Yes I support efforts to help people stay positive and hopeful. But it’s still the case that suicide is an acceptable response to pain. Suicide can only be seen as a last resort. By far the main victim of suicide is the suicide victim themselves. They’ll inevitably be the ones who’ll have to grieve the most for the imminent loss of their own life, past experiences and memories of friends before their suicide. It’s not the business of other people to judge them. We don’t know what their final thoughts and feelings were like.
The brain can be a mystery where pure metaphysical challenges can fail in a person's subconscious mind. So it's not necessarily about a lack of faith in a religious context. It sounds strange but many philosophical conundrums contain paradoxes that relate directly to human life and cannot always be resolved in our limited and humble lives. Mental illnesses aren't always philosophical in appearance but they're deeply rooted in how our emotions deal with the absurdity of existence. A God who allows evil would have no choice but to allow suicide even if it can be deemed evil. People who are pre-occupied with other work pursuits might be well-advised to avoid over-thinking life's mysteries in case it spirals downwards. When certain religious scholars criticise suicides in their own faith group they forget that the religious victims may have been beleaguered by peripheral doubts in their faith. The victims may have still abided by the central tenets of a faith like the existence of God. However even a secondary belief like hell could destabilise a believer. For example believing in a long-lasting version of hell by an amoral God could delude a religious person that their mental illness was an accidental version of hell where suicide was the only escape. Evil people often don't believe in hell such that the belief could easily lead to friendly fire so to speak. Hell might be a supernatural weapon if it exists when you die but the mere belief in hell during the medieval era while they were still alive on Earth was actually used as a paranormal weapon against sinful people. After all the brain is physical such that any minor aspect of the faith is still extreme relative to a materialistic worldview. Pluralism of multiple faiths that each contain rival doctrine is itself far beyond the capacity of any individual to comprehend yet is still physically predictable. As such any inclusive religion could ironically descend into mental illness given the extreme devotion of each faith. The psyche of a pluralistic individual of both Islam and Christianity may very well implode given the contradictions! Religious activists who criticise fellow religious suicide victims as opposed to atheistic suicides would simply pressure them to hide their own body in a natural environment so as to be reported missing. Atheistic people might not care less about religious criticism such that being cruel to be kind to nonbelievers doesn't make sense. That is to say attacking atheistic suicides might only end up insulting families of religious suicides.
Sometimes pain can simply exceed a person's prior strength level such that they can't handle it. Suicide contradicts certain religious principles but there can be exceptions to every rule. For example if people become uncontrollably violent then it's not technically immoral for them to take their own life instead of taking someone else's. I would never encourage such thinking but it's not an impossible scenario that it becomes a lesser evil. A problem with ascribing guilt to those who left behind dependent children ignores the fact that these are exceptionally rare cases when it comes to suicide. Moreover it's mostly the responsibility of relatives and not really society if they wish to make passionate pleas of resisting suicide to parents.
It is sometimes commented how lots of people are able to avoid mental illness but we don't always know the circumstances of how patients became ill in the first place. Mental illness might seem self-inflicted but the trouble is the pain is involuntary once the illness begins. Unfortunately we can't travel back in time to warn ourselves that our thought patterns will gradually lead us into turmoil. It's theoretically possible that some mental illnesses are related to consensual decisions but these may very well be accidental and accumulative. For example relative to my strength level a month of anxiety was literally inevitable given the shock at onset. Perhaps another person would find it easier to consciously surmount their anxiety but the trouble is I'm not them!
I agree that it’d always be better for their own good if they managed not to die. The conscious sensation of pain is never permanent no matter what the source of it is. However at the end of the day there are another 7 billion people alive on the planet so suicide cannot be claimed to be immoral. It’s logically possible for an action to be bad and hurtful in terms of oneself without being harmful or unethical towards other people.
Mental pain can cause uncertainty because without visible physical symptoms there’s no clear prognosis on when precisely the pain will dissipate. As you can see there’s two aspects to that statement. The lack of a physical source means that the pain is bound to heal eventually. But one has to have hope and trust that the pain isn’t long-term which might be difficult in a crisis situation.
Suicide by definition refers back to the self and is therefore intrinsically consensual. Arguments of vulnerable people being pressured to die by suicide are inconsistent: if a supposed friend encourages you to do something you don’t want to do then they obviously weren’t ever a friend to begin with. Euthanasia isn’t necessarily required for people who are physically capable of self-inflicting their own death and so that is a slightly separate debate. Anyone who thinks it's necessary to dismiss suicide in order to dissuade others might have to view such advice as a lesser evil rather than an actual good. To say suicide isn't natural could also have unintended consequences given the nature of psychosis. Suicidal ideation might be inevitable in certain people such that viewing it as immoral and a threat to the mental health of others could almost imply an almost paranormal thoughtline.
I felt suicidal in a psychiatric ward in 2016 so I started praying a lot with short mantras even though a staff member asked me what denomination I was and said that the church would actually be opposed to my potential suicide. My aunt brought in a prayer book and I managed to repeat a very short mantra of "O sacred heart of Jesus/God, I place all my trust in you." If you don't want to appear too religious or solipsistic you could pray to "our Holy Spirit" in an emergency. I underwent a silent conversion from agnostic atheism to general Christianity when death felt imminent. I even prayed to deceased relatives. This confused some people who thought I might have been radicalised into dying! I think it's a bit of a balancing act where I'd never advise anyone to die of suicide but we can't persuade people out of suicide if they don't say they're suicidal. In order to coax suicidal people out of suicide we first have to acknowledge that suicidal ideation can be a symptom of severe mental illness. There's little point pretending an extremely depressed person is very sad but never suicidal even if it's only momentary. Thinking about suicide does not mean you're going to act on it. It will be hard to get mentally ill individuals to admit that they're suicidal if we try to shame the act of suicide. To shame suicide is to shame suicidal ideation even if it's to a lesser extent. In other words it'd be an immoral and embarrassing thought though not an immoral action.
For me it wasn't a gradual build-up of pain or stress that lead to me getting overwhelmed. It was actually the opposite where it existed immediately as a reflexive thought when my anxiety began. The first staff member I told about being suicidal gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. My unconscious mind gave me no indication of what was happening and I couldn't control my visceral sensation of pain. I was caught off-guard and it shook me. It almost felt like I was opposing my own intuition by living on. As the days went by I was seriously contemplating whether my own subconscious was against me and if I was going to be in pain forever. From the get go the sheer intensity of the pain made me suspect that the anxiety would last for a very long time. I thought about euthanasia and dying in my sleep but the fine print about your organs exploding kept dissuading me! Eventually I became more resistant to suicidal feelings by continuously procrastinating and always hoping that the anxiety would be gone the following day until it actually disappeared weeks later. The fear of my own suicide made me fear even more. Being with other mental health patients in hospital can be a reminder that other people can also be in an equivalent level of pain and not to be solipsistic. A distant relative said awkwardly how he didn't know that I was allowed to have shoelaces in the ward! I once bought a glass jar of carrots into the ward only for me to be told to hide it in case others misused the jar!
I benefited from 3 years of subsidised accommodation and also community activities like walking, bowling and soccer so I don’t want to come across as overly critical of the mental health service. They’re obviously doing a huge amount of good. They've also lots of mindfulness classes, group discussions, pleasant meal times and games sessions in psychiatric hospitals. Seeing fellow patients overcoming their symptoms in a hospital setting can increase your motivation compared to battling a mental illness at home or by yourself. My mystic Celts t-shirts amused one or two patients. I’m merely of the view that if someone is intent on suicide, they shouldn’t be in some way restrained from personally doing so in a hospital setting or psychiatric ward. I wouldn't try to live solely for my antagonistic parents but also out of the pleasure of life itself! I don’t see a contradiction in saying that we can try to prevent and reduce suicide as much as possible without unrealistically attempting to stop all suicides.
(I'd to blank out the coarse language!)
Time for some downbeat music! Certain pop songs can almost resemble a monastic chant in intensity!
Nightcore Disturbia - DevonFarren
There's a complex interplay between over-protectiveness and autonomy!
(Mr Incredible saves suicide jumper, then gets sued.)
"In the Soviet army it takes more courage to retreat than advance." (Joseph Stalin)
Suicide is sometimes linked into the complex issue of masculinity. I think I'd be quite brave in a warzone but of course I'd be fighting for the opposing side! A fleeing soldier would almost be forced to fight their own allies in self-defence in the front line if they're being sentenced to execution for cowardice by their superior officers!
Perhaps there's a slightly less painful form of suicide(!):
"Considerable apprehension often surrounds the issue of sudden cardiovascular arrest (SCA) during physical activity, especially that related to sexual intercourse. " ahajournals
Having fun at local social soccer:
Posts 15, 17 and 19:
After 2 years on the dole(!):
Cast Away - Fight With Wilson Scene
The maintenance of walking stamina becomes an increasingly important function for the body as we get older. If we viewed daily exercise accumatively then an elderly person would start off each day with tens of thousands of miles already completed. That is to say the body has less ability to recover when we're older such that sleep doesn't set the mileage back to 0. Running until you’re out of breath will eventually depend on quicker but shallower chest breathing rather than diaphragm belly breathing. Otherwise if the body were somehow capable of 100% efficient breathing while running, you’d actually be able to effortlessly sprint non-stop all day long. Our inability to do so is a reflection of why extended, challenging physical exertion is an intrinsic source of stress even though it feels rewarding and refreshing to try to overcome it. So I imagine the fact that our muscular sprinting ability declines with age inevitably means that our fast chest breathing also becomes less efficient. Thus these systems of subtle breathing patterns and body postures are inter-related and might be a contributing factor in chronic pain conditions.
There’s many small hip flexors and other involuntary muscles in the spinal engine that we aren’t always conscious of even though they play a big role in our movement. They’re like cruise control muscles! I’m not a biomechanics expert but notice the suboptimal location of the largest and smallest leg muscles: the glutes are powerful but very far away while the tibialis anterior is closest to the feet but it’s a weak and elastic muscle. So being overly dependent on these sorts of muscles will likely slow you down considerably. The way it can feel harder to simply stand still than it is to walk is a little reminder that to keep upright our bodies are always under the stress of time and ageing. The hip flexors are like stabilisers that resist excess motion in one leg to elastically transfer energy to the next leg back and forth. If our body were somehow capable of walking 100% elastically then it'd be like we'd be gliding unconsciously. Our spinal engine can work in reverse through the kinetic chain. That way we can transfer some of the weight of passive objects from our shoulders through the back and onto our hips when we're carrying a heavy object by our sides or on top of our back.
One way gym music can be addictive like the trance song below might be how they can combine different emotions into one song even when the emotions are too extreme to be representative of one person. So I could concoct a laid-back version of myself who's also a marathon runner only to find that the emotions contradict themselves too much even though each individual trait is perfectly compatible with one person. So gym music addiction can help you empathise with how intense other people can be. Perhaps the tantalising song below can still help me gain a tiny bit of the emotion on offer!
Delirium Silence
For instance if you didn’t move your legs as much and tried to use the hips more to passively swing your legs then you’ll have a decreased stride length seeing as the hips have a very limited forward range of motion and it’s largely rotation. Fully rotated hips can increase stride length during a full exertion static lunge. Although flexible hips would then deflect elastic energy away from the opposite leg towards the shoulder during the backswing phase of lunge walking which would make “lunge running” terribly inefficient. When the heaviness in the calf muscles began I was never unstable but I became much more subtly attuned to my posture and arm swing than I was previously. It felt like I was walking uphill even when I was on flat ground. I could often do an intermittent jog or short run but I could never prolong it to run consistently. Either the heaviness fatigued me or I’d begin to run inefficiently. If I increased my stride length my stride frequency would eventually decrease and vice versa. Eventually my running speed would be equivalent to a walking pace such that it was futile to maintain a running posture for long distances. For tennis I could still do a small jog to the ball and turn quickly for some agility.
