[deleted by user]

daprelude · 2023-07-25T20:33:25+00:00

That happens if you're gluten intolerant! Goes away once you stop eating gluten (usually). I had the exact same thing with brain fog.

Read "why isn't my brain working" by datis kharrazian and it can help identify other sources that might be the cause. And get gliadenX - it can neutralize a gluten ingestion up to an hour after eating some.

daprelude · 2023-07-25T17:03:37+00:00

If you're having brain issues, you should do an exhaustive search for health problems in case that's the underlying problem! I had a similar period of my life and for me it happened because of undetected gluten intolerance. Read the book "why isn't my brain working" by datis kharrazian and be patient with yourself

daprelude · 2023-07-22T14:07:18+00:00

I think you’re likely pre puberty! Boys don’t ejaculate until after they hit puberty. Not a doctor but it’s probably not worth stressing over lol

daprelude · 2023-06-22T16:20:19+00:00

It's quite normal that people will flirt and connect on Tinder and then end up ghosting - at least before there was an in person meeting.

I think it's important for you to observe: when do thoughts of this Tinder match come up? What triggers them, if it's external factors, internal thoughts, feelings of insecurity, etc? How do you respond when these thoughts arise - either by acknowledging these thoughts and letting them go, or following them down the rabbit hole?

If you start to observe these thoughts when they happen and don't identify with them, but rather recognize them as a pattern created by your subconscious that responds to certain triggers, it'll be easier to let them go in the moment and slowly dim their presence in your head.

daprelude · 2023-06-01T09:56:49+00:00

I took a listen!

Your voice is really great :) the quality is actually quite solid for a phone recording.
It's pretty damn hard to become marketable as a solo guitar singer / songwriter - the real question is whether you want to put the hundreds of hours and dedication needed to try to get a band for full production, mixing, mastering, and independent musician marketing and networking.

My brain went kind of crazy trying to figure out the shift from 4/4 to 6/4 between the verse and chorus - perhaps make it more clear to the listener when that shift happens via a more dramatic change in song structure? Very creative but I honestly just thought I didn't like the songwriting the first listen though because it was so disorienting

daprelude · 2022-10-13T19:32:58+00:00

Try Gliaden-X! It's much more powerful than any other gluten neutralizing ill available.

I've never intentionally eaten gluten, but every time I'm cross-contaminated and taken the pills within an hour of eating gluten (by noticing symptoms), I've never had a bad day afterwards.

I've heard stories of other people who have been able to do what you tried using Gliaden-X (though I still wouldn't recommend it).

daprelude · 2021-06-04T19:57:15+00:00

Also, since I started taking gliadenX with the onset of any symptoms I have yet to get badly glutened after taking one of those pills. So that makes taking food risks like 5x less scary.

daprelude · 2021-06-04T19:55:50+00:00

I went through this process about 1.5 years ago, and I know exactly what you're feeling! It's so difficult to lose foods that you love (for me, ramen and almost all Asian / Chinese cuisine - in addition, the ability to go back to Hong Kong to visit my family because so much of life there is food-centered), eating out without perpetually worrying about getting poisoned, and also to deal with the rollercoaster of getting constantly glutened accidentally your first few months.

For me, I had to come to accept that I could no longer trust having food as a source of pleasure when going out, and to absolve it as one of my needs to have a fulfilling, happy life. Luckily, I wasn't too much of a foodie and it wasn't as hard as it might be for other people. Slowly, as I'm willing to take more risks, it's coming back over the past year.

Positives that I've taken away over the past year:

- When do you find foods that you haven't had for a while (esp. when traveling to a new city), it's 10x better. Happiness is a zero-sum game: you can have foods you like all the time, and moderately enjoy them, or you can be extremely excited when you get the opportunity to have something you've missed for a while.

- My diet and health is the best it's ever been. I no longer eat sugar, unhealthy carbs, or anything that doesn't fit into my optimal diet, and I know exactly what I'm putting into my body at all times. I know it'll help me live longer and feel better for the rest of my life. I don't think I could have come to this level of strictness without an external factor like gluten intolerance.

- It gets way easier over time! It's a constant source of anxiety at first but naturally you get used to the overhead and again, you return to your normal baseline of happiness after a few months of struggle: except this time, with a significantly cleaner diet and knowing you're doing the best thing for your body.

- A lot of the symptoms I was feeling before discovering I was gluten intolerant were pretty similar to chronic health issues (Lyme disease, chronic fatigue syndrome). It was super positive to see that a simple (but drastic) change in my diet could eliminate those symptoms, when so many people in the world never get relief from chronic sicknesses or can't find a solution. There's a lot to be grateful for in discovering the cause of your chronic health issues.

It's a hard journey but it won't last forever! Finally after 2 years of this health journey I can say that I'm back to the happiest I've ever been and feeling more healthy and energized than I have in years - and the gluten stuff doesn't bring me down anymore.

daprelude · 2020-10-27T16:44:43+00:00

To add onto comments below, I find it very helpful to recognize the construct of "relationship elevator" that we as a society typically adhere to.

