Early yesterday morning, when I was getting ready for church, it was twenty-six degrees below zero. This would normally "shut all my machinery down", but I continued on my way. When I returned, I dealt with my attitude by taking a nap. This doesn't sound like a success story, but in my case it was indeed.
In the past, having a manic depressive personality meant that my brain chemistry would be out of balance for as long as two weeks. Perhaps longer if I hadn't exercised for awhile. Not that it would have had to have had a specific reason to crash for it truly had a mind of its own. Some years back, in my attempt to deal with this difficulty, I stumbled across this concept. "Change your mind, change your world." This crystalized my fragmented thinking. Why not deal with the mental world mentally?
My target behavior, since brain chemistry really isn't totally in your control, was a quicker turn around time. Less time in the swamp, so to speak.
The movie Beautiful Minds was an inspiration to me. John Nash, who was schizophrenic, won the Nobel Prize for mathematics. Talk about a mental world, this one even produced its own citizens that Mr. Nash could visit at his own leisure. The power of his mind was incredible and yet he had to deny it to sustain himself. This was a pure boot strap operation, hoping against hope.
Dealing with a much smaller brain in my case, MD ( Is that why the wine was called Mad Dog 20-20 ) was a much smaller problem.
When I woke up and commenced carrying wood for the fireplace, I noticed a fair sized icicle coming through my roof. No tail spin today, I just grabbed a spade, and sent that litter bugger crashing.
6 comments:
This is one of my favorite entries thus far. And a great topic most people are afraid to bring up. Instead we make a term "nashing it out" and deal. I quite like the way your brain works. I must say dad.
I like the term "Nashing it out". I never heard that before, descriptive.
Change your mind,change your world really changed MY world Tony! Talk about words to live by. My pschycologist (SP?) friend explains that emotions among other things (movement,language,ect) lays down actual neural pathways in the brain and the more you use them(say negative emotions) the deeper the pathways and the harder they are to change. So we gotta lay down those positive paths!D
One thing I do is "gratitude practice",thinking before I go to sleep about all the things great and small I'm grateful for.
D: The spirit exactly. I never thought of gratitude practice exactly but it is a great idea. It reminds me that the sub conscious takes the last conscious thought and mulls it over and over throughout the night, i.e. those people who tell themselves how tired they are when they go to bed, get to wake up tired because the subconscious has goal directed mechanisms built in that will produce the necessary effect.
Tony,
You do give me some shit to think about.. Nash had nothing on you.. You have been thinking with both sides of your brain for ever!
Thanks Erin, but I never even got into fact that Nash talked about singularity.
Post a Comment