Warning: general discussion of the world being a dumpsterfire and that burning nightmare being caused by unexamined trauma -> purposeful thoughtlessness that allows tribalistic B&W nonsense and highly-reactive, extremist behavior.

There are no specifics mentioned / sides taken. But if you’re not here for it, don’t read past ~50%.

Let’s go.

Intro: How-to change >>> Learning “what’s wrong.”

[ Especially right now.]

Confession time. One of the known shortcomings of the work I’ve put out for Traumatized Motberfuckers in recent years has been the emphasis on learning… and lack of instruction about DOING.

(Look. A trauma-informed bitch doesn’t want to get preachy or tell anyone else what they “should” do. Over time, I pulled back.)

But this seems to be the time that focus on heady learning needs to shift back towards the practical behaviors required for managing / rehabilitating trauma. Because, now, more than ever (?) the ability to navigate and wisely operate our trauma brains is going to be crucial.

(I don’t need to name the stressful nationwide/worldwide events I’m alluding to, right?)

Looking at all the writing on the wall… and some of the inscriptions in the sky… I wholeheartedly believe:

We (humans, on both sides of the issues) cannot afford to get spun out by global events and catastrophic future tripping – nor can we allow the news headlines to enable / encourage our own recovery regressions because there’s just too much goddamn stress to keep up with.

So.

It’s time we get more instructional, and less educational – if you’re here for it.

To start, let’s talk *again about one of the CRUCIAL behaviors that, without a doubt, is necessary for recovery.

*(Check my many past episodes on time orientation, the time signature of your body vs. your life, getting in touch with the Self, and the basics of trauma recovery / reprogramming the brain with mindfulness on Patreon)

That crucial behavior, required for real trauma recovery is?

Slowing down.

But hold on, because it’s not that fucking simple.

“Slowing down” as we commonly think about it is only half of the prescription.

Before we get into my (potentially preachy, sorry again) contrarian-thinking advice for CHANGING TRAUMA BEHAVIORS, not just learning about / lamenting about them…

First, here’s this article that hit me in the “hey, that’s what I’ve been saying… but I have more to say than this” department and convinced me to write this post.

Article: “Slowness leads to mindfulness—and may even expand time.”

Note: Yeah, I know, “expanding time” isn’t what you’re aiming for when your trauma brain is turnt up -“I’ll take full disassociation from my time of suffering, please.” But when you’re in an overdrive pattern and don’t have enough “you” to keep up with the real world threats of starvation / homelessness / being a bad parent / your own brain imploding / everything else. Yah, then time slowing down sounds a bit better. Feel like that needed to be said.

Now here’s the article:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/out-of-the-darkness/202407/living-slowly

I do recommend giving it a quick once-over. It’s an easy-breezy 3 minute read that tauts the science-based merits of slowing your lifestyling in order to slow down your experience of life in order to increase mindfulness.

For our purposes, this article promotes the behaviors necessary for not trauma-reacting your way through every day, and wondering why your years fly by while amounting to “the same old bullshit” / “oh god, I’ve become my mother or father.”

Also for our purposes, they say at the end:

“Of course, slowness isn’t so compatible with modern life, with all its pressures and demands. But we all have a degree of control over how we respond to situations, particularly in our leisure time. We can choose not to rush. We can choose to slow down when we walk, cook or do our chores, and so on.”

Does the article say anything particularly new or mindblowing?

No, it’s from Psychology Today (lawl).

But it reinforces THE SINGLE BEHAVIOR that I would recommend to anyone who wanted to change or better manage their sometimes-wonky brain. (note: all brains are sometimes wonky)

Slow down / Reprogram your brain / Change your life (and stop living a trauma-reactive nightmare)

MANAGE YOUR BRAIN BY MOVING SLOWER

What happens when we move quickly?

We react, automatically. We don’t wisely respond.

Our brains move immediately from “recognition of an event that feels/smells/looks like another event we’ve encountered before” to *LEARNED REACTION THAT WILL KEEP US SAFE*

But unfortunately, many or most of our learned reactions to stay safe are not based in circumstances that actually are similar to what we’re encountering in the modern day. They feel familiar, but they are not identical. Therefore, the behaviors are not appropriate or adaptive… they create less-than-the-best results… and we never feel like we “progress” in life.

I know, I know. We often end up in situations that are reminiscent of prior ones. Therefore, we feel like it IS extremely wise to react like we did in the past, when we survived the first time(s) around.

But conditions then can never be the same as conditions now. So allowing these old patterns to continue is a crutch that will actually cripple you. We, for starters, are older, more powerful, intelligent, and wiley beings than we were when we first learned these reactions.

1) Therefore, the majority of our learned, automatic, reactions to any stimulation is not our best choice.

And

2) We’re “letting our brains get away with us” without realizing it. Giving our control over to our historical brain programming, letting our thoughts become ever-louder echoes of the past, and allowing our cognitions + external behaviors to run off in scattered, pointedly obsessive, or otherwise destructive directions.

