I’m referring to the disturbing images on packaging.

Nah do it like they do in Europe. Pictures of what it looks like to be held to the bed screaming by a 19y/o who had no idea what they signed up for while an ICU nurse shoves a tube up your ass so that the diarrhea they induced to rebalance your ammonia doesn’t dissolve your anus as quickly except she can’t get the tube to stay in because your anus has already been slightly dissolved so she keeps shoving the tube back in and you’re still screaming because you’re in acute alcohol withdrawal and the terrified child they’re paying $12 an hour to help the ICU nurse restrain you seems to have snakes crawling out of their dinner-plate sized eyes.

Leaving the tide pools. Possibly even forming proteins to begin with. I much more enjoyed being stardust.

I was in the mood, lol. lmk if it helps.

So the Dialectal Behavior Therapy (DBT) skill above is called sensory-self-soothe, but it sounds like you might need something more like opposite action. I do recommend you take a breather first, so try to take a little bit of time away from those things entirely. This is to let some of your overall emotional inflammation die back before actually getting to work on this. You’re not gonna get this done right if your emotions haven’t even had a chance to stop getting their ass beat. How much time is gonna depend a lot on how you specifically relate to or need any of those things, but even 15 minutes can make a huge difference, especially if adrenaline/panic juice is involved. That said, if it’s some distant acquaintance you might just cancel lunch and get back to them next week, y’know?

So opposite action means intentionally acting differently than the emotion you are feeling calls you to, with the eventual goal of changing the emotion you are feeling. The worst part is that that’s a legit measurable phenomenon in behavioral psychology; you actually can fake an emotion until you feel it. Your brain will literally be like,“well. I’m smiling. So I guess I’m happy???” Brains are dumb but the cool part is once you know your own exploits stuff gets a lot easier, and this one is in pretty much all human brains.

IMPORTANT FIRST STEP. should you be using opposite action to solve this issue? There’s a decent chance that whatever feeling you’re having is actually relevant, actionable, and important, so you need to rule that out before you use it. If there is a person or entity who is physically hurting you, constantly criticizing you or saying hurtful things, controlling you, etc, you’re supposed to feel anxious/generally bad around them or it. Those unpleasant emotions are there to tell you to move away from something dangerous. I don’t know enough about your situation to know if it’s legit or not, I have no way of finding out over an internet message board, and more importantly, it sounds like you’re talking about multiple things, so I suspect it’s a mix of both legitimate and trivial anxieties. You’ll need to evaluate the relevance, importance, and action-ability of each emotional state on a case by case basis. If one of them doesn’t match up, opposite action is probably the wrong skill. For reference:

• Relevance - “is it an emotion that makes sense for me to feel about this situation?” If not, try to figure out what you’re actually upset about first.
• Importance - “do I need to act on this?” - major fight with your significant other? Yes. Some idiot took too long in the crosswalk? No. If it is something important, you probably either need
  • one of the problem-solving skills like pro and con lists to differentiate options or behavioral chain analysis to break down specific, individual undesired behaviors (often but not always substance related).
  • one of the interpersonal skills, specifically DEAR MAN (negotiation) or FAST (negotiation / boundary setting).
• Action-ability - “is there anything I can do about it anyway?” If you are in an abusive / oppressive situation, sometimes it’s ok to push your emotions down for a bit for the sake of safety, just also try to focus equal energy on finding safe outlets.

How to use it? idfk lol I’m not in your fucking brain and we’re probably not even in the same country. Be willing to be a little creative though. A great first step is before you even go back to trying to interact with that person or thing, try to spend some time reminiscing about what you did like about that person. Scrapbooks and photo albums are great for this, physical or digital. Video is extra good. Do an activity you bonded over. Use, wear, look at, or otherwise enjoy a gift they gave you. Read a nice message they sent you. Protip: start collecting stuff like this about your loved ones in an accessible location if this is a problem you have often. When you’re with the person, the two big things I recommend are:

• keeping your posture as relaxed as you can. I don’t know if you’ve ever learned to swim or a sport or craft where you have to relax your body but that’s part of it. The other part is to think about how you interact with an overall space when you’re comfortable. How do you sit on a couch when you’re comfortable vs uncomfortable? How do you walk down a hall? What clothes do you wear? What are your mannerisms? Study your comfortable self like an actor doing a character study, then practice playing that part (as much as is appropriate anyway, some comfort behaviors are for private environments only obviously). It will legitimately feedback and make you less anxious.
• doing favors / generally being kind to the person. This mostly speaks for itself, but to illustrate my point I’d like to point out that it’s also a known behavioral psychology phenomenon that successfully getting another person to perform favors for you will legit make them like you more.

