Pushforward Psychology Center

I feel that Pleasure Sensitivity Training holds the key to breaking out of the viscious cycle of screen / social media addiction. The viscious cycle I think works something like this: Screen usage > Densitizes you to your body Desensitized body > Seek stimulation externally Seek stimulation externally > Use screens more This cycle of numbness and external stimulation then devolves into a self-reinforcing cycle. Part of the way out of the cycle, I believe, is becoming more sensitive to our bodies. This can start by simple bodyscanning type meditation techniques. But I think it is especially powerful when we specifically train ourselves to become more sensitive to the sensations of *pleasure* in our bodies. This is because often it is pleasure that we are specifically seeking externally. A very simple technique for doing this is a form of breath meditation. When breathing in one notices the sense of nourishment and pleasure the body feels from breathing in. When breathing out one notices the sense of relaxation and pleasure the body feels from breathing out. Straight away one starts to contact their capacity for pleasure without the need for external stimulation. Learning to recognize what the feeling of love feels like can be another alternative to breath as the object of meditation for pleasure sensitivity training. Then if one wishes to go further, one can learn more formal jhana meditation practices. But to start with, breaking the numbness / stimulation cycle can begin by any exercise that allows us to become more sensitive to the sensations of pleasure available in our bodies.

A London hospital just built a rooftop garden where its sickest patients can lie outside in their beds, still on full life support, surrounded by plants and open sky. For intensive care, the idea is brand new. The instinct behind it is about 4,000 years old. King's College Hospital opened the garden on 29 May 2026, the first of its kind in the UK. It sits on the roof above the 60-bed critical care unit, with room for six beds. Each bed pulls up next to a weatherproof cabinet that supplies power, data, and medical gases, so a patient can stay hooked up to their machines while breathing fresh air. It cost 2 million pounds, paid for by a hospital charity. The designer described the goal as a hospital ward set down in a meadow. Doctors in ancient Egypt sent distressed patients to walk through palace gardens, around 2000 BC. The kings of Persia built huge walled gardens around 550 BC, planted with shade trees and running water. Our word "paradise" comes straight from the old Persian word for one of those walled gardens. Then medicine moved indoors. As drugs and machines took over in the 1800s, the gardens mostly disappeared from hospitals. Florence Nightingale pushed back. In her 1859 book on nursing, she called fresh air the first rule of caring for the sick and direct sunlight the second. She noticed her patients in east-facing rooms got better faster, and that being able to look out a window beat staring at a blank wall. Flowers and bright colour, she wrote, were actual means of recovery. She was working from what she saw, not hard data. In 1984, a researcher named Roger Ulrich tested it in the journal Science. He pulled ten years of records from a Pennsylvania hospital and compared gallbladder patients in rooms facing a small clump of trees against matched patients in identical rooms facing a brick wall. The patients who could see trees went home almost a full day sooner. They needed far fewer doses of strong painkillers. And nurses wrote about a third as many notes about them struggling, just over one per patient versus nearly four. That one paper helped get window views written into hospital building rules. Now King's is turning its roof into a live study, tracking how sunlight and greenery cut down the delirium, the confusion and hallucinations that can take hold during long stays in intensive care. A 2 million pound ward, full of custom-built equipment, made to deliver something a doctor on the Nile was already prescribing four thousand years ago.

Pagi-pagi membaca post ini dan cukup tercengang. Ini memang kasusnya di US, bagaimana dengan di Indonesia ya? (Tautan menuju post ada di tweet selanjutnya)

A young Harvard medical school graduate spent nearly three years stuck in his parents' house, having panic attacks and hallucinations. One evening at twilight, walking into a dressing room, he was hit by what he later called "a horrible fear of my own existence." His name was William James. The diary entry he wrote on April 30, 1870 became the foundation of modern psychology. The line was this: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will." He was 28. He'd given up. So he made one decision: stop waiting to feel okay before doing things. He would do them first, and let the feelings catch up whenever they could. He spent the next twenty years turning that one diary line into a science. His 1890 textbook landed on a simple split: the things you do are under your direct control, but the things you feel are not. You can decide to swing your legs out of bed and walk to the kitchen. The mood that hits you while you're walking, you can't dial. So you work the part you can work. The feeling side shows up on its own clock, when it's ready and not before. Brain scanners caught up about a century later. There's a network in your head that switches on the moment you stop paying attention to anything specific. It's the voice that drags you back to something dumb you said in 2014. In depressed brains, this network is overactive. It runs in loops. It will not let go of the negative track about you. The second you start doing something that actually needs your attention, the loop quiets and a different network takes over. Action is the off switch. In 2016, The Lancet published a trial called COBRA. Researchers took 440 adults with depression and split them in half. One group got CBT, the gold-standard talking therapy where you work on your thinking patterns. The other group got something simpler, basically James's idea written into a treatment plan: pick small activities each week, schedule them, do them, see what happens to your mood. A year later, both groups had improved by the same amount. The simpler version also cost about 20% less to deliver, because junior workers can run it. Five days of training is enough. In 2024, a research team pulled 218 studies together, covering 14,170 depressed people. Walking and jogging produced a real drop in depression scores. Yoga, same drop. Weights, same drop. The authors' verdict: exercise belongs alongside therapy and medication as one of the main treatments for depression. So that's the answer William James worked out from his own three years in hell in 1870, and that 14,000+ people in clinical trials have confirmed since. Action. Walk somewhere. Pick something heavy up and put it down. Show up at yoga. Schedule one small task and finish it. Any of these works, and they work for the same reason. You move, and the feeling follows.

Jared McCain elbowed Dylan Harper in the throat, backed it up on him and fell down 😂🤣

After 8 years, Jordan Clarkson is back in the NBA Finals and is now a 2x Eastern Conference Champion. 🏆 Jordan Clarkson is the first Filipino American to win the NBA Cup. Can he become the first Filipino American NBA Champion? 🇵🇭