Small Shifts In Stimuli Are Surprisingly Simple To Do And Can Do Wonders For Your Mental State

So how do they make that?

I realized why the idea of constellations has always swayed me. constellations are so very human.

our wonder of the stars is bone-sunk; we’ve been thinking and dreaming and watching and watching and watching since the beginning of time, and we looked for so long that we started making connections. 

we played a celestial game of connect-the-dots; trying to find order in something so vast and trying to show that the stars are in everything and everything is in the stars.

we plucked pictures out of the infinite; there’s a dog, there’s a bear, there’s a lion, see? look, right there; the stars hold and mirror back everything. 

but then it went a step further. instead of everyday things, we stopped picking out the cups and the bears, and instead we saw stories. 

look, there’s Andromeda, chained to a rock and waiting to be devoured by Cetus. there’s Orion, and Hercules, and do you see Orpheus’ lyre? Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve it after Orpheus’ death and he placed it in the sky. 

we did the most human thing imaginable: we wrote our stories into the stars. we filled the night sky; previously so vast, so unknowable; with our history. we forged connections to the stars and made it so our children will always know where they come from. 

Hey! so i just created my very first studygram (shameless self promo @decafstudy follow me) and one of my irl friends saw my stories and posts and asked “How many hours does your day have? ´cause mine only has 24″ and that got me thinking abt how i take the most advantage of my days to make them feel (or look) 48 hours long! Here are a few of the things I incorporate on my daily student life to be more productive!

• IF YOUR FIRST CLASS STARTS LATE IN THE MORNING WAKE UP 2 HOURS EARLIER THAN NEEDED i know, am i crazy? ok so here´s the deal. If your first class starts, let´s say, at 11:00 A.M you might be tempted to wake up at 10:00 A.M, get dressed, and head to school. Not only does this create bad habits for when you get assigned a 7:00 A.M class (which will happen) but you lose MANY HOURS OF PRECIOUS TIME. Get your 8-9 hours of sleep and do not let yourself wake up later than needed. My class sometimes starts at 11:30 A.M so i wake up at 8:00 have a nice morning, relax, work out a bit, light up a candle and get ahead on reading and work for school! Your day will start and feel more productive!

• NEVER LEAVE CLASS WITH A DOUBT ON YOUR MIND I know this might create anxiety for people who are shy and do not like asking questions during class (i am one of those people) If you feel just too scared to ask during class APPROACH THE TEACHER AFTER CLASS ENDS. as soon as he dismisses class, approach him and ask the question. If you are not able to do so DO NOT STRESS, BUT WRITE THAT QUESTION DOWN ASAP ON A POST IT AND STICK IT YOUR NOTEBOOK. that way you will have the question at hand and you can seek tutoring later and ask, or even ask a friend BUT NEVER LET A QUESTION GO, NEVER think “i will ask it later” BECAUSE YOU WON´T and IT WILL DOOM YOU. This will save so much time when you study, because all your questions will be at hand and you will know what you have to focus on studying.

• WHENEVER YOU HAVE FREE TIME, USE IT TO WORK WHILE DOING SOMETHING FUN instead of just diving head first into watching a movie, ask yourself if there is something more productive that you could be doing rn (reading ahead, reviewing, doing extra math exercises) if the answer is yes, then put that movie on mute and work while taking a peek at the movie ever once in a while. This will not only help you with discipline and learning to keep yourself from distractions, but it will occupy your free time in something that your future self will thank you for later on.

• NEVER ASSUME THAT YOU WILL BE ABLE TO DO IT LATER again, think in terms of your FUTURE SELF how much would your future self love it if instead of studying 3 days before the exam, you studied a week before it? How much would your future self love it of instead of reading until 12:00 PM tomorrow, you divided the reading between today and tomorrow? never assume that you will have spare time ahead because chances are that you won´t and you will end up with A BUNCH of work that you didn´t do and that you can´t do at the moment. FUTURE SELF THINKING has saved my life.

