49 karma · joined September 17, 2021
Something similar (although likely less severe) happened to my wife in a not too distant past. More or less from one day to the next she started feeling very very unsafe, thought people were after her and conspiring to take away our child. She started writing protective symbols on the walls and doors of our house and felt she was talking to ghosts. I would find her yelling at passersby from our flat window. No one in her life, including me, felt like a safe person anymore.
To me it felt like this foreign power had invaded our life and started ripping everything to shreds. I honestly have never been so stressed in my life.
Luckily we did find our way out of it. My wife was on ADHD medication at the time (dexamfetamine) and we had been going through a rough time our marriage. Covid had just happened and we had a 3yo son. I think by the time she started developing delusions she probably hadn't slept well for months.
Her mother came to live with us for a couple of weeks, we stopped the dexamfetamine and we focused on just making our life as low stress and loving as possible.
I am honestly so grateful that we managed to navigate our way out of this together and that we are fine now. I can't give you much by way of advice. The position you are in is unfair and whatever you do to help your friend is commendable.
One thing I realized is that once the human mind is stressed enough it becomes a sort of runaway nuclear reactor, stuck in a cycle of every more stressful thoughts. The kind of behaviors you will see in that situation are hard to witness, and the best thing you can do as a friend is to provide safety, even when the other person sees the opposite. Living together with this person might not be a workable or safe situation for you or for him, and unfair as it might be you might end up in a position where you have to make this call. Your friend might see this as a betrayal. Be compassionate to yourself and your friend in this moment. Know you are trying to make the best out of an impossible situation. Understand you are not in control and that you are afraid to do the wrong thing and that the fact that you feel this way is what makes you a good friend. Best of luck!
The interesting thing to observe is to see in real time the metabolic spectrum of the foods we consume. Liquid sugars cause glucose spikes within 6 minutes. Solid carbs 30-120 minutes depending on carb complexity etc. Proteins 3h+. Fats can be six hours or more.
The thing is there are a variety of insulins available, some of which are rapid acting and others act more slowly. So to keep my son in range with multiple daily injections you are playing this game of giving him the right mix of foods where his carb digestion matches the profile of his rapid acting insulin.
Pizza is an interesting case study. It is by far the most carb rich deal we've tried and it is almost impossible to manage. With so many carbs it's hard to get the insulin dosage right, and once he is high, once he is coming down from that the digestion of the fats kicks in and he remains high through the night.
I think it would be a great thing for people to wear even just for a couple of weeks.
You see, screens are really great at capturing kids attention and it will give you a moment of peace, but you pay the price the moment you want to turn the tv off to leave the house/eat dinner.
The worst part of it is that screens allow you to be emotionally quite detached from each other.
I think the educational value of an ipad is also very much exagerated. Learning for young children is really a full body experience and i dont think an ipad is a value add until much later in life (possibly never).
That said, parenting is not something you figure out before you start really. Kids will grow, you will grow and the balance will constantly shift. The most important thing is giving your children plenty of thoughtful attention throughout life..
What we should try to do is write a tool which can provide a sort of chatGPT integrated ide where a dev can
- specify an overall goal of varying complexity. - ask chatGPT to split this up in smaller subtasks - iterate down the tree until chatgpt decides a task is specific enough for implementation to start - ask chatGPT to write tests verifying task completion - then initiate a feedback loop where gpt can suggest code, run the tests (in a containerized setting), evaluate if output is as expected, and amend changes - once tests pass, commit, move onto the next ticket.
Programming then becomes a process of guided decomposition with humans mainly guiding the process along.
- Try going to bed early every night for a week. Going to bed early simply means early enough so you can wake up at 7.30 in the morning without the need of an alarm. - Find a form of exercise you like and do the absolute minimal amount of it needed to get some noticeable positive benefit. I have done 20k runs at a decent pace at various occasions, but I find that I can get 90% of the health benefit by doing a light 20m jog. The trick is making it so untaxing, and so easy to simply do that you can manage to do it repeatedly without relying on too much motivation or inner drive. - Try and give some extra attention to what you ingest into your body. Make some time to cook a meal for yourself (and some friends) and enjoy it. - Spend some time thinking about the things you take pleasure in and engage in those things. Have a glass of wine, smoke a cigarette and find someone interesting to talk to, put some music on, whatever it is just don't overthink it al so much.
With some time you might find you forgot all about this rut, and if it persists, maybe it's true you are not pursuing the right things, but hey that's also just part of the journey of life and you are a student so you should be examining these things right now.
That said switching to nose breathing is not as easy for everyone. Chronic mouthbreathers often have clogged sinuses and a sensitivity to allergens. Making sure the air quality in your bedroom is good helps and there is a ton of other things you can do. Do checkout 'the oxygen advantage' youtube channel for some in depth material: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=oxygen+advantag...
To give you an example, I recently gave myself a huge energy boost at hardly any cost by just improving my breathing and sleep. This is what I did. 1. Started going to bed early enough so no alarm was needed. 2. Bought air filter for my bedroom (300$). Fixed a bunch of allergy problems and improved my sleep with no added effort on my part. 3. Noticed I often wake up tired with a dry mouth. Did some research on healthy breathing patters, particularly at night, and found that I was probably mouth breathing. Fixed this problem by taping my lips at night for 10 days in a row (sounds weird, actually no big deal). I now wake up after 7 hours of sleep feeling fully awake.
The energy and clarity I gained from these small habits then actually gave me the space to try and build an exercise habit gradually. Because my schedule is such that exercise needs to take place in the morning this is helped by feeling more energised and awake in the morning. I also noticed that because my body is better oxygenated in the morning i have far fewer aches and pains than I used to.
The point is that there are some changes in life, like exercise or overhauling your diet, that, while undoubtedly beneficial, require a level of clarity and mental focus to have a chance to be successful. If those prerequisites aren't met it just becomes another stick to beat yourself with. Just examine yourself with kindness and see what the easiest way is to give yourself a boost. Good luck!
EDIT: typos