one of the experiences that fed into my enthusiasm for feeling my feelings etc. was being extremely confused about the energy economics of feeling depressed / "low on spoons"
like i could not believe that the raw biological energy was unavailable, given that i had plentiful food
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so it seemed to me that the only way i could possibly ever feel "low energy" despite having as much raw biological energy as i could ask for is that there were regulatory mechanisms actively preventing me from using the energy i had
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and i eventually found such a mechanism, namely, the freeze response, which was more than satisfactory as an explanation of my own low-energy states for a long time
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but recent experiments with my diet like cutting out seed oils and fasting a bit, plus reading 's website, suggests a quite different possible cause of "low energy": the body could be struggling to digest food effectively
bodyepiphanies.com/bioenergetic-n
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if much of your energy is taken up with the struggle to digest and meanwhile you're getting less energy from your food than a hypothetical person with perfect gut health, that combination might be enough to sap your energy by itself? (trying to first-principles this)
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i am still struck by how calm i felt 40 hours or so into my last fast. i finally felt like i was in a state where sitting meditation made perfect sense, where i would've been happy to sit in stillness for hours. all from... reducing gut inflammation???
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thanks for the input everyone, i got a lot of gut health stuff to learn about. i decided to fast yesterday on a whim to see how much it would help and boy howdy did it. i feel calm and patient, my gut feels quiet and no longer looks like i'm pregnant, my breathing is easier twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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normally i always feel like i am vibrating a little bit and not in a pleasant way and 40 hours after i stopped giving my digestive system new work to do i just... didn't??? fucking insane
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ya i feel like a lot of my circles approach mental/emotional issues as a sky problem more than is justified; i suspect so much of ppl's trauma about their parents or aversion or anxiety is just something something gut microbiome
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i think they can be made compatible. like the healthier you are the less big of a deal past trauma stuff seems? wish i had a clearer picture of the interaction. something something vagus nerve, something something enteric nervous system
imo a bit too simplistic - gut inflammation prob is a good guess for biological mechanism "masking" emotional signals with overall physiological arousal or what you called "vibrating", so if you remove the masking it's easier to access and work on understanding and integrating
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it feels like the more shitty I feel physically due to a bad diet, illness, etc, the harder time I have with clearly getting physiological clues in my body and therefore recognizing what's happening and what I am feeling - it's like there's this overall buzz or haze masking it