Sunstream

Additional unfun fact, in case the implication goes by anyone; some few folks have discovered exactly how much it sucks when your immune system discovers your eyes and have, indeed, gone blind because of it :(

I learned in a video that cats can read our facial expressions just fine, we're just crap at reading theirs because their facial muscles don't allow for the same movement as humans (and dogs to some extent). They'll become more anxious if we show a fear expression around them in a new environment, or become more relaxed and cuddly if we smile at them in a new place. They look to us for reassurance as much as dogs do.

Once I learned that they do a lot of their communicating with their tail, I started paying attention to my two cat's tail movements and now I can't unsee it. It's as obvious as a waving hand, and they'll talk to one another this way as well as with us.

For example, they lift their tail as a greeting. If I say their name as they enter a room, I might think they'd completely blanked me if I didn't see their tail lift 'hello' every single time. Once my older cat, Bartine, didn't bother to tail lift, and I said "Oi! Barty! Rude?!". She then gave me a quick, half-hearted lift, like she couldn't be bothered with more than half wave, lol

Their tails quiver with excitement if there's a very interesting treat up for grabs, or my favourite is a coquettish swirl which is 100% "I love you" because it's always followed up with an approach to snuggle or headbutt. They also understand me when I say I love you, but particularly now because I see the swirl tail and say "I love you, too!" followed by indulgent pets.

'Tis a silly one, but it's hilarious when it stumps people. Best used verbally:

There are thirty cows in a field, and twenty-eight chickens. How many didn't?

::: spoiler Answer Ten. Ten didn't eat chickens! :::

It sure is; here's a video demonstrating the effectiveness. Shutting your door can mean the difference between life and death. I encourage anyone to watch or re-watch this, just to hammer it home.

Unfortunately, my cats can't deal with shut doors, so if there's ever a fire in my apartment, at least we'll all go together 🙃

This wasn't maliciousness to my mind so much as it was pure selfishness, but our school guidance counsellor fucked up in a vulnerable moment (particularly for me, but pretty much everyone who had to witness it as well), then doubled down on it and somehow made it worse.

One morning I came to school and my class was really somber. I found out that a girl's mother had died yesterday- that girl was part of my friend's group and I'd just met her mother a few weeks earlier at friend's birthday party; she was lovely. A drunk driver had hit her on a roundabout at 12 midday, of all times, and she'd passed before they'd even gotten her to the hospital.

This was traumatic for my friend on every level, I'm sure, but it was my first experience with second hand grief, so you can imagine it was a bad time to go ahead with the scheduled guest that morning who was there to do a very graphic presentation about drunk driving involving sound effects and acting out a car collision.

I feel sorry for the guy, in hindsight, because he probably hadn't heard a chorus of horrified screams and spontaneous sobbing in response to one of his shows quite like that, before, but that was on the school admin, anyway. What the fuck were they even thinking? "Yes, yes, we're all sad about Jessie's mum ... So anyway, this is how she died, in real time!"

So, moments before this bloody show started up, another close friend of mine turned up late and was confused at our dismayed faces. No one had taken her aside to tell her (the bastards. Why would you not take the girl's close friend group aside to tell them first? Jessie's mum was like a second mum to some of us), so I found it was on me to convey it. That really sucked. A lot. I was clumsy, friend was distraught, you get the picture.

This bitch counsellor, though... When the completely inappropriate presentation got to the graphic bit, my friend took off crying down the hall 'cause fuck all that, and I made to as well. The counsellor stopped me (like she thought I was trying to go after her), and fucking made me sit down and watch the rest of that show, clinging to my other friends trying to sob as quietly as possible and not imagine poor Jessie's mum at the moment her death. We were like, what, 15, 16 years old?

I don't know how the hell my feelings about this bullshit got back to the counsellor, but I think my mum must've called the school after I came home in floods, because again, this fucking bitch called me aside right as the bell rang to go home to (figuratively speaking) pin me down and explain to me why she was totally right to do what she did and she hoped I understood that she did the right thing, blah blah blah.

I just nodded along desperately, getting more and more anxious because my one bus out of there had a very narrow window to get on, and eventually had to interrupt her to beg her to let me go home. I got to enjoy the sight of it driving off without me and had to call my mum to pick me up over an hour later (side of the road on a hot Aussie afternoon- no there was no bus shelter, no the school wasn't open to let me hang around 'til my Mum got in).

