brayden

Avoid people who are too curious about your private life.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas. Her sample is dominated by the single most protective bacterial species a vagina can host (Lactobacillus crispatus). Only about 25-30% of reproductive age women globally are L. crispatus-dominant, and “dominant” usually means above 50%. Kate is at 98.7%. The lab found nothing bad to report. (no gardnerella, Candida, STIs, opportunistic pathogens, aerobic vaginitis markers, etc.) This is linked to lower risk of BV, UTIs, yeast infections, HPV persistence, HSV-2 and HIV acquisition, preterm birth, and improved IVF outcomes. A vaginal microbiome is downstream of everything: sleep, glucose control, stress, gut health, sexual health, immune function, what you eat, and what you put in it.

This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas. Her sample is dominated by the single most protective bacterial species a vagina can host (Lactobacillus crispatus). Only about 25-30% of reproductive age women globally are L. crispatus-dominant, and “dominant” usually means above 50%. Kate is at 98.7%. The lab found nothing bad to report. (no gardnerella, Candida, STIs, opportunistic pathogens, aerobic vaginitis markers, etc.) This is linked to lower risk of BV, UTIs, yeast infections, HPV persistence, HSV-2 and HIV acquisition, preterm birth, and improved IVF outcomes. A vaginal microbiome is downstream of everything: sleep, glucose control, stress, gut health, sexual health, immune function, what you eat, and what you put in it.

Using Kalshi to bet on whether my date's vaginal microbiome score will improve after I eat her out. It did not, but I bet accordingly, confident that my womb-juice siphoning technique would deplete her. I made $60 on that trade, almost breaking even after our date at jersey mikes