Jan

| she/her, aromantic | Just a place for me to reblog a bunch of stuff | Naruto, SPN, TADC, Malevolent Podcast, Gravity Falls, Epic the Musical, MP100, FNAF, Undertale, Red vs Blue, TMNT, TUA, Legend of Zelda, PnF, & manifestation stuff |

[moveslikekeithrichards]

there is no greater joy on this earth than Making Lists, Categorizing, & Sorting

[flying-lemons]

oh do I have the game for you

[dancing-crow]

I could . not. put. this down for 48 hours - stayed up too late, had weird dreams about it, woke up early, and played it while I was supposed to be doing other things. the last several dozen items took a lot of googling, which I do not even begrudge it.

and then. My partner started it. And the SAME THING happened to him.

surprisingly compelling. start when you have free time. like, yanno, a snow day.

[headspace-hotel]

I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.

It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.

Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.

It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.

In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.

Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.

I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.

I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?

I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."

[fluffyhummel]

ive been wondering when id have my bananas arent supposed to be spicy moment but i cannot fucking believe this

what do you mean breathing exercises arent supposed to make you feel out of breath???? what???

also why the fuck did i need to be told the feel better exercise is supposed to make me. feel better? what went wrong here. genuinely asking.

jesus. what a revelation.

[texasdreamer01]

Reading everything above, I am having... several questions. Mostly about how exactly breathing techniques are taught, and also how these instructions are interpreted.

There's a few reasons why breath control is considered a gold standard in calming people down: 1) requires no additional tools or outside intervention, 2) a practice prevalent in many cultures and thus something most patients are already familiar with the idea, and 3) a solidly-proven and well-researched quickest method to regain homeostasis.

It is not supposed to make you feel worse, emotionally or physically, because it's acting directly upon your nervous system to change feedback patterns - I'm going to link as reference the following Wikipedia articles for anyone to read at their leisure:

Conscious breathing

Control of ventilation

Hyperventilation syndrome

I have no idea what anyone is telling a patient to make this literally painful for them, but you're supposed to slowly ease into a completely controlled state of breathing - not a single person is able to go from panicking to calm by ordering themselves to do so, regardless of general mental health. If that were the case then it would not be a state of panic.

Secondly, sometimes therapists are far too by the book, and I'm not sure if it's been recommending to purposefully tense your muscles from head to toe before attempting to regulate your breathing. This helps some people but does not help others; try it out and see if it helps you, because then at least you'll know.

The reason why yoga class was helping to make it click is because regulating your breathing is often done in conjunction with regulated movement, i.e. martial arts. (Yoga is a type of martial arts, for clarification.) The entire point of martial arts is to have good command over one's body, so at least a good third of it is learning exactly that before you get to any of the stereotypical martial part of martial arts.

[headspace-hotel]

See, this is more of the stuff I've always been told and never understood. I "get" the physiological basis of how it "should" work, but the way it feels in my body is distressing.

okay. pausing in typing this to sit up straight and do the breathing exercise thing for a few cycles so I can vividly describe what happens.

Breathing in deeply feels like I'm filling up my lungs too much, like I'm trying to engage the wall of my abdomen to get my breath to deepen but it feels wrong. I'm trying to feel that expansion in my stomach, but it just does not feel right. Sometimes there's a "locking up" that happens in my shoulders here.

Holding my breath is just against what my body instinctively wants to do. I feel myself tense up trying to stop from breathing out too soon, and sometimes there's this kind of locking-up feeling in my throat and it's like I almost swallow air trying to stop the exhale from happening. I keep accidentally skipping the hold breath part because the urge to exhale is too strong.

Breathing out for longer than my inhale makes me feel like I'm just trying to wheeze air out of my already airless lungs at the tail end of the breath, which also tenses up my body. It feels wrong to try to empty out all the air from my lungs to that extent, and there's kind of a "gulping" feeling or a spasm in my throat. Like I'm trying to actually flatten all the air out of my chest.

Then of course it seems like the problem is I need to exhale more slowly, but trying to control the length of my breaths more consciously makes the muscles of my back, stomach, ribs etc. lock up because I'm trying to stop it from going too fast and my whole body tenses.

Like, at every part it feels like I'm fighting and wrestling with my body against what it wants to do, and it increases more and more because it feels like I'm not even absorbing oxygen from my breath, like my brain has this panicked feeling of "not enough air" and I have this increasing, reflex-like urge to gasp that I also have to fight against.

Jesus Christ, I only did this for like 3 cycles for the purpose of this post and my neck already hurts.

