（−＿−；）

Australia || he/they || Obsessed || Really just posting or reblogging anything I feel like || not consistent at tagging || ⚠️ will post adult content sometimes ⚠️

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

[ Insert description here ]

My main:

@be-cunning-and-full-of-tricks · But first they must catch you.

Nature, positive things, nonsensical art, ‘hopecore’ Beware, I don’t post much. I’m trying to get into it more though. So we’ll see.

[lokaror]

GOUGAR CLAIMS COOL ROCK

[ubersaur]

God forbid women do anything

[justpastsaturn]

She had a good time, too

[partywithponies]

My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.

[secretgarden]

[charlesoberonn]

[weavingshaw]

was at the public pool yesterday and i kept looking around at all the women with fat and rolls and stretch marks and discolouration and cellulite and scars and thighs that bounce and bellies that jiggle and it's like wow. literally Everyone has these features that society is trying to convince us are evil and unnatural. idk it just really put things into perspective for me. highly recommend checking out your local public pool

[aximili]

tbh the fact that cats purr was an unnecessary bonus we don't always acknowledge. they're already cute and baby and little and soft and make silly noises and do funny shit. but they also like to cuddle and make a soothing pleasant noise to indicate they are happy when they cuddle you? huge. huge for the human race.

[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.

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

This is why these problems never get helped: because any mismatch between personal experience and what’s supposed to happen is seen as something not being done right.

Breathing exercises didn’t work for me for the longest time because my baseline stress was way too high. It felt exactly like OP described; like I was fighting against my body to force it into the pattern and slowly choking all the while.

I figured out the problem with me was that the underlying attitude to everything that I’d been taught - being raised as a woman, being autistic, being bullied by my parents etc. - was to basically throw away everything my body was communicating and blindly follow whatever the other person was telling me to do. Which was reinforced by the therapist in front of me (a frustratingly close-minded school psychologist) expecting me to do exactly that. She was the expert after all. Like I said; anything wrong is seen as you not doing it right.

So when I’d do breathing exercises no part of me was trying to find calm within myself. Even easing into it like they described above, even doing it by myself, I wasn’t really easing into it but performing how it should be done. I was literally forcing myself to breathe slower and slower because that how easing into it is supposed to go, right?

It felt like every bit of advice from others was reinforcing it, too. Whether imagined or not (I would put money on it being a subconscious societal pressure,) they were all telling me the same thing: you’re not doing it properly. If you want to get better then follow the help we kindly offer to you, and if that’s not working it’s your fault for not trying hard enough.

I get the impression the form of dysregulation I struggle with is very very common, with popular cultural attitudes being what they are. To do with holding onto subconscious tension because some part of you feels like you need to. Like being restrained, contained, tense, is not only the safe option but the right one to be a good person.

The only thing that helped me in the end was to ignore everything everyone else told me, walk out into a forest by myself to physically isolate, and do whatever felt good. Sitting by a creek and staring at the water, or climbing a random ass tree worked way better for my mental health than sitting still and forcing myself to breathe regularly.

And now I have found my own calm I can do the breathing. It’s easier to listen to myself instead of the external pressure to conform now, so it actually helps.

[headspace-hotel]

Okay I have a question about this paragraph

So when I’d do breathing exercises no part of me was trying to find calm within myself. Even easing into it like they described above, even doing it by myself, I wasn’t really easing into it but performing how it should be done. I was literally forcing myself to breathe slower and slower because that how easing into it is supposed to go, right?

What is the alternative supposed to be?

Like I relate REALLY hard to the rest because that's why I kept doing the breathing exercises for so long: I had to be doing the stuff that I was "supposed to" do or else I wouldn't be helped because I wasn't making the effort to get better.

Like, if I went to a therapist about my extreme anxiety and stress, therapist was going to ask if I did breathing exercises. If I said no, they were going to make me do breathing exercises.

Eventually, I started off with new therapists by saying in the Very First Session that I wanted No Fucking Breathing Exercises, I've done them forever and they don't fucking do anything (previous therapist would not believe me on this). Which, they gave me other stuff that also didn't work. Which increased my feeling that I was doing everything wrong somehow.

But...idk. It seems like there is some kind of mental component to the breathing exercises that I'm not picking up on? maybe?

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

Honestly, from my experience the best thing in that situation would be to forgo the traditional breathing exercises for a while. Instead find something different that actually calms you down.

What helped best was all the sitting by creeks and climbing trees I mentioned before.

It’s difficult to explain because it’d be totally dependent on someone’s character. It has to help you, and it has to be something casual you don’t force yourself into.

I’m talking anything that helps you, no matter how weird; curling under a blanket in a dark room and rocking back and forth, wandering around a field for hours imagining a childish story with dragons and dinosaurs, escaping to a creek and staring at it for ages unmoving, taking a sick day and pacing back and forth in the kitchen. Etcetera. I’m a weird person.

