Don't conserve what little you have during lockdown. Generate more.

When you're low on energy, low on morale, low on self-belief, just low in general....it might seem like the best strategy is to conserve what few resources you have left for those parts of yourself you think are the most important or valuable. 

But you only have to look at how the The Conservatives operate to realise why replicating their mistakes and applying austerity to our own bodies will never leave us feeling better.

You have to invest your resources into things which are real and here, now. Not promises of what you'll get in the future. You have to invest your resources in things which are natural but also feed everything else, making the pursuit of dreams and ambitions possible to begin with. Investing in the living environment around us in order to help it make more of itself to nourish others.

Your Anxiety Is Telling You Where Your New Strengths Lie

Your anxiety is telling you where your new strengths lie.

When I was at uni I would often walk into the campus library with my rucksack all packed with the day's study materials, find the nearest available computer to sit at, and just stare at the screen blankly for what felt like 2 hours, but was probably closer to 30 minutes. Occasionally I'd scroll through the day's news and current affairs headlines before preparing to head home, feeling like a total fraud, and an embarrassment to my friends and family, who had such high hopes for me.

The dark void I carried around in my chest, a black hole from which all light was unable to escape, would begin pulling my vacant heart down, as I sat on the bus back towards my halls of residence, wishing to never arrive. All attempts to prevent my heart from free-falling through self-administered pep talks, always failing - making the rushes of despair and the urge to sabotage myself beyond all repair increasingly alluring. Open planned libraries were the worst. It felt as though the only direction safe for me to look in without being stripped naked by the scrutinizing gazes of my fellow students was at the floor. But what do you expect when you're smoking tons of weed every single day!!!

That period of my life I think was bordering on full on depression to be honest, and I was only able to feel sad about the state I was in long after I'd begun to get better. Sadness, for me, feels like a temporary sense of loss for something, and so I didn't feel sad for myself at the time because I didn't have anything left I could lose.

In order to stave the ominous pull of depression manifesting, I feel like sometimes people just have to throw themselves without thinking into the deep end of their current anxieties - against the wishes of their protesting ego, in order to realise that they do actually possess the strength of will to overcome the adversity they are in or soon must face.

A lot of my anxiety over the years has stemmed precisely from not wanting to realise this fact - from not wanting to find out if I would sink or swim should I decide to take it on. I would cling to the delusion that by choosing to remain in limbo, in a state of perpetual inaction via the means of procrastination - by refusing to enter into a confrontation with my anxiety, I could stay protected from its debilitating effects. But what ended up happening was the complete opposite to what I'd hoped for. The anxiety created by denying that I needed to take action simply lay dormant within me - silently growing in its intensity, until eventually becoming a new, and even more corrosive source of anxiety which dwarfed the original.

FFS!!!

Thankfully, after thousands of failures, denials and refusals to act, I began to accept the lesson which had been staring at me all along. The best way in which I could become stronger was by flipping the script about what anxiety actually means to me. Anxiety is simply a signal informing me where I must apply myself next. And I'm finding that the rewards from conquering the challenges that confront me when I locate its origin always outweigh any benefits I thought I would have obtained had my anxiety decided one day to magically fuck off and disappear forever!

Anxiety is like a loot box in a computer game, in the sense that if you dare to smash it, you get rewarded with additional life skills, weapons and bonus health to aid you on your quest, because you dared to take the risk. And it's all for free too!!!

And so the more anxieties you have, the more potential strengths there are for you to acquire. You just have to take the plunge, and build up your plunge taking muscles over time. Don't think too much. Just leap into your anxiety and start kicking its pathetic little ass as soon as your feet touch the ground!  

Nothing good ever comes from trying to avoid things that are located inside your head because wherever you go the bastard just keeps following you around! Anxiety and shadows have a lot in common in this sense.

  

Mindfulness Has Now Become A Tool Of The Oligarchy And State

"I'm sorry we had to evict you without notice. As a gesture of goodwill, a link to a best-selling online mindfulness course has been attached below to help ease any anxieties you may be experiencing due to you having no Plan B".

Mindfulness now operates in much the same way as satire does - as a tool consumers use as a defence mechanism and pressure release valve for their anxieties. It's becoming increasingly noticeable though that private business as well as the State, are employing mindfulness to quell the rage, anguish and frustration caused by the injustices they are responsible for which could lead to civil unrest.