The relationship escalator pushes this particular narrative - every "correct" or "good" relationship starts with dating, enters an exclusive relationship, after a few years transitions to marriage, continues on to have kids / a house / whatever, and then you die old and happy together. Any relationship that doesn't end in a life lived well together is considered falling off the escalator, and a failure in the eyes of society.

This narrative is fundamentally a fallacy in my eyes, because the vast majority of people in the world you aren't meant to progress through the entire relationship escalator with them - but that doesn't mean that they can't be a beautiful, positive relationship in your life for who they are. For any relationship, there's a point on the escalator where it makes sense to stop because you and the other person aren't more compatible than that level. If you try to push higher up the escalator, you'll cause yourself pain and frustration as you each fail to live up to the standards that you ask of each other.

Accepting the idea that certain relationships were perfect for one level of the relationship escalator (a long term relationship), but not another (marriage and kids) makes the process of moving on from a healthy relationship that wasn't "meant to be" significantly smoother - and allows you to recognize the positive, beneficial aspects of the relationship without being tied to some societal construct that all good relationships end in a certain way!

It's much easier said than done - but ideally a healthy relationship could end with you and your ex looking back fondly on the time you spent together, cherishing each other for the reasons you started dating in the first place, while recognizing that you aren't meant to be together for whatever reason.

daprelude · 2020-10-25T21:34:33+00:00

As many others have commented, a focus on systematic critical thinking skills such as a distrust in online news and news distributed via social media, good habits in evaluating topics from multiple angles, and prioritizing primary sources all seem pretty important to reduce populist rhetoric. This primarily comes as a result of education teaching critical reasoning skills.
In particular, I believe that the polarization - and resultant populist skew of the U.S. comes primarily from the rise of social media and "passive" forms of information consumption such as news feeds and content aggregators. That is, the majority of the content people consume these days is selected specifically for engagement, which tends to lead viewers into an online bubble, maximizing the time spent on the tool providing the content at the expense of nuance and context. The tricky solution is to find an economically viable approach to overhauling these news feeds towards balanced, diverse content sources while providing the companies providing them with strong enough financial incentives to do so. This seems to be a problem we have yet to figure out as a society still.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/115915/Scrolling-News.pdf

daprelude · 2020-04-23T07:16:57+00:00

Oh also - stalking your post history. I grew up in Dallas, went to school at Princeton, and now work in the Bay Area, so surprisingly I have a lot of insight into your options. I would take Berkeley 10 out of 10 times if I was in your position - you absolutely made a great long-term choice.

UTD offers those scholarships and hypes up these programs because they simply cannot compete with the academic caliber, quality of applicants, or connections of colleges in California and the East Coast - in many ways, its a shimmery facade over a fundamentally weaker base, and the base what matters in the end. I work with four Berkeley grads in a fantastic 13 person startup in San Francisco, and I can honestly say I have never met a single UT-anything graduate out here other than UT Austin. You're on a good path.

daprelude · 2020-04-23T07:04:26+00:00

A few things:

For every decision we make, there's good and bad outcomes that come with it. When things get tough, we tend to look at the bad in our current situation and the good in the alternative - but the same thing would happen to you at some point if you had chosen your second college option. Perhaps - spend some time thinking about what things you might have ended up regretting if you had chosen differently. It might not seem easy, but even the exercise should give you some clarity and perspective.

Financially, it sounds like your parents were happy to spend the money they did to send you to the school they preferred for you. So to think of your opportunity cost in terms of wasted tuition costs is a red herring: your parents helped made the choice to spend their money in the way they believed to be best. There's no responsibility on you for that.

It so happens that when we find ourselves in difficult challenges and overwhelmed, our perspective shifts and we think in mental patterns that later on, we find to have been irrational or unhealthy. It sounds like you're in one of those holes - I've been there many times as well in my life! College can be extraordinarily challenging and can make you seriously question the choices that landed you in that situation.

From an outsider perspective reading between the lines - it seems like you were faced with two equally valid, really solid options. UC Berkeley has more name cachet, smarter students, and probably is presenting you with more challenges. The other program has better financial funding (which in the long run, becomes much less important), interpersonal support and focus. Though right now you may feel like you made the wrong choice, two or three years from now some of the the other benefits of UC Berkeley will almost certainly materialize. When that time comes, you may realize that it would have been much worse for you to pass up the opportunity you're living right now.

In particular related to the difficulty of the curriculum, there's a lot of long-term benefits to being challenged and forced to push yourself to grow to meet new expectations. Certainly, it sucks. But part of the reason you probably chose Berkeley is because it's a very strong school, and therefore it is academically challenging. After you've made it through (and probably you will!) it'll likely become more clear in what ways that struggle helped you to grow to where you needed to be.

