Sharing some recent media consumption for fun:
Diary of a CEO - Dr. K (YouTube)
DrDrayz - Natural Deodorant (YouTube)
Hacks (Crave)
James Acaster: Repertoire (Netflix)
Guesthouse Berlin Podcast #20 | Fabian Dikof (SoundCloud)
StoryGraph (Brighton Ruby)
The Great (Prime Video)
Jan Blomqvist - Canopée des Cîmes (YouTube)
You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (Netflix)
Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut (Netflix)
The Sympathizer (Crave)
Happier Than Ever
Life has never been so quiet, and I’m happier than ever!
This night-and-day difference is similar to the one back in June but much bigger. But knowing me, my body probably won’t settle into this slower rhythm until Summer 2025.
Finished two big, multi-month projects in November, one personal, one for work. Took a whole month to snap out of Cow Mode after that.
Personal project was selling the condo. It was a significant topic in a previous version of this blog, and now it’s gone! Many thanks to our realtor for doing the heavy lifting. While it was both a source of income and grief, it served its purpose, and I’m happy to have divested. Mixed feelings, but the dominant ones are relief and freedom. Being a landlord for four years through the pandemic and other life events has taken its toll on my already-weary soul, so now I can rest easier and catch up with myself.
As a result of all this capacity opening up, I’m resetting my coping system. Deleted all the comfort shows from my home theatre PC, ripped from the DVD era. Yes, I have a computer server for my home theatre. That should tell you how much time and resources I’ve devoted to using this distraction.
Coincidentally, my therapist left town for the winter. I’m gonna try my hand at self-regulating until they get back, but they also provided referrals to other therapists they thought I could work with. I’ve been doing remarkably well as of late. I’m less compulsive with self-soothing via snack attacks and doomscrolling. Dedicating more time to reading books rather than internet stuff. Cleaning out my backlog of chores and projects.
To avoid sliding down the path of winter sadness, I’m employing this novel framework called “moving my body.” Obvi not mind-blowing stuff, but the big difference this time is the new capacity in my energy budget. Bouldering twice a week consistently. Picked up some winter cycling gear for Black Friday, and joined a bike gang that mocks my ebike. I even broke out my Nintendo Wii U to play Wii Sports. Boxing is a pretty nice way to wake up and get ready for the day.
IBS
One of the drivers for this post was to follow up on my IBS-D. I said “let’s check in again in November,” but that was a lie. It’s been over six months since I wrote about my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and I’m happy to say that it’s gotten a lot better. Not fully gone, but nearly there.
It’s hard work always buying and preparing fruits and veg every week, but what other choice do I have? When you don’t get enough dietary fibre, your gut bacteria starve, and they eventually start eating away at the mucus lining in your colon, leading to inflammation and other tummy issues. Can’t just keep living like I’m a baby, free from responsibility. I’m eating for two (trillion) now.
I probably should have listened to the advice to slowly introduce dietary fibre into one’s diet. I went a little berserk for a couple months, scarfing down big salads and all sorts of fermented foods every day, thinking I could speed up the process. Kim chi, yogurt, sauerkraut, olives. Mm, ya, no. 2024 was an especially flatulent year for me. On Hack Your Health: The Secrets of Your Gut, one interviewee said it could take 9 to 12 months to fully recover your microbiome. I suppose a person can speed up the recovery by a few weeks or months by not going as slow, but alas, I don’t need my Kirkland Signature diarrhea pills anymore.
Drugs
Finally got my flu shot and first HPV vaccine in December. Not sure why I missed the HPV when I was a kid, so I’m just about caught up with all my immunizations. Probably due for another COVID one.
Haven’t gone back to vaping since I quit. It is finished.
Started trialling Intuniv (generic name: apo-guanfacine XR), which is a non-stimulant ADHD medication. Taking it in combination with Vyvanse. Apparently it’s a classic combo. After a couple months, it feels like it’s settling into a nice place. Vyvanse as soon as I wake up, Intuniv at 8 PM. Both have half-lives above 12 hours, so the Intuniv brings a steady flow of dopamine at night and in the morning. Now my head doesn’t hurt as bad when I wake up, and it’s easier to start my day. My sleep is actually kinda regular now. 😭
The allergy shots I started two years ago are starting to take hold. I can usually breathe through my nose now. Dafuq.
This one isn’t quite a drug, but I saw my Ears, Nose, and Throat doctor before the holidays. I’m lined up for multiple surgery for sleep apnea in the summer, and possibly on short notice if a slot opens up earlier. Best case scenario from surgical intervention is taking things from, say, 85% to 95%. Nasal canals are uneven, so cartilage needs to be shaved down on one side. Tonsillectomy. Doing something to the columella. The flaps in the back of my mouth, the palatopharyngeal arch (I think), are too close to the centre of my mouth, reducing airflow, so they’re gonna be pulled outward like a set of curtains. Pain and recovery will be significant, but since my sleep has always sucked, I think it’s worth the risk.
