I feel that this song is evidence of the major milestone I reached this year, as I ultimately served as my own psychiatrist through the process of writing my Enneagram book.
This song presented itself as I was encountering my darkest, deepest stage of ego death:
Someone tell me why I think it’s gonna be okay – I’m at peace with all the mysteries I can’t explain – If ignorance is bliss then I want more of this – Is this a glimpse of what it’s like to see life as a gift? I’m living comfortably in the uncertainty – I’m not taking things way too seriously anymore – I’m in a better place now – I’m climbing my own way out – This is what a good day looks like – Things are gonna turn out all right – Will I still feel this way tomorrow? Is it even up to me? Can I keep my head in the clouds and look around without something pulling me down to the ground? I’m in a better place now – Something tells me that God is smiling down on me – I’m at peace with who I am now and what I believe – If He is love I guess I’ll trust it works out in the end – Is this a glimpse of heaven when we all begin again? I choose hope over meaninglessness – I choose faith over being a nihilist – I admit I could spend my life believing the wrong thing – But if God isn’t real, my search to find Him still led me to a better place
According to studies, over half of caregivers have depression, with a majority of them experiencing what is commonly called “caregiver stress” according to Senior Care Center.
This isn’t surprising when you consider how many people who are caring for a parent have multiple other responsibilities that they are juggling as well. Full-time jobs, raising their children, along with household responsibilities all add to levels of stress that are already high. As part of this process, it is very common for caregivers to put aside their own well-being, feelings, and health. This can be very damaging and lead to a wide range of physical conditions including guilt, sadness, and anxiety. If you need help caring for a loved one, or some advice contact Senior Care Center.
So, if you are caring for an aging parent, Senior Care Center advised us that you should recognize the following warning signs, and then immediately deal with your stress.
Feelings of depression, hopelessness, and dread
Unexplained irritability
Difficulties with focusing on other aspects of your life, and potentially resulting in reduced work performance
Recurrent colds, stomach aches, and headaches
Weight gain or loss, and changed eating habits
Exhaustion, fatigue, and difficulties with sleeping, either too little or too much
Social withdrawal from friends and activities
Unusual anger, moodiness, or sadness
When you are caring for other people, it is also critical that you make your own health a top priority. Here are some suggestions for you to consider:
Make lists, and get a daily routine established. Track all of the tasks that need to get done, and then prioritize, balance, and delegate responsibilities. Most important of all, change your schedule in order to avoid exhaustion and anxiety.
Whenever you need it, make sure you ask for help. Getting support from loved ones and friends is a sign of strength and not of weakness. It is critically important that you take good care for yourself so that you can provide your parent with quality care. Beyond immediately family members, many cities have adult care and other types of services available for the elderly. There are also many churches that provide senior programs. With friendly and safe environments and lots of activities offered, make use of outside care in order to give your parent and you a well-deserved break.
Take good care of both your mind and body. In addition to exercising on a regular basis, you should also follow a balanced diet as well, and take the time to get together with friends, enjoy a hobby, and simply to relax. Although it can be hard to leave the care of your parent in somebody else’s hands, it is critical for you to have a break, for at least a couple of hours. If you neglect your own emotional and physical health, you will be left vulnerable to exhaustion and disease.
Get help if you are feeling depressed. Caregivers are at very high risk for depression, however, many people do not even realize they are depressed. Those feelings develop over time and if they are not treated will grow progressively worse. Instead of just hoping the condition will disappear, seek medical help instead. That can make a significant difference.
Talk with a close friend, support group, or counselor on a regular basis. Although you might not want to talk about your frustrations and feelings, it can be beneficial to have an outlet for these emotions. A parent might have behavioral problems – wandering away from home, hitting, yelling – that may stir up painful and unfamiliar emotions. A sympathetic listener can provide the perspective, comfort, and support that you need to get through your day.
It is well worth noting that it can be very challenging to care for an elderly parent but also can have positive effects on your entire family. It provides you with a strong sense of purpose, the opportunity to nurture and strengthen an intergenerational bond, and that positive feeling of knowing you are making a big difference in your parent’s life.
Back in 2014, researchers in Canada were attempting to compare the behavior of men who watch pornography regularly, with men who have never seen pornography at all. However, they were unable to find one man who had never watched pornography.
