Todd Bergert

Great idea for a family vacation

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.

Küçük kız, babasının 2075’te ne kadar yaşlanacağını görünce bu gerçekle yüzleşemedi ve ağlamaya başladı.

Please pray for my husband, he got stung by a bee in the forehead. He’s in the hospital now, his face all swollen and bruised. He almost died. Luckily I was close enough to hit the bee with a shovel.

@PatriciaHeaton I still need my fiction so I’m in the historical fiction camp; two birds, one stone!

The older I get, the more I only want to read history books. Is this true for anyone else?

@shellenberger @RyanHoliday @IvankaTrump I liked his book but he’s insufferable

Stoicism values humility, emotional control, and loyalty to family. And yet America's leading popularizer of it, @RyanHoliday, displays none of those qualities in his angry, TDS-fueled condemnation of @IvankaTrump. He displays an arrogance every wisdom tradition warns against.

@3rubengoat @MrBeast Not as good as mine, buddy

I’ve been subscribed to you for the past 9 years Jimmy, I’ve been working so hard to attend a challenge of yours and win and today I’ve finally won @MrBeast

Can’t wait to take care of some overdue library fees once @MrBeast pays me

@MrBeast Like

If this tweet has exactly 1 like in 24 hours I’ll give that person $1,000,000

Me too. Me too…

My dad used to say, "You can’t go around saving everyone. They have to learn to save themself." He was a lovely man, but a terrible lifeguard.

@NJSimmondsbooks New York by Edward Rutherford Bone clocks by David Mitchell

Any incredible 5 star reads I should get on my Kindle? I'm about to get on a 17hr flight and I want to get ridiculously addicted to a book!!

@JonahDispatch That episode stuck with me and another one where Steve has to cut the three wires that defuse a bomb and was tempted to cut the red, white, and blue ones, but at the last second, cut the green instead of the blue bc the bad guy didn’t like America. He chose wisely

This was a huge deal for me too.

I can still remember the smell and I’m sure it was made of just about every cancer causing toxin known to man and I loved it

In Navy SEAL training, students who failed daily had to do two extra hours of punishment. They called it “circus.” Those students should have burned out first. Instead, they got stronger than everyone else. Admiral McRaven spent 20 minutes explaining the 10 lessons SEAL training taught him: Lesson 1: Make your bed. Every morning, the first thing instructors inspected was your bed. Corners square. Covers tight. Pillow centered. "It seemed ridiculous at the time. We were aspiring to be real warriors." "But if you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will encourage you to do another task, and another, and another." "And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made. That you made." Lesson 2: Find someone to help you paddle. Students were broken into boat crews. Seven men paddling through 8 to 10 foot surf. "Every paddle must be synchronized. Everyone must exert equal effort or the boat will be dumped back on the beach." "You can't change the world alone." Lesson 3: Measure a person by the size of their heart, not their flippers. The best boat crew was "the munchkin crew." No one over five-foot-five. "They out-paddled, out-ran, and out-swam all the other boat crews." "The big men would make fun of the tiny little flippers the munchkins put on their tiny little feet. But these little guys always had the last laugh." "SEAL training was a great equalizer. Nothing mattered but your will to succeed." Lesson 4: Get over being a sugar cookie. Several times a week, uniform inspections. Hat perfectly starched. Belt buckle shiny. "No matter how much effort you put in, it wasn't good enough. The instructors would find something wrong." Fail the inspection, you ran into the surf. Then rolled in sand until covered head to toe. "Sugar cookie." "Many students couldn't accept that all their efforts were in vain. Those students didn't make it through training." "Sometimes no matter how well you prepare or perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It's just the way life is sometimes." Lesson 5: Don't be afraid of the circus. Fail to meet standards, your name went on a list. End of day: "circus." Two hours of extra calisthenics designed to break you. "No one wanted a circus. More fatigue meant the following day would be more difficult." "But everyone made the circus list. And an interesting thing happened. Over time, those students got stronger and stronger." "Life is filled with circuses. You will fail often. It will test you to your very core." Lesson 6: Sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle head first. The obstacle course record had stood for years. Seemed unbeatable. Until one student went down the slide for life head first. Mounted the top of the rope instead of swinging underneath. "Dangerous. Seemingly foolish. Fraught with risk." "Instead of several minutes, it took him half that time. He broke the record." Lesson 7: Don't back down from the sharks. The waters off San Clemente are breeding grounds for great white sharks. Night swims were mandatory. "If a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid." "If the shark darts towards you, summon all your strength and punch him in the snout. He will turn and swim away." "There are a lot of sharks in the world." Lesson 8: Be your very best in the darkest moments. Underwater ship attacks. Divers swim over two miles to the target. As you approach, the steel structure blocks all light. "The keel is the darkest part of the ship. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. The noise is deafening. You can easily become disoriented." "At the darkest moment of the mission is when you must be calm. When all your inner strength must be brought to bear." Lesson 9: Start singing when you're up to your neck in mud. Hell Week. Six days of no sleep. Constant harassment. His class was ordered into the mud flats. "The mud consumed each man until there was nothing visible but our heads." Eight hours until sunrise. Instructors said five men could quit and everyone could leave. "Then one voice began to echo through the night. Terribly out of tune. Sung with great enthusiasm." "One voice became two. Two became three. Before long everyone was singing." "Somehow the mud seemed warmer, the wind a little tamer, and the dawn not so far away." "If I have learned anything, it is the power of hope. One person can change the world by giving people hope." Lesson 10: Don't ever, ever ring the bell. A brass bell hangs in the center of the compound. "All you have to do to quit is ring the bell." "Ring the bell and you no longer have to wake up at 5 o'clock. No longer have to do the freezing cold swims. No longer have to endure the hardships." "Don't ever, ever ring the bell." This 20 minute speech will teach you more about discipline, resilience, and hope than every self-help book combined. Bookmark & give it 20 minutes today, no matter what.

Heard this in AA years before I realized it was wu wei: “It's easier to act your way into new ways of thinking than it is to think your way into new ways of acting.”

@BenSasse The illegal kind

what kind of cocaine is good for cancer?

😂😂

I saw a girl say that when she feels stuck, she imagines she's 85 years old and gets one chance to come back to her younger self for one day, suddenly, everything feels like magic again, the walk, the music, the sunlight, live everyday like that. wow. im doing this DAILY now.

The speed of sound is a funny thing. Your parents tell you something when you're 20, and you only hear it when you are 40... #Lifefact 💐🤠💐