Posts Tagged ‘antidepressant withdrawal’
Debunking the Chemical Imbalance Theory, Part I
I’m going to take the time to dive into the chemical imbalance theory of depression, and why it’s a big ‘o pile of crap. I’m taking the time to do this because 80% of people believe that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, despite overwhelming evidence otherwise. Today I will focus on the history…
Read MoreDo as Much as Necessary And as Little as Possible
As I sit here on this gloomy spring morning, the tentacles of a migraine still latched onto the left side of my head, I am reminded of the phrase, “Do as much as necessary and as little as possible.” I first heard this phrased used around physical training. Think of an Olympian, for example, who…
Read MoreYou Aren’t in Traffic. You Are The Traffic.
As I was taking my car to get serviced at 7:30 this morning, I pulled onto the highway and was met with a line of cars backed up for miles. I cursed myself for a moment, annoyed that I chose to take the highway at peak rush hour instead of taking the back roads. Whether…
Read MoreWhy Happiness Practice Matters
I find myself writing to you today from a rather odd place. There is pressure surrounding a particular issue in my personal life, and I can feel my inner world preparing for the earth to crack open. This isn’t unexpected, and the details don’t matter. But it renders a newsletter about happiness as a skill…
Read MoreHow Your Vision Affects Stress And Anxiety
This week, I wanted to draw attention to the work of Andrew Huberman, an American neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Huberman specializes in the visual system and how it affects brain development, neuroplasticity, and neural regeneration and repair. Our eyes, as it turns out,…
Read MoreThree Science-Backed Apps for Better Emotional Health
One of the pitfalls of depression is that because it tends to come in waves, the habits we gather while we’re feeling okay often fall by the wayside when we’re feeling rough. And while I’m a huge advocate of forcing yourself to maintain those habits during times of darkness, I know that sometimes, it’s…
Read MoreWhere to Find Mental Health Research (And How to Tell if it’s Legit)
For most of my life, I struggled with the assumption that people with letters after their name were not only smarter, more powerful, and more successful than me, but that the research they create is gospel. I’m not sure when or how this seed was planted, but it’s lead to a lifelong feeling of…
Read MoreThe 51% Theory, or, Factual Optimism
Healing Depression through Factual Optimism How do we find happiness when we are still depressed or in antidepressant withdrawal? We don’t. At least, we don’t aim for big changes. Instead, we go for getting it right 51% of the time. If we quantify happiness onto a scale that ranges from 0% happy to 100% happy,…
Read MoreMAY CAUSE SIDE EFFECTS coming 2022!
When I started Happiness Is A Skill, I did it for two reasons. First, I wanted to have an outlet to talk about mental/emotional health and antidepressant withdrawal without enmeshing myself in social media. The topography of those niches on Twitter is a nightmare, and I couldn’t bring myself to swim around in that muck.…
Read MoreThe underdog of decision making: choosing to wait
In a day and age when information travels at warp speed and lives can be irrevocably changed by one photo or a single tweet, there was something poetic about the speed of the 2020 federal election. All the bandwidth and technology in the world couldn’t move it along any faster than it was going to…
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