Like I said, dumb, but very useful once you know the exploits.

Trained pavlovian responses to sensory triggers. If you meditate to the smell of lavender enough times eventually it starts inducing a trance you can use to combat panic attacks. You can also use other smells, sounds, colored lights, textures, etc. It actually works best if you use multiple different senses at a time. The catch is you have to continue meditating to whatever sensory trigger(s) you’ve decided on, and you have to do it more often than you use it to stop anxiety/panic. If you use it a bunch of times when you’re anxious / panicking and don’t keep using those triggers when you’re already calm, eventually the behavioral pathway will flip and the calming trigger will start causing anxiety instead because that’s when you’re doing it most. Ever set your morning alarm to your favorite song (if you haven’t, don’t). Even your favorite song in the world will eventually sour if it’s heard more often interrupting a blissful sleep than being vibed to.

I was waiting for someone else to comment because I was hoping they would know and I just wanted to say that you really let me down, man.

Situational awareness. I’ve had people look me up and down and ask how I handle the patient population I do considering I’m kinda skinny-fat and like

a) I’m a lot stronger than I look, especially with adrenaline in me one time I picked up one of the weighted dayroom chairs because I needed to get to a patient and it was in my way

b) 99% of it isn’t even fighting people anyway it’s mostly just having an ear for bullshit. One time we had a patient set off one of the safety alarms in their room and waited in the dark behind the door for someone to come answer it. I got there, saw the darkened room with the weird alarm going off and just noped the fuck out and called security.

If you have the common sense of every guy in the horror film that says,“Absofuckinglutely not” (and you don’t mind being paid pennies) psychiatric nursing calls to you.

Brains that run faster than average are very cool and impressive to people who don’t have to live in them.

I’ve used it for art and writing before but I find while it does make a product that’s like 75% done you still have to do a lot of editing and if you don’t fundamentally understand what you’re trying to do you won’t be able to edit it correctly. AI is for making you faster at what you already do, not for shoring up the fact that you never learned something to begin with.

I looked him up on YouTube because I wanted to see what you meant and all the comments say he’s been replaced with AI.

Damn. That show got weird.

Endometriosis is uterine tissue forming outside of the uterus and can be associated with a number of side effects (some of which can be dangerous) including mood swings. We’ve officially come full circle on diagnosing hysteria.

What red flags? He’s a solid, hardworking, and nonjudgmental family man! Unless in the later seasons I haven’t seen he becomes a shithead?

Zuko from AtLA, but part of that was also a deep experiential empathy for his character growth arc. Also sometimes having undefined gender issues at the same time makes it really hard to tell whether a feeling like that is attraction or envy.

One of my favorites in highschool and made EDM my favorite genre (well, that and playing speed over Beethoven in DDR). My faves now are apashe and avicii. If anyone knows any EDM that incorporates classical elements (especially strings and/or piano) I am ALL ears.

The logic behind it is that it’s a bribe “tip”-based system. The “tips” often provide more than a living wage, so it really works out better this way!

Nursing/Psychiatry: here’s what to pack for your friend in the psych hospital!

• T-shirts, logos fine, avoid anything explicit/vulgar
• stretchy pants, no drawstring or that can have the drawstring removed and don’t need a belt
• a sweater without a hood or zipper
• socks
• slide on shoes (no laces)
• a puzzle book with more than one type of puzzle
• a book in a genre they like
• a coloring book
• a notebook to write in
• crayons
• a stress ball
• one of those silicone bubble popper toys
• snacks/food that are still sealed or that have one of those doordasher stickers fast food places use sometimes.

DON’T bring:

• anything with long strings or cords
• anything sharp or pointy or made of glass or ceramic
• plastic bags
• bedding/pillows
• anything valuable or sentimental other than maybe a smartphone, and ID

Sir, we’re gonna need a sample, for science.

About the same I would say.