Back in the day, anxiety was the wallpaper and furnishings of my mind. I (somehow) soldiered through, but living in anxiety was a way of life for me. I’d panic in social situations, I’d worry about upcoming events (that paranoid feeling of suspicion and mistrust of people or their actions without evidence or justification), and I’d ruminate – focusing on repetitive thoughts of catastrophe.
I have a friend who by any measure of success has “made it”. He’s an acclaimed authority in his field; he makes good money and others clamor to work with him.
Yet, he feels as if he’s never caught-up. As a perfectionist he’s nose to the grindstone working nights and weekends but seldom claims victories.
Are there shades of this in you? If so, you may have a form of depression, what’s called cold depression, that’s the opposite of what we normally imagine depression to be.
I know what it’s like to feel anxious – back in the day, I lived with anxiety for decades. Crippling anxiety actually, and it was particularly overwhelming in social settings, where I would perceive everyone around me as superior, telling myself that I was unworthy to be there and out of place.
Call me backward, but my true introduction to the term “deepfake porn” came in January with the unsettling news of Taylor Swift becoming a victim of it. She emerged as the focus of what’s called, “image-based abuse” in January, where sexually explicit content is created using AI to realistically superimpose people’s faces onto bodies not their own. I was curious about it and with easy browsing, it didn’t take me long to find the repulsive internet images.
Take a pill and feel better! As Westerners that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. No muss, no fuss! Just take the pill and be done with it! Of course, as we know for these “mood managing”medications, the trade-off is side effects. The side effect reported to me most frequently is the narrowing of the whole emotional spectrum.
The current trendy phrase for folks not getting back to you is “ghosting.” As in, “We went out a few times, and then they ghosted me.” But let’s not limit it to just dating – it happens in all sorts of relationships, be it professional, family, or friends. You might even be guilty of a little ghosting yourself, yes?
“I never get angry,” says a character in one of Woody Allen’s movies. “I grow a tumor instead.” This is a hilarious line but a poignant reminder how profoundly emotions can affect our human physiological functioning. Yet, as a culture, we generally place our physical well-being over our emotional well-being. We see it all the … Read more
Mystical traditions teach that there’s an infinite world inside of us – and the question for our Western minds has always been, “How do I access that infinite Inner world?” Of course most of us know that meditation is the one approach recommended time and time again…