I found the big things, like going outside, work in the long-term because they easily decompress me from a week’s worth of shit. Then I fit smaller stuff in like maintenance doses. If you’re creative enough there are so many things you can fit into a lunch break. Back before I did delivery driving I would hide in the back footwell of my car on my breaks and watch embarrassing asmr videos under a flat sheet.

It really worked too. I usually felt significantly (if not completely) better before I had to get up again. It was like half the relief came from just.. letting myself do what I actually wanted to do. It didn’t always work, mind you. There was a lot of trial and error. I find the best activities are ones that involve the sensory and the body, but casually; focussing too hard on it just led to “I am self soothing now. I am soothed. I am. Calming. Down.” … I would start forcing it again.

If you don’t know what would calm you down because nothing sounds like it works, try thinking of what you enjoyed as a kid. I started drawing and taking “imagination walks” because of something I read online about being the same person throughout your life. The stuff that calmed you down at 10 probably still would. Just adjust it for an adult.

If they’re anything like my self-soothing activities they’re probably gonna be weird as hell, but I think that’s actually a good sign because it shows you’re doing what you want and literally nothing else.

Eventually, I tried breathing exercises again and discovered they do help now. I think it was a mix of already being practiced at calming down (if that makes sense), being more confident in doing things for me only, and having less pressure because no therapist was breathing over my shoulder with expectations about how well it was supposed to work. I could breathe for a bit, not really do it ‘properly,’ only kind of feel better, and that that would be okay.

[nitw]

*jumps up and down waving my hands and yelling in a crowd* DISCORD WAS NEVER MEANT TO REPLACE FORUMS AND WIKIS!!! IT'S JUST EMBELLISHED CHATROOMS WITH MULTIPLAYER GAMING FEATURES AND LOOTBOXES AND SHIT!!! PLEASE PUT FAQS AND MESSAGE BOARDS OR AT LEAST A DIRECT EMAIL-BASED SUPPORT SYSTEM ON YOUR WEBSITE!!! 1GB NEOCITIES DOMAIN ZERO DOLLARS

[childmagazine]

Larrabee State Park, near Bellingham, Washington, May, 1973

[dogpuppy]

[amanitaphalloides]

when heath ledger refused to participate in brokeback mountain skits and said “it’s not a joke to me” that’s how i feel when fast car by tracy chapman is alluded to in almost any context

[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.

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

This is why these problems never get helped: because any mismatch between personal experience and what’s supposed to happen is seen as something not being done right.

Breathing exercises didn’t work for me for the longest time because my baseline stress was way too high. It felt exactly like OP described; like I was fighting against my body to force it into the pattern and slowly choking all the while.

I figured out the problem with me was that the underlying attitude to everything that I’d been taught - being raised as a woman, being autistic, being bullied by my parents etc. - was to basically throw away everything my body was communicating and blindly follow whatever the other person was telling me to do. Which was reinforced by the therapist in front of me (a frustratingly close-minded school psychologist) expecting me to do exactly that. She was the expert after all. Like I said; anything wrong is seen as you not doing it right.

So when I’d do breathing exercises no part of me was trying to find calm within myself. Even easing into it like they described above, even doing it by myself, I wasn’t really easing into it but performing how it should be done. I was literally forcing myself to breathe slower and slower because that how easing into it is supposed to go, right?

It felt like every bit of advice from others was reinforcing it, too. Whether imagined or not (I would put money on it being a subconscious societal pressure,) they were all telling me the same thing: you’re not doing it properly. If you want to get better then follow the help we kindly offer to you, and if that’s not working it’s your fault for not trying hard enough.

I get the impression the form of dysregulation I struggle with is very very common, with popular cultural attitudes being what they are. To do with holding onto subconscious tension because some part of you feels like you need to. Like being restrained, contained, tense, is not only the safe option but the right one to be a good person.

The only thing that helped me in the end was to ignore everything everyone else told me, walk out into a forest by myself to physically isolate, and do whatever felt good. Sitting by a creek and staring at the water, or climbing a random ass tree worked way better for my mental health than sitting still and forcing myself to breathe regularly.

And now I have found my own calm I can do the breathing. It’s easier to listen to myself instead of the external pressure to conform now, so it actually helps.

[lucy-is-bored]

hot tip vpn to andorra on your phone before going on youtube because there's no ads there

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

Or Albania!

[whatinthefugckingsheeett]

You know it would be so easy to stop using plastic bags. So bloody easy. Every business in my whole state is required to give you paper bags only. Not a single use plastic shopping bag in sight. And it works. Come on it would be so easy to do it to everything else.

[moveslikekeithrichards]

when i say “that reminds me” & theres zero connection you just have to take my word for it theres no time to explain

[nickyflowers]

we need Internet 2: an internet for people who give a shit and like talking to real people. Internet 1 can be for LLMs and Mastercard

[andreweatspussy111]

Is this guy bothering you? cuz I could bother you too but in a different better way