The Posts of 2008


Filed Under Round-ups, Uncategorized | Jan 7, MST 12:29 pm

 
In the four months since this blog started, thirty four posts have published on this site.  That breaks down to about two posts a week. In the first months of 2009, I’d like to increase that number to about five posts a week.

I hope to improve the quality of the posts as well. Right now, I’m still experimenting with this site (expect a new redesign in the near future), trying to find a good work flow.  I guess Steve Pavlina said it best in his essay on creating value: beginners always suck.

And this blog is just beginning, so it’s got far too many rough edges that will have to be smoothed out. However, looking back over some of the entries I’ve made, and a few of them show promise. The following are my favorite posts of 2008 — in no particular order.

1. Mimicry, social beloging, and automatic behavior


In this article, I examined how people constantly and unconsciously mimic the people they’re around. This automatic behavior poses certain interesting questions that have yet to be answered. The one I’m most intrigued by is that, if people are constantly responding to their environment in ways they’re not consciously aware of, what does that say about the control they have over their lives? I believe misery is built on a solid foundation of ignorance, and cultivating self-awareness is the key to living a happy, meaningful life.

2. A Holistic Guide to Dealing With Emotional Vampires

When you considerhow we unconsciously ape the people we’re surrounded by, you begin to appreciate how important it is to avoid emotional vampires. The quality of the people in our lives determines the quality of our lives. We’re not immortals, so we shouldn’t waste what precious time we do have on people who are disrespectful and destructive.

3. Searching Your Way To Better Health: How I cured myself of panic attacks

Five years ago, I started having panic attacks. At the time, I didn’t know what they were, and I sought out medical advice. Unfortunately, the doctors I saw were complete idiots, and I returned home determined to do what they couldn’t — cure myself of whatever it was that I had. I turned to google, typed in my symptoms, and within minutes I had a name for what I was experiencing. Once I had a name, it was as if I had established some degree of control over my experiences, and within a short amount of time, my panic attacks went away. I can’t recommend that other people will share my luck, but in my case, Google was a better health care provider than any of the medical professionals I spoke with.

4. The Five Factors of Depression

In this essay, I break depression down into five different areas of concern: genetics, environments, relationships, physical health, and internal states. Deficiencies and problems in any one of these areas can contribute to depression, and usually several problems across all five areas exist. The interesting thing is that each area is like the leg of a table, and if you knock down a couple legs, the whole thing comes crashing down. Improving conditions in a couple of these areas will usually end up improving conditions in all of them. Change your environment and internal states, and you’ll often find your physical health and relationships improve, and so on.

5. Beating Seasonal Affective Disorder

SAD is a condition that hits people in the winter months. Human beings need sunlight, and when the sun is in hiding, people often come down with the blues. This post lists a variety of ways of dealing with the energy zapping condition: light boxes, dawn simulation, vitamin supplements, and pharmaceutical interventions among the therapeutic possibilities. It’s a good overview of the condition and the possible treatments available to those who have it.

6. Why do depressed people wake up exhausted?

A short but sweet video post about a question that has always baffled me: why do the depressed wake up exhausted? According to the video in this post, depressed people have different sleeping patterns then healthy people. They spend more time in the more active REM phase of sleep, where dreaming frequently occurs. The depressed dream more than healthy people because they have more emotional issues that need to be resolved, and since this emotional debris isn’t being cleared out during their waking hour, the brain takes it upon itself do this while people sleep. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do that great a job. I’m not sure how much weight this theory holds, but it’s an intriguing line of thought and it’s definitely worth investigating. Having seen the video, I now try not to carry any emotional baggage to bed.

7. Ten Illusion Clips

This has to be my favorite round-up of the year. It’s a collection of ten optical illusion videos, and each illusion shows just how wonky the human mind can be. The importance of this list is that it emphasizes how unreal our interpretation of the world often is. Visual trickery isn’t the only kind of illusions we end up experiencing — there are emotional, psychological illusions galore in the gallery of our personal experiences. We all have to be wary of automatically assuming something to be real simply because it seems real. Appearances can deceive, so we need to approach life with the possibility that our knowledge about the world and ourselves is faulty. Certainty is a dangerous thing.

In my opinion, these are the seven most interesting posts I’ve made this year. That works out to roughly one good post every two or so weeks. That’s a number I plan on improving this year!

Cybersex Bums You Out


Filed Under Personal Stories, Relating to People, Uncategorized | Oct 31, MDT 10:43 am

 
A recent Australian study from the Swinburne University of Technology reveals that the more time a man spends online looking for sexual thrills, the more likely he is to suffer from poor mental health.  In a survey of 1325 Australian and American men, doctoral student Marcus Squirrel found that 27 percent of the men surveyed were moderately depressed, 30 percent had high levels of anxiety, and 35 percent were moderately to severely stressed. Those numbers were directly related to the amount of time the men spent on sex sites.

That’s not to say that cybersex is in itself a bad thing, however an excessive amount of online sexual activity can be a sign of deeper personal problems. It’s important for people to be aware of what motivates them to do the things they do. Sometimes, our hobbies are actually forms of self-medication, subconscious efforts on our part to bring balance back to our lives.

Cybersex itself is a snack, it’s not a meal. People who spend more time on cybersex than the actual kind are a bit like people who spend more time eating junk food then real meals. They’re trading real calories for the empty variety. Instead of eating a healthy dinner, they’re muching on cheatos and drinking cola. After awhile, their health will take a hit.

In the end, it’s about moderation and self-control. Cybersex itself isn’t a determinant of poor health — the majority of the men surveyed were healthy, and many of the men who spent a lot of time engaging in cybersex didn’t suffer from depression. However, on average, the more time that was spent on sex sites, the more likely the person had problems of some kind. This knowledge should encourage people who do frequent sex sites to examine their habits and find out if they’re approaching them in a way that adds to their life or in a way that masks their unhappiness. Put differently, they need to make sure that they treat cybersex like a snack and not a meal replacement.