It's interesting how easy it is to turn sex songs into running songs such that a secondary benefit of chronic pain could be an increased libido(!):
Snoop Dogg - Sweat
In my own case I used to do a lot of running training when I was a teenager. Perhaps I didn’t warm up sufficiently or didn’t allow myself enough recovery time between sessions. I also did some intense middle-distance running in 12-minute sessions on a treadmill where it can sometimes be tempting to mentally overexert yourself. Doing an 11 minute run and a twelfth minute sprint might have been a bit too uneven. I used to do 15 units of speed on a treadmill for 11 minutes where the last minute would be at 20 units. I never asked but I assume the machines measure speed in km/hr! Treadmills are healthy but the tempo is different than an outdoor run where the backswing of the strides are assisted by the belt. We can run as fast as we like until we push the stop button which makes it easier to resist fatigue. Consequently it might be better to mix in both outdoor and treadmill runs instead of using the treadmill exclusively. Music is great to pump you up during a workout but sometimes it might give you more energy and adrenaline than your body is physically able for. Some pop songs can almost make you define yourself by your physicality during the gym:
The Saturdays - All Fired Up
I trained to failure in most running sessions where I should have taken a longer rest period afterwards. Furthermore my training was often unplanned where I overtrained at attempting too many physiologically contradictory disciplines like sprinting, middle-distance and long distance running along with various weightlifting exercises. I used highly irregular repetitions for my upper body sessions. There were the odd high-rep stamina days while the majority were mid-rep hypertrophy training. If I ran out of steam I might have just done lower rep max strength lifts. I used to run every second day and do weights on the day in-between where switching the exercise probably didn't serve as enough of a rest. General fitness doesn't always equate to athleticism where athletes tend to be specialist even in team sports. A dilemma with trying to achieve a toned physique without being too muscular or too cardiovascular is that it relates to a passive Mediterranean physique. As such white people would really have to assume a really violent mindset rather than an athletic one to match a generalist Mediterranean physique like Roger Federer. Ireland was never colonised by Ancient Rome where we lack the militant body types. To be as fit as a Mediterranean an Irish person would have to re-interpret centuries of warfare between rival Greek states and Persia or between Ancient Rome and Carthage as a sport with upper-body gym sessions in-between the charging! Another training mistake was that I used the calories burned during running to justify eating an awful lot afterwards. Bodybuilders might eat a lot to build muscle but running is different to weightlifting in being catabolic by reducing muscle mass. There's a limit to how toned our muscles can be or else they'd tear. So overeating by 1000s of calories like Michael Phelps is unsustainable for cardiovascular exercise. Eating loads to run faster only works for grass-eating herbivores! I used to do a small bit of running for hurling training when I was a child. Then I started doing small laps around the park around age 10. However I seriously upped the tempo when I was 14 which may have been a bit too sudden. I was a bit overweight in primary school and so I shouldn't have taken running too competitively even though I was skinny as a teenager. For example people who were thin throughout their lives likely have more stability than those who suddenly become thin. Being overweight as a child meant I didn't have years of focus on slower breathing rhythms before losing weight as a teenager. People who are genetically or mentally built for running are often able to keep running consistently through the year. I'm not sure if the way I took the odd month long break might have actually interrupted my recovery. It's a paradoxical phenomenon when you over-train and over-rest. Over-resting implies that the body can adapt to cardiovascular demands much like strength training. Although the problem here is that running is always a mental challenge no matter how physically strong you are.
A lot of athletic people are outdoor a lot of the day where their muscles are well warmed-up before exercise. By contrast sitting down extensively at school and for homework means you can be energised for exercise but not properly warmed-up. Sitting down on the ground is a form of meditation that is visibly taxing to the body. Yet sitting on a chair is only a temporary relief to the physical challenge of resting your bodyweight. It's also possible that sitting down so often at school disguised how I was weaker at long distance walking from doing weights and running seeing as I could walk fast but I didn't try walking very far. As such having more time to myself after my leaving cert might have meant that I'd more time to walk only to realise I was no longer as good at walking. So perhaps shin splints could also have been a form of embarrassment where I simply didn't feel an instinct to run when I struggled so much to even walk. Perhaps to run fast you sometimes need to walk less where restless and heavy legs might be an ultimatum to specialise in either walking or running if you're not very strong. So I might only have had the energy to mostly walk in the early years of shin splints. A dilemma might have been that even had I chose running instead of lots of walking it's possible that I wouldn't have run very fast compared to fitter athletes. I used to study long hours after school such that it's possible my body surreptitiously compromised my walking stamina in order to adapt to my school gym routine. So I sometimes tried to rest a short while before running during the shin splints but who knows if I'd actually have to sit down for 10 hours before attempting a faster sprint so as to match my teenage study habits. I don't necessarily feel much more energetic in the morning after many hours of sleep which is why I didn't feel that lying-in all the time would be too natural just to sprint.
Shorter people often appear to have a higher pain threshold for cardiovascular exercise. This means they can run relatively effortlessly with great balance even if they're not always as fast as taller people who specialise on running. For example shorter soccer players are often exceptionally agile due to a lower center of gravity. This emphasises that running isn't always related to muscle mass where middle-height people can easily over-exert themselves. I once had a dream where I saw a pack of wild dogs chase donkeys in a field. So running is a paradoxical form of strength in the fight-or-flight response that can be used to run away as fast as you can from a scary challenge or to run towards a challenge aggressively. Few marathon runners train just in case they ever had to run for so long away from a thief! So direction is everything when it comes to running simulations in mental illness! Shin splints is kind of like an internal sports competition where weightlifting and running can violate each other to that extent if you're not strong enough. In other words different physiques can be very painful to reconcile with one another.
Ancient body armour often forced you to slow your walking stride where you could charge ferociously for a few seconds. The metal weight provided more momentum but took away both leg speed and upper-body perseverance. An analogy is that chronic pain can increase reflexive strength but detracts from immediate body strength much like invisible body armour. Skinny and overweight people can often experience a lot of physical pain and yet have physiques unsuited to athletics. As such it can be tempting to underestimate their perseverance when they're truly challenged(!):
In 2015 just before I was 20 it became difficult to run fast. My lower legs were always heavy and ached sometimes in what resembled shin splints except that it has never fully went away since that time. Occasionally there’d be a friction rash between my upper legs as if my stride had narrowed too much and my legs were gliding past each other. If I sat down too long my calf muscles would feel tight and I often had to stroll around in order to relieve it. My legs often felt slightly warm so I’d wear shorts a lot even when it was cold outside. I've even went commando a few times! This also helped to lighten the weight on my body if I was walking for many hours. One night a person on the street commended me for my "solidarity" in embracing the cold with shorts! I wouldn’t really feel out of breath when I ran simply because I couldn’t reach the speed to get to that point. I temporarily tried dieting to see if it reduced the leg pain and it failed to do so. Needless to say there are other health benefits of a healthy diet besides leg weight. An obese person can't run and neither can I and yet my body isn't too overweight. The initial ache of shin splints resembled a heavier bodyweight than I actually had.
I went to the doctor when it first began where I couldn’t run even though the doctor couldn’t discern any muscle tension. I didn’t think much about it at the time because the heaviness occurred for 3 or so months previously in late 2014 before temporarily disappearing for a few weeks. So I suspected something similar would happen where it’d be gone yet again in a few months. It's not impossible to that this taster of shin splints was an unconscious hint that future pain and anxiety won't be permanent no matter how long it lasts. It was frustrating as I’d still full mobility in my legs, joints and muscles but I was never able to really accelerate. I just had this slow walking stamina. During the first few years I'd be out walking and I frequently hoped that the shin splints had went away whenever I was able to jog. However my legs would quickly feel heavy again because I was only using spare energy from my upper body. For instance I could turn both of my feet inwards while I jogged but the new lease of life would disappear after a few minutes. I often found that when I slightly altered my stride into a new posture to incorporate underused muscles that I could jog temporarily until those muscles fatigued which is quite common in shin splints. One time I even experimented with a "scream" run where I opened my mouth to breathe as fast as I could. I turned the corner past a petrol station where a load of boy racers were much amused by my expression! Rarely I might hold my breath as much as I can and temporarily hypo-ventilate in order to increase my jogging concentration. I missed the old running routine on the treadmill when the fatigue first began but after a long period of time I began to appreciate the slow treks. I used to view shin splints as harmful for my walking because my maximum walking speed decreased. In the early stages I didn't interpret my extra walking motivation as stamina because it arose through restlessness. I think the accumulative effect of a slightly reduced stride length and width in your walking stride can gradually cause a slowdown of momentum over a long period of time. So even a minor change could cause problems for the body as it has to be able to always function efficiently with whatever the adverse effect is for many years to come and not just the short-term. I'm not sure if wearing blade runners I bought on holiday in Qatar might have given me too much suspension when out sprinting for the first months of 2015 which lasted until a few months before the shin splints.
Being overweight might appear evil because I'm remorseless for overeating. The human body doesn't rebel against eating lots of food because you'd be healthier only if you were hysterical. That is to say eating lots of food forces you to burn it off either through walking or mental stress. It's not immediately apparent why thin people are better runners because a larger belly never feels too heavy through habituation. The secret is that thin people are thin 24/7 and not just during exercise. As such their "belly backpack" so to speak is always light for rest periods and exercise. Being overweight is technically a sturdy physicality for long-distance walking much like a camel. Running could help obese people to walk further because all postures are interrelated. Being overweight could achieve physical supremacy over all other physiques by blending upper body strength and walking stamina only if we converted to absolute evil:
Death of a Hero: John Brooder Killed by Cannibalistic Savages | Bone Tomahawk | 2015 |
The heavy sensation in my lower legs eventually disappeared after 5 years. I thought I would regain my speed once the aching feeling had left my calf muscles. But I’d become so used to moving my hips and overall posture at this slower speed such that I’m still actually moving no faster than I was when the leg fatigue left. My legs had already become accustomed to a certain pace of movement. The initial ache and apparent weight in my shins used to make me walk an awful lot to relieve it but now I no longer have that same sensation to stop me accelerating. It has given way to a kind of inertia in my hips, knees and ankles that undermines my steady balance if I try to run continuously. Running requires a simultaneous and irregular movement pattern of all the joints with stable hips. It's a lot harder to concentrate on a triple-pendulum of the ankle, knee and hip rather than just the knee and ankle. Everyone has a unique style of running that's formed over a lifetime. Thus if you break your rhythym it's going to be hard to ever find a new gait. You can build muscle but you can't build a different skeleton.
(Pain-free Jog: that video was taken in April 2020 when the shin fatigue had finally went away. I compensate a small bit by using a tight inward arm rotation. To me it consciously felt like I was running as fast as I was when I was a teenager but as you can see I was physically significantly slowed down. I think our movement can be so complex that if you’ve paid too much attention to it then it’s like analysis paralysis and you can’t accelerate. My stride length was a bit smaller while my increased stride frequency made me think I should've been accelerating faster. A few times during the month I'd be out walking and suddenly I'd feel the energy to sprint all-out for a minute or two until I lose the momentum. It might make me walk slightly slower afterwards. If we walk up a hill at the same pace as level ground then we're actually walking faster in terms of absolute displacement and so our bodies will have some leeway to alter our pace. Walking down a hill is equivalent to walking on even ground and then abseiling vertically downwards at the end. Some weeks I'd have no jogging energy and I might occasionally dash a few quick steps on a walk to keep energised. Rarely I'd be caught out on my way back to the house from a looped walk when I'd feel an overwhelming fatigue in my legs to walk at a snail's pace. After 20 minutes to half-hour my motivation would increase again and I'd be back walking at my normal pace. Obviously I could sit down mid-walk to rebuild my energy but I try not to surrender in order to focus on longevity. I'd listen to music sometimes while I was out walking for extra incentives. However other times I might cut down on the music in order to preserve my mental energy for the entire walk. I gained a small bit of weight since the shin splints began because I was relatively thin as a teenager. Although the extra abdominal weight only came after my inability to run rather than it being a direct source of the heavy leg sensation. I'd a gym mentality where I always harboured a belief that not only would I recover but that I'd end up being faster and stronger than when the shin splints first began. So it took me a long time to accept that I was going to be a champion merely in the strolling around category! I was already well-able to walk before the shin splints and so the mere idea that the aches would help my walking used to baffle me. After the recorded run I may have been impacted by a self-fulfilling prophecy: I no longer viewed myself as a prospective runner and conceptualised myself more as a steady walker. Then my running energy waned perhaps because I lost focus. So who knows if my physical body simply adapted to my self-perception in a gradual way. Slow walking isn't a pure form of fitness because it can be apathetic. You can easily "lose yourself" on a slow walk by letting your legs do most of the work! Running requires me to exaggerate my posture which in turn briefly requires a hyperbolic level of over-confidence. For example running can be interpreted as combative and even megalomanical if you solipsistically focus on your breathing. Anger can help you to run faster. Yet running can also help you to relieve anger peacefully by exhausting your emotions both good and bad. Just before the beginning of 2023 I noticed that I could focus on jogging once every few days in order to rebuild my mental stamina. Although I didn't train this way too much beforehand as my jogging ability isn't as frequent as my tennis sessions. Requiring multi-day rest periods after a disappointing slow jog that detracted from my walking stamina wasn't very suitable for recreation until I was ageing and needed to feel young again! Feeling rejuvenated wouldn't be too consoling if you were already a young adult. Clearing your mind of thoughts can help you focus on your stride as a form of mindfulness. Thinking while walking can improve your emotions but it might not improve your physicality. For example the pain of running often demands total focus on your musculature where you cannot multitask contemplations on Greek philosophers!)