Goddamn, I still think about that sometimes. It's not even close to the worst I've heard of teachers, but it's just so petty and unkind it somehow pisses me off more than overt cruelty. Like fuck off, you can't gaslight me into believing you had my best interests at heart with bullying tactics.

Oh yeah that's right, that same counsellor told me I had depression, too, when a) at that point in highschool I absolutely did not and it came out of left field completely, and b) when I did start to suffer from anxiety and depression she was as useful as a cat flap in an elephant house. Shocker.

Fuck you Mrs Whatever-your-face-was. I only remember you by the dumb nickname everyone gave you and that's fair enough because you're also dumb.

You gotta think diabolically.

My psychiatrist here in Australia cautioned me when doing online research into different ADHD medications to check the country of origin and avoid American sources where possible, as there is a huge anti-drug bias in US public and medical literature, and to stick to European/Australasian/other resources for more accurate information on mechanism of action and potential side-effects.

Boy, he was not wrong. If you go on many American websites that talk about the pros and cons of one stimulant or another, it'll overemphasise its propensity towards abuse and extensively list the side effects without bothering to explain how the drug actually works in the body.

You'll think it's an unbiased source, at first, because the website itself only seem to contain basic drug information (at a cursory glance) only to scroll to the bottom and find that the website is owned/sponsored by a rehab facility, of all places.

It'd seem like there's money to be made off of dx and prescribing ADHD meds, but we all know how fucking hard it is to dx'd in the first place, let alone prescribed something that works. It's not wildly profitable to prescribe drugs with heavy federal restrictions on it.

What is profitable, however, is to give someone 6 other psychiatric medications to treat ongoing mental health issues from undiagnosed ADHD, and the half dozen other co-morbid issues like substance abuse disorders, PTSD, anxiety/depression, bipolar disorders, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and so on- none of which you'll get much traction in treating without also addressing ADHD, and some of which may be misdiagnosed or more effectively treated when identifying the core disorder.

Why treat 1 condition when you can treat 7 ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Better yet, you can do that in an inpatient facility that their insurance can pay for, where you can convince them that their substance abuse issues are due to moral failing rather than an attempt at self-medicating a (widely speaking) treatable disorder, yet hypocritically prescribe them a cocktail of other psychiatric medications for their "moral failing".

That being said, I'm not saying all rehab facilities are bad or operate in this manner, but it is just one of many ways that the medical and pharmaceutical industry inadvertently or directly discourages appropriate ADHD treatment, additionally fuelled by the government's bigotry-fuelled war on drugs.

There's no part of the mechanism by which the neocortex is impaired in ADHD that explains "justice sensitivity" except dysregulated emotional control, which is present in myriad disorders and may result in hundreds of psychological pathologies.

If you've any sense of justice at all, you may feel it to a greater intensity than the average person but have less chance of directing it towards useful action. If you get so far as to take action, tendency towards impulsivity also dilutes the utility of such a trait.

You've got the best chance of taking thoughtful action if you're also intelligent, but in ADHD, all that's going to do is add a layer of imposter syndrome to a positive outcome because a part of you knows you weren't in full control when you leapt into the fray.

I'll also point out that the second result of the search you posted is a study that attempts to quantify the phenomenon of 'justice sensitivity', and concludes by suggesting "that higher justice sensitivity in people with ADHD is a coping strategy to prevent the impression that they do not care about social norms and thus to avoid social conflicts and denigration." I don't think that's the the only possible interpretation, but it does speak to what I've described.

Yeah, same here (same med and dose, too, lol), but it got better with therapy. I was used to being at the mercy of my mood my whole life, so when I became chipper and productive almost all of the time, I felt an an unnatural sense of urgency to 'make hay while the sun shines', so to speak.

I couldn't feel comfortable sitting down and relaxing when I could still see so much to do and I had the ability to do it.

What I learned in therapy was that, whilst having been given ability to action my goals, none of my old self guidance techniques really applied.

If life is a raging river, all I could do in the past was try to yank my raft towards rocks to block or divert myself, with my bare hands. Hard, painful, rarely successful and never without consequences.

Now that I have medication, I've been given a oar, but I kept using it to refine my existing techniques under the false assumption that the rocks need to be hit in order to get anywhere- but hey, at least I don't have to use my hands anymore, right?