Too bad they didn’t know I existed, because I would have been perfect for their study.
I understood from the very beginning, as a preteen, that viewing such unrealistic images and ideas of women would ultimately psychologically rewire my brain, potentially like the equivalent of a computer virus.
To me, it was always beyond religion and morality. It was always about psychology instead.
It’s true, I’ve never looked at, nor watched, pornographic material. I’ve had multiple opportunities, when no one else was around, but I can’t really say it was ever a true temptation to me.
I have always been fundamentally opposed to the idea.
On my main YouTube channel which officially crossed the 4,000 subscriber mark last month, I serve as a mentor and life coach, helping younger, insecure balding men realize that their identity and how attractive they are to women actually has a lot more to do with confidence, kindness, and skill sets.
Recently, I discovered a subtle trend in which my subscribers were openly talking in the comments section, about looking at and watching pornography. Then I made the connection:
Why is it that some guys go bald young and it doesn’t seem to affect their confidence at all (and therefore they don’t watch my channel), yet others barely show any signs of hair loss but they freak out about the possibility of going bald on a daily basis?
The answer: Most of my subscribers are in their teens and twenties, meaning that they’ve grown up with unlimited access to pornography online, during those crucial years of developing their sense of identity and building confidence in who they are. (The Internet went mainstream in 1997, before most of these guys were even born.)
Compare that to me, a guy who has never looked at or watched pornography.
It makes sense now why my YouTube channel “about hair loss” is so popular: It’s really a YouTube channel that helps young men who may be experiencing hair loss, which is quite common, who are also addicted to or at least regularly exposed to pornography, overcome their insecurity issues; taught from a 37 year-old man who was never psychologically corrupted in the way they have been.
So I began making some videos addressing, and testing, this pattern I was seeing.
Those videos became some of my most popular and received more thumbs up than my other videos.
Some of my viewers confirmed I was correct: That regularly looking at and watching pornography has crushed their ability to be confident in themselves and only reinforces their insecurities about the concept they are experiencing hair loss; or at least, think they are.
To test my theory, I made a video in which I predicted in the title, that 99% of my subscribers were addicted to pornography. I stated in the video that if I were wrong, that out of my 4,000 subscribers, more than 40 would leave a comment proclaiming they do not consume pornography either.
Instead, only 2 people left a comment saying that. So yeah, over 99%.
I then theorized that many of my viewers were drawn to pornography due to some unnamed psychological trauma they experienced as a child (like being abused, their parents divorcing, a close family member dying, etc.), and they never got the proper counsel with a psychiatrist that they needed.
So that childhood trauma was never dealt with or even acknowledged, which psychologically set a pattern in their mindset to be anxious about things they have no control over: like hair loss.
I discovered this connection after reading an article on Huff Post that found the common theme among people who suffer from anxiety or depression is that they live with unresolved psychological trauma from their childhood.
Turns out, men who were overly obsessed with hair loss fit into this category as well.
I consider myself a missionary to the mainstream.
The way I see it, I was put on this Earth to serve others. If I can help thousands of insecure, pornography-addicted young men to acknowledge that pornography is killing their confidence and sense of identity, I can hopefully lead them to a decision to be pornography-free as I am, and eventually, overcome their trigger, which is hair loss.
I say, an attractive man is a confident man- and a confident man doesn’t tolerate the use of pornography in his own life.
So when I’m not being a Family Friendly Daddy Blogger, I’m serving as the host and life coach of a PG-13 rated YouTube channel to help mentor younger men.
But not allergic to peanuts themselves. Noted, I’m no doctor.
One of the darkest places in life for me is when I am throwing up- which only happens a few times each decade. It’s that feeling of inescapable depression, like being a notches away from a sickly death- a hellish gravity so overwhelming that I tend to wonder if I will wake up as a ghost like Bruce Willis and not realize I’ve been dead the entire movie. Usually I try to keep things a bit classier when I write, but in this case there is really no way around the fact that over the weekend I spent the hours from midnight until 4:30 AM constantly vomiting, only interrupted with sporadic periods of rest on the bathroom rug. I understand that some people have never gotten food poisoning. As for myself, I can easily think of my three worst occasions: The Central Park drive-thru in 1990, the shady Chinese buffet restaurant in 2007 (back when I still ate pork and shellfish), and the apple & peanut butter incident of 2010.
