#spilled truth

[colepaxton]

How To Actually Stop Scrolling So Much!!

⎪Track how much time you're actually spending on your phone for one week without changing anything first. The data is almost always more confronting than the estimate. Start with the honest number before you try to change it.

⎪Put the phone in a different room when you're doing something that matters. Not face down next to you. Out of the room. The presence of it reduces your cognitive capacity even when you're not using it. Remove the presence.

⎪Replace the scroll with something that requires your hands. Cooking, drawing, writing, stretching, building something. The reach for the phone fills the space where nothing else has been placed. Place something else.

⎪Identify what you're actually trying to get when you pick it up. Connection. Stimulation. Distraction from discomfort. Knowing what the phone is substituting for tells you what to actually address.

⎪Make the first thirty minutes of your morning and the last thirty minutes before sleep phone-free. Two things improve simultaneously. The morning and the sleep. Both are worth it.

⎪Unfollow accounts that consistently make you feel worse about your own life. Your feed is an environment. Environments shape your mood and your self-perception. You are allowed to design yours.

[colepaxton]

How To Actually Have A Better Morning!!

〰 Protect the first thirty minutes before anything requires something of you. Before the messages. Before the email. Before the news. That window, kept consistently for yourself, changes the quality of everything that follows it.

〰 Drink water before anything else. Before coffee, before food, before you look at anything. Your body has been without it for hours. Give it what it needs first before you make demands of it.

〰 Move your body in some way before the day claims you. Even five minutes. Ten minutes of stretching on the floor counts. The body that has been moved thinks differently from the body that hasn't been moved since yesterday.

〰 Stop checking your phone for the first ten minutes after waking. The first input of the day sets something for the hours that follow. Choose what sets it instead of defaulting.

〰 Do one thing for yourself in the morning that isn't functional. The specific music. The coffee made properly and tasted. The five minutes outside. Something that signals the day has begun as yours before it becomes everyone else's.

〰 Give yourself more time than you think you need. The morning that is chronically rushed is not a morning that belongs to you. Leave earlier, wake up earlier, schedule less into the pre-work hours. The morning needs space to actually be a morning.

[colepaxton]

How to stop overthinking!!

〰 Recognize that overthinking is almost never thinking. It is anxiety wearing the costume of thoroughness. Real thinking moves toward a conclusion. Overthinking circles the same content indefinitely. If nothing new is emerging after twenty minutes, you are not thinking. You are running.

〰 Write the thought down and close the notebook. The loop runs partly because your brain is trying to hold the thought while also thinking about it. Externalizing it onto paper completes something. The thing written down is no longer the thing you have to keep holding.

〰 Set a decision deadline and mean it. Open-ended questions stay open forever. Name the point at which you will decide with whatever information you have and treat that commitment as real. The overthinking feeds on the absence of a closing time.

〰 Ask what the realistic outcome is. Not the catastrophic one your brain keeps modeling. The actual most likely scenario. Your threat detection system is consistently generating worst cases and presenting them as predictions. They are not predictions. They are possibilities. Usually unlikely ones.

〰 Take one small action toward the thing you're overthinking. Action interrupts the loop better than any mental strategy. The moment you move, the relationship to the stuck thought changes. Motion is the circuit breaker.

〰 Stop seeking more opinions past a certain point. Two or three perspectives is information. Seven is noise wearing the costume of due diligence. At some point you have enough to decide. More input is more delay dressed up as carefulness.

〰 Accept that certainty is not on offer for most things that matter. The resolution you're looking for through more thinking is not available that way. At some point you decide with what you have and adjust as you go.

[colepaxton]

How to actually follow through on what you say you're going to do!!

〰 Make the commitment specific and time-bound. Not I will work on this more but I will do thirty minutes on Tuesday at 7pm. The vague commitment has no anchor and floats away. The specific one has somewhere to land.

〰 Tell one person. Not for pressure in a punishing way. Because the commitment that exists only inside your head is different from the one that someone else now knows about. Saying it out loud makes it real in a different way.

〰 Make the first step embarrassingly small. Not start the project but open the folder. Not begin the routine but put on the shoes. The barrier is almost never the full action. It is the starting. Make starting tiny.

〰 Schedule the recovery when you miss rather than when you succeed. The question after breaking a commitment is not why did I fail but when exactly am I returning. Same day if possible. Tomorrow if not. The return matters more than the streak.

〰 Remove the decisions required to start. The version of you at the moment of commitment and the version of you when the commitment comes due have different levels of motivation. Design the environment for the less motivated version. Remove every barrier in advance.

〰 Reduce the number of commitments you make. The person who follows through on five things is building a different relationship with themselves than the person who makes twenty commitments and follows through on twelve. Quality of commitment beats quantity.

〰 Track the follow-through over time. Not to punish the misses. To build the evidence of your own reliability. The accumulation of times you did what you said changes how you think about what you say.

[avemotherlilith]

“She’s such a liar and fake” no bby you heard lies about me and created a whole parasocial persona for me based on said rumors 💋

[colepaxton]

Memory science will make you question everything you thought you knew!!

— Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Every time you remember something you are rebuilding it from components, not retrieving it intact. That sentence should change how you think about your own certainty.

— The reconstruction incorporates your current emotional state, your current beliefs, and everything you've learned since the original event. The memory that feels most vivid and certain is often the one most thoroughly revised.

— False memories are not a rare pathology. They are a normal feature of a system that was designed to update rather than to preserve. You have confident detailed memories of things that didn't happen the way you remember them.

— Eyewitness testimony is one of the least reliable forms of evidence available and also one of the most persuasive to juries. These two facts together have contributed to an enormous number of wrongful convictions.

— The emotional intensity of a memory is not correlated with its accuracy. Flashbulb memories, the vivid detailed memories of significant events, are not more accurate than ordinary memories. They just feel more real.

— Sleep is when memories consolidate. The learning that happens before adequate sleep is retained at a fraction of the rate of learning before adequate sleep. The all-nighter is neurologically counterproductive.

— The act of remembering changes the memory. Each retrieval makes the memory briefly malleable before it reconsolidates. The memory you access most often is the most changed from the original.

— Therapy that works with memory is not changing the past. It is changing the relationship to the reconstruction and that relationship change has real measurable effects on the present.

[dreams-encapsulated-in-glamour]

Gender Identity

Thinking about how being queer really does impact my life. I am generally someone who exists as genderless, and it does affect how I want to be perceived. I had a situation at work today where my coworker said, "I thought to myself, "excuse me, sir!" when I saw the trash" (I was about to take out the trash as the last part of my job), and at first I did my general "OH! I am so sorry! I will do that, already planned on it, I will go and do that now and I am so so sorry for not doing it", and then after doing it, and finishing the last aspect of closing down my section of the shop, I had a second to breath, and I realised that I really felt not okay, and that once I reflected on the whole "excuse me, sir" thing, It was that I was percieved. As a man, and that was not feeling good within my body. I have not felt good about being perceived recently; I am definitely feeling the effects of my family perceiving me in that way (Man, not even masculine).

I do not like to be perceived most of the time, and if I am, it's something...not exactly aligning with anything. Very liminal space-y.

Anyway. I am now dealing with those thoughts and a very sore body.

Night.

[words-and-whispers]

I hate your resentment but mine defends yours you carry.