Andy Brehm

@DeRushaJ @SD50MNGOP Sad. Love that place.

Whoa! Moe Sharif is retiring and the Downtowner on W. 7th is closing this weekend in Saint Paul

Pretty weird stuff.

I don’t understand why both political parties’ candidates aren’t running ads like this for every midterm race? Govt competence; zero culture war nonsense.

@Tim_Walz You won’t be in elected office next year…just saying.

Minnesota is going to have a trifecta next year… just saying.

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.

Wonderful!

“Have faith,” Jesus tells us in the #GospelOfTheDay (Jn 14:1). That is the secret! It is precisely this faith that frees our hearts from the anxiety of possessing and acquiring, and from the illusion that we must pursue a position of prestige to have worth. Each person already has infinite worth in the mystery of God.

@GrageDustin She’s a terrific leader

Kristin has done more than anyone in the legislature to expose fraud and corruption in Minnesota. She should run for the State Senate seat now that Warren Limmer is retiring and help secure a Republican majority in the chamber.

Amen. She sure has. Now it’s time for Minnesota Republicans to unite around @LisaDemuthMN to be the next governor of our state that so badly needs and deserves new leadership.

This might rank as the top cringiest MN political video of the year. Someone needs to tell Wolgy politics isn’t his thing.

@NortonMpls Big fan of @Michele_Tafoya’s chances against her.

@andybrehm Big fan of Peggy?

I’m aware of another candidate with a bigger profile that wants to rescind their endorsement of Angie Craig, seems like this could become a trend. Janet Mills thinks Angie’s campaign is spiraling.

I actually can’t believe I grew up in the vicinity of people like this. If I wasn’t involved in politics I wouldn’t believe they existed.

I really feel for the person he falsely accused. Lots of people are laughing on this site. I doubt she finds it as funny.

Minnesota Democrats should skip lectures about the dangers of politically motivated prosecutions. The @MinnesotaDFL endorsed @MaryMoriarty is a poster child for that kind of thing. You agree with her politics, she’s gentle with you. You don’t or are a cop, she’s brutal. 👎

“Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul except sin. God commands you to pray, but He forbids you to worry.”   — St. Francis de Sales

i can still live another 50 years if @Mike_Pence has the courage

My goodness. I know it’s hard to ask people to watch anything for 40 minutes these days, but please do watch this. Thought-provoking for the first 2/3 and deeply moving for the final bit, especially the very end. Wow.

I am so deeply sick of Jimmy Kimmel and the hate he spreads in the world.