The art cave @kooky-the-artist - Tumblr Blog

I always forget there are maga people on tumblr, this doesn’t feel like a website you’d find them on, so to keep them away:

Reblog if your blog is a maga free zone because if it wasn’t clear enough fuck ice, fuck maga, fuck Trump, Fuck Rowling, and fuck all the other bigots I missed

forcekenobi

as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine

forcekenobi

sorry. only semi-related but i simply wasn't ready for "the sun is a distant gorilla". thank you NASA

hyperchaotix

icarus-suraki

greelin

being alive is great because there are so many different vegetables you can sauté. but then there are also the horrors

yves-and-scessernee

with faith and perseverance, one day we will sauté the horrors

so-much-to-read-deactivated2025

half-giant-fighter

wolfythewitch

Saw a tweet about mamdani solving the astrophage crisis and now im just imagining them sending mamdani to space

wolfythewitch

This came to me at 3pm in the afternoon

my-darling-boy

So I had this half lucid dream where I was swimming in a lake with my crush and his friends and we climbed up onto this very low dock that dipped just a little below the water. I thought “Oh I want to hold a water animal!” and what I WANTED was a dolphin, but my brain couldn’t quite conjure the image of a dolphin, nor could I recall the word “dolphin”.

So after much thought as to what a dolphin looked like, a giant banana with floppy banana peel dog ears, banana peel fins, and two beady black eyes hauled itself into my lap from the waters of the lake.

And I remember thinking “... Now wait... something is not quite right with this...”

I sat looking it over for a moment until I realised, “Oh I forgot a tail!” so when I looked down, the creature had a fish tail, and I was Quite Proud of how well I had recalled what a dolphin looked like from memory, and it deserved to be drawn:

the-haiku-bot

And I remember

thinking “… Now wait… something is

not quite right with this…”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

litttleprincess-deactivated2017

Don't ever hesitate. Reblog this. TUMBLR RULE. When you see it, REBLOG IT.

trappedinmyoldways

Depression Hotline: 1-630-482-9696

Suicide Hotline: 1-800-784-8433

LifeLine: 1-800-273-8255

Trevor Project: 1-866-488-7386

Sexuality Support: 1-800-246-7743

Eating Disorders Hotline: 1-847-831-3438

Rape and Sexual Assault: 1-800-656-4673

Grief Support: 1-650-321-5272

Runaway: 1-800-843-5200, 1-800-843-5678, 1-800-621-4000

Exhale: After Abortion Hotline/Pro-Voice: 1-866-4394253

If you ever want to talk, my ask box is always open

jaydove-writes

Please reblog this. I don’t care what your blog’s theme or aesthetic is. This is important.

whylee-wheeler

This is important to reblog for yourself too, not just for others to see it. You never know when something could come up and if you need help it’s right there on your blog

antichristxxxxx

.

≻───── ⋆✩⋆ ─────≺

bredloafluna

please reblog it peeps

arl00100

In case ANYONE needs it. Seriously.

xxangel1x

reblog peeps

h0pe-official

reblog yall please incase anyone needs it

@jello-the-frog @will-grahams-adams-apple @dolls-playhouse @cinammonlavender @pocoloco4nico @that1insomniac @artpnutty @whimsi-s0ul @ant131 @lloveorlustt @saturnatlasiv

@littl3cut3g1rl @sircringey

dolls-playhouse

Reblogging

starspangledmoth

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline also

oldbootbutch

You are allowed to find things hot in theory while also never wanting to actually do them in real life btw. You can get off on whatever wild shit in your imagination and still prefer to be very vanilla in real life. Or not want to have sex at all in real life. You don't owe the universe anything in exchange for your dirty mind.

oldmanstillborn

im going to be talking about the dndads folgers incest commerical parody on my death bed

telomeke

aggot

everyone wants masc carpenter trade until his rough calloused handjob sands your thing down small and smooth as a river stone

verminfang

Thinking about a vampire dude bro who won't drink girl blood- because he's afraid it will estroginise him soy products style- getting trapped in a mental cage when he learns vampire dude who only bites other dudes reads as gay

my0clonic-jerk

cardassiangoodreads

Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have the summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all. (The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)

tjalexandernyc

Laws like this indeed do a lot to stop fascist book censorship. They can also help legally protect librarians from getting fired or harassed for keeping books on the shelves! Some states like Rhode Island have already passed these laws. If you're in a blue state, look up whether you have laws like this on the books. MAYBE your state is trying to get one passed right now, like New York's Freedom to Read bill. call your state elected officials to voice support for it.

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.

kooky-the-artist

Hi as someone who ends up hyperventilating when they count sheep because their breathing forcefully sinks up yea this sucks! For me I veer away form counting exercises and focusing on my chest and ribs expanding but if that's painful, counting objects while breathing tends to cut out the drowning feelings for me.

Also sour candy really helps the effect for some I know, I imagen mint may work the same.

#anxiety relief #coping #Grounding