions is a great step, and harder than it sounds sometimes xD And not dragging people down with you is a good goal, as long as you're not accomplishing it by not telling any close friends about your thoughts and struggles. Real friends want to know if you're struggling, and we tend to overestimate how much we're actually burdening others Not saying this to invalidate your feelings at all (as someone who's only a few months into his 20's and is still developing), but a lot of mental health struggles are somewhat attributed to just being under 25 and not having a fully developed brain, which sucks xD Our brains are bad at figuring out healthy coping mechanisms, we constantly compare ourselves to peers and try to figure out our place in the world, and we're trying to figure out our identity. All while battling through school and academic stress, plus hormones. Tis a perfect recipe for mental struggles, unfortunately

Sure! I'll respond here, since it may be applicable for other folks as well (Spoilered for length) Lmk if that makes sense

Sorry you're going through all that, just remember that things can and will change, and you will be warm again. Please take the opportunity to tell your therapist everything when you meet with them next. The suicidal thoughts and the SH. Exactly what you've been thinking and doing. You can only see them so often, so use this chance while you have it and tell them everything, so they can actually help you. You can't just keep bottling suicidality and SH up without telling someone IRL, you need to talk to an actual professional about it, especially someone you can see regularly. Crisis hotlines are amazing, but your therapist can work with you in a more involved way and track your progress and give more personalized help. And I realize that this isn't the advice you may want to hear, but if you have parents who love you, please involve them. Especially if you're a teenager/live with them, they're the ones in the best position to help you.

I’ll probably be yapping a lot about emotions on this blog, since it’s what I research, so I first want to give some general info on how emotions are created, most of which comes from Dr. James Gross and Dr. Jennifer Veilleux. Emotions are difficult to define, and even experts in the field can’t agree on a single definition. But essentially, they’re messages from our brain about something that matters to us. Emotions are brief, usually only a couple minutes at most, as compared to moods, which are longer. But what actually causes emotions and generates them? If you’re like the majority of people, you may think that they’re caused by some sort of event or even thought/memory. While the process of generating an emotion is indeed caused by a specific trigger, that’s not actually what creates an emotion. If it were triggering events that caused emotion, we’d all have the same emotional reactions to the same stimuli. The trigger is only the first stage out of four. The next stage is Attention, in which we attend to a specific aspect of the triggering situation. It’s the aspect of the situation that’s most notable to you in the moment. If you get in a car crash, you could attend to your own physical safety, or the state of your car, or the safety of the other person. The third step is Appraisal. This is what happens inside your mind, where you interpret what you’re attending to. If someone cuts you off in traffic, there’s different ways you can appraise the driver’s crazy behavior. Maybe they’re just being a rude person who doesn’t know how to drive, or maybe they’re driving their pregnant wife to the hospital who’s about to give birth. Then lastly there’s our emotional response, which is generated by our appraisal of what we attended to. Oftentimes the emotion wants us to do a particular action in the moment, though we have the choice whether or not to follow it. Back to the traffic example, if we appraise the situation as unfair/rude, our brain wants us to seek justice and fix the wrong, which is the message of anger. But if you appraise the situation and think that maybe the driver had a good reason for acting that way, you may feel sympathy or only mild annoyance instead. This four step model can be both good and bad news for some. On one hand, it means that it’s possible to change your appraisal or attention, even if you can’t control your trigger. But that also means that we can’t fully make ourselves the victim. Yes, there are some situations that will inevitably result in certain emotions. If someone kicked your pet in front of you, you’d almost certainly experience anger. But there are a few situations with some wiggle room, where it’s up to you how you appraise the situation and respond. Ofc this level of self control takes practice, and I’d recommend starting by trying to change how you appraise small situations, to try and be open minded and understand others’ PoV, which can help mitigate our negative reaction to others’ actions. Easier said than done I know, and I’m far from the best at it myself. It’s impossible to fully control your emotions, and that’s a good thing. Our negative emotions serve plenty of useful purposes, and you shouldn’t try to smother out all your negative feelings. But there are lots of times (like the traffic situation) where it’s ultimately not that important, and you can save yourself from unnecessary distress by tweaking how you appraise things a little. However, the majority of the time, you’ll still feel negative emotions when a negative stimulus occurs, and that’s totally fine. And when you do inevitably feel negative emotions, don’t try to push them away or blame yourself for feeling them. Acknowledge that your feelings are valid, and think about what the emotion is trying to tell you, and feel the message of that emotion. For example, sadness often tells us that there’s some sort of loss or lack, and wants us to seek comfort, whereas anger tells us that there’s some sort of injustice, and wants us to seek reparation or justice. You don’t have to do what the emotion is telling you to do, but just naming the specific emotion and identifying what it’s telling you can help reduce the intensity of the negative emotion. If you have any questions, comments, or topics I should yap about, lmk