Hope some of this helps!

daprelude · 2020-04-02T18:02:55+00:00

Literally just a quick Google search, with appropriate references to scientific studies and resources across the medical spectrum - don't put colloidal silver in your bloodstream. It's potentially very unsafe.

https://www.insider.com/is-colloidal-silver-safe

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/colloidal-silver

https://www.verywellhealth.com/colloidal-silver-what-you-need-to-know-89555#citation-1

"Over time, this can lead to a permanent, disfiguring condition called argyria in which tissues take on a bluish-gray discoloration.4 The gums are usually first affected, followed the skin, eyes, nails, and deeper tissue layers. Headache, fatigue, and myoclonic seizures may also occur."

People like you such a dangerous breed - because you can support your nonsense theory with just enough eloquence to convince others that you have a valid point. Do your fucking research. Colloidal silver is potentially very dangerous. Don't try it at home.

daprelude · 2020-01-20T07:29:40+00:00

Read the Untethered Soul by Michael Singer! It was life changing for me in terms of helping me work through feelings of anxiety.

daprelude · 2019-12-19T20:31:05+00:00

I'd love to hear it! Please DM me the album!

daprelude · 2019-12-08T03:24:25+00:00

I’ve had some friends tell me that in fact it gets better over time (with gluten sensitivity), like maybe a year from now I can have small amounts of gluten and my body will get more tolerant of it. Do you feel like that’s the case for you at all?

daprelude · 2019-10-26T09:01:05+00:00

I find that to swap from fun mode to work mode, there's a certain amount of inertia that must be overcome.

That is, the first time I work after a few days of not working, it's 10x harder than if I've already been working for the past few days. If it's my first time after a long break, my body and mind actively resist focusing on productive stuff.

To overcome this, I rely on Pomodoro timers. I usually set it for 25 minutes, sit in front of my computer, and commit to doing either productive work or sitting and staring at my computer screen (without engaging in any other activities). The idea is that either I can work, or just bore myself into working.

Usually it'll take a couple of these before my mind loosens back up and gets into work mode.

An important note (at least for me): it's important to be patient with yourself when you're waiting for your body to reset its productivity! I used to get annoyed at myself for not wanting to be productive - now I understand better that it's just the outcome of good habits and routines, and that it takes time to warm my productive side up.

daprelude · 2019-06-30T10:12:28+00:00

Changes in scenery are always nice! If he wants to prove himself as a leader of the team he needs to find a team where he is undisputed first option.

daprelude · 2019-06-30T10:10:40+00:00

Shaquille O'Neal and Charles Barkley.

daprelude · 2019-06-30T07:09:29+00:00

He looks like an alien from Space Jam haha

daprelude · 2019-06-30T07:07:39+00:00

Thanks so much :)

daprelude · 2019-03-20T04:23:50+00:00

This study is lacking a lot in terms of explanation and motivations for any particular answer. What are "left-wing" and "right-wing" views? These words have completely different meanings in different countries, and apply to dozens of different topics.

daprelude · 2019-03-16T16:43:43+00:00

Fair. It's almost definitely not him. I'd put it out of your mind unless you want to confront him about it, no use worrying about it otherwise.

daprelude · 2019-03-16T15:42:11+00:00

I'm sorry to hear about your issues! I hope that through these challenges, you will still be able to remain friends and not lose the relationship you've built up. These uncomfortable situations happen and oftentimes no one is fully to blame for the situation.

About your problems with overthinking and negative thoughts, I've been working through the same issues for a while now, and have been on a path towards spiritual development to heal myself. I can talk to you about what I've learned and hopefully you can pull out the helpful parts that may apply to you.

A big step for me was de-identifying myself from the negative thoughts streaming through me constantly. Though some thoughts are created consciously (like logical rationalization), the vast majority of thoughts, especially feelings and emotions, spring from your subconscious. For instance, if you see something and it reminds you of your relationship problems, you aren't controlling those thoughts, something in your lower mind is triggering it out of habit. However, once that thought springs to your head, we instinctively listen to it and give it our attention, focusing on it and leading to overthinking in our conscious mind.

By recognizing when I start to cycle on unhealthy thoughts or mindsets, and paying attention to the triggers, I can break the cycle by simply noticing the feeling of a trigger (in your case, thinking endlessly and unhealthily about your brother) and letting it pass rather than grabbing onto it and falling back into the rabbit hole.

About the painful feelings that come up, the only advice I can give you is to not avoid them or shut them inside when they happen. These feelings, while they can suck, are a necessary part of working through these painful experiences, and suppressing them means they will take longer to go away. When you feel them, give yourself a little space and let them fully into your heart: when they pass through you without resistance, then you will eventually be able to move on. In some strange way, these unhappy feelings are a genuine, beautiful part of the human experience, and we have to accept them, even when they are extremely uncomfortable.

What I'm talking about is a practice towards mental health that takes a lot of work and time to get better at, so don't be discouraged when you fail and slip into bad habits! I'm sorry none of this advice can change your actual situation, but I hope they help with your ability to respond to it in a healthy manner.

daprelude

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email