Excessive walking can have a disorienting effect on the mind!
The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be 500 Miles
Perhaps we should be wary of listening too much to songs that have long distance walking as their central theme. Otherwise many of us would find ourselves walking all night long!
Vanessa Carlton: A 1000 Miles
An indirect way to approach the problem might be through mental focus and mood. Exercise can have mental effects like a “runner’s high” of adrenaline. I often found a run after school can refresh your concentration before beginning homework. Perhaps I was a little too dependent on running to compensate for the mental fatigue of studying. Conversely walking at an extremely slow pace is often used as a form of mindfulness. Walking with weightless, anaesthecised legs would be like you were meandering around in a dream. Shin splints is almost like you're sleepwalking.
Fast breathing is associated with anxiety while slow breathing is a meditation technique. So in some instances perhaps chronic pain is working backwards to achieve a certain frame of mind in the context of mental illness. The resting state of sleep is associated with variations in muscle tone and irregular breathing. Breathing problems are occasionally reported in instances of sleep paralysis. Perhaps the sense of pain in that particular example is to prevent disorientation and to ensure the mind has the ability to concentrate to a degree that’s enough to prevent the threat of psychosis. We often can't think as fast when we're in physical pain because we're so distracted by it. For example if you've a very sore foot then you'll struggle to hold a conversation. Yet we can invert that statement by saying if we can't think properly then the body might interpret this as physical pain. In other words chronic pain might conceal psychotic thoughts, emotions or sensations. Body pain would present the sufferer with an alternative challenge so to speak. Although this could present an opposing problem in the context of anxiety where if you can't think due to pain then you'd struggle to regain your thinking styles in order to rationally solve your problems. Maybe breathlessness can force you to stop all thinking in order to prevent psychotic thoughtlines. For instance people often joke about breaking a foot to distract them from other less painful injuries. Chronic pain might appear imaginary but hallucinations are real to the people who perceive them. If it's possible to hallucinate sensory input then it stands to reason that the body can "hallucinate" physical pain.
Breathing has both voluntary and involuntary components so an alteration in that ratio where we direct more of our attention on breathing might cause distress. Anaerobic sprinting is more about muscle strength which doesn't rely on faster breathing as much as slower aerobic running. Even though we breathe faster when we sprint we're still hypo-ventilating relative to the amount of oxygen needed to idealistically sprint effortlessly. Subconscious pain that’s perceived physically might gradually give you mental resilience and coping skills to deal with future stress and worry by making it pale in comparison. Then chronic pain would be a way to reify and personify your mental problems. There are many indirect muscle synergists and accessory inspiratory muscles that help the breathing mechanism in the back for instance or the abdominals. Intense running is very healthy and invigorating and it can make you feel focused afterwards but it's temporarily mentally fatiguing which might be distracting or disorienting if you'd certain mental illnesses. Physical fatigue can eventually cause anxiety. An unusual approach to chronic pain is to view it as a rugged form of spirituality. Extreme pain can be a reminder of our mortality and it often helps to look past ourselves in order to overcome it; whether it's through meditation or prayers. Struggling to breathe can mean that your mind has been distracted by spiritual matters for so long that you simply lost focus on the breathing mechanism. So it might be too late by the time your breathing starts to hurt.
A neurological way to approach chronic pain is to say that a lot of the brain is extremely complex where a single miswired neuron might go unnoticed. I'd a brain scan where no anomalies were found. Yet seeing as neurons can't repair themselves it's possible to say that overcoming one faulty neuron alone could cause a lot of pain. Genetics are also so complicated that a frail neuron at birth could be responsible for pain decades later.
I don't know how relevant lucid dreaming and anti-realism are to chronic pain. I didn't have the same intuition for anti-realism as I do now. Perhaps the lack of academic knowledge on the mystery of lucid dreaming was one source of stress during the breathlessness. For example I had the sense that my vision genuinely changed during the late 2013 panic attack mentioned in the anti-realism thread. Later in the same day I felt my visual perception was almost back to normal when I recovered except that I was slightly more attuned to the contrast between colours. Perhaps running consistently requires total dissociation and transcendence from your perception. In other words you might have to be at one with your body where you're not perceiving level ground like a tiring upward hill to the horizon! Or if you perceive distant objects as closer than they actually are then maybe your stride frequency would be shortened. Perhaps chronic pain tried to make my interpretation of my own sensory perception more materialistic even if it's not fully materialistic when the physical world still has external components. When the breathlessness occurred in 2016 I experienced infrequent though troubling lucid dreams. One time it felt like there was a cartoonish person sitting beside my bed. Another night it seemed like my dream character was describing a scene in which I was floating around a crevasse in a mountain with a lot of people swinging around me. While lucid dreaming I must still focus on my residual level of breathing. The night before the anxiety began I was kept awake by loud ear worms (musical hallucinations). I remember my psychiatrist thought I was joking about ear worms until I explained the technical meaning! Physical pain might help you to distinguish between the real world and the numbness of the dream world. I don't think alcohol played too much role in the anxiety because I consumed it very rarely and only binge drank on perhaps two occasions well before the shin splints. Admittedly before the shin splints I took a glass of Bailey's alcohol before running on the treadmill where I ran well but who knows if it gradually compelled me to only run with such a relaxed state of mind! If I'm particularly tired after a long day outside then I might appear to be walking a tiny bit tipsy to an outsider. It's possible that doing a lot of gym work can lead to complacency for mental health issues because you might lose track of how much more stress you could withstand in tackling emotional issues only to take on far more than you bargained for.
I had 5 weeks of this peculiar sort of anxiety in 2016 when I was 21. I became hyper-focused on my breathing where it would sometimes feel that I was breathing too fast or too slow. For me subjectively it felt like torture. I don't know how to describe it; it was like my nostrils felt constricted when I nose-breathed and my throat felt tight when I switched to mouth-breathing. There could occasionally be cycles of feeling too hot or a sore type of sensation around my chest. Very briefly I experienced a freezing sensation shooting down my legs while I laid on the bed. The way the source of the pain changed every few hours gave me extra motivation to withstand it. Breathlessness is the diametrical opposite of hyperventilation and so this might have been a sign that the pain was sourced internally rather than physically. There was never any break from it as whenever the breathlessness stopped I just felt pure anxiety and fear for when the next round would begin. It felt like I was running on a treadmill with the stop button broken where there was also a wall of knives inconveniently left behind me and pointing towards me should I fall. When it first started it was so severe and bewildering that I actually thought I was getting a heart attack and asked to go on a ventilator. The moment it began I asked a nurse if I could go to a hospital in the sense of a physical checkup but she replied that this was a hospital too with reference to it being a psychiatric ward. She encouraged me to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth but unfortunately this wasn't going to relieve the soreness. Indeed I could feel the air going in and out of my nose but I'd to compensate by overwhelming effort to inhale with my breathing muscles. A metaphorical analogy would be like you were struggling to breathe in air that had no oxygen. One more comparison would be as if you were breathing in cold air that went right to the back of your nose and made you feel sensitive. Alternatively I could describe it as if it were a headache that made your breathing nerves really tender. A dissociative way of viewing it is that your physical breathing is nearly too "relaxed" and "apathetic" for your mind to focus on it. Catatonic schizophrenia has been reported to cause death by voluntary suffocation in patients though I don't know if such an illness ever extends to weeks of breathlessness.
It was fierce painful but of course the psychiatric staff couldn’t physically detect any problem at all; “the machine doesn’t lie”! If you're ever stuck for describing pain then just say you're in unspeakable pain! I lay down in my bed where a nurse came to see how I was doing. I told her I was dying but she seemed confused and said that I looked calm and relaxed. She mentioned that she was elderly and that if anyone was dying around here it'd be herself! A few hours later I came to realise that it wasn't a typical heart or breathing problem by the mere fact I was still alive. I didn't know what was going on and I suspected the tired breathing was out of some kind of recovery process. I was almost begging for my previous problems to come back just to get rid of the breathlessness. I was in hospital voluntarily at first but after an appeal and a court tribunal I was made an involuntary patient. I didn't want to sound confrontational so I referred to it as a second opinion rather than as a tribunal! When I told a fellow patient that I was made an involuntarily patient he looked bemused and joked, "you mean to tell me you've just been here voluntarily up to this point?"! The nurses were saying that if I was able to physically talk about it then I must be breathing perfectly fine. Catch-22! (Perhaps if I’d went to a private psychiatric ward! More one on one tutorials?!) I suppose initially I said I couldn’t breathe when it’d have been more accurate to say it was highly stressful and exhausting to breathe. It was like expending my lifetime’s worth of breathing pain! I'd the shin splints for approximately a year before the breathlessness began. When the breathlessness began I didn't think it was inherently connected to the shin splints because the shin splints seemed far easier and milder in comparison. But these type of low-level aches can have a spiral effect in the long-term where it gets progressively more tiring due to a lack of rest. So now I think the breathlessness may have been a passive and unconscious reaction to the prolonged shin splints. The staff frequently asked me to have a shower even though I don't sweat excessively; I only got overheated sometimes with tired muscles. I asked a fellow patient if she was OK and she replied no that she's in a psychiatric ward!
Some people thought I was overreacting a small bit and actually to some extent I could be as confused as they were. The only caveat is that it wasn't my immediate mind that was initiating the pain but rather my subconscious mind. After all why would I want to be in pain? I'd ask myself why am I so breathless despite being physically healthy and my frustration would be to no avail. One way to think of the pain response is that it's a very blunt mechanism where the biological body often overreacts to pathogens like we see in allergies and autoimmune disorders. Evolution cares far more about your survival than your happiness. From the body's perspective it can be better to overreact than to under-react so as to err on the side of caution. Likewise a contributing factor to a few mental illnesses might be the subconscious mind recursively double-checking our motivation.
Evidence was cited of me walking around town without shoes or socks at 5am in the morning. I told them I was just experimenting with the barefoot running trend but they didn’t understand! There was eyewitness testimony of me spending too long looking into a mirror as if I was seeing things. That was actually me thinking about the mirror experiment in the antirealism thread! I found the unusualness of ringing for a takeaway pizza to the psychiatric ward a bit fun. There were other reports where I was acting suspiciously around my phone as if I might have been paranoid. I had hid my phone just as a nurse was walking by. What really happened was that I was giving out to some relatives and I simply didn’t want the nurse to overhear! The art therapist reported that my drawings gave an impression of anarchy and inner uncertainty. To be honest I was really never good at art! A nurse asked me about my hobbies and I told her I liked the tennis. She was happy but reminded me if I wanted to be a professional that it might be counted as a delusion! Yet another accusation was that I recklessly discharged an airgun in my room back home. Unfortunately I don’t have any comeback to that one! I was messing around aiming it at a wall and just didn’t know it was loaded. I was a bit frustrated sometimes but I tried to act pleasant even though they perceived it as if I was smiling to myself! I had initially asked for a painkiller or a heart tablet and was handed anti-psychotics! For a while I was moved from oral medication to injections. Any injections of anti-psychotics into the gluteal muscles were usually administered by a female member of staff to reduce the awkwardness!
The anxiety just seemed to be out of the blue and it appeared very disproportionate to any other stressful thoughts I might have had at the time. To me the pain seemed systematic and external while the staff were saying it was the other way round and I was just too anxious. I felt the anxiety was more an unconscious result of the painful breathing. I wasn't trying to shy away from the fact I was anxious but it seemed to me that I was anxious about my immediate breathing. It didn't feel like I was rationally worried about thoughts in my mind or possible stresses in the future but instead I just perceived it as an emotional and instinctive form of anxiety. It was almost self-referential in being anxious about being anxious! I couldn't tell myself to stop being anxious. Occasionally I shook my hand slowly to help me focus on each breath. In retrospect it felt like no matter how briefly I could have calmed down I still would have had trouble and panic symptoms for many weeks. I was actually in hospital for several days a few weeks beforehand after feeling worried and generally anxious. I was walking alone on the bypass and had become pre-occupied by a risk that God didn't exist. When I came back home I cried on the floor and wailed to my father that I loved him. I eventually came up with a bare interpretation that God lived through others in what I'd later understand as panentheism. However this was a milder experience compared to the instance of depression I felt years later. I'd regained a small amount of composure by the time I reached the unit. I was generally self-controlled in my expression during the initial days. However my uncertainty about God was then compounded by my uncertainty about dreams such that my night-time thoughts sometimes fretted if I was being deceived by the existence of others. I'd actually already dealt with anxiety from unreality many months before as mentioned in the anti-realism thread. However consciousness is interconnected where being a bit uncertain on multiple problems simultaneously means that they can spiral downwards as one major problem. For example if we view God as the creator of other minds where you've previously resolved that other people can be proven to be conscious due to the complexity of their language, then you'd have to reconsider the existence of other minds if you question their apparent creator of God. In other words you'd be in big trouble if God Himself is deceiving you even if you were only reliant on your perception of others and not of the physical environment. If an omniscient God created fake minds then you'd have no way to prove their existence no matter how complex their communication was. Anyway that wasn't a conscious thought-line during my breathlessness but it's possible that it was latent from earlier brief worries. Older people tend to be more confident than younger people such that if you're mind is distracted by mental illness then it's possible that the subconscious mind will inflict pain to deal with critical periods in mental growth. Perhaps older people must be more confident then younger people from the brain's perspective such that a mismatch could lead to an impairment in the ageing process of the mind. I was discharged and then later asked to come back in to check-up on how I was doing. Although my experience and sensations during the second visit were entirely different and much more intense and longer than the first visit as I spontaneously felt it hard to catch my breath as I walked down the corridor.