Tis somewhat hard to explain in quick bullets, so I'd recommend just watching at least some of the video, where he dives into practical methods and strategies. The short version is pretty much just what I said above: Focus on understanding/pondering the relationships between ideas, and compare and contrast them instead of just memorizing heaps of information Use mind maps to draw out and visualize those relationships as opposed to regular notes Things that don't really fit those two bullets, like memorizing dates and vocabulary, regular notes/flashcards works I'd recommend just watching the video, there's even chapters if you want to just find the practical stuff

It’s hard for our brain, and that’s the point. Your brain isn’t able to remember everything word for word, and the difficulty is what forces you to summarize the key essential concepts. It’s hard, and takes a lot of practice. Same with mindmapping. Maybe not best for right before finals (tho I tested most of this out for my cell bio final and it worked amazingly, so depends) there’s always plenty to learn over the summer tho, so if you’re studying anything on your own it’s a nice stress free way to practice

Hi yall! How we doin today Ya'll had a golden chance for a new record when I was at a choir thing for 12 hours yesterday, oof @Fizz9

One thing I've been diving a lot into this past week is learning about learning, which has been super interesting. Most of what I've learned has been through Dr. Justin Sung, who's a learning coach and makes a bunch of great youtube videos. (Almost all of this is summarizing what I learned from this video) If you're like me, if you take notes, it's probably the standard handwritten/typed full page of words, directly copying down words of powerpoints or what the teacher says. Maybe the odd diagram or two, but mostly just writing down things slightly worded differently or verbatim, in a linear fashion down the page in bullets or paragraphs. This is seen as "normal" notetaking, but it's actually one of the worst ways to write notes, and is only slightly worth doing. Our brains don't hold information in a linear way like that, and neither does the brain of the person teaching the info, whether that's a professor or a textbook author. Our brains hold information in a complex network, made up of countless relationships. When we learn new information, our brain then tries to relate that info to other info it already holds. And when it can't, it's much more likely to forget it. (Part of why languages are hard) Our brain uses 20% of your body's total energy, so it's very good about preserving that energy, by getting rid of unnecessary information. That's great in some ways. It'd drive us insane if we remembered every minute sensory detail of every second. But our brains often throw away info that we actually want to learn. When we forget things we study, it's because our brain deems it unimportant and irrelevant. So then our task as learners is to make our brain recognize that info as relevant. When we just copy down linear notes, or speed through a book without taking ample time to process the info, then our brain forgets most of it very quickly. (About 90% of new info after one week) The primary way of fixing this is through improving our encoding methods, which is how we transfer new info to our memory and make it stick. (Most "genius" students who can ace their exams with little to no studying are often just really good at some of these encoding methods, even if it's unconscious) For example, instead of linear maps, try mind maps, where you draw out info in a super summarized, visual format where you spatially arrange concepts and show relationships and make comparisons. (Plenty of examples and youtube videos on how to do them) The very act of drawing the mind map makes your brain compare ideas to see how they relate to each other and to info you already know, which in turn makes you remember more of it. The key is to spend an equal time digesting info as consuming it. How often do you read a chapter of a biology textbook, then just sit and think about the content? Not writing it down, not highlighting, just thinking and processing it in your brain to relate it to other concepts and understand it. It can be time consuming yes. But if you're only retaining 10% of info, then you're already wasting time, and spending more time digesting will ultimately result in more efficient and higher quality learning. Summarizing is also key. It helps you to remember the actually important bits, and that act of deciding what info to prioritize also helps your brain remember it better. One strategy that helps is delayed notetaking. After learning a new bit of info, especially via lecture, try to wait 30+ seconds before writing it down. Your brain can't juggle all that info for very long without having to write it down, so it forces you to summarize that new info to be able to remember it. This all isn't to say that route memorization doesn't have its place. There's plenty of types of learning that doesn't really have much relationship to other info, like memorizing formulas or language vocab. In those cases, applying the info through practice problems/sentences is key, though you'll likely have to just grind through some of it with flashcards and the like. Also in high school, more of the learning tends to be lower level and not require as much higher order thinking (look up Bloom's learning taxonomy for more info on that), and there's a lot of brute memorization. But in some of the science classes like chemistry and biology, or history, can be learned really well via mind mapping and other techniques. It's also useful to pre-study before classes, since you already have a vague outline of the big picture and can fill in as the teacher gives the lecture TLDR: When learning, if you spend ample time mentally organizing new info and focusing on how it relates to other info, how it compares and contrasts with each other, then it makes your brain consider it more important, and therefore remember and understand it better. I'd highly recommend the video linked above, despite it's length. It's really a goldmine, and most of ya'll likely spend 5 hours a week on the shard or scrolling anyway