When I get to a calm bit of river I should use that time to rest, "-but why? I have a paddle, now! I should go hard whilst I still can, I'm so much further behind everyone else, and soon I'll be too exhausted to use the oar so I should use my energy while I can."

I'm beginning to learn that I can use the oar to guide myself before rocks and turns, to not exhaust myself early, and to know that the river winds as it will but I don't have to meet it with a headbutt (lol).

Lol that was a big ol' metaphor for cognitive behavioural therapy, but honestly I wouldn't be where I am today without it.

I take medication but I also suffer from chronic illness- many times my health issues render my medication barely effective, so when I first came to my psychologist 2 years ago to work with him, I told him that I wanted to learn behavioural patterns and frames of mind when I was well that would still help me when I was sick.

It's working very well, I'm proud to say 🙂

Idk about where the original poster is, but here in Australia, yeah there are different energy providers. They all take advantage of the same infrastructure (which is run by a singular company, by and large- Energex), but different companies will offer different rates or deals for your energy needs and your service area. It's supposed to provide some competition for the consumers, although I don't know how that works out on the vendors side of things.

Technically speaking, it's both of these things. The melanistic changes to skin tone are a direct response to incoming UV damage, and is intended to be a protective mechanism.

There's a limit on how protective melanin will be for you, though, and it does not protect from every type of damage that the sun does.

UVB rays, for example, does the most DNA damage, but can be less obvious in its immediate impacts than UVA, which cause the bulk of the tanning (and burning) effect.

It remains to be seen if the negative impacts of sun exposure will outweigh the positives for each individual.

Every person will be better or worse at different aspects of compensation; regenerating collagen, scavenging free radicals and removing damaged cells are all governed by myriad factors like genetics, behaviour, environment, and so on.

It is actually important for your skin to get direct sunlight touching your skin in some way shape or form, but it's prudent to be in control of how long you do so for, what part of your body you expose (arm and leg skin is generally more durable than face and chest), and at what intensity.

As I understand it, a light tan is good if you can maintain it (relatively) safely, but a very dark tan stacks the odds higher on the side of cancer. No tan at all, though, leaves you very vulnerable to other forms of cancer- some things have to die to be renewed, after all- so I encourage any behaviours that limit overexposure of sunlight, and encourages cell turnover.

There are topical creams, supplements and behavioural changes you can try to encourage more cell turnover in your skin.

You might choose to use a light daily sunscreen for your face, neck and hands, but leave the rest of your body if you're just running a few errands outdoors that day.

Or you might wear a hat with a mesh covering when working outdoors that allows filtered light.

You might check the UV rating on your phone's weather app and choose to cover up with sunscreen if it's high, and so on and so forth.

Lots of info, I know, but I hope I've helped.

Nah, solidly a feature of either/both.

Misophonia, I think it was?

I've been going to a psychologist fairly regularly (fortnightly or monthly) for over 2 years, and I do generally have a positive self image, now.

I didn't start going just to gain better self image, but it came naturally the longer I spent articulating the problems I have and the goals I want to achieve.

When you answer questions about yourself, your thoughts, your ideas and values (specifically when you SAY them aloud to another person), it tends to expose your internal biases; against others, as well, but particularly yourself.

Negative thoughts said aloud, repeated, begin to sound like hyperbole. It's easier to catch yourself being unfair, mean, critical or thinking with no nuance about yourself, when you have to articulate it.

Even writing my thoughts down worked better than just thinking them. Feelings were no longer vague and undermining, they were nameable and confrontable. Having someone verbally intervene in unfair self judgements- and to highlight and celebrate my personal wins- is infinitely rewarding.

I feel good about myself, overall. I see my good, bad and neutral traits, and the bad is easier to tackle or accept when I know good and bad don't cancel each other out. Many things can be true at once, and it serves me nothing to fail to see my wins.

Almost no one I know is fully evil, bad, useless or selfish, they always have at least one thing that's worth celebrating.

I decided that, now that I can see my good, I'm allowed celebrate, enjoy and share it, because the bad doesn't grow without my permission anymore, and they're not in competition; it's just all me. Complex, like everyone.

If what everyone else said hasn't already put the wind up you, this portion of an article below details why lithium fires are so freaking bad.