• LEAVE TIME OPEN FOR MENTAL HEALTH/PHYSICAL/RECREATIVE CARE as much as i always put work first, I KEEP MY THERAPIST VISIT AND MY GYM ROUTINE STABLE no matter how much work i have. This helps me feel more balanced and like i am on top of everything, not just school, feeling good=more productivity.

• POMODORO TECHNIQUE i know many people know about this but if you don´t, this is basically a studying technique in which you work or study for 25-30 minutes straight NO DISTRACTIONS and then have a 5-6 minute break, and then repeat the process as many hours as you need. This really helps me not get burnt out when I have a heavy load of work. Watching study with me videos on yt is a good way of keeping the pomodoro system going. Some good apps that I use for POMODORO are Forest and Tide.

• HAVE AN APP CARPET ON YOUR PHONE THAT IS CALLED “PRODUCTIVITY” ie. download a BUNCH of cute as hell apps that help you get motivated and organised when you look at them. This will make you more prone to look at your phone as an INSTRUMENT rather than a DISTRACTION. (my fave apps are Taskade, Forest, Tide, Brainscape and Pocket)

• Lastly, GET MOTIVATED i know this sounds cliché, but the reason why i love keeping my day busy is because i surround myself with a romanticised idea of studying. Doing these kinds of posts, following a bunch of accounts with pretty notes, having a clean room and desk, going to the library and appreciating the color scheme or sounds around you, listening to relaxing sounds or music while working, downloading many pretty apps to keep myself on track while having a cute aesthetic… all of these things might seem small, but they make you feel cleaner, more balanced and more prone to LIKING the work you do.

Anyways i know most of you already do these cause yall are on top of your game alllll the tiiiiime girl, but if any of these helps, ill be very happy!

Okay but why does it feel like Hogwarts would be just around the corner?

I Held a Swastika.

Part of my hospital chaplaincy duties is to write a reflection on how it’s going. Identities may be altered for privacy. All the writings are here.

—

The nurse told me that the patient, Willard, had taken a bite out of another nurse. He had swung at one of the doctors and thrown urine at a surgeon. Willard had multiple organ failure and he couldn’t walk; he kept demanding to go home. “Get me a wheelchair, I’ll flop in and ride over you people.” The staff kept trying to get him to stay, to get treated, despite his violent non-compliance: because nurses and doctors have the guts to look past that stuff.

They called for a chaplain to ask about Willard’s family members, to see if anyone could pick him up when he was discharged. I was the lucky chaplain who took the order.

When I walked in, I immediately noticed the patient had a tattoo of a heart on his hand, near the inner-fold of his thumb, with a swastika in the middle of the heart. The cognitive dissonance was startling. Not “I love mom” or his wife’s name, I thought, with a bit of snark. But hate in your heart. Very subtle.

“He’s one of those, you know, angry old fogeys,” the nurse had whispered right before I walked in. The nurse was a Middle Eastern man, about my age, and I couldn’t imagine the awful things he had to go through with this patient the last few days.

My eyes locked on the swastika first. The symbol held a terrible place in my memory: when I was a kid, someone had spraypainted a red swastika next to the front door of my dad’s business. Though my dad had tried to paint over it, I could still see it on hot summer days, a scar on the wall and a scar in my head, a mad throbbing declaration of all the world’s ugliness dripping in crimson. I still dream about it sometimes, and in the dream I’ll peer down at my wrists, which are engraved with the same red marks down to the veins.

The patient, Willard, saw me and said, “Thank God, a chaplain, finally someone who can hear me.”

But I don’t want to hear you, I thought. And a sick part of me also thought, You deserve this. I hope you never leave. Then you can’t hurt anyone out there.

He said, “Look, I see your face, I’m not trying to hurt anybody. You get it? I just want to go home. Fetch me a f__ing wheelchair, would you?.”

