To counter.......................

 

.......................................perfectionism:

1. Mistakes don’t make you a failure. They make you a learner.

2. Achievements are not a symbol of your worth. They’re a snapshot of your performance.

3. Beating yourself up doesn’t make you stronger; it leaves you bruised. Don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to a good friend.

4. It’s impossible to please everyone. Decide whose opinion matters to you—and whose doesn’t.

5. Character is not revealed by how many setbacks you face. It’s forged by how you face them.

6. People gauge your competence mostly by your hits, not your misses.

7. The objective is not to be the best; it’s to get better. The person you’re competing with is your past self, and the bar you’re setting is for your future self.

8. Our biggest regrets aren’t actions—they’re inactions. Don’t set yourself up to wish you’d taken more chances.

9. Healthy goals include two targets: an aspirational result and an acceptable outcome. If you fall anywhere between them, you haven’t failed.

10. Success is not a straight line. It’s a squiggly line.

downstream......................

 

And that’s the funny thing: so many of our problems aren't even the actual problem. They are the downstream effect of some deeper, unseen problem. And the work to actually fix the problem usually has way less to do with fixing and way more with simply learning how to see it clearly in the first place.

-Mark Manson, from this episode

A challenge..................

 

     Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become.  Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being.  We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill.

-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Normal.....................

 

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. 

-Albert Camus

We shouldn't forget, as we learned in school, that normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

to heal........................

 In order to heal the stark divisions in our country, we need to approach one another with compassion and understanding. It’s baffling to see how many members of both parties have never taken the time to understand the other point of view and learned to say, “I disagree, but I understand.” This is vital for the future of constructive discourse in our nation.

Christine Schueckler, from here

wellness............................

 

image via

                A library is a hospital for the mind

-anonymous (quoted by Toffler)

Get your daily..........................

 

...............................................dosage here.

hijacks...............................

      Our brains are special, fascinating miracles of the natural world, but they are also organs of the body.  They are flesh and water and electricity, and the fact that they are the seat of our thoughts does not negate their physicality or susceptibility to sickness.  Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.

     If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more of itself, you wouldn't talk ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you?  If you have a reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn't measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you?  Can you imagine considering chickenpox to be an indictment of your life or evidence that you are lesser than other people?

     No.

     So how is it that our self-worth and the value of our personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that depression sufferers neither willfully create nor invite into our lives?  Depression is not a mirror held up to our identities, nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of our essential selves.

     It's the flu.  It's a rash.

     It's the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.

-Jarod K. Anderson

Frugal versus..............................

 ..........................................independent.

Hugs are pretty important....................

 But, trust me, money is no substitute for mental health. I would rather be poor and happy, than subject myself to constant stress in a work environment. You will not starve if you opt for a solo practice. You probably won't have luxuries that others have; but, in the end, spend your time developing a happy relationship with another human being. Your money can't hug you in the middle of the night.

-Rick Georges

diagnosed........................

 "He was never actually diagnosed as a kid," his mother says, "but he says he has Asperger's. and I'm sure he's right."  The condition was exacerbated by his childhood trauma.  Whenever he would later feel bullied or threatened, his close friend Antonio Garcias says, the PTSD from his childhood would hijack his limbic system, the part of the brain that controls emotional responses.

     As a result, he was bad a picking up social cues.  "I took people literally when they said something." he says. "and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really mean."  He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding.

     Like all psychological traits, Musk's were complex and individualized.  He could be very emotional, especially about his own children, and he felt acutely the anxiety that comes from being alone.  But he didn't have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.  He was not hardwired to have empathy.  Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

practice self-compassion.........

 People who practice self-compassion experience lower levels of depression and anxiety. When we know it’s normal to experience problems, they don’t overwhelm us. Everything gets easier when you remember we all have bad days, and we all occasionally screw up when trying to make them better. You’re a “work in progress.” We all are.

-as excerpted from this Barking Up The Wrong Tree post

Walk....................

 

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

-Soren Kierkegaard, as quoted here

the critical skill of unlearning.....

 via

a prey.........................

 Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

-Baruch de Spinoza

Mental health.........................

 

Well, tell us how you really feel..................

 I really want to send our public health officials walking across a live minefield wearing blindfolds, so that they can get a sense of how they are providing us with information that would be helpful.

-Arnold Kling, from this post

Yea, but this sounds really hard.........

The way to rob the narrative managers of their ability to manipulate our sense of normalcy is to create an image of a sane and healthy world for ourselves to hold onto at all times, and to make that image into our own personal sense of what normal is. By having a vivid picture of what a sane and healthy world would look like in your mind, the false normal that the propagandists are trying to sell you will have no purchase.

-as culled from here

And don't forget, as we've said here many times before, normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

A prerequisite for.....................

.................................successfully navigating the 21st Century:

"an immune boosting sense of humour."

-Nicholas Bate

On mental health...................

“Get out of your head. It’s a bad neighborhood.”

-Jennifer Pastiloff