You are my sweetest downfall - I loved you first, I loved you first...
Subject line care of Regina Spektor.
I LOVE my new therapist, and because I actually trust her (imagine! trusting one's therapist! ...eesh!), I've started telling her things more or less in the ways that I want to say them. And some of those things are sweeping generalizations about the state of the world. ...what?! I read a lot! So I hope that I might be able to start actually writing these things down because I believe in them very strongly to the point that these are things that I consider *to be true.* And I won't remember them all (because gosh!) but I at least want to start. Also... this all comes from like, decades of random research - I could find the studies, but... whew, that's gonna be a lot of Googling.
A smaller thing that I thought of was spanking: for the longest time, I was very like, "I have never raised a child, I have no idea how that goes, and it also sounds like the most stressful thing ever," but then a bunch of research came out that pointed VERY clearly to: absolutely not, never, and indeed yelling affects people poorly too! And... that makes all the sense in the world, actually! And it does not result in better behavior or character or anything, and in fact links more clearly with measurable brain damage and behavioral problems. So, the whole spanking debate? It's... over, basically; only one side has evidence behind it.
This is one of the things I was telling my therapist about recently: every human has a big germ ecosystem, and in fact there are more germs than there is human because the germs go on for a foot or two (hence why "six feet apart" is the COVID rule - your germs need a fair amount of space to roam). It's some wild number like 99.97% of those germs are just something that feeds on something our body makes and they're completely harmless, we just have a symbiotic relationship. Thinking about it more broadly is fun and strange, especially when thinking about what "you" means in this context.
OH! Right, that's the main thing I was talking about regarding COVID: they've done studies on people socializing via phonecall, text, internet, cam, and in person and they're just generally fascinating! But the biggest takeaway was that every form of socializing was beneficial in some way - alleviating loneliness, elevating mood, reducing stress, that kind of thing, but only in-person socialization granted these MAJOR physiological benefits. When you socialize in-person with someone (and not in any other method), your heart rate slows, oxytocin levels increase, cortisol levels decrease - like, basically everything you read about happening when you pet a dog, and it's really good for you. But I can't stress this enough: only when the people involved were in the same physical location.
I LOVE my new therapist, and because I actually trust her (imagine! trusting one's therapist! ...eesh!), I've started telling her things more or less in the ways that I want to say them. And some of those things are sweeping generalizations about the state of the world. ...what?! I read a lot! So I hope that I might be able to start actually writing these things down because I believe in them very strongly to the point that these are things that I consider *to be true.* And I won't remember them all (because gosh!) but I at least want to start. Also... this all comes from like, decades of random research - I could find the studies, but... whew, that's gonna be a lot of Googling.
A smaller thing that I thought of was spanking: for the longest time, I was very like, "I have never raised a child, I have no idea how that goes, and it also sounds like the most stressful thing ever," but then a bunch of research came out that pointed VERY clearly to: absolutely not, never, and indeed yelling affects people poorly too! And... that makes all the sense in the world, actually! And it does not result in better behavior or character or anything, and in fact links more clearly with measurable brain damage and behavioral problems. So, the whole spanking debate? It's... over, basically; only one side has evidence behind it.
This is one of the things I was telling my therapist about recently: every human has a big germ ecosystem, and in fact there are more germs than there is human because the germs go on for a foot or two (hence why "six feet apart" is the COVID rule - your germs need a fair amount of space to roam). It's some wild number like 99.97% of those germs are just something that feeds on something our body makes and they're completely harmless, we just have a symbiotic relationship. Thinking about it more broadly is fun and strange, especially when thinking about what "you" means in this context.
OH! Right, that's the main thing I was talking about regarding COVID: they've done studies on people socializing via phonecall, text, internet, cam, and in person and they're just generally fascinating! But the biggest takeaway was that every form of socializing was beneficial in some way - alleviating loneliness, elevating mood, reducing stress, that kind of thing, but only in-person socialization granted these MAJOR physiological benefits. When you socialize in-person with someone (and not in any other method), your heart rate slows, oxytocin levels increase, cortisol levels decrease - like, basically everything you read about happening when you pet a dog, and it's really good for you. But I can't stress this enough: only when the people involved were in the same physical location.