Positive and Negative States

Heartache

It can be hard to go through a breakup, to grieve someone dying, to deal with an extreme event such as a cheating spouse. The pressure in your chest. The inability to focus. It can feel terrible. However, the heartache sensation is not about you. You are not the only one going through the difficult situation that you find yourself in. Your body is trying to process it too. In doing so, some of its population suddenly comes up with a long list of new needs. Many of those needs are small motions that are complete nonsense and inconsequential to anything. However, it is important that every need in the list be quickly identified and performed. Every decision-making entity in your body that is expressing a new need in that moment must be able to express themselves physically or with your attention in whatever manner that they individually see fit at the time. They must feel like they have agency in their own body, just like you do. They must be able to express some form of control over their own body; the body that you are all sharing. Remember, it was not just your relationship. It was not just your friend or family member. You share a body and a life.

After they see that the action they directed you to perform is inconsequential, they likely will not ask you to perform it again during the next heartache. These systems do learn quickly. Stopping that first heartache before it occurs is the difficult part. You must check for needs often, and you must act on them quickly, to prevent a need list backlog. Doing so will prevent depression and both short long-term issues regarding the event that caused your heartache. Cognitive deficits caused by heartache are prevented entirely, and you may deal with your messed up situation calmly and clearly.

Panic Attacks & Sensory Overload

When an individual is experiencing a panic attack or a sensory overload event, often a rebuild is occurring. If possible, check if a rebuild is going on. If so, to alleviate symptoms follow basic rebuild protocols. Shut off all lighting or provide dark sunglasses. Assume a reclining posture. Laying down with feet up is safest, but consult your body for exact body positioning and angle of leg elevation. Also consult on specific light levels. Then determine the system being rebuilt and the behaviors being inhibited to avoid exacerbating the symptoms and restore internal equilibrium.

11.3 Depression

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Observations

I used to deal with severe depression. It would interfere with my work. I didn’t want to eat or drink. I would, instead, focus on computer games or the internet to distract myself. I was very lonely. I moved around a lot as a child, resulting in never really having a social group. All of my social connections were temporary social straight lines, not social circles. As I got older, I tended to have a lot of long distance relationships. This seemed to help my loneliness issue sometimes, in the short term, but exacerbate it in the long term. I wasn’t getting the social connection that I needed. I didn’t know how needs functioned, but the problem was getting worse and I could feel it. I hated it. I hated everything about feeling lonely and depressed all of the time. I burnt out of programming. I couldn’t be motivated.

Fixing the Body

After I discovered body communication, I eventually started using it enough to take care of all my major bodily needs. The ignoring of those bodily needs turned out to be the real source of my depression. When those needs were well taken care of, depression became far less frequent. I was getting enough water, eating exactly what my body wanted me to eat, I was sleeping very well at the same time every night, and my body was encouraging me to work out. I had even found solutions for my social issues. All of that was great, and it solved the greatest part of my depression and loneliness: the bodily needs that were causing them. There was, however, another aspect to my depression.

Fixing the Mind

I still dealt with my depression sometimes, but it was different. It wasn’t triggered by bodily needs anymore. Instead, it was triggered by thought patterns and learned behaviors. I had spent so much time depressed that one of my modes of behavior was depression. I didn’t fix this problem. I didn’t even recognize it as a problem to be fixed. Instead, my body took action to fix it for me.

One morning, I noticed that I couldn’t access my memories of my feelings of depression. My memories of those time periods were weirdly lacking in sensations. I could remember events, but nothing about the feelings. Additionally, the depressive behavior patterns were also blocked. I recognized the block. These were aversion walling it off from me. The same thing that makes you not want a particular food after you eat it too many times in a row, that aversion is what was blocking me from accessing these parts of who I was. I was freaked out. I was unsettled. I didn’t know what to think about it. I knew how these aversions worked. They last over a month. They get stronger when you push against them. They fade over time, but by the time they are faded, the thing that they were blocking tends to be forgotten, at least for me. Basically, this was part of myself being permanently deleted, without my consent. It was incredibly unsettling. It was a terrible part of my life being removed, but it was part of my life. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to empathize with others that were going through depression. That had been a big part of my life. I had always been the person others went to when they were going through something. Now, how could I stand in their shoes if I couldn’t even remember what those shoes felt like? Logically, I knew this change would be good for me. That first day, though, I was upset.

Since then, I couldn’t be happier being completely rid of that part of my life. No depression, no suicidal feelings. All of it gone, permanently, with no risk of a relapse. I’ve been depression and loneliness-free for about five years now, whether I’m in a relationship or not. Whether I have much of a social support system or not. I feel great without that burden, and I love it.