Low Cow
I haven’t gotten such a large response from the blog in a long while. I usually get between zero to three text messages/emoji reactions per post, and this topic got about a dozen. The idea is resonating, so perhaps it’s worth exploring further.
Been thinking more about how Cow Mode exists on the Human-Animal Spectrum. That is, there is a continuum of cow states rather than it being a discrete, yes/no situation. There are different ways to be a cow.
(Tangentially, I wonder if better names can be struck. “More Cow Bell” is already taken. Low Power Mode. Low Cow-er Mode. Lowing is a type of cow sound. Low Cow also sounds like low cal(orie). Locale. SoCal. Low key. Low cow and high cow. The Human-Animal Spectrum is a form of zoomorphism, assigning animal characteristics to humans. Animorph Spectrum. Yep, got ’em.)
The Animorph Spectrum defines a few deviations from the ideal Human Mode, where a person’s brain is fully developed and they have full access to it all day every day. Human Mode has mythical/legendary status because of how oppression and capitalism come for us all. Self-actualization would be a more popular term.
Perhaps Cow Mode is the state that the mind takes on after overexertion. What I described last time was merely one version of High Cow Mode. It is highly specific to my place on the Animorph Spectrum, stemming from anxiety and trauma. However, given the people that texted me about it, I don’t imagine any of them simultaneously experiences CPTSD, ADHD, and all the other things I have to endure. One enters Cow Mode after using up all of their physical and mental faculties, running out of juice (milk?), and hitting a wall. Notably, once I realize I’m in Cow Mode, I feel a soft and natural pull back towards Human Mode, like a bubble floating up out of the water. As in, it’s hard to keep being productive once you’ve become a cow, even Low Cow.
Fun fact. Cows are ruminants. Latin for “to chew over again.” Ruminants are animals that gain energy from plants using their special stomachs. In psychology, rumination also refers to the replaying and rehashing of the same negative thoughts, one of my old pastimes. Rumination isn’t ideal because you often get stuck trying to understand what you did wrong, and then you struggle to move out of that mental movie theatre towards taking any type of corrective action to help the offended party. Thankfully I’m much better here than I used to be, but now I’ve overcorrected by fixing so many things that I enter Cow Mode. In other words, I stopped spending so much time ruminating only to become a ruminant.
Action Item: Reverse Gaslighting Myself
“A problem well stated is a problem half-solved.”
- Charles F. Kettering, American inventor, engineer, and head of research at General Motors (1920-1947)
One of the managers at work dropped this new pearl of wisdom on me recently. Makes me feel better about writing as much as I have in the past, and thankfully, I’ve written a lot less in recent years. Nature is healing.
The solution to spending so much time in Cow Mode is dead-simple: spend less energy than I have.
So why can’t I just sit still? I get anxious when I’m not doing anything, and a tightness develops in my chest after a short time. As in, it physically hurts me to do nothing.
The primary way I’ve shifted this emotion is to scramble to be, or look, busy. My headspace is already preoccupied with different strategies for best managing my energy. Like, at least every hour. Even with two different ADHD drugs, my attention and focus can still be sticky, so some days I finish 10% of 9 tasks; other days, it’s 150% of 1. Saying ‘no’ is the simple solution. FOMO probably complicates that.
To understand what drives my overproduction, I’d probably have to sit still long enough to look at some more childhood trauma. This time, it’s the fear of being worthless because I’m not producing external worth at all times. “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.” Thus, the solution to minimizing time spent in Cow Mode is to fix my self-esteem by reaffirming my intrinsic self-worth. Easy peasy.
Correcting this cognitive distortion feels like, what I’m going to call, Reverse Gaslighting® (RGL). In therapy, some people need assistance to feel their big feelings, while others need help with more logical problem-solving. I usually need help with the feeling part, which requires that I stop using my mind to veto or override my body’s natural corrective instincts and then to let my body release all the tensions and bad energies. In fact, I sought out my current psychologist to assist with body-focused work because I have most of my therapy hours doing more of the problem-solving and emotional processing.
But now that I’ve clocked loads of time feeling my feelings, I now find myself needing to bolster my brain’s grip on reality. Since I was gaslighted for a long time, my body’s instincts have been rewired for the purposes of my gaslighter. Therefore, this next stage of healing requires that I stop listening to my body’s reactions and instead, divert that energy to strengthening my brain’s grasp on reality. Leaned too far in one direction, now have to lean in the other.
“Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.