I've come up with various ways to interpret the pain I once felt but truth be told I still don't fully comprehend the source of it or why precisely it happened. There's still a bit of mystery to chronic pain even though I've attempted a spectrum of answers. The following guess might be a bit far-fetched but it could be possible that chronic pain is a paradoxical defence against latent suicidality. I'm uncertain of this perspective because the anxiety of chronic pain can itself cause suicidality. The first time I went in hospital was after a very brief spell of quasi-suicidal feelings but by the time I arrived at the hospital I was no longer suicidal. I never felt suicidal in the intervening period but perhaps the physical body could pick up on previous fears of mortality. Then it'd be like the breathlessness forces the issue by ensuring that you've the long-term willpower to resist an unconscious spiralling of suicidal thoughts. To be honest I felt exponentially more suicidal during the panic of chronic pain than I ever did beforehand. Anyway who knows if I'd still have been afflicted by a resurrection of suicidal thoughts even if the breathlessness were never to have happened. I don't really know how my body could ever know if my mind was once suicidal unless the breathless sensation was akin to the amount of breaths I would have missed out on had I actually acted on my initial thoughts of suicide.
It seemed to last from morning till night. Thankfully I managed to get a few hours sleep each night but it always restarted as soon as I woke up. I tried to pass the time by strolling around the corridor and garden or else sitting and lying down. After it ended my memory of it just slowly faded away as if it was all meaningless. I spent so long trying to ignore the previous day's pain in order to focus only on the present pain that when it finished I passively lost my memory of it over many months. I thought the pain would traumatise me forever and instead the memory just became increasingly distant and hazy. I couldn't recreate the intensity of the breathlessness which would have reminded me of the mindset I had during that period. While I had the breathlessness the pain was so overpowering that I couldn't remember myself breathing normally before the episode started. Hence I couldn't conceptualise how the breathlessness would end when breathing was an alien sensation. By the end of it I felt like my body had run out of its supply of chest pain! I cannot remember the moment where the breathlessness ended for good. The likely ending of the breathlessness was an extended pause between a shift in pain source like moving from breathlessness to chest pain except that the pause must have become permanent. A technical way of describing the sensation though not the physical process would be like my ribs felt paralysed and I'd to interchangeably use other breathing muscles like the diaphragm or vice versa. One way pain is adaptive can be seen in a live operation without anaesthesia. Unlike torture in warfare the pain in a medical operation is simply there to force your attention to the areas of recovery.
I thought in retrospect that somehow the initial inconvenience of shin splints and the way that heavy sensation eventually disappeared was indirectly connected to the episode of anxiety I had when I was 21. An extreme analogy would be if you were out of breath and trying to run for just one more minute, then forgetting about the previous minute straight afterwards means you can possibly keep running forever one more minute at a time! That is to say continuously ignoring previous physical stress can prolong your focus and stamina. So our mental energy and motivation can affect our physical energy. A runner's high can be described as a rush of endorphins but we might also be able to interpret it as a very mild form of temporary amnesia. For example no one gets PTSD after running a marathon because the mind is better at recovering from physical pain than it is at emotional pain. A synonym for ignoring pain is forgetting pain. Nonetheless it's impossible to withstand weeks of running pain voluntarily no matter how much involuntary pain I felt! Repression of the weeks of breathlessness doesn't always mean the memory is too traumatic or evil but can simply be a sign that in times of pain any indifference from others can be misinterpreted as aggression. My memory of life before the breathlessness was also reduced where I could semantically remember most events but not always visually. Was the breathlessness merely a form of daily amnesia were I not in pain from the breathlessness? Perhaps my subconscious mind forced me to re-interpret my childhood in light of my perception of non-physicality. A mathematical way to interpret chronic pain would be that if I could better recall some of my repressed teenage years then I might be able to regain more of my teenage sprinting ability. I had the exact same sensory and physical perception as a materialistic young teen as I do now as an anti-realist only that my interpretation of my senses is different. So maybe the 2016 breathlessness stopped me living in a dissociative fugue by compelling me to remember childhood life before my earlier derealising panic attack in late 2013.
Thankfully I made a full recovery but it was such an ordeal that it caused a lot of demotivation and confusion in the months afterwards that disrupted my ambitions and long-term planning. My anxiety was less painful than the pain of suicide but in a paradoxical manner. I thought that as soon as the breathlessness ended the shin splints would go away simultaneously. That didn't occur and so I felt it'd only be a matter of time for the shin splints to disappear. I waited around a long time but it gradually dawned on me the tiredness in the legs were there for the long haul. It fatigued me when I was doing courses. I was always telling myself that once I overcome the breathlessness that everything will be sorted and so it felt almost absurd to have to worry again about training and careers when I finally recovered. Incidentally I saw an ex-patient with his brother and asked him if he was going to continue with his plans to move to Boston. Apparently I put him in an awkward position and he was desperately trying to convince us that I was thinking of a different patient that was absconding to America! I was never officially diagnosed with chronic pain. I was initially diagnosed with prodromal psychosis and it later changed to autistic spectrum disorder. (Prodromal means "in the early stages".) I didn't dispute the diagnosis because they all share anxiety as a symptom. I knew I'd a few deficits in social skills and so it'd be helpful to work on that area too. It'd be hard to be self-aware of autism since it just means a lack of awareness of other minds. Some autistic people might be extremely smart but all the diagnosis means is that you'd be exceptional at being you! In other words if you can't fully understand others then you'd be forced to be the best at your own personality! I feel as if I can appreciate the people I meet but just through circumstances I was often quiet through my formative and teenage years. In order to understand your country you'd have to appreciate millions of conscious beings. Yet in any community there'll be good and bad people and so it's harder to empathise with collective units. Perhaps the way older generations had such a strong faith in God inadvertently meant they were more capable of understanding the sheer size of their own population. Non-physical fear could theoretically cause a self-induced heart attack. Although this usually only occurs when the heart is already weak such as when an elderly person is frightened to death by a burglar.
A basic version of chronic pain might be that there's no limit to multitasking where I could be stuck on a dozen different personal dilemmas simultaneously from family relations to academic issues where breathlessness might relate to the amount of unconscious stress needed to deterministically resolve each issue in the future.
A speculative idea is to connect short-term anxiety with longer-term depression. Some of the staff thought I was depressed when I told them about the breathlessness. Although the pain never consciously arose from thoughts about the meaningless of life. For me the anxiety was solely caused by the apparent lack of inhalations. However I mentioned in my patheism thread that I experienced a very brief spell of nihilism. This was about two or so years after the breathlessness. I never used to link the two because they were so far apart from each other. The sadness resembled depression in its intensity. However I never fully identified myself as depressed to others simply because it only lasted for 20 to 30 minutes while reports from other patients are often for over a day or a week. My mind went on a sudden tangent about the purpose of my life given that any path I choose will still end in a possible oblivion after natural death. I thought to myself that if death is ineluctable then why waste time on this life. It was like I was so afraid of dying in the distant future that I almost wanted to die there and then just to get it over with. This isn't strictly an atheistic viewpoint by the way. An agnostic fear of the simple notion of eternal oblivion got to me. So it wasn't a certainty that there wouldn't be an afterlife. After all eternity is so long that even a momentary and hazy visualisation of such emptiness can evoke panic. Perhaps the way I got the anxiety out of my system in previous years meant the depression didn't have to last too long. I'm not definite about this specific interpretation of chronic pain because it's highly indirect. Nonetheless it might be handy to brainstorm all possible causes in case anyone else ever had similar experiences. Oblivion can be a double-edged sword where the fear of it can motivate us to withstand pain and live each day like our last. Yet the same concept can risk making our lives seem pointless in the long-term. I notice that religions often speak of "hope" as opposed to "expectation" when it comes to heaven. We could make a similar style of argument where heaven gives our lives meaning. Yet if I were 100% guaranteed everlasting happiness the moment I died then I might be tempted to succumb ahead of time. Perhaps these hidden complications in the mindsets and motivations of mere mortals are one reason the afterlife is kept secret from us. Maybe a supernatural account of chronic pain is that you're not agnostic enough to be mystical nor atheist enough to be fully materialistic nor Christian enough to be transcendent. So chronic pain means you'd almost be undecided about how undecided you are as if you were a meta-agnostic! The spectrum of Socratic ignorance is unlimited.
One more far-out idea is to apply the anxiety to our analytical skills. Fear forces you to focus. I mentioned earlier that chronic pain could be working backwards to achieve a meditative state of mind. In fact I use this working backwards analogy throughout my blog. I do so directly in my dreaming and tennis threads and indirectly in other threads. For example if I think of a stressful event I could use a near impossible standard where the very fact that I'm thinking about it means that I don't fully understand it. This is a catch-22 where if I learned everything I could from the situation then the knowledge should be so intuitive that I should hardly need to recall it. I can use this working backwards technique by attempting to minimally mimic the all-out mindset I had during the breathlessness. For my militia thread I could tell myself that if the premise of the argument is correct then it should feel completely natural for people to agree with it. Yet to get to this level I'd have to describe it in such a manner that it conforms with people's pre-existing beliefs as much as possible. The only way this could happen is if I form as many new ideas as I can relating my cental idea with most of their old ideas. This isn't a full working backwards mechanism since it involves a progression of smaller ideas. Nonetheless the motivation I have stems to some extent from a futuristic ideal of a perfect explanation. For difficult personal relationships I sometimes think there's no smoke without fire. Thus if I feel stressed I'm tempted to think the problem must be worse than I first imagined it to be. I've an enhanced appreciation of my motor memory for tennis where I can interpret muscular fatigue in my arm as neurological fatigue. I could tell myself that if my technique were perfect then it should be so clean and efficient that my arm should barely ache even when I'm hitting a lot of fast swings. The way my shin splints stopped hurting after many years is like my unconscious mind worked backwards from a simulation of a painfully high muscle tone until it desensitised to a relaxed one even when the tension was always invisible and physically the same. A thought process that I sometimes find myself engaging in is if I was thinking of something bothersome I'll decide to ignore it. Although the strange thing is I often suspect I could easily resolve it if only I put more thought into it. It's like the way a negative event can force you to compensate by working harder except that I'd be overcompensating by artificially extending the thought line. I might put a stressor to the back of mind solely to use it as fuel to help my creativity. For example if I think about failed exams I get the impression I could interpret the situation better by analysing it more. Although I get so many serendipitous ideas by viewing myself as an underdog that it paradoxically feels as if I don't want to resolve the initial feeling of failure. So I'll commit to not overthink the failed exams until my spell of creativity runs dry. I'll have all the time in the world when I'm elderly and retired or on a middle-aged vacation to reflect on difficult personal problems during my teens instead of analysing them as a young adult. Indeed there could be additional benefits of pursuing this strategy of letting regrets hang behind you. You could multitask other topics and let the unconscious mind assimilate new information passively. The older you are the wiser you'll be and so procrastinating on a certain dilemma means you can deal with it when you'd have more skill. Then there's also a stoic notion of ignoring frustrations to prevent them interfering with your wellbeing. Of course the last option of stoicism has its limits if you never deal with your problems and allow them to build up until you implode. If this analytical interpretation of chronic pain is valid then it'd be like perfectionism were a neurological disorder rather than just a risky and ambitious strategy, obsessiveness or a personality flaw like vanity. In this scenario chronic pain would be like a stress test for mental stress instead of physical stress. The breathlessness would be like practice for all other negative emotions. Or you could say that physical anxiety is like a literal version of analysis paralysis! Whether a troubling experience was objectively good or bad for our long-term focus will always have a mysterious side to it when our brain that engages with the experience is itself a mystery!