How Mindfulness Privatised A Social Problem

Reality Softeners

It was a lot easier in the past to label cool looking people socialising with their buddies while wearing sunglasses indoors, as being pretentious. That was until I reaped the unintended benefits of forgetting to charge my bluetooth earphones before leaving the house, and then finding that they acted as exquisite reality softeners; a device for when the intensity of real life needs the bite taken out of it.

Glasses that not only allow us to see, but allow us to see less. Earphones used in order to allow us to hear less. Many people these days use their mobile phones in order to not have to talk to others, and will pretend there is someone on the other end of the line to reduce the anxiety caused by having to wait alone in public for a friend to arrive. I've had many great conversations with myself over the years as the actual friend I'd be waiting for took forever to get there, and my phantom phone friend would find themselves obliged to probe deeper and deeper into the minutiae of gibberish I'd be spouting at them.

It got me thinking about the class of technologies which return once again to their former evolution when they are without power. Like escalators robbed of electricity, that suddenly find their hypnotic majesty has been taken away from them without warning, and have been forced to return to their former lives as excessively ornate stairs. This must be a crushing fall from grace for something which knows it is capable of so much more.

Choosing to use emojis to react to emotional stories we see in our news feeds because we find it difficult to articulate ourselves as we would like, is degrading our ability to communicate effectively, which in turn is affecting our mental health and sense of personal autonomy

If you happen to read something in your news feed which leaves you feeling angry or upset and are compelled to say something in the comments, but then worry about saying it right or upsetting someone, or people misunderstanding what you mean and then attacking you - don't trade all of the anxiety in wanting to speak your truth for a convenient emoji instead - because soon enough you'll have forgotten how it feels to articulate your grievances through words to any satisfying degree at all - and the next time your emotions are stirred by injustices taking place in the world it will be even more difficult to muster the confidence to say what you really want to say, making it more likely you will choose the easy way out once more - taking the entirety of your feelings and emotions in that moment and replacing them with 1 of only 6 possible options - I agree - I love - I'm amazed - I hate - I'm sad - I'm angry

We're much more complex than emojis allow us to express, and deep down we know it. It seems as though the continued denial and inaction to improve our capacity to describe our reality is becoming yet another increasing source of frustration for us. And if a backlash to the inherent lack of precision of emojis does eventually become a source of collective distress, I would not be surprised at all if companies like Facebook responded to the outcry by introducing yet more refined emojis capable of allowing us to 'articulate' ourselves with greater 'nuance'.  

Not being able to express our sentiments exactly how we experience them, or not feeling free enough to talk openly about sensitive topics that may require us to be generous and kind to each other - isn't good for our collective mental health going forward. The system itself in which we communicate (Facebook) encourages us to be less nuanced in our thoughts through the crude alternative of emojis.  

Emojis are to language what McDonald's is to food. They never fully satisfy, but they do at the time.  

We can only be as expressive as the tools that we use will allow, and being able to crystallise in words precisely how we feel at a certain point in time truly is one of the best ways to externalise and then look squarely at, whatever it is that might be troubling or exciting us inside.

So down with emojis and alphabets FTW!!! :D :D :D  

I'm troubled by the culture of fear I see growing around me, when I look at my friends and read their concerns over consequences of them expressing themselves honestly online. I worry about the long-term conditioning and self-limiting effects this will have on them. From what I can see, a lot more people are choosing to self-censor in order to minimise the chances of anxiety inducing responses from others, and for some, even the idea of getting into a debate online these days is leading some to become filled with anxiety. If having a debate online in front of an audience feels like a battle, then the ability to articulate yourself as you would like surely is a great weapon to have in your arsenal.  

Reflecting on this last point a little further it seems as though one of the precursory factors which causes people to avoid engaging in online discussions stems precisely from them perceiving online debates as battles. If you use war analogies and metaphors as the lenses to help you make sense of discussions then you've already admitted to yourself that conflict of some sort is to be expected. But if you choose to see discussions as group problem solving exercises, where everyone present is a free participant able to contribute an idea or (just as important) counter an idea in order for the collective train of thought to eventually arrive at the truth, then it may help us see others more favourably and with less preconceived judgments.