So you can see why from a psychological and brain-scientific perspective, it’s necessary to stop moving so fast. To be less purposely-busy, if that’s something you also struggle with. To put time between absorbing external information and engaging with it.

That last part is important, let’s talk about it:

DON’T JUST SLOW DOWN, EXPERIENCE INFORMATION AT AN APPROPRIATE PACE

Here’s my caveat to the whole “slow down and life will chaaaaaange” argument. (stars and rainbows here)

Plenty of TMFRs don’t move a fucking inch in an hour.

Freeze states and parasympathetic responses rule them, rather than fight/flight/ordie hyperdrive conditions do.

And guess what? They aren’t recovering or feeling particularly “in charge” of their brains, either.

Here’s why.

It’s not just about slowing down your movements. It’s about absorbing information from the outside world at a pace that matches the human brain’s processing speed.

Which means… Sure, y’all might sit perfectly still all day, growing moss (sign me the fuck up)…

But if you’re still staring at a phone, spacing through endless hours of binge streaming, pumping newsheadlines into your brain as fast as your apps can “refresh,” flipping magazine pages, playing anything from solitaire or Eldenring, swimming in human drama and trauma from outside sources, stirring up your own human drama and trauma, planning out your next post, internet stalking your enemies, etc. etc. etc….

Your brain isn’t capable of experiencing, processing, or reflecting upon all that information.

And it’s going to be rapidly reacting (in potentially very anxiety-inducing, miserable ways), even if you never get out of bed.

Thus:

“Physical immobility” is not the same as “cognitively moving slowly.”

And only the latter is beneficial for your trauma recovery / the future of our world. (for real.)

Consider it from the evolutionary perspective

Have you heard about this recent experiment in which they locked apes in artificial environments they couldn’t escape from, filled those enclosures with nonstop stimulation via tv screens playing 18 hours of media all day, every day, including many media pieces that exposed them to unknown apes under severe distress / threat of life that they were unable to comfort or assist, and observed the impact on individual and social behaviors over the next several decades and generations?

Either way, anwer honestly:

What would you expect to happen in those circumstances?

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the apes became anxious, overstimulated, and eventually depressed by the helpless nature of their predicament. That their wake/sleep cycles were disturbed. That they demontrated frustration, hostility, and even aggression towards self and other. I would expect stereotypical behaviors to emerge as the apes tried to cope with their unfit habitats and unnatural wys of living. Starvation and self-neglect, or overreliance on food and grooming for comfort might be seen. Over time, I would expect that their social behaviors would become disturbed – perhaps leaning into isolation, as their stimulatory flooding was already too much to deal with and media demanded their attention. Yet, I would also anticipate that with time, they would be acclimated to the continual artificial stimulation and panic if it was withdrawn.

Hey, my guesses are correct.

Here’s why:

Ape brains have not evolved to handle a continual onslaught of information to sort through.

Ape brains not evolved to engage with the world through fake, 2D surfaces and brilliant flashing lights.

Ape brains not evolved to have images of death and destruction from round the world shuttled into them.

Ape brains not evolved to have stimulation and dopamine available 24/7, if they simply direct their attention outwards in a specified direction.

And your brain has not either.

What I just described is called “the modern life on earth experiment” and we can all see how it’s fucking going.

We are these apes.

And our brains were not evolved for the ways that we’re living.

Which is ruining our personal lives

As well as the future of all life.

Yep. Here comes my preachy bullshit that no one wants to hear…

The benefits of “Slowing Down” only apply if your brain’s consumption ALSO slows down

The key to living a healing and purposeful life, as best you can is?

1) Less information all at once.

2) Which allows longer, richer, deeper engagement with the information at hand.

That’s what our stupid fucking brains need. That is what’s lacking in modernity. That’s why the world has become the movie Idiocracy.

This is true for REAL psychological / neurological reasons, not because I’m a unibomber in the making.

We require less information + more conscious time spent analyzing chosen information (duh) in order:

1) To process the information coming at us from all ends. (Rather than half-absorbing it, having a stress response, and diverting attention to another source of stimulation for relief – thus, never really finishing a thought or emotional cycle, but carrying their ghosts with our bloating subconscious-ees instead.)

2) To reflect on and integrate that new information with prior knowledge. (Rather than accepting our initial gut reaction and failing to think critically about, say… “assissination attempts” that seem a little too convenient to be real, based on everything else we know.)

3) AND ESPECIALLY in order to deprogram behaviors that are less-than highly functional and replace them with new ones. (Rather than spiralling into withdrawn terror OR radical extremism because our most primative survival reactions are being stoked by fear-mongering and tribalism, on top of whatever personal traumas and dramas we’re dealing with in our own lives.)