Suicide

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Observations

I never actively considered suicide, but I did occationally feel the need for suicide. Back before I discovered body communication, I was good at separating feelings from actions. No matter how I felt, it wouldn’t result in me committing suicide or harming myself. It couldn’t, since I didn’t provide my body with any suicidal behavior options. Since there were no options, it was never a consideration. It was always just a very terrible feeling.

Even though I never would have done it, I still felt suicidal needs. Fixing my depression stopped those needs from occuring, however, I eventually discovered the source of the need for suicide. There is at least one suicidal need node. It gets triggered if enough of the individual’s internal network hates their living environment enough to provide the suicide node with enough encouragement to do its job. Its sole job is pushing the need for suicide. It doesn’t matter which parts of the internal network provide that encouragement. Practically any of them can be the catylist.

Evolutionarily speaking, this suicide node likely exists to protect a gene pool from individuals that exist in inhospitable internal network environments, depending on their biological and environmental circumstances. Basically, this node harms individuals, but would serve to speed up natural selection. A gene pool is more likely to thrive if individuals that pass negative traits use fewer resources and are less likely to pass on those negative traits.

This type of decision making, however, may be biologically logical, but it is socially terrible, extremely harmful for families, life ending for individuals, and a huge burden on society. So much harm and so much unnecessary waste. No one should go through that. Hopefully knowledge about these internal mechanisms will provide solutions to these problems. Since suicidal need can be caused by any combination of internal systems complaining about their environment and lack of cooperation, a solution to the problem of suicide is improving that internal environment and teaching people how to care for their body’s needs and help these internal systems. Hopefully this works as well for others as it has for me.

Pleased & Productive

Life can be difficult when you’re fighting against your body. Fatigue, headaches, burnout, soreness; all of these things can get in the way of living your life. However, by working with your body, these symptoms can be understood, eliminated, and even prevented, as previously discussed. Removing the bad doesn’t make life worth living though. Let’s talk about pleasure.

Rewards

Your body rewards you for behaviors that it wants you to perform. However, its rewards tend to be weak. You can query your body about performing an action and get a positive response. However, if you want the full benefit of working with your body, continue to pay attention and query your body while performing the action. Are you getting and drinking a glass of water because your body told you to? Keep querying while you get the water and while you drink it. Every moment of that action will be rewarded. You’ll love it. The same thing happens with food, with movement, with being social, with sex, and literally every other aspect of life. If your body wants you to do it, and you do it, you can be rewarded for it and love it.

When You Need Nothing

If all of your body’s needs are currently cleared, you’ll find yourself in a state without needs. As long as your body isn’t busy with rebuilds or other such tasks, it will encourage productivity. Meaning, you get rewarded for work. You can enjoy it, instead of work turning into a painful hardship that you have to slog through. Remember to keep querying your body while performing the task. Your body will reward you as long as it wants you to keep going.

You may find it difficult to focus on what you need to do. Distractions like social media, games, and internet videos are constantly at your fingertips. However, your body understands the difference between passive behavior and active, mindful behavior, and it will discourage mindless activity like TV when it isn’t in some sort of repair state. I personally love being able to get an insane amount of work done in a day, both at my job and on my personal projects. It’s no burden and I love it because my body rewards me for it. Just remember to query your body if it stops rewarding you, because it’s likely that you have a new need to attend to. How fast can you take care of your need and get back to your business?

Influenza

Back before I discovered body communication, I tended to catch a cold or something about once a year. It was nothing serious. Just your normal symptoms that I treated like anyone else. I did, however, notice something odd the few times that I caught something after I started seriously working with my body. If I caught something, the first thing that I would notice is that my body’s self care instructions would change considerably. Diet would change, I would be instructed to lay down a lot and move slowly. There were instructions for what to do with my attention as well. If I wasn’t taking care of my body the way my body instructed, I would start to get normal symptoms. Those symptoms, however, would go away when I started listening to my body again. It was as if the symptoms themselves were caused by my body as extreme measures to get me to stop what I was doing and take care of myself.

This isn’t magic or a cure-all. If you use body communication, you can still get sick. If there is a serious virus being spread, you can still spread it. This only seems to mitigate the symptoms so that you don’t notice if you have caught something. It doesn’t stop you from being a carrier, and it doesn’t even guarantee that all symptoms will be mitigated in all situations. However, it does appear to be effective for me. I have not experienced the symptoms of a cold since I got good at always following my body’s instructions. If I am following my body’s instructions perfectly, at all times, and not slipping up, there really is no way for me to tell if I’ve caught something. I have likely caught colds several times in the last six years, and merely been completely unaware, as my body has been able to handle colds without bothering to provide me with any symptoms.