Yet another weird idea is to interpret walking impairments and memory deficits as the body's default response to ageing. So even if we solved many terminal illnesses like cancer, we'd still be psychologically mortal and eventually succumb to exhaustion. Thus chronic pain could be a way to guide our body through the ageing process. Through experience we could balance opposing mental and physical strengths.
There were one or two occasions where either my pulse was too fast or the heart monitor was slow to work. The staff thought at first that this might have been due to white coat syndrome or hypochondria. The brain can work recursively such that the fear of your symptoms worsening can add to the anxiety. Under this light an irrational fear of an imminent death would cause you to save your breath which in turn would only create more panic. Hypochondria can be an understatement because anxious emotions will force you to think of potential problems that could have caused that sensation of fear. Hypochondria in the context of mental illness can be tricky because our emotions and thoughts affect each other indirectly. A feeling of sadness can force you to work backwards under the subjective impression that our emotions are under our control. However the initial stimulus of a mental illness could be acausal given the complexity of consciousness.
A far-fetched version of chronic pain is as a response to economic adversity. People who grew up poor are naturally very resilient in adulthood. Poor children are accustomed to stressful situations or pessimism. By contrast a downwardly mobile middle class person might have very little meditative strength to deal with the frustration of long-term low-income. It's hard to know whether our unconscious mind can speculate on our income prospects when it comes to inflicting anxiety. For example people living in slums could technically all be described as being in chronic mental stress relative to first-world nations but we don't always relate to them in physical terms.
A philosophical way to view chronic pain is that it could be a disorder of free will. Our brains have some components that are deterministic. So if we use our free will to form a delusion, our perception is biologically instructed to comply with our faith system. It's not that it will succeed in doing so but as a physical system it will try its best to overcome the stresses placed on it. For example I don't have unlimited control over my visual system to change the colours I see but I can use my free will to alter my eye movements. Likewise the way we interpret our senses in the brain is subject to "perceptual free will". How the conscious mind, unconscious mind and physical body interact is not yet fully understood in science. Yet there must be a connection. I'll take a superficial example where a very tall person is probably slightly more confident than the average person. Is it that being taller is simply reassuring in a social context such that being confident is little more than a side-effect, or do you have to be mentally confident first to grow tall, or do your genetics have to be there to make you subconsciously confident which will make you physically grow tall in a mutually dependent way? Perhaps we'll have to ask a tall person what their secret is! Anyway my point is that the physique we have bears some relation to our subconscious personality even if it's in a concealed and incomprehensible way. Could a slower gait be seen as more repetitive and hence more deterministic?
A working backwards interpretation of breathlessness is that the weeks of chest pain was proportional to the amount of running that would have taken for me to feel a year's worth of shin splints beforehand. The physical body is paradoxical and who knows if the breathlessness was actually intended to permanently ingrain shin splints. For example had my shins recovered then maybe my chest would never be able to withstand any fast running speed anyway.
An autistic way to view chronic pain is that your emotional self-awareness might not be mature enough for your age. As such chronic pain might be trying to delay your passage into adulthood by extending the critical periods of spiritual and intellectual learning. A problem with a growth mindset is that you might be too self-critical and refuse to say the you today is the real you in favour of an idealised future self. Trying to extend your study beyond secondary school could be a challenge if you branch into new subjects. Not alway being able to assess other people as part of a religion or a political or economic belief system in their private life might be one reason I might struggle to interpret other minds properly. For example I might overestimate my ability to understand Christians or agnostics in a way that I wouldn't do for Hindus when Christians and agnostics can still be very diverse in their belief systems.
Chronic pain to pre-empt psychosis might seem excessive when psychosis isn't always torturous. Psychotic patients can still live long and happy lives much like other physically disabled people. However it's possible that a very long and intense psychotic episode might lead to permanent psychosis. So maybe chronic pain is forcing the issue by telling you to either allow your thoughts to deteriorate to the extent that it becomes incurable or else to withstand the breathlessness. Some schizophrenic patients can passively improve or even fully recover without chronic pain but maybe it's only possible when the psychosis isn't too extreme.
Vague suicidality without any imminent plan of death can often be a perverted way of working harder. It means you're not actually depressed but you have it in you not to think of a week ahead on a continual basis. For example thinking you might die of natural causes anytime in the near future without ever taking it seriously can increase your stress response which indirectly helps you focus on a task. Yet working to the apparent death on anything might result in a violent mindset that chronic pain might be pre-empting.
None of my countermeasures to breathlessness fully worked to relieve the pain. Hence the way my mind tried to relieve itself during the absurdity of intense pain could be a reflection of my inner free will. Choosing to stroll around a corridor to avoid more pain instead of remaining seated could be a pure form of free won't.
A metaphysical approach to chronic pain could be how different personalities are correlated with different physiques. Stereotypes sometimes have a grain of truth even if they're often unfair. For example Spain has a very humble demeanour which rhymes well with their running physique. Certain rural people can have a runner physique simply out of their intense meditative qualities even if they weren't out training every day. Certain bodybuilders might easily view pride and morality in a different way to the average person in light of their greater self-control. Hence when we train for a certain athletic look we forget that people are equal and those with different religious values or less emotional qualities might be compensated with a naturally better physique.
Competitive fitness isn't directly proportional to the time you spend exercising. By contrast the longer you study a school subject the more knowledgeable you become. There's really just a loose correlation between exercise class and physical strength. This is most apparent when an athlete travels to a hotter country for training. People in hot climates are passively and constantly engaged in cardiovascular heat resistance which aids running stamina. At the ripe age of 16 I went to a tennis camp in Majorca and had to have cold showers and shorten my training sessions out of extreme heat exhaustion. I went in the hottest time of year in July and tried to condense my training schedule in the week-long break without having spare days to acclimatise to the heat. Coaches were surprised by my apparent lack of fitness when the climate of Ireland is comparable to Britain which was a more familiar country for them. Yet I used to train on a treadmill back in Ireland and not so much in the sauna! Who knows whether the breathlessness was a delayed response to my near-fainting years earlier during the roasting heat in Majorca. For example during the breathlessness I often felt roasting in my chest with few cold periods other than a rare freezing down my legs. During the months after the tennis academy my tennis in competitions was poorer due to latent heat fatigue. At the time I had went to the doctor who confirmed that my pulse was fine but I declined a heart exam that would've led to a tube being placed down my throat. I was so busy with academia in 4th year that it's possible my mind eventually forgot about the prior heat exhaustion in Majorca where I was still able to run. Although the heat exhaustion might have been one of many factors that lead to overtraining and shin splints after 5th year of my leaving cert. Incidentally one of the songs that gave me the earworm the night before the breathlessness began was Snoop "Vato" as if gangland violence in the heat evoked memories of my prior heat exhaustion in Majorca!
Older adults would be far fitter than younger adults in terms of mental perseverance if only body strength didn't age. As such mental illness might be a way for the mind to skip ahead the years to reach an older mindset faster than usual.
We don't have access to another mind to see how they qualitatively perceive their breathing. It's possible that the unconscious mind can respond to mental stress by making breathing easier on some occasions. So maybe someone who's meditative in their mind all the time might have slightly more pressured breathing but in a steady way that aids resilience. By contrast someone under work or study stress might breathe easier as an unconscious compensation mechanism. Hence periods of easy breathing would have to be counterbalanced by anxious breathing in order to return to equilibrium.
A sports advantage of being overweight is good proprioception simply by your muscles being heavier. For example if I practice a serve I can simply walk it off later in the day by rotating my chest and hips a bit differently off court. In other words your subconscious can relate your walking stride to a new athletic manoeuvre by strolling around in a less balanced way until you regain your composure. Then when your stride improves your athletic techniques might have improved in the background simultaneously. Slow walking allows you to hyper focus on your joint co-ordination. For example walking with one hand swing can mimic your posture for a tennis ground stroke. Motor memory is invisible which is why overweight athletes can be very bad if they're not skilled by having no cardiovascular back-up plan. Yet they can also be very good if they practice the sport regularly. Roger Federer isn't overweight but he's not the best marathon runner either and still managed to be a world tennis champion. Running stamina on the track isn't sufficient where running hip motion has to be synchronised with tennis after years of constant practice.
A possibly flawed explanation of breathlessness might be that an academic subject is violent to your mind. For example the subject of chemistry is not complete in its metaphysics. No one can truly relate a chemical formula to sensory perception. The potential of the subject might be amazing in a futuristic way when we'll have a better intuition of the physical world. Yet the subject contains a lot of arbitrary relationships from the perspective of our emotional system. For example rote learning a telephone book is possible but would lead to fatigue where the benefits to mental focus are extremely indirect. So maybe only future generations could assess the state of certain subjects as to how their incompleteness in our lifetimes could mimic obsessive or psychotic learning patterns. Maybe most chemists are mentally healthy because it serves an immediate function like a profession. By contrast studying chemistry as a hobby as if it were tennis might appear to your neurons like you were a part-time hostage negotiator! Any day hostages were killed you can learn off a page of a phone book to calm you down!
Chronic pain from an ethical standpoint might be the personification of a lesser evil. Anyone who decides to be a lesser evil is matching the health benefits of chronic pain. For example amputating someone's legs as a form of torture might have silver linings in giving the victim resilience and a sense of humility no matter the trauma. Yet people who are evil don't report chronic pain more frequently than others. Everyone has a baseline of good even if they choose evil. So maybe chronic pain is telling you that you could be ethical only if everyone didn't mind you torturing them. If no one cared about unending pain then no one would really care about the pain felt by crime victims. Ethics isn't materialistic where a decision to be ethical not based on culture or religion might force you to represent your own brand of ethics. If you can withstand chronic pain without needing to be evil to others to relieve your own pain then you're reconcilable to the spirituality of ethics. Chronic pain might be an internal war of good versus evil. Then the irony of chronic pain would be that you're heroic for restraining your own temptations to be evil. Evil people aren't detectable in their physicality other than that they might look too intense in a casual role. So maybe chronic pain is recreating the emotional intensity of an evil personality in an ethical person. Chronic pain might mean you're morally agnostic and don't fall neatly on an ethical, amoral or immoral vibe. We're not able to judge ourselves as objectively ethical when our community isn't always ethical to the third world. Individual ethics is relative to a collective. Chronic pain then might be a form of anger management forcing you to withstand pain without attacking others. Perhaps the temptation to scapegoat others isn't always conscious where chronic pain can make you more self-aware.
Obese people overwhelmingly don't report suicidal levels of chronic pain but this might be because they're all unique and individualistic. Some obese people might be impaired in their motion but not necessarily be in aches. So an obese person might relate to the pain of shin splints if they walked constantly in spite of any weakness in their legs. Many overweight athletes like the tennis star Stan Wawrinka might never report intense breathlessness because their mindset is already extremely focused from a hot climate. Hence chronic pain might refer to a hybridisation of obesity symptoms after many years of intense exercise and a heavy diet.
A religious version of chronic pain might be that certain worldviews are antithetical to one another where individual conversion might be very difficult. As a teenager I viewed myself as agnostic about God simply because I'd a growth mindset and knew that my adult self would be better informed. Yet this might have been idealistic because I might actually have been mostly atheistic as a teenager in terms of my emotions because I didn't go to mass too often. As an older adult I notice that the hedonism in some pop songs seems too good to be true as if there were undercurrents of atheism in some of my gym songs. So who knows if my atheistic self was capable of running simply because my perception was fully materialist where my physique might compensate to a unique athletic baseline compared to the religious outlooks of other physiques. It might be that atheism exceeds theism in complexity where lucid dreaming might be a consequence of a mismatch in scales. Religious converts don't normally report chronic pain but it might be the case that there's a spectrum of conversion depending on how literal each tenet of the religion is taken. Perhaps both atheism and theism are both healthy belief systems but might appear mutually psychotic in a relative way.