Willard got louder. He clenched his fists and waved them around. It was rather sad to see someone so animated and aggressive while pinned down to a bed, like the blanket had eaten his lower half and he was trying to crawl out. “Come on, I told you people that I wouldn’t hurt nobody. I got a dozen things wrong with me, I’m not a danger to you, I want to go home and to die in peace. You hear me? I’m ready to go home and die.”

He went on like this for over a minute. That’s a long time to stand there and let someone monologue with escalating hysteria. He dropped more f-bombs and jabbed a finger at me and tried to point at the whole hospital. His voice got so loud that I was worried about the patients nearby, and that maybe the nurse would call security, or that Willard himself would keel over. At several points it looked like he wanted to hop out of the bed and punch my ankles. The strange swastika-heart tattoo flashed before me like a flag on fire.

I had half a mind to leave. I didn’t have to stay. I didn’t want to stay. I kept looking at that swastika. I kept thinking he deserved to be here, to be sick and sorry and helpless.

When Willard stopped talking for a moment, I said the only thing I could think of.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Willard. It sounds like you have a lot going on and it’s been really hard for you.”

He said, “Yes, yes it’s been hard. I swear, I’m not a bad person.” And he burst into tears.

Just like that, his face flipped from anger to grief, and his entire body melted into the bed. Just a broken down old man, crying.

Then he motioned so I could hold his hand. He needed me to hold that hand.

For a second, I stood there, confused and bewildered and infuriated. This is not okay, I thought. You’re everything I hate about the world. Why would you think this is okay?

I pictured two of me, one turning about face and never looking back and absolutely unable to endorse what this guy stood for, and the other me stepping forward in an ostensible betrayal of my deepest values, of my father, of that little child who had to ask why someone would paint such a dirty symbol of hatred over us. I remembered going with my dad to buy new paint, his face set and smiling and determined to be better than this, to make it in a harsh, lonely country that never fully welcomed him, but that he welcomed anyway, because he dared to believe in bigger dreams than the ones that had been painted for him. And I wondered if we were ever going to make it like this, that if we walked away from each other that we would ever heal, and if maybe the very same hands that could carve such scars could also build a life through those wounds, too.

Dad, you showed me something better. You dreamed bigger. You built the dream in me.

So I stepped forward anyway.

I held that man’s hand. I held his swastika, that ugly little tattoo with the heart tattooed around it. 

Willard sobbed, loudly. I asked if he believed in prayer, and he did. I prayed. When I finished, I tried to pull my hand back, but he wasn’t having it. The nurse walked in, a little alarmed, giving me that look: This guy is a real human being who cries, huh?

The nurse prepared a syringe and gave Willard a few shots. My hand was nearly crushed. Willard kept sobbing; I must’ve held his hand for fifteen minutes while he wept and wept. I was silent. No words would work here. And at some point, our hands together, I didn’t want to leave anymore. This all made sense somehow, some kind of crazy giddy exuberant kind of sense, like God or the universe or fate had aligned and unlocked and we were exactly as we were meant to be. I still wasn’t entirely comfortable, and I wasn’t okay with all this man represented: but I pictured a river breaking through, breaking up our old walls and taking down the guard-posts and making the roads new. I wish I could describe the lightness in my being right then, a kind of diffused outwardness from my elbow to my fingertips, like my arm was stretching with a pulse. We were painting something different, maybe for our first time. I didn’t think this made the “bigger person,” because I had every instinct to leave, and there were plenty of times I had failed at this before. I only knew that I had to choose against myself, and choices like this matter, maybe more than the ones we want right now.

When we parted, Willard looked up at me with eyes brimming red.

He didn’t say anything. He only nodded. And inexplicably, we both laughed, just once. I don’t know why we laughed, but it was good.

Later, I told my fellow chaplain, “I have to tell you the craziest story.”

And my friend, at the end, laughed at the obvious symbolism.

“I guess you were the heart around that guy’s swastika.”

I could only nod. I was my father, painting over old scars.

— J.S.

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

Please, don't stress about it so much

One day we'll all forget about it, remember?