[texasdreamer01]

I appreciate you taking the time to duplicate the steps you've been taught, and to describe the effects - please take care of yourself!

You're not required to do a longer exhale, if I'm being really honest - the goal is to extend the length of your inhales (and not even necessarily breathing deeply, just regularly and more smoothly).

Speaking partly from research and partly from personal experience, you can experiment a bit and see what helps you best. Some inhale-hold-exhale patterns that I've seen helping people are 7-5-4 (i.e. seven seconds inhale, five seconds hold, four seconds exhale), or 4-5-4, or similar ratios.

Personally, sometimes doing a long exhale as a start is often more helpful, because it's a good way to trick the brain, but any method works so long as you're slowly increasing how long it takes you to inhale (this is the main part of it). However long that takes you to accomplish, that's how long it takes.

If it hurts to immediately do a large inhale, then uh. Don't do that? You don't have to? If someone's telling you to, they might be more concerned with following their education than looking at the person in front of them.

One thing I would say is that you don't have to correspondingly increase how long you hold your breath with how long it takes you to inhale. A rhythm of, for example, 2-1-3 can be good to start off with, but only if you find it helpful.

Additionally, sometimes squeezing something in time with your breathing will be a better assist than counting - can be your own shirt, or pants, or someone's hand, anything at all that encourages your brain to focus on something other than your breathing (this is one of the reasons why yoga is so popular). Stress balls, fidgeting toys, necklaces, etc, are also helpful but sometimes completely overlooked by people like therapists.

[headspace-hotel]

Huh. I thought the exhale being the longest part was supposed to be what was important.

It doesn't hurt to do a large inhale, it just feels weird and wrong. The hurting comes in as I struggle more and more to breathe slowly enough and my body tenses up.

The pattern I learned was 6 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale. When I learned about "box breathing" it was 4-4-4. There isn't much consistently. Box breathing feels really bad to me too though.

So, I'm hearing that people count out seconds in a certain pattern. I'm also hearing that you're supposed to slowly lengthen your breaths more and more. If that were the case, the cycles would get longer, right? So counting would only make it confusing? It seems really hard to mentally keep track of 3 different counters as they increment upwards.

I guess I'm overthinking this. But like, how do I know if I'm doing it "correctly" would be my question.

[the-shade-system]

I'm gonna be 100% real with you, breathing exercises straight up do not work for everyone, and with the descriptions you've given about how your body reacts, I doubt that they'll be helpful for you in general.

For context, hi, we're actively studying psychology, specifically because we intend to go into psychiatry. This is very much within our area of expertise.

Breathing exercises are something of an exploit in your autonomic nervous system. You're effectively attempting to forcibly tell your body that things are okay by forcing your breathing to mimic how it would be if things were okay. For a large chunk of people, doing that works just fine, because their autonomic nervous system doesn't FIGHT THEM at every step of the process.

From the descriptions you've given, I would take a guess in saying that your autonomic nervous system is more active/resistant to conscious influence than most people, which means that techniques based on effectively Forging Signals like this just. Will not work for you.

[headspace-hotel]

...hmmm

I mean yeah it does feel like my body is struggling against me the entire time...

[what-even-is-thiss]

This might not help you but in case it does, what works for me is not counting seconds but just focusing on making sure I’m not doing shallow breathing and hyperventilating. Counting stresses me out about doing it right so just slowing down for a second and making sure I’m getting proper lungfuls of air and not starving myself of oxygen is a lot more helpful for me.

When my anxiety disorders were less controlled than they are now I used to hyperventilate so much that when I took a moment to breathe properly I got dizzy from actually getting a proper amount of oxygen because my body had adapted to running on low oxygen and that also freaked me out at first.

[sicklesium-moved-deactivated201]

i dont get offended at white people jokes even though im white because: 

i can recognize white people as a whole have systemically oppressed POC in america, which is where i live 

most people when they make white people jokes only mean the shitty white people and i am not a shitty white person 

im not a pissbaby

[damncommunists-deactivated20180]

my white friends that have reblogged this give me life

[zelda-tempest]

4. Sometimes I am a shitty white person and the jokes remind me to FUCKIN STOP

[lallamariamhabibi]

If ur white and like this post I fux with u

[birdpapi-deactivated20171121]

^absolutely

[verdant-witch]

5. It’s hard to be offended when white people jokes involve bland food/tourist dads in socks and sandals/white girls in yoga pants obsessed with pumpkin spice/suburban PTA moms and other harmless and mostly true stereotypes while jokes about POC involve them being called thugs/criminals/slurs/uneducated/illegal immigrants.