Once lithium battery fires take hold, they are notoriously difficult to put out, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. There have been several reports of fire departments being unable to extinguish burning EV batteries, which—amongst other things—led to Tesla issuing specific guidance to firefighters as to how to deal with such fires. There are several reasons for the severity of lithium battery fires. For a start, they burn extremely hot, and have a nasty habit of spontaneously reigniting when you think you’ve extinguished them. They also burn for a long time. If there’s any elemental lithium present, it will react with moisture in the air to produce lithium hydroxide and hydrogen gas. Hydrogen gas is flammable. Very flammable. Lithium-ion batteries contain little or no elemental lithium, but any that is present—it can form on the anode during the charging process—can present a very unwelcome surprise. The nature of the electrolyte used can also be a problem—some high-specific energy lithium-ion batteries use a flammable electrolyte that contains lithium hexafluorophosphate, which can decompose into the thoroughly unpleasant hydrofluoric acid during a fire. Lithium ion fires also produce a variety of other gases, including oxygen, which means that simply smothering the fire doesn’t work, because the fire essentially generates its own fuel. Several of these gases are flammable, and can ignite explosively, while oxygen, not flammable itself, causes other materials in the battery to burn much hotter and more rapidly. Both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide are also produced, which can present breathing hazards to firefighters. Generally, the best thing to do with a lithium fire is to stay a long way away from it and let it burn itself out. Of course, if it happens to be, say, the car or e-bike in your garage that’s on fire, this approach may prove unsatisfactory.

Or, say you put a fucked up battery into your phone, then your phone into your pocket... Well, you might be golden if you also decided to start carrying lithium ion gel with you everywhere you go, but barring that, you'll make a pretty charred shish kabob in short order.

You're not even supposed to charge your phone near combustibles like sheets and clothings, ideally, or overcharge your batteries (to avoid overheating).

Too right. Someone in my household reminded us that we used to use munted all the time, so we're bringing it back into our vocab, haha

Munted - mutated, fucked up, borken

Parasitophobia and dermatophobia (fear of parasites and skin disease, respectively). This bleeds into a fear of fungal infection and worms in general. I guess my kryptonite would be a parasitic skin infection 🙃

I don't know what it is about them that repulses me/freaks me out over anything else- I quite like spiders, snakes, heights, the dark, etc- it's just instant nausea when anyone starts talking about them. If there's a hint I'm in danger of encountering either irl, I'm out.

Worst fear is having something crawl into my ear (I guess I can thank Animorphs for introducing yerks to me as a kid). I've seen some videos of that sort of thing happening to people, and I can't even fathom how calm people seem to be in comparison to how I would be if it were me. I'd have to have to put on a watch so I didn't start ripping into my head in animal panic.

I also have a particular dislike for really large fish and really large lizards. Anything larger than a foot and a half begins to make me uncomfortable. Dinosaurs are right out.

As my sister would say (who has a fear of lizards, herself) "If I were trapped in a room with a komodo dragon and a gun with two bullets in it, I would shoot myself twice."

I watched a looot of Animal Planet when I was a kid, so I didn't have many illusions. I could never figure out how the fuck birds did it, though. I figured that male birds must have extendable bits somehow, but female birds have a tail in the way.

We kept ducks when I was a kid, and during the time that we kept a mallard, he would straight up stand on the female duck's backs, and that struck me as terribly inefficient. To support this, none of the female ducks ever laid fertilised eggs, so I figured he was just terrible at it.

Little did I know about the horrifying intricacies of duck mating. I'll thank the internet for informing me in later life... Yeesh.

I replied with this to another user already by I think this applies here, too: I think what they meant was that they participate in only 10% of conversations because when they do they talk too much. Nothing about OP's post tells me they're not aware of the problem or in denial.

Wait, so does symbolic memory transition to being primarily language? I assume we retain symbolic memory in some capacity?

I'll give you a piece of advice that's been very valuable to me, especially in the case of getting injections, which is always difficult for me. In the lead up to a local anaesthetic, and during, take a short-to-normal inhale through your nose (depending on your lung tolerance) and do a loooong, extended exhale, as long as you can extend it without needing to take too big a gulp afterwards. When you exhale, this pushes your diaphragm up into your heart, slowing your heart rate down and significantly decreasing the physical effects of anxiety.

It works very, very quickly, and if you do it for up to 5 minutes, the heartrate lowering effect can last several hours. Doing it regularly (5-10 minutes a day) has long term positive effects for your overall cardiovascular health, too.

I've never been one for meditation, but practices like that have probably been helpful to so many people because it naturally takes advantage of the relationship between breathing patterns and heart rate variability.

