Your mom broke the garage. That was absolutely irresponsible of her, not you, you were trying to help out which is really sweet.
And I mean what was the goal here anyway? Even when running late the 3 seconds it takes to start a car will hardly make any difference.
Farming locally doesn’t mean use a city building, it means use a field thats kinda in the same region, not at the other end of the world. And of course that’s more sustainable. The shorter the transport routes are, the better.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer.
I live in a county that almost religiously reuses glass bottles and have never heard nor experienced such a story. Seems like someone figured out how to sanitize them.
No what I’m saying is maybe you are sensitive (for whatever reason - from a exceptional metabolism to placebo, over other sensitivities/allergies, complex psychological effects, etc everything is possible) but it’s certainly not because glutamate is a neurotransmitter.
Neurotransmitters and the stuff in our bloodstreams (nutrients, hormones and so on) are two very different systems. Think of it as a river and a power grid. We all have this massive stream of different molecules in our bodies, and we have an elaborate information system made from electric and chemical signaling, like cables and batteries, working right beside it. The batteries might happen to utilize the same molecules that swim around in the river, but they still have nothing to do with each other. The river doesn’t touch the batteries, and your body very carefully decides which part it takes out of the water and into the batteries. Highly simplified of course, but that’s kinda how you can imagine why one doesn’t hurt the other.
To add:
For severe problems it’s probably always wise to check with a physician, or if there’s specific stuff in your head that keeps you awake to consider telling a friend or therapist about it. To distance yourself from your thoughts is something everybody can learn and it can be tremendously helpful with stuff like that.
Even though you’re right in that glutamate is a neurotransmitter, eating it doesn’t affect our brain chemistry at all. It can’t pass the blood-brain-barrier. Which is relieving since basically every food group contains it and flooding our brain with that would lead to violent epileptic seizures and certain death. Not insomnia.
And melatonin isn’t a neurotransmitter but a hormone.
So maybe you do in fact sleep better when avoiding specific food groups in the evening, but your explanation certainly isn’t correct.
Just putting this out there since glutamate is such a highly misunderstood molecule surrounded by many misconceptions, this one being a very common one.
Communication about times would get so much easier, communication about schedules would get so much easier.
Except that it wouldn’t. It would make communication about time a culture sensitive topic. Sure, the exact time of day in relation to the position of the sun might get lost with our current system, but if someone tells you “I’ve slept til 12am” at least you know it was somewhat around noon. Under your new system you’d always have to consider where someone lives.
Psychologically that would be a desaster. People would wear themselves out in an instant, and in 6 months top we’d have a world population suffering from clinical depression.
Waking up and starting the day in darkness is even more detrimental to mental health than spending the evening in the dark, because light stimulation in the morning is what actually aligns our inner clock. DST all year round would shift our circadian rhythm and social time further apart, worsening sleeping problems and affective disorders.
But don’t take my word for it - there are many smarter people than me who actually researched this. For example:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0748730419854197
DST in the winter would suck so much. Think of all the worsened seasonal depressive disorders (aka winter depression). If the alternative would mean an increase in suicide numbers I will gladly endure the annoyance of changing my clocks twice a year.
Then again if we could abolish DST - yeah I’d be down for that. But too many people think getting rid of standard time will make our winters more like our summers. But it won’t. It will make them worse. Our biology isn’t meant to wake up three hours before sunrise.
You could totally work with your inner child on that basis. Obviously don’t have to. But just imagining this little version of you and the hardship they had to endure, thinking about what they would have needed from an adult, and imagining yourself being that adult for your imaginative younger self - that would be very much in line with the idea of the technique.
This may depend on the country but I as a therapist ask everyone anyway. And I’ve experienced many, many people over the years being afraid of speaking up. It’s always a moment of relief when it’s out there and they realize I’m not freaking out over it.
I’ve pretty much heard it all. Including the various ways people try to approach the subject while still unsure how I will react. And I do think that is something you could try if you’re unsure about your therapist - talk to them about your suicidal thoughts and see how they react before you confirm plans or attempts.
Chances are of course they can get quite a bit from your way of talking about it, because you’re definitely not the first person with those thoughts in front of them. The thing is - suicidal ideation is, depending on the type of disorder, quite common. If we’d admitted anyone who thought about suicide to a psych ward immediately they would be bursting at the seams and we’d get nothing done at all. So that’s not happening. As long as you can convincingly agree with your therapist on a plan forward (which could mean: Okay, I promise not to kill myself until next Tuesday) you don’t have to be admitted if you don’t want to. Which also would be an option of course. Psychiatric wards are emergency departments. They are supposed to be there for you when you’re seeing no light at all and in my experience, at least where I live and work, in fact have saved quite a few lifes.