[blackpoeticinjustice]

i fucks with u heavy if ur white and you reblog this

[sm0k3-ring-deactivated20160109]

6. They’re usually really fucking funny and don’t perpetuate stereotypes that will ever affect me economically, politically, or cause me any true harm, let alone create risks that “justify” my murder and/or death

[chimpdinnerlive]

our server's weekly movie voting rules

[chimpdinnerlive]

War has changed.

[starlight-chickens]

Having a breakdown? Why don't you try our new, original and ethically tested solution : Switching With Your Headmates™? Only for the low low price of a maybe headache and sometimes a "where the fuck are we". Available in your nearest plural shops. Sometimes. When it wants to work.

[wyoming-chan]

this is basically what was happening on chorus while she was hanging out with epsilon right guys

[jade-kyo]

I was gonna make a post being like “red vs blue is like a dead wife to me” and then I remembered

[sulphuric-onyx]

We (Tuckington nation) talk a lot (and rightfully so) about how everyone else met Agent Washington: The Merciless Killing Machine, wheras Tucker met Wash: The Sorta Lame, Very Human, Guy.

But, I think another fun aspect of thier dynamic is the Tucker that Wash sees and recognises. Tucker is so incredibly human to everyone around him, like the other sim troopers, hes funny, and generally a little non threatening, at least compared to the freelancers and mercs you may be accustomed to. And Wash sees that guy aswell don't get me wrong, he learns to be human again with that guy, they hangout a lot, but he also sees the Tucker: The Great Force to Be Reckoned With, wielder of a glowing fucking sword you do not want to be on the business end of, (funny personality aside)

Idk, its just another thing about them I love, like as much as we do a lot of explorartion of hands accustomed to murder and violence learning to be gentle and to love again about Wash, but if you think further, Tucker's onscreen kill count is the highest of the whole show. And in universe, Wash is the only, or at least the first to notice that potential.

Neat.

[akalegos]

my grand conspricy is that rvb is about love

[radiocowbooy79]

2 am thingy

[castledeity]

A medieval fitted yankee helmet by Mashkow Alexey

[nemfrog]

The nervous system. Man, woman, know thyself! 1908.

Internet Archive

[videolottery]

One hundred and ninety nine dollar tacos

[videolottery]

Wow thank you to my fan for painting this

[videolottery]

Bro if the group chat gets leaked we’ll be celebrated for our inclusive and respectful language

[videolottery]

I’ve been watching so many old garbage movies recently that I’ve started to have like 60s sci fi themed nightmares where I’m being attacked by like horrible ape monsters and it’s actually scary as fuck! What an awful problem to have

[hanashin]

hi hana!

can I be your 🎯 anon?

what's been something(s) you've looked forward to in your most recent shifts?

Is bakugou pretty?

how do you personally feel that you've helped alot of people find their footing with their shifting? what's your reaction to people letting you know that they've finally shifted?

did you ever feel like it was never going to happen for you?

when you stopped letting doubt be your base for how you proceeded with shifting, was it truly as simple as accepting you were there for you to consciously get there?

thanks

hello!! yes you can be 🎯 anon <33

1. hm, probably trying out a new quirk i scripted? i got inspired after watching spiderman brand new day and i’ve been itching to test it out properly in training. also, just hanging out with my friends and going to visit my sister, i haven’t visited her in a while.

2. objectively, yes. he’s very conventionally attractive. like even if you don’t like his personality, you can’t really deny that he’s very pleasing to look at.

3. i don’t know if i’d say i’ve “helped a lot of people” in some grand way, but i do know my words resonate with people, and that means a lot to me. when someone tells me they’ve finally shifted, i feel this mix of happiness and relief for them. it’s like… YAY! you made it!! you’ve finally reached the beginning of something endless. or more accurately, realised you’ve always been at the edge of infinity.

4. yes, of course. i was in that headspace for years. it took 6 years before i shifted for the first time. there were definitely moments where i felt stuck, frustrated, or like i was going in circles. that’s why when people come to me with their frustrations about shifting, and i say i understand, i mean it sincerely. i believe every “experienced” shift blogger will agree with me when we say we’ve all been in the same boat once.

5. yes, but not in a superficial way. it wasn’t just saying “i’m there” and hoping for the best. it was a genuine shift in how i saw things. i stopped using doubt as my foundation and stopped looking to the appearance for confirmation. once that clicked, it really did become simple. not effortless in the beginning because the unlearning of old mentalities was tricky, but definitely simple.

𑣲𝒽