by “same playing field” i don’t at all mean same magnitude, i mean you can reduce your chronic stress by cutting out chronic stressors of any kind
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Yes, but many will feed the gorilla with the corpses of the marmosets, so I can't earnestly recommend marmoset hunting until the gorilla is dead.
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i've lost track of the metaphor here. can you give an example? i have no idea which of these things you think is the gorilla
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Chronic mental stress is the gorilla. Lots of neurotic people try to cut out smaller external stressors like junk food and cigarettes, and in doing so increase their chronic mental stress enough that they're even worse off.
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ah gotcha, that makes sense
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yup the junk food and cigarettes are load-bearing coping mechanisms. I’m increasingly suspecting that focus on them is actually mistaken and even harmful
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similar to “if being hard on yourself worked, it would’ve worked by now” — if attacking symptoms would’ve resolved the root problem, it would’ve worked by now
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the men's group i was in had a two-pronged approach to this i really admired; there was a dopamine detox where we quit our addictions for 2 weeks, *and* an open offer to support the men in all the uncomfortable feelings that would bring up that the addictions were keeping away
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yea this is also why Act 2 of Introspect, which is the longest and most comprehensive act, is All about building up skills and confidence *before* we get to entering the labyrinth and confronting the minotaur. Without that you just get pwned
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week 2 of the program was the dopamine detox and week 1 was "circadian warrior" which involved stuff like getting more sunlight, sunrise + sunsets, less screens to fix sleep cycles. think it helped us with overall health in a way that prepped us for everything else
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i was a little surprised to see that we didn't do any prep re: emotional work before doing the dopamine detox and somehow it all worked out anyway. circadian warrior was a non-obvious choice for week 1 to me, wouldn't have guessed it in advance, but it worked really well i think