Please please actually tell your therapist things. I’ve been doing therapy-adjacent work with participants in my lab and it’s showing me how much further the recipient can get if they’re honest. 1) How can they help you if you don’t actually tell them the significant problems? 2) They’ve seen it dozens of times before and won’t judge you for it, even if they want you to stop. 3) They also won’t judge you for withholding the info previously, they know fully well how difficult it is to open up fully While telling the partial truth is a good start, you can’t get the full benefits of therapy without opening up all the way. And they can’t actually help you overcome the SH or give you strategies if they don’t know you’re doing it This 100% It's still therapy yes, but your therapist can actually specialize their help to adapt to the fact that you're SHing, which can make ain't important impact on how they help you. Technically it's "just therapy" if you just stare at your therapist in dead silence for an hour, but it doesn't mean you'll get anything out of it. Most people don't go to therapists because they know the why of everything. Part of the main job of therapists is to help you find that why, which is part of what they're trained to do. You don't have to explain, you can just tell them that you've been SH, and you can work through it together and figure it out. But it starts with opening up

It does in fact summon me (I just choose when to respond to said summons) Yay, congrats!!

(Sorry for the very late response lol) I'd personally recommend waking up at 6:30 or 7 on the weekends too if that's when you wake up on weekdays, yes. But it's up to you and how much you care about your sleep quality and maximizing your overall health. You ofc don't have to turn your life into an 100% optimal machine lol And fair on the parents. Tis easier after moving out when you have full control over your schedule. Don't stress it too much, and just do what you can. Most TV's also have a warm light filter like iphones, so if you can turn that on, then that's great

Ok for that I'm stopping ya'll right there @Fizz9

Oo nice, ya'll have gotten far @Fizz9

In the wise words of Will Wight: "A lot of people mistake me for an adult on account of my age"

It is often a self fulfilling prophecy yeah, just like ya said. And yes, the underlying stressors in your life will still be there. Everybody has stressors, but our lifestyle, emotion regulation strategies, and mindset determine how we respond to things. If you're doing all those well, every day, all the time, and lets say you have way better symptoms and daily life because of them, then... what's the problem? Ofc there will be bad days, but if your average day becomes better, more manageable and fulfilling, then that's 100% an improvement. And when you're better rested physically and mentally, and have more room to breathe, you'll likely be better able to reflect and tackle the underlying root stressors in your life and find solutions. And yeah, taking a break from the Shard doesn't do much if you just bedrot and scroll other things online, especially if they're actively dragging you down. It's best to physically distance yourself from your phone and put it in a different room entirely, since it can even be distracting if it's in our vision, even if we're not using it

Spoilered for length

They’re both kaze xD The kanji 風 is read か in 風邪, but as かぜ in 風。 it’s a bit confusing lol

Nah @Fizz9