A slow pace of walking can seem monotonous relative to an outdoor run. It's when I'm in scenic areas that I can truly appreciate having a residual amount of energy that I can rely on. For example I was in Barcelona for a week-end holiday in 2020 and I was so refreshed after several multi-hour walking tours around the city. I didn't have to worry about timing my pace because I was going at a carefree speed and took an occasional tea break. It's reassuring to be able to plan for a day's worth of walking where you can absorb all of your surroundings far more than you would on a bus ride. It might even sound as if I'm advocating for people to get chronic pain when in truth I thoroughly resented the breathlessness. Despite hating the aching sensations I'm actually kind left to justify the same aches in order to explain it to others! Did the breathlessness in 2016 somehow function to reduce the pain of shin splints in 2020 after many years? Or could the way I forgot about the breathlessness be in some way involved in repressing bad dreams? I don't know if the frequency to which I was about to have lucid dreams was reduced by chronic pain seeing as it's possible to overdo it. The way the mind moves the body is a mystery and so breathlessness could also be a form of physical psychosis as opposed to mental psychosis. At the very least chronic pain can remind you that you're in some way connected to a physical body in case you try to transcend yourself too much or dissociate too often. Living to old-age isn't something to be taken for granted in modern life given the temptations of luxury and boredom. Even if the physical body is capable of reaching a 100 years you'd still psychologically have to earn each decade! If everyone around you are encouraged to live to a 100 then it's possible that there's a psychological and cultural component to life expectancy. If I fail to live as long as a Japanese person or walk as efficiently as a Chinese person then chronic pain could still help in making the daily stress of all of my mundane personal problems effortless to solve throughout the rest of my life. Perhaps one reason Japanese people live so long is that they don't perceive themselves as weaker when they're elderly when they were never very strong as young adults. So maybe elderly Europeans are just as physically strong as elderly Japanese people but view themselves as mentally weaker when they'd so much more physical strength when they were younger. So chronic pain might relate to lifespan in making you focus only on residual strength that's able to maintained for more years.
A paradox with promoting awareness of anxiety is that anxiety as a neurological phenomenon might still refer to perceived humiliation no matter how tolerant other people are. So the way I became breathless might have had to do with my own ethical system being somehow humiliated in a way that I wasn't consciously aware of. Yet humiliation can be subjective because anyone can be humiliated only if they compared themselves to rich people and army generals. As such the way humiliation might work in our unconscious mind is purely relative to our idealised selves. For example chronic pain could disprove that society was very loving had they perceived themselves as fully collective when no amount of sympathy could cure breathlessness.
A self-deprecating version of chronic pain is as a delusion of grandeur. For example believing in an unorthodox spirituality like anti-realism isn't in and of itself megalomaniacal but could appear so indirectly when so few others can validate your beliefs. In other words the delusion of grandeur would be that you might not be personally serious and focused enough to promote a new belief system even if the belief system is itself valid. Hence chronic pain could be a way to compel you to be more serious unless you give up some of your unique spiritual viewpoints! For example my understanding of impartial maths as a teenager might have unconsciously rebelled against vague beliefs in lucid dreaming unless I analysed lucid dreaming more intensely. Perhaps I was so academic as a teenager that my mind was compelled to rationally analyse the anxiety during the anxiety itself leading to recursive anxiety when anxiety isn't fully quantifiable. Chronic pain might be a physical attempt to reject you being a medium or a prophet of a new belief system!
When I stopped lifting weights when the shin splints started I had more energy to resolve personal and spiritual problems. Yet the way I sometimes tremored during breathlessness might have been a reminder to stay mentally strong as if I were lifting weights and stretching.
An embarrassing version of chronic pain would be that sexual perversions like sadism aren't fully knowable in how some sex addicts can commit crimes while others who had perverted thoughts are never tempted to act out a perversion because they're more self-controlled. So chronic pain can force you to empathise with victims of sexual violence.
A problem with declaring violence on an issue is that it might be an overcompensation for having not taken the issue more seriously from an earlier date. So if I tried to be aggressive against my own perception of pain on a treadmill as a teenager then maybe I should have performed much longer warm-ups simply because I wasn't good enough rather than it being critical for top athletes. Likewise no matter how long I spend focusing on my tennis technique as an adult I simply didn't play enough tennis as a young teenager if my aims were to be a top tennis player. Assuming a violent mindset could dilute an initial disadvantage but it has limits when other people simply trained for longer.
A Christian version of breathlessness might be how forgiveness is also a materialistic system where people might metaphysically be compelled to be sincere if they forgive people. For example the way my father appeared very anxious when he was apologising for different issues might have meant that I was compelled to comprehend anxiety when it comes to forgiving an insanity defence. So breathlessness might reflect how there's no limit to forgiveness only that the virtue can be a bit contradictory.
I never thought the breathlessness in 2016 was connected to cold hypothermia until January 2024 seeing as the breathlessness almost seemed like the opposite of hyperthermia and excess heat. Yet I read how hypothermia can have diverse symptoms like a racing heart beat and constricted blood vessels. So who knows if many cold nights of walking in shorts during the months preceding the breathlessness might have made mild hypothermia a contributing factor. For example increased leg muscle tone is a symptom of hypothermia that might have related to the shin splints:
It's possible that running is actually a bit mysterious in how it relates to emotional self-control were running responsible for the months of breathlessness. So who knows if running requires so much calmness that anytime you're angry outside of running means you're actually more angry at someone than you were from the pain of several minutes of running. For example getting upset for a long time at someone being rude to you might be the biological equivalent of a sprint where past running can be used as a reference point for any other source of stress.
It's possible that pain can also be a defence against objectification by inverting a sensation that was disliked by others in order to exceed their dislike with self-hatred as a deterrent to others being unkind. So if I got insufficient sympathy during the breathlessness then it's possible that the most charitable thing to do was to fully exhaust the pain response to become way calmer as a person in order to disprove people thinking I wasn't anxious. In other words I couldn't directly prove I was anxious due to the mind-body problem but I was capable of inverting a personality trait in a way that might have appeared unnatural to cynics. I gave a lot of blood for medical analysis during the breathlessness where it's possible it made me feel physically weaker even though good test results luckily lead me to feel mentally more confident.
I listened to so much diverse music to keep me upbeat during the shin splints but I'm not sure if there might also have been a small bit of adrenal fatigue from the music too in contributing to my dancing gaits!
Breathlessness might also have been a way to limit the idea that anger would make you way physically stronger because involuntary pain exceeds anger. So faster athletes are likely more serious people and not just angrier or more resilient people where mental seriousness is hard to increase. Pain and fear are subjective interpretations of stress frequency. Breathlessness can alternate between being in fear during pain and then feeling fear without bodily pain. Feeling chronic stress might add resilience to reduce intense pain and fear where these three negative emotions could exist on a spectrum. People who speak non-stop can feel out of breath and perhaps an analogy for those who are anxious from overthinking is that they're breathless after years of incessant subvocalisations! It might seem as if I'm obsessed about analysing personal issues like my leaving cert or my parents. Yet because of a plethora of mental illnesses I was never able to fully analyse difficult events in the period after they happened. So not only did I not repeat my leaving cert but I didn't even assess the reasons I didn't seek to repeat the leaving cert at the time due to lucid dreaming. Hence with career difficulties I might often find myself thinking over events of years past as if I were analysing them non-stop! Elderly people might be metaphorically breathing with one lung compared to young people except that elderly people have been gradually habituating to the breathlessness. Overall experiencing chronic pain can increase empathy for other people in pain. You've to learn to walk before you learn to run! We tend to think of Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease as an elderly phenomenon. Yet it's possible that these are really just the end result of a gradual aging process. Maybe 30 year olds are slightly more amnesiac than 20 year olds. So any loss in memory is simply interpreted as added mental focus seeing as 30 year olds aren't being educated. Perhaps the decreased walking speed of a 50 year old isn't an impairment but a beginning of a decline that might lead to Parkinson's in later decades. Viewing chronic pain as a working backwards mechanism could be compared to a fierce massage. So your ligaments are passively stretched so much that it takes months for your mind to proprioceptively fit into a more flexible muscular arrangement. Part of my fantasy about shin splints resulting in much greater speed might have been because of my awareness of artificial steroids mimicking huge strength increases such that I'd no idea what the capacity of involuntary shin pain might be in terms of natural steroids. It might be the case that the apparent hypertonia of shin splints would make you physically faster with more momentum only if your mind was that strong and unfortunately I'm simply not mentally strong enough to run at high speeds with such heavy legs. In other words even over a month of breathlessness failed to give me the mental stamina to match a top sprinter who spent their childhood with the equivalent leg strength of shin splints where mental strength can spiral over long periods of time. Maybe I'd literally have to walk every waking moment for 16 hours a day as if I were trekking in a war zone in order to be able to sprint freely at top speed. A possible interpretation of breathlessness is to instill bravery in yourself for your own lifepath rather than just for others where the prayers I repeated while in pain during breathlessness would help automate the prayers for whenever I'd be in danger again. If Chinese people were the intense ultra-walkers with Japanese people being the natural power-walkers then perhaps Indian people were like the suave walkers who jogged intermittently to give the impression of nonchalance! No wonder India preferred posh cricket as a display of walking supremacy over athletics!
When we're younger we've less psychological resilience but more physically resilience when it comes to fear. Perhaps chronic pain uses up our physical energy and converts it into a more relaxed or meditative state of mind. Non-physical fear can rarely cause a heart attack when you're elderly:
Dougal Almost Gives The Bishop A Heart Attack! | Father Ted
It looks like a silly march but while I was in my room I decided to do some exaggerated vertical hip stretches and elastic horizontal hip movements in order to emphasise the loose and indirect nature of our spinal engine. The white supremacist physique(!):
Altering how hard our foot strikes the ground can change our posture. Using a softer landing can be great for a steadier pace. A harder kick to the ground could increase your momentum when you initiate your walk.
Some gallivanting postures! To see how convenient our arm swing is we can check how awkward it’d be to walk with both arms swinging forward and back together or else having the same arm move ipsilaterally with the leg. It’s easier for us to stroll a tiny march with one foot continuously in front of the other than a bipedal galloping jog! I try not to crash or trip during my last few steps. Turn off your vestibulo-occular reflex to turn your head on each stride and walk like a monkey! Monkey is sometimes used as a racist insult even though there is actually a monkey for every skin colour!
Some all out, existential music! Skipping and jumping through the third verse: (3:00)
(Red Hot Chilli Peppers: Dani California)
A slower beat can help for the lethargic walks!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=na47wMFfQCo&pp=ygUyd2Fsa2luZyB0aHJvdWdoIHRoZSBkZXNlcnQgb24gYSBob3JzZSB
(America: A Horse with no Name - It's only when you can't even remember your name that you can call yourself truly elderly! Or perhaps do certain Alzheimic people feel like children again?)
We’ve to keep on the move because our hearts will explode when it beats too slowly! Please ignore the nude references at the beginning of the video as I've too many nude jokes in the blog already!
(Father Ted: Dougal the Milkman and the Booby Trap)
The shamanic pose! If you don't find yourself sexy then mimic a posture that relates to contradictory sexual highs such that no one but you knows what it means(!):
I'm not very tall but that doesn't mean I can't pretend to be! I've my own ethnicity of one! Extreme pride can be excused by needing my arms out wide in case of a fall downhill! Assuming a sarcastic posture mimics the non-functional nature of a soldier's dress uniform. For example England's royal guards wear ridiculous red uniforms to symbolise apathy towards enemies implied to be weaker. This creates a circular effect where an outlandish uniform is a placebo to focus on a serious posture as a counterbalance against appearing too silly. Losing your athleticism might be an opportunity cost of individualist spirituality because if you view your perception as immaterial then this has a recursive affect on viewing your own body as immaterial. Maybe a materialist outook passively helps your physical strength when you're connected to a collective population of materialists or religious people. Obesity might reflect flaws in spirituality when Japanese people tend to be thin simply they're socially collective no matter how lazy any individual Japanese person might be. For example I'm a compatibilist for how the mind is connected to the body but isn't simultaneous with the body. Yet I'm not fully knowledgeable of the physical world where I've to focus on the mind much more meaning that I'm an accidental dualist relative to my physical brain. As such overweight people might simply not socially connect with other overweight people sufficiently to comprehend others with similar mindsets. Perhaps an overweight person is simply in a collective of one where they lack full awareness of their own metaphysics.
A unique interpretation of chronic pain would be that the body actually has no problem adapting to exercise where the body would be ironically at risk of over-adapting to an exercise. So chronic pain would be a way for your unconscious to reduce an unsustainably harsh physicality. I was much thinner at age 15. I won an all-Ireland tennis title with doubles teams from my club. Truth be told very few tennis players actually took the community games very seriously! Nonetheless I can now get away with saying I toppled all of them with a national title(!):
I used to run quite often in the woods and tried to attain the coveted dented 4 pack abs. Even though I tried much harder at athleticism when I was older my body simply rebelled against me.
Check my "Shin Splints Jogging" channel for extra videos: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCMJq0CvNOmi-95wokCkKcOQ/videos
(The YouTube app might not show the description for short videos where you might have to use the normal search engines.)
(I got no reply.)