There are even more 'tricks' like this, such as the double inhale. Taking two very quick breaths in succession before that long exhale is even better at reducing your heart rate and generally calming you down. You've even done it before, but you wouldn't know it.

Children in particular will do this, and it can happen naturally when you're sobbing. Sometimes you'll take two short inhales like "huh, huh!" before going in for another cry rather than one big gasp- and this is why!

I hope this really helps you out, because it's very quick and straightforward, but boy does it work fast. Sometimes I've only remembered to-do it halfway through an unpleasant experience and it still banishes burgeoning pre-syncope and nausea. Good luck!

It gives me the shudders to think of waking up on the table, but I suppose it beats the years prior to that, again, where it was "Jeremy, get the 40 proof... You, bite down on this and don't scream too loud, you'll pop a vessel."

Oof, that must have been infuriating. I know there wasn't much choice involved, but good on you for going back each time. I know a few people whose pride would have financially crippled them in that moment. Patience and persistence paid off, in the end. Congratulations on graduating :)

It can depend on how complicated your impaction is. Sometimes they look at you and go, "Yeah I can work that out no issues," other times they'll be like, "Nah fuck that, this is going to be a major surgery." The last thing you want is for them to realise it's the latter and not the former when they're halfway through the procedure 😅

I've heard of that happening, actually; the dentist ended up driving the patient around themselves trying to find an available surgeon to finish the job, and eventually gave up and just dropped them off at the emergency department.

Usually it's not that wild, but I feel safe in assuming that many dentists choose to book a general out of an abundance of caution, 'cause I'm sure that scenario features in their nightmares as much as it does the patient's.

It probably has something to do with licensing and costs for anaesthetists, too, come to think. Most dentists are qualified to give locals but not generals; verrryyy different ballgame, you can imagine.

Oh yeah, and finally, people's jaws are getting smaller. Seriously, though. The smaller the jaws, the more complicated dental surgeries are becoming, so there you go.

I'm kind of sad that I never got to experience that, to be honest. I only had two wisdom teeth- 1 on the top left and 1 on the bottom right. The right was set to be impacted, but apparently it hadn't grown any roots, yet (I was 17 or 18) so they decided it just get it out with a local. It was... unpleasant. The top left one has never come through, either, so I may well not have bothered 😓

Indeed! Auditory processing disorder can exist independently of ADHD or other disorders, and it can also exist secondarily to acute or chronic disease states like chronic fatigue syndrome 👍

This is because ADHD is primarily driven by overfiring neurons in the frontal cortex, resulting in overuse (and therefore dysregulation) of key neurotransmitters like dopamine and noepinephrine (or so it is understood by science thus far).

Disruptive activity in the frontal cortex and/or neurotransmitter dysregulation can occur under other circumstances such as I mentioned, and both of these factors would be a huge driver in moderating the phonological loop.

If you've not watched Mork and Mindy, that's worth it. It was Robin William's breakout role in television, so if you know Robin, you know what you're getting. It's delightful.

I've been really getting into Korean tv on Netflix lately, too. Best watched with subtitles and no dubbing. My gf and I have been watching Good Manager, which is about a tacky mob accountant trying to run away from his problems by skimming flagrantly from all of the dodgy businesses he manages. He gets hired at a large corporation and thinks he's onto his biggest scam yet, but the accounting team are sincere, the managers are psychos, and he's still got a glimmer of heart beneath his red hair dye and 1980's Sears catalogue suits that makes stealing from big business really, really hard when they take it out on the little guy. It's had me absolutely rolling; people's facial expressions, their theatrics, and vigorous use of the leitmotif really brought it together. 10/10, for me.

Yeah I'm 30, now. I presume they're just chilling, lol. Has anyone's come down after that point, do you think?

I think what they meant was that they participate in only 10% of conversations because when they do they talk too much. Nothing about OP's post tells me they're not aware of the problem or in denial of it. Their question was how to stop doing it.

I think you're taking it for granted that if someone knew about the problem and tried hard enough, they'd be able to stop, so you've answered assuming that they mustn't be taking it seriously else they would've quit doing it already- only there's a lot of reasons why it might be extremely difficult.

ADHD is one of many reasons, and it's not a matter of willpower. This is why it requires medical and psychological intervention to treat effectively, and it is by far not the only cause of overbearing social behaviours.

The Fifth Element. Still in my top ten list, and always will be.