To pull this conversation together…

Where the world dumpsterfire comes in: Everyone has become a moron, and they refuse to do the thing that would sanitize the world.

we need to stop consuming information 24/7.

absorb and reflect more on the bountiful information we already need to sort through. (like our trauma histories, current relationship issues, anxiety, etc)

and stop being fucking idiots who too rapidly:

• accept new information as reality, without evidence
• dismiss new information that mismatches our chosen perspective, without other reason
• act like assholes to prove that we’re right about the other side being assholes
• perpetuate our past trauma by repeating it with new targets / spreading it to the world as part of our radical belief systems

But no one wants to because that would mean 1) putting down the artificial dopamine drip 2) being present in time-space 3) the energy-costly experience of critical thinking and integrating information.

It would mean we had to

1) SLOW DOWN our mindless consumption of information and entertainment.

2) Instead of constantly asking “what’s next” as we pick up our phones and seek out something to make us feel even semi-alive, we would have to ask: “What’s already happened?”

3) Then, create a well-synthesized, cohesive, evidence-based story that confronted modern reality, rather than a chosen reality or a reality from 50 years ago.

4) So we could behave in line with what we’re consciously, wisely, deciding upon and aiming for in the future… rather than what our stupid fucking brains immediately, instantly, shat out in line with our stongest, unexamined, probably-historically-based, emotion.

In conclusion, for our brains and lives:

Yes, slowing down your outward pacing is necessary. This is a great behavioral change to start with, because it can be universally applied to all people, all times, all circumstances.

But we need to recognize that this includes our MENTAL PROCESSING pacing, especially as animals who’ve only had tech / 24hour news for less than a percent of our history.

So we stop overflowing our brains like hopeless bathtubs every day, all day, beginning as early as our phone-staring / PC fiddling / gameplaying does…

And then wondering “why this water* is leaking all over, slopping everything up, and fostering the growth of toxic molds that are rotting out the structure of this home we all share?”

*water is the element of emotion. this was a metaphor.

My HOW-TO MANAGE AND CHANGE YOUR TRAUMA BRAIN, EVEN AS THE WORLD SHAKES ADVICE IS:

Change your pace, sure, by slowing your movements…

But moreso, by removing artificial stimulation from your life as much as you can.

Actually absorb the details of the reality around you, which requires sitting and becoming receptive, rather than constantly looking for new information.

And give that reality your full attention, as you rethink prior thoughts about it and form cohesive, emotionally-balanced, critically examined narratives about it.

Hell, you don’t even have to TRY to do this. If you simply stop pumping your brain full of flashing stimulation, and, instead… READ A BOOK… your brain will automatically start processing backlogged information. Take away the goddamn screens/podcasts/media stimulation and you’ll figure out what you really think about what you’ve already thought, without putting in enormous effort.

Then plan out your behavioral path, using that newly-defined authentic and evidence-backed belief as the backbone of your outward activities.

So trauma reactions become less prevalent…

Consciously chosen behaviors make a return to our species…

And change (healing and quality of life improvement) can start on the individual level, to the community level, upwards.

Manage your brain. Have your best thoughts. Change your behaviors.
See your personal life change for the better, escape from the patterns of your FOO, enjoy relationships again.
And the human race gets one more ally, empowered to make a difference rather than shutting down, spiralling, or screaming, while you’re at it.

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One last note:

I know, I really do, that putting down the phone/tv/computer/podcast/album is stressful. It feels like there’s a huge void in life. Like, every few seconds, something is missing and life is undirected. It feels to me like a best friend / guide has suddenly disappeared.

At first.

And then you wonder “how the fuck was I ever living like that?” within a few days/weeks, especially as your brain starts clearing up and your consciousness starts to be a bullshit-slicing weapon that you’re expertly trained to wield.

As you learn to stay associated with your life and experience the sensation of “not continual stimulation,” – maybe for the first time – it will become less and less stressful. First your brain needs to get over that initial, reactive and false, panic when it gauges “I’m alone and I don’t know what to do with myself.” It will learn what to do with itself.

Your time will become more and more clarifying, more and more rewarding. You’ll begine to notice that real, physical, life is… enjoyable?

Your brain will become your friend. You’ll enjoy spending time with it. You’ll have a direct line of communication with yourself and yourSelf. You’ll notice that reality is… kindof neat. (have you seen trees lately?) You won’t even miss your fake internet life, you won’t be so influenced by other people, and your emotions will become enjoyable experiences.

And if you couple all these cognitive with behavioral changes that align your actions with the deep thoughts, emotions, and you-authentic beliefs that you’re finding inside of you, I promise you this:

You will begin to live a life that feels indescribably more purposeful and rich and rewarding and nonstop-entertaining than anything you can find on a constantly-refreshed screen.

Your best life requires your best brain.
And the world needs “your best brain” as much as you do.
So STFD already.

But, in my view, it’s a little more than “taking a bikeride everyday.”

CHEERS