- Bessel van der Kolk
For instance, my nervous system has been rewired to spike at certain triggers, so my brain keeps reacting to dozens or hundreds of emergencies from the past, even when it very clearly doesn’t apply to the present moment. In the summer, I was having dinner with my cousins, and one of them asked “why are you so anxious all the time?” Truly, there wasn’t much of anything to be concerned about, but that’s just how I roll, hypervigilant.
Thus, on the face of it, RGL is not really that complex, but I must say that it feels weird. Almost wrong. It’s probably what victims of cults have to endure when getting deprogramming. Put another way, since I just watched The Sympathizer, RGL must feel like when someone is rescued from a re-education camp and needs to be re-re-educated. You have to be repeatedly told, by yourself and others, that since you have faulty ideas about reality, your feelings are about a situation are not as accurate as they could be. Clearly an oversimplification, but still, the correction feels like a violation.
Perhaps surgery would be a better analogy. In order to fix something, this stranger has to cut open your skin and hurt you.
The non-oversimplified version of RGL would at least highlight the abuse. That is, there is a valid explanation for why the victim’s current feelings are invalid. In the original gaslighting, the abuser’s main explanation for all kinds of misunderstandings comes from the victim’s cRaZiNeSs.
In the absence of my current psychologist, here are some rebuttals from the combined voices of previous therapists, friends, authors, etc. on RGL:
“Reverse gaslighting feels wrong if you only look at it from the simplified view. If you want to look at the complexity of the situation with more nuance and understanding, your feelings are still valid today because yesterday someone attacked your confidence in your own judgement. So that explains why you tend to misread or have different emotional reactions to these types of scenarios compared to most people. ”
“Our emotions are the main pathway that our brains take in signals from the world through our bodies and senses. They inform our heads on how to respond. Our brains crunch all these experiences and spit out these warning signs because there was a resemblance to a previous dangerous event.”
“Sometimes the brain is wiser than we can imagine, and other times it’s a confused chunk of electric tofu.”
“Emotions are simply one guide on how to exist in the universe. There are many others.”
“Distrusting your body’s new feelings, post-gaslighting, would repeat the original violation. Your gaslighter made you distrust your mind, and you can’t get back at them by distrusting your body.”
“Your heightened nervous system shows that you can trust your emotions. There was garbage fed into the input, and your body output garbage feelings. The system is working as intended. Now, all we have to do is replace the garbage input with the good stuff, and you will be healed.”
“Let’s workshop your feeling of fear in this scenario. You lay out every single neurotic thought about what’s going on and what your body is telling you is going to happen, and we’ll get together a committee of your must trusted advisors to decide on whether your judgement is the most accurate. Then we’ll walk with you through this fear, and then we’ll decide whose prediction was the most accurate.”
“The assumptions that fuel anxiety turn you into a god. When you develop fear and anxiety from gaslighting, the fearful thoughts and their resulting behaviours assume that you can know anything and everything. It places full confidence in you alone and your ability to consistently predict the outcome of all events with perfect accuracy and precision. Anxiety tells you that everyone else is wrong, even if there are many people far more qualified to make such judgements and with the receipts to prove it. We can have compassion for your experience of living with anxiety, but it quickly turns into a dangerous situation, for yourself and others, when it becomes your sole advisor.”
“CPTSD informs us that there were many valid reasons for you to associate quiet with danger. Those reasons are no longer valid, so take your time in trusting this new reality. Many people with CPTSD have trouble with sitting still.”
“When insecurity and danger are the norm, safety becomes the danger because it’s different. Fear of the unknown is common and natural.”
“You have thousands of memories of voices telling you the wrong thing. It’ll take time to fact-check them all.”
In essence, I’m still gripped by this childhood fear of something “bad” happening if I’m not productive, so I rush to protect myself from this catastrophe by doing all sorts of tasks to build up my castle’s defences. I’m practising self-compassion and being patient with myself for still struggling with what seems to be a simple problem.
Wrapping Up
I’m happier than ever! 😁
I still have my dark days. Some are great, some dogshit, but there is noticeably less dogshit, now sprinkled with the faint hope of autonomy and agency thanks to my various flavours of therapy: pharmaco-, physio-, psycho-, retail-. I spent a lot of last year dealing with some longstanding problems, like IBS and dialling in my drugs, and now that I’m almost finished those, along with my two big projects, I’m starting off the new year with a lot more energy in my budget.
Now I can focus on the frequent problem of sliding on the Animorph Spectrum into Cow Mode, which results from using more energy than I produce. This overexertion is driven by fear. To stay closer to Human Mode, I need use Reverse Gaslighting to retrain myself to believe that I have intrinsic worth and to give myself grace. Should be fun.