Yoga and stretching can help relieve tension! Try not to activate every breathing and leg muscle in an unnatural way. Chronic stress can force you to try other ways to relieve yourself!
Ali Rose and Chloe Miranda - Hot Naked Yoga - Playboy TV - YouTube (Clean)
We shouldn't use animalistic analogies because objectifying women as bunny rabbits pretty much dehumanises you into a fox without you realising it! Or perhaps you'd become a bull if you focus only on their chests! Cats and dogs might make for less violent comparisons! I thought my descriptions were helping to pre-empt perverts only to realise very few people were actually at that level anyway! A penile "boner" can be biologically literal in forcing you to think about a skeleton. Obesity in the ancient world might have related to absurd levels of hypersexuality where a high food intake didn't matter and warfare was constant. Yet in the modern day obesity might relate to an indulgent mindset in any discipline where the absurdity of hypersexuality is a mere metaphor. Perhaps breathlessness could also be a form of self-control over promiscuous desires seeing as if you had actually achieved your desire to have so many romantic partners then you'd likely be much physically fitter!
Perhaps visualising a lot of nude runners during your own run could increase your stamina! Enjoying women will gradually decrease a man's speed and strength to that of a woman over the decades of ageing much like a curse!
Liking black women can endanger you to a porn overdose! Perhaps for a white man to run as fast as a black man you need to appreciate black women!
Jenna Brooks topless
"Anthropologist Peter McAllister thinks that a set of preserved footprints of aborigines in Australia suggests that some early settlers on that continent would have been right up there with the likes of Bolt if they were asked to run the 100 metres final. Mr McAllister’s analysis of the footprints suggests that this group of humans were capable of running at up to 23 mph, bare foot and over soft mud in their pursuit of prey. Or perhaps they were being pursued themselves, trying to avoid becoming a meal for one of the many super-predators that they shared their Australian home with.
The prints of six men chasing prey and Mr McAllister’s analysis leads him to believe these men if trained and provided with modern running shoes could beat Usain Bolt in a sprint. Peter claims that these ancient ancestors of ours could theoretically reach sprinting speeds of up to 28 mph. It is not known what speeds the likes of Usain Bolt, Yohan Blake or Tyson Gay could reach if they were being chased and in fear of their lives."
Our great great grandparents might have been far physically stronger than our generation where chronic pain might be a reminder of ancestral strength even if it doesn't quite stretch as far back as prehistorical strength! Perhaps shin splints forced me to prioritise upper body strength over running. For example I often preferred running over weigthlifting as a teen because running was more challenging. So the pain response of excercise might be misleading because the pain of running meant that I might not have been as physically strong at running compared to weightlifting even if I found running more mentally refreshing. That is to say being better at withstanding the pain of running compared to the pain of weightlifting isn't always objective when the pain response is internal and a bit subjective. I might have underestimated how I might have been stronger to have not been in pain for the early repetitions of weightlifting.
"The ground forces applied while hopping on one leg at top speed exceeded those applied during top-speed forward running by 30 percent or more. That suggests our limbs can handle greater forces than those found for two-legged running at top speeds...
The new work shows that running speed limits are set by the contractile speed limits of the muscle fibers themselves, with fiber contractile speeds setting the limit on how quickly the runner's limb can apply force to the running surface.
"Our simple projections indicate that muscle contractile speeds that would allow for maximal or near-maximal forces would permit running speeds of 35 to 40 miles per hour and conceivably faster," Bundle said."
On Sunday 21/1/24 I'd a dream in which I was late for the train and got angry at the driver only to chase after the carriage where I got hurled back several metres by a taller person. Perhaps the dream indicates that no matter how much faster I could run than a heavier, muscular person the problem was still that I'd have less momentum than them even had I crashed into them while I running at top speed.
Stronger athletes serve not only as motivation to excercise but also as a deterrent to overambition and overtraining in case weaker people like myself misjudge who ourselves. Team sports and being extroverted allows people to immediately assess their strengths and weaknesses so as to not be distracted alternative forms of strength. The treadmill might have allowed me to run way faster than natural because I wasn't very good track athletics. So perhaps the way top athletes don't notice an increase in speed from the automatic leg kickbacks might have been because they're already at their physical peak. For all I know I might have been
Running can strike fear into anyone(!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2itQkiQUOE
The Wizard Of Oz - The Cowardly Lion (6/8 1939)
One version of breathlessness might be that the pain of breathlessness was to deflect from the physical pain of suicide. In other words the act of suicide would not actually have been much more painful than the pain I was already in as if the pain response were trying to be impartial on the ability to kill myself. For example if I tried to hang myself but became hesitant than I could try to hold my breath beforehand where the relative pain of initiating my hanging would be reduced. So the way I felt trapped in my body during breathlessness might have been a working backwards mechanism to make suicide easier had I chosen that option. As such breathlessness might have been an ultimatum to either kill myself or to choose not to kill myself in the medium term and not just the short term.
A last ditch version of the breathlessness in 2016 was as a defence against criminal psychosis where my lack of knowledge on neurology might have scared me into thinking that psychosis could descend into criminal psychosis. An ironic limitation with the insanity defence in court cases might be that losing control of your thoughts might feel more dangerous than it is if criminal psychosis is still a bit rare and also when others can defend themselves against you. So the breathlessness might have allowed me to empathise with any potential victims in order to gain more self-control. Because of the mind-body problem juries cannot fully assess criminal psychosis. Yet perhaps an ethical system is capable of infiltrating the same amount of anxiety being displayed by criminally psychotic people in order to try and avoid a conversion to evil. After the breathlessness ended I thought I'd never have to work again as if I were going to be a professional athlete because I was almost in the same amount of pain in those few months as I was for two years of studying. Yet maybe breathlessness might have been more about transcendence where my inner psyche has the potential to placate other mentally ill people into remaining calm and forgiving rather than to just to intimidate certain mentally ill people out of amorality. For example it's hard to mind-read others as a form of empathy but it's possible to imitate their emotional gestures if they display traits of anxiety to see if their anxiety was slightly exaggerated or mostly sincere. In other words breathlessness might be a form of karma where mentally ill people counterbalance each other!
Chase Scene - Shutter Island
I admit that I try to be an unceasing perfectionist. Except I’ve often failed to achieve any perfection. So I’m not sure if that makes me a perfect failure or a failed perfectionist! At least I’ll be self-critically humble about not being a true perfectionist! I remember watching a documentary about all of the different types of ants. I can only paraphrase it but the ants were descended from some type of wasp thing. Apparently these type of wasp flies were the most populous species on Earth for a small part of its geological history. So maybe we need spiders or the world would still be ruled by flies! They’re an enemy of an enemy. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/121605-arachnophobia%C2%A0%C2%A0/
That’s one of the biggest ones I’ve caught. I put my tennis racket beside it to add some perspective to it; as if I was investigating a crime scene!
I’ve had a one or two of these fly into my room in the middle of the night. I’d be chasing it all over the place to capture it in a glass. I’d be jumping on and off my bed if it was on the ceiling. It must of sounded like a war-zone and everyone else would awaken. I was often left bemused when someone else would just walk in, catch it in their hands and release it outside.
They’re certainly not creepy. But maybe our pets find us creepy as they probably view humans as a superior species with ambivalent intentions. The labrador’s name is Toby. It wasn’t me that named him so I always assumed it was just a dog’s name. So you can imagine how awkward I felt when people started introducing themselves to me as Toby!
(John Wick: It wasn't just a dog scene)
I remember watching this movie and was thinking to myself that I know so many people who’ve had a pet killed by a car. Whatever I do I won’t get them this movie as a Christmas present!
Somehow I can’t see that sport taking off in Ireland: we’d have to choose between buying a car or a bird! Unless maybe we could train it as a sort of “security bird” to chase after trespassers😀. I was a spectator at a handball tournament in Qatar when I was allowed hold a cool bird in my arm.
They’re sly creatures who have a penchant for killing mice and ruining leather couches. Threatening but not creepy!
I always have to mentally prepare before eating shrimps and squid when they’re served uncut. I like pictures of crabs and octopuses so I try to think of them when I eat these fish. If you in any way think about their grasshopper appearance then I’m afraid you’ve already lost and will be unable to continue!
Fr Ted - Spider Baby (Dougal)
Random act of kindness: I pushed a beetle stuck on the footpath the right side up!
Who's more conscious?!
I tried to hit that stubborn fly away at least 5 times. I know they’re unfeeling but I do think some flies have a wry sense of amusement. I've improved my sparring against agile flies by slapping at top speed and often by aiming a bit above their position so that they'll jump into my swing! Other times I've to creep up behind them and launch an ambush! If there's a few them I might shiver every now and then like a pony! I'll be a trained boxer by the end of it!
At least this guy found my jokes funny.
(pdf on home page)
Unfortunately I happen to be an expert on the topic! She was very rebellious, talkative and resilient. Another quality she had was her independent-minded attitude where she wasn't afraid to pursue unusual hobbies like pole-dancing. Although this uniqueness and self-reliance had a downside in that she wasn't in any way dependent on my company! Unrequited love is almost like a fictional version of an abusive relationship. It's where you put yourself in an imaginary relationship just to test how resilient you'd be to deal with the constant isolation! The very fact they don't love you almost makes them even more attractive as a kind of challenge! A trouble with trying to mindread someone you like that's temperamental towards you is that their nice behaviour can be an average assessment of them. For example someone could find you a bit friendly and never hold any hateful feelings towards you. Or else they could be really attracted to part of your personality but for some reason truly despise another element of you. Yet both versions can appear the same overall and so it's hard to know if they'd ever be tempted to form a relationship. After all people tend to be reserved about what they don't like in a person. It can be disappointing when you're left guessing what they didn't like in you. Although I'm not sure if it'd be any better if they told you upfront what they disliked in you! Unfortunately you can't sue a potential partner for discriminating against your background! An irony of finding rebelliousness attractive is that rebels can also rebel against each other! I always admired her sarcastic sense of humour even though it could occasionally be myself who'd be the butt of the joke! She asked me if I could help her find a boyfriend. I agreed because I thought she was just being coy and playful. But I was to later find out that she was serious! Imagining about going on a date doesn’t count as a hallucination! I went to see her for coffee once where she was explaining how she had a brain injury but that she recovered and it's not visible that she had it. I misspoke when I agreed with her that it wasn't noticeable and she just looked normal. But then she picked it up wrong and felt that I was saying she wasn't normal. I've to be more careful with my words! She told me about two unusual ex-boyfriends where there was a guy who had become gay by the end of their relationship and then there was another who descended into drugs. Perhaps I wasn't eccentric enough! At first I thought she was playing hard to get only that the time became longer and longer! We went into a bar one time and I got an alcoholic drink. She asked for a sip and I obliged. However she wasn't meant to drink any alcohol due to her injury and I got into a small bit of trouble. I was in a no-win situation! She asked me to describe my personality in a bar where I told I was a quiet person. Perhaps I should have elaborated! I was put in a tricky situation where her friend would act nice to me while I was with her but anytime I saw him on the street he'd walk straight past me. He was an ironic person who greeted me more passionately than anyone else with a high-five but didn't always maintain his enthusiasm! She said hello to me years ago the first time when I was shopping in Dunnes Stores because she thought I was someone else! She initially seemed interested but once she got to know me she appeared to change her mind! Perhaps I was being solipsistic by expecting her not to lose interest! She was frustrated at first that she'd to ask me to meet up when convention dictates that it's meant to be the other way round! On another one of our early meetings we went to see Fifty Shades of Grey at the cinema. Perhaps I shouldn't have recommended an explicit movie to start off with! She'd usually cancel every second meeting and we met once every two months. It was strange because it was usually her who asked to meet me where she'd cancel an hour beforehand or while I was en route. On one occasion she randomly asked me to see her and then immediately cancelled it and texted me to say she hopes I'm not annoyed but that she's sorry if I "felt" that way. Eventually we could only meet up if it was with other people! She asked me to write a Valentine's Day card only as friends! Having my own personal theory of gravitation didn't change her mind! In fairness she had playfully asked me a few weeks after we met if I was trying to "get something" from her before bluntly warning me that I "won't". Then she yawned and joked that she wanted to sleep in my bed because she was tired! I had bought her a cup of tea and a muffin beforehand but obviously she wasn't too pleased! I got the impression any potential romance or friendship was over when she didn't really say hello and appeared to ditch me once or twice at nightclubs after having invited me there with her friends. The first night I was asked to take a group photo of them and idly wandered around listening to music. I stayed there for a long time because they were friendly before we went inside the disco. The second night I detected I'd be by myself again so I left after 10 minutes. Beforehand I'd to wait for 15 minutes because they told me to meet them at another place when they were already inside. I remember trying to approach them where she appeared to be trying to push another fearful woman in my direction! One of her friends approached me looking sad and then walked away again. I initially said I didn't want to see them anymore. Eventually I couldn't resist and met up with her on other days just in case she ever changed her mind and became friendlier! She later said that it was my job to follow them around dancing rather than it being their job to come to me standing by the side! I was fascinated by her recovery from her injury but her and her friend sometimes seemed rather cynical towards me. Her friend had told me I should've followed them around at the disco like a normal person in an apparent distortion and gross exaggeration of what I had previously said.