There are cases where psychiatric admission is the right call though. Sometimes it’s literally life saving. Depression isn’t static - it goes up and down, goes loud, goes silent. When you’re deep in a life crisis, when you’re feeling like you’re losing your fucking mind and are actually about to kill yourself those are the places to go to get you over those critical days or weeks to recalibrate and reconsider. I’ve personally spoken to many patients who were completely releived afterwards and glad that there was such a place for them. If the alternative is a lost life, psychiatry is a valid attempt to get better, even if it doesn’t work for everyone.
Of course it’s an even better route to get there by admitting oneself - I just believe the likelihood of that happening depends a lot on how afraid people are of psychiatric clinics. And they do vary of course. I personally still would go though. Before I end my life I guess there wouldn’t be anything to lose anyway.
I do think that is true. I’ve worked in a clinic through the whole pandemic, which meant mandatory tests everyday. Cought two asymptomatic infections this way. With the first one I had a very light headache - I would have thought absolutely nothing of it if it weren’t for the test. Second time I’ve got no symptoms whatsoever. I then got it again for round three and that one suuucked.
Who knows how many had it were none the wiser.
When remembering a stressful experience it’s important not to get stuck in your thoughts.
Most people would be a bit shocked after what you’ve been through. Our brains tend to try to go over things a few times to get a grasp at what happened. Sometimes our thoughts become a movie of the stressful incident that plays on repeat in our thoughts. Try to think further. Remember how you got out of the situation, remember how you got home, remember how you had dinner, remember how you got to bed. And remember: You’re okay, you’re alright, this is all behind you, you did alright, and right now you’re safe and fine.
Try to explicitly think this a few times. At the very least, this is a much more pleasant thought to get stuck on than “fuck, I’m in danger”.
And if it helps: Either distract yourself or tell someone what happened. Both are okay. Just don’t stop at the scary part when telling the tale, always think and tell about it to the point where you were safe again.
It didn’t, at least not in the way you think. The headlines of the past few days show the aftermath of the last decades: industry contracts that were made in the last century and the political heritage of a generation of politicians who are no longer in power.
Coal is being phased out and that’s not changing. It cannot change substantially anyway; there is only so much coal in the gound. Recent political decisions moved to keep most of it there. For technological, political, economical and industry related reasons this won’t be a fast process unfortunately.
One of the roadblocks of our transition to a sustainable energy supply is how much money (and in our capitalisic society, therefore, power) the industry itself holds. Coal lobbies will work hard for you not to think about them too much. Nuclear lobbies will work hard for you to blame those pesky environmentalists. A game of distraction and blame shifting. This thread is a good example of how well it’s working.
Our resources are limited. This is true for good old planet earth as well as our societies. We only have so much money, time, and workforce to manage this transition. And as much as I’d love to wake up tomorrow to a world with PVC on every roof, a windmill on every field, and decentralised storage in every town center, this is just not realistic overnight. We’ll have to live with the fact of our limited resources and divert as much as possible of them towards such a future. (And btw, putting billions of dollars in money, time, and workforce towards a reactor that will start working in 10-30 years is not the way to do this, as much as the nuclear lobby would like you to think that.)
Eh. Humans have (confidently and incorrectly) assumed such causal links for millenia. There’s thunder, so there must be a thunder god. There’s a sun in the sky, so someone must have put it there. There’s people, so someone must have build them from clay.
What we could conclude logically: There is something - so something, somehow, once began.
That’s it. It’s also kind of recursive. It’s factual, but there isn’t anything meaningful inevitably following from this.
And everything else is an assumption.
You can say “I chose to believe that this somehow was a someone.” You could decide to believe that there was a personal entity as a single cause for all that is. Someone who had somewhat of a consciousness, who willingly and deliberately created everything. You could assume that this someone was eternal and all-powerful and therefore later on or even until right now still alive/active. You could speculate about this entity being interested in creating a specific planet with a very specific ecosystem. You could ponder whether this entiry would be interested enough in one species within this ecosystem to watch, influence, and even hold something like a relationship with them.
A bit far fetched, but sure. You wouldn’t be the first one to assume all these from a simple “There is a cake”.
Insane. Thanks for sharing.