I don’t know; maybe getting food poisoning every couple of years is like getting stuck by lightening more than once in a lifetime. Or maybe my digestive track is just ultra-sensitive to any food that is slightly less than proper and sanity. But what I do know is that I am unable to digest slightly massive amounts of anything- even if it hasn’t been setting out in a Chinese buffet for three hours unattended. What clued me into my possible allergy to large, consistent amounts of peanut butter was my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup overdose of 2003, when I consumed 36 of them in less than 24 hours: I had just came back from spending a summer in Thailand where both peanut butter and rich, American chocolate are rare finds. I experienced a major depression for the following two days along with a mild rash on my left wrist for the next six months.
Last week my choice snack every day was an apple with three tablespoons of peanut butter. So good- and seemingly healthy. But I guess by Day 6 of this treat, which I made my lazy dinner Friday night, was just enough peanut butter in a week’s amount of digestion to throw my digestive track into shock. Because this was the first time that after I puked up all my food from that evening, I puked up a thick yellow substance, then a thick green substance, then blood- and that pattern repeated a few times before I finally fell asleep until late morning. Eventually though, every single trace of peanut butter was erased from my body. Now, a few days later, I was able to eat my first meal with meat (tilapia, okra, and salad), though my voice is raspy from all the ralphing and my ribs hurt any time I cough or sneeze.
To my understanding and according to my self-diagnosis, I have survived yet another case of food poisoning- and surprisingly this time it didn’t involve a restaurant, but instead a good snack. I’ve eaten a lot of peanuts in a week’s time and never had anything like this happen. There must be something about the simple process of smashing the peanuts to turn them into butter than makes them slightly toxic to me. Sure, I didn’t experience any of the typical symptoms of peanut butter allergies like swelling, but I just think it that peanut butter is smart enough of a food to hurt people in its own sneaky ways.
Lesson learned: From now on I’ll go light on the PB.
While it is indeed important, I’m not talking about truly remembering the real meaning of Christmas – I’m just talking about avoiding a headache, along with possible mild depression and constipation.
Thanksgiving Day wasn’t that long ago, so there’s a good chance you have fresh memories of sitting around the house all weekend, eating too much food, and ultimately feeling miserable. That was my story for so many years. Until last year when I decided I didn’t want to feel that way anymore during my days off from work. So today I share with you two easy tips so that you may truly enjoy my holidays with friends and family.
Bring a case of bottled water and fresh salad to the meal. Part of the reason it’s so common to feel yuckified during the holidays is because it’s way too easy to become dehydrated (there is such an easy access to both soda and alcohol at these holiday meal gatherings both of which dehydrate the body). Also, holiday meals are very similar to a Chinese buffet in that they mainly consist of carbs and sodium. Not only is it too easy to eat too much, but it’s too easy to also eat virtually nothing nutritious in the process. When the freshest vegetable dish available is green bean casserole, you’re bound to feel down. Drink plenty of water and make sure there are fresh vegetables available, if it means that you are responsible for bringing it.
Get out of the house and out into the cold. As much time as you will spend watching the 1983 classic A Christmas Story on TBS repeatedly and playing Wii with your nephews and nieces, there’s a good chance that your idea of “getting out” simply means going shopping for good deals or running to the convenience store to buy more milk. You need real exercise and fresh air during the holidays. So in addition to bringing the salad and bottled water, your responsibility is to stand up and say, “I’m going for walk outside- who’s with me?” (Don’t forget your coat, of course.) You’ll be the hero. And you’ll be surprised at what interesting conversations can arise from a (30 minute minimum) walk in the cold: Certain conversations just can’t be born while lying in a coma-like state on the couch.
I guarantee you will have a better holiday experience if you try abiding by these two tips. Cabin fever can be prevented. And you can be the Holiday Armadillo that changes things in your household. No matter what you believe the winter holidays are actually about, the importance of giving to others is ultimately attached to your religious or cultural traditions. So give to the needy. Care for the orphans and widows. Love the unloved. And lastly, give the gift of “not feeling miserable” to others.
Family Friendly Daddy Blog 