Sometimes I reduced contact with her not because she wasn't romantically interested in me where she claimed I was jealous but simply because she wasn't always friendly. There might be periods where she'd stop replying to my messages for several months or a few times she'd ask me to meet her in town only to leave after a few minutes. Or perhaps she'd ask to go to the cinema only to meet for a small walk instead. I went to one of her birthdays where was upset that some of her other friends didn't arrive in a slightly ungrateful way. Or maybe I was just overestimating my influence on her! Anyway she and her friends were very nice as her birthday progressed. I asked her whether she'd like if I invited some of my tennis friends to the party for extra company only for her to reply that she didn't want a sausage party! She said once how she didn't mean to ignore me but that she was feeling down. It's a surreal feeling when the person you want to meet more often asks you for advice to help them overcome their loneliness without actually wanting more contact from you! Her and her friend visited my house one evening where we watched a "Superbad" comedy movie and ate pizza. She said she was fat as she ate a slice. I was probably meant to disagree with her facetious comment far more strongly! I was always preoccupied with other challenges in life and so initially I didn't mind waiting to meet up with her and her friends even if they weren't reliable. She was quite fond of practical jokes. We met in town and asked her for a kiss but she said she wanted to kiss if we met together the following day. Perhaps I should have got a small kiss the that day as collateral! But lo and behold she'd a sudden change of mind when I arrived the next day and she no longer felt comfortable. It was as if I was well-studied except for the most basic kiss and hesitated where she no longer wanted to kiss. I asked if we could both look at each other's bottom but she turned her head in shock! It was probably presumptuous of me to have asked about an "unconventional relationship" months earlier! I'd to justify it to her that I wasn't serious about a relationship and then morally justify it to myself that she might be tempted into a full relationship afterwards!
It seems herself and her friend unfriended me without a reply for a year after May 2021. Or maybe they simply didn't like me writing a blog post about them and are wary of future reports! She once expressed her view that criminals should only be rehabilitated and that medical cannabis should be legalised. Needless to say I agreed with her but she may have found me contradicting myself in the blog. It's hard to know whether spending a lot of time with people who then choose to permanently avoid you is time wasted but at least it was some sort of social recreation and emotional practice. I was always hoping she'd come to her senses and change her mind which probably creeped her out a bit! Nonetheless I can try to learn from her humble attitude towards life. I always found her penchant for the odd curse word really amusing and endearing. On second thought she probably wasn't always intending it as a joke! She was also very forgiving to others quite often. I'd to be very forgiving to others just to compete against her! To some extent I had extorted her and she may have extorted me. It was me who was more at fault because she also had to cope with a brain injury. I was reckless about sending her the insulting texts after the disco and for that I was truly sorry. I felt perfectly justified in leaving the disco without saying goodbye. Yet I went overboard and texted her good riddance. Then I showed no discretion towards her friend and told him to f- off. I told them I was sorry for what I did and they accepted me for a while. However I'd almost have been better off saying I wasn't too sorry for leaving but that I was emphatically sorry for being rude afterwards. In other words I don't always have to compromise the two sides. Insults are always subjective and can really backfire if it causes unexpected distress. She discussed her new boyfriend when we had dessert at a café. Sometimes if you feel very upset that someone didn't like you then you could try to be competitively as nice as him or her when you meet other people rather than being mean to everyone. The first time we eventually ate dessert together in a café was when she showed me a picture of her new boyfriend. All I learned about him was that he also had anxiety. Despite the pain of unrequited love I ironically had to learn from her resilient personality as much as I admired her social skills. It was very inappropriate of me to be particularly attracted to her slurred speech when she was physically impaired. Her very dislike of me was a paradoxical source of attraction for me where she was emotionally skilled in expressing a cautious distrust of me! I often disliked myself and she sometimes disliked me which is something we had in common! Overall she and her friends were extremely nice people even if we didn't always get along. Their pranks ironically helped me to understand my frustrations with my parents a bit better. Their occasional charm allowed me to see more clearly that I was deprived of a lot of company before I ever met them. It's possible that mysterious people can exude a charm because they know in advance that they won't be your friend for long where their decision to leave you isn't spontaneous. Estrangement can be accidental when we never see colleagues again after changing to another workplace. Yet to premeditatively estrange yourself from someone after first seeking them out can be an extreme interpretation because they essentially don't want to see you until your next life. I eventually received some correspondence from her in October 2022:
Ouch(!):
November 2022:
I decided to just be really overconfident in my texts in order to take the bullet for my multi-year presumptuousness(!):
I often rang her when I was abroad only to get no answer. I didn't know whether to stop because she never actually told me she needed to be distant. It's a bit unhelpful seeing as you don't really know how upset they are or even if it's simply a distrust of a public phone number. Yet it's clear from later correspondence how apathetic they must have been. Another dilemma is that it can be really exciting to know a friend simply because they appear mysterious to you. Although her male friend eventually appeared more distrustful in his mannerisms despite his upbeat demeanour.
Sometimes someone becomes almost a different person and you can't change them back to when you first met them. It's almost a lesser evil to form dirty mental thoughts towards a random woman or two passing you by on the street with a brief look to distract you because pornography will never emotionally relieve you from the grief! Or perhaps you'd have to find disinterested older women to chat with in order to reduce and bore you out of your sexually violent thoughts!
I thought I met as well appear a bit masculine by asking her explicitly for loving acts knowing full well she was always going to say no! Perhaps the question was a bit of practice for the next woman I'll ask out before being rejected again!
Mabel - Thinking of You
(Unfortunately she must have been listening to her other song "Don't Call Me up"!)
Last ditch effort:
I received texts again from her male friend after we greeted each other in town in early 2023:
I despise extroverted men! I was in a restaurant and a pretty foreign waitress took my order. "Tea please" was all I could manage. Then an older cousin noticed me and sat down. He managed to give an extremely elaborate order. There was nothing suspicious because he was married and he was always talkative anyway. Before long I heard she had Italian and South African parents. By some fluke he knew some Italian words and showed off his skill! Mission failure on my part! Perhaps I'd have to tell the waitress just to sit down for a few minutes and take a break from her work so we could have a mini-date! The best I can do is order a salad with my toasted cheese sandwich instead of chips when ordering from an attractive waitress! Instead of first guessing a country and asking if the waitress was from there I decided to ask her which country she was from in as simple a way as possible! She replied Spain and I said very good. No wonder Mediterranean countries had such brutal histories when their women were more fierce than their men all along! I kept going to the restaurant for cups of teas without ever saying much to her to avoid harassment. Luckily I received a voice message from a tennis tournament in Spain while I was in the restaurant and asked her to translate it! At the end of a 2 hour flight back from Portugal I managed to build up the confidence to ask the woman beside me if this was her first time in Ireland. She said yes and we left it at that. Practice makes perfect!
Dating a foreign-language person would work well for an introvert. She'd be learning how to speak English while you'd be learning how to maintain a conversation. Win-win! "I don't speak much English either; I just write English!" If online dating became more popular I'd try to impress people with poetic verses but don't expect much artistry in person. I'd never be the life of a party:
Entertaining Father Stone | Father Ted
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The trouble with certain mental illnesses is that the stress blinds us from seeing the full spectrum and everything appears all-or-nothing: the world either has meaning or it doesn’t, the world is real or it’s a fake illusion. Ordinarily we can appreciate that there’s shades of meaninful and meaningless aspects of our lives while remaining confident that the scales tip in favour of the meaningful side. We can usually understand there’s non-real components of our existence like colours and death without becoming preoccupied by these matters. Mental illness are painful because they can force the issue. It might be easier to passively withstand involuntary pain than actively defeating voluntary pain. https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/119204-solipsism/
Maybe a cure for solipsism is to find ways to transcend yourself like fiction and music!
(Ian Van Dahl: Castles in the Sky - Trance)
The moderator didn’t understand what I was saying. I've no "dark" agenda! I was commenting on the slavery theory in athletics and not slavery itself. So if I sounded a little dismissive it was solely of the slavery gene theory and obviously not the harshness of slavery. From what I can gather, survival of the fittest in evolutionary terms is more about adapting to the environment. It doesn’t literally mean the stronger the better. For example, being physically weaker and therefore being able to live off less food means that your more efficient and better “adapted” to working with a limited food supply. Being the strongest bodybuilder yet needing to eat 8,000 calories a day means that you wouldn’t survive the likes of slavery. So it doesn’t follow that only the physically strongest survived slavery. There’s a limit to what our bodies can adapt to.
Even if I was wrong on which causes which the fitter you are the better your temperature regulation. Heat resilience is not only important for cardio but also to prevent dangerous heat illnesses and sun stroke. All colours have different heat properties and so the phenomenon isn't uniquely black. Radiation in this context is a synonym for heat and not uranium! It’d take a brave athlete to dope with nuclear fusion! And even if I were wrong on everything, I fail to see how it’s in any way racist to say people might look fit when fitness is very much appreciated in today’s society! For instance, being taller and muscular means that you can physically lift heavier weights than a thinner person. Nothing controversial there! But obviously it doesn’t make it psychologically less demanding to lift heavier weights for that bigger person. Of course the sole exception is the Schwarzenegger terminator robot! Anyway it’s simply that they wouldn’t be physically at risk if they attempted to exert themselves. That is to say the larger person still needs to endure much more psychological pain than a thin person when both of them are at their respective 1 rep max. Although a stronger person could reach a weaker person’s maximum with less effort but they can then go beyond that. Their physicality can make them capable of reaching more psychological pain for that discipline. There’d be negative feedback for a less muscular person where they’d be physically unable to endure an equivalent amount of psychological intensity solely in terms of lifting weights. Please note that I didn't say that a person's skin colour impinges on their empathy and conscious selves. I'm not sure if it's any consolation to hear that if I view anyone as non-human it's myself!
In 2011 when I got heat exhaustion at a tennis camp in Majorca I realised I wasn't a very strong runner where the temperate climate in Ireland can be deceptive. I often had to leave training sessions in Majorca early for cold showers to avoid light-headedness. Yet I never got heat exhaustion abroad after the shin splints when I travelled to Tunisia and Gran Canaria for tennis tournaments. So maybe shin splints is a biological reminder that no amount of running will ever let you catch up to those in hotter climates. I'm like a white van with petrol canisters in the boot competing against red ferraris when I play against Meditteranean tennis players! It'd take many days of refueling for me to ever beat them! I'd be the best tennis player in the world if every tennis match were like the multi-day John Isner and Nicholas Mahut Wimbledon epic! So I'm not really racist against blacks and just a bit racist towards Mediterraneans! A non-racist interpretation of black strength is that their women can be physically stronger meaning that the strength of their husbands and sons can spiral upwards! If "red" Native Americans in temperate climates and tanned Inuit in Arctic climates were re-interpreted as a variation of white people then we'd realise that their red skin evolved to defend against the cold by reducing heat emission. Yet this would entail that white supremacy at slow walking speeds would never be absolute with stiff competition from Native Americans!
"Despite the frigid, ice covered landscape of Northern Canada and Alaska, the Inuits remain warm beneath parkas of animal hide. Warm and…tan. Despite barely seeing the light of day, the native people’s skin retains a bronze glow...
Skin color is determined genetically. Genes tell the body how much of the two types of melanin, the pigment that helps to determine the skin color, to produce. Pheomelanin causes reddish yellow pigments, and eumelanin gives deep brown coloring. But skin tone is not all genetic: more melanin is produced when you are out in the sun. Sunlight exposure causes the optic nerve to signal the pituitary glad to release more melanin. Thus, you tan."
Perhaps the way I'm very slightly tan only allows me to jog smoothly! So maybe shin splints would feel as if you were in a hot country even when you're in a cold country(!):
Iggy Azalea Work
When I was in 6th class in primary school I'd a few months where I'd occasionally be stuck getting random words out of my mind. If I woke up with the thought in my mind then I'd assume I'd still remember it for the following day. It made no sense at all which made it stand out in my memory. When you learn off books at school your mind might wander too much!
(My 2 comments are towards the end of the first page in the above “du vide” thread.)
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