Is attitude the main difference between happiness/health and misery/disease?

[Riesensackteil]

If for example Phenibut mimicks proper gut health, I think that even if you try to delude yourself, you will fall back into the usual trot

 

[andrewlee224]

Certainly physiology/endotoxins/etc. play a big role in this.. when you're in a suboptimal physiological state you may think you're having bad thoughts because that's how you are and they are coming strictly from yourself.. but that's not true. With a proper supplement/food intervention the attitude can shift by 180 degrees quite quickly, and then you are left wondering why you were so miserable - and it seems that the 'happy' you can't understand why 'miserable' you was miserable and vice versa.
Of course there may be situations when you truly are sad for a good reason, but I think it's distinguishable from the 'endotoxin' type irrational sadness.

 

[Collden]

Thinking about the millions of people who grow up poor, in war torn countries, are homeless, and yet persist with a good attitude. Yet I get grumpy, angry, and complain cause an under ripe fruit irritated my stomach. laughable when you think about it from a grand scheme

Yes, it becomes kind of absurd to think that humans are so frail that a slightly undercooked meal could send you off into a depression or that sophisticated hormonal and nutritional support is required to be healthy - when 80 years ago, an entire generation of americans went off to war and endured more hardship in a year than modern humans will face in several lifetimes, then came back to life long, happy and healthy lives afterwards. I don't buy the story that modern humans are that much physically weaker than previous generations, I think the change in mindset and lack of experience dealing with hardship leading to learned helplessness is the main difference.

 

[Ben.]

A chemically induced high allows you to temporarily glimpse the outside world from within your prison cell, but to actually escape it requires work in the real world to break your mental programming, and a lot of that programming one must break I believe is related to pain avoidance.

Freedom is knowing that you can achieve anything you set your mind to, if you have a problem, knowing that you can solve it. But a pre-condition of attaining that freedom is accepting that achieving anything or solving any kind of problem involves pain, whether its the pain of losing weight if you're overweight, the pain of becoming fit if you're a couch potato, the pain of approaching women and facing possible rejection if you're shy, the pain of working hard when you're lazy, the pain of focusing on a problem when you're procrastinating, the pain of confronting dysfunctional relationships, the pain of overcoming any kind of weakness that is holding you back in life. Being able to accept the pain that comes with working to achieve what you want leads to a sense of freedom, the opposite of learned helplessness. And it is this sense of freedom that will liberate your metabolism.

Please be careful with this attitude about attitude. I've seen people in immense pain and other awful health conditions and yet there are doctors saying "it is all in your head". There could be no bigger insult because it may distract from the actual path of healing/health. Contexts matters. The individuals situation matters.

I had these moments with and without specific chemicals/supplements that made it crystal clear it is not "attitude" or "willpower" that is lacking. The thing is, if the health/baseline is so bad its like you are literally trying to run a marathon with a 100 KG weight west and you keep going because of "attitude" just to end up destroying yourself, wondering why everyone else is so much faster than you are. Everyone trying to get better has the attitude, but it only works for some, so whats the difference? Lets keep the people who don't even try out of the picture because it seems like thoose are the ones you are reffering to.

I used to think exactly what you are describing and seem to propose here. I thought, to become better i just had to learn to keep my mental state/attitude up even in the most dire times. That's what makes all the difference afterall right? No. I did all that for years, working out like a beast, changing habits, conquering every social anxiety or emotional trauma there is/was - head on - like declaring full on war on it, i worked harder on all of these aspects than some people ever had to or ever will and i kept wondering why noone of it is working, why things are getting worse instead of better. The attitude thing destroyed me even further health wise.

It took me many failures and harships to realize i was trying to force all of this attitude stuff with the wrong basis. It was as if i tried to sprint with broken legs.
The only "attitude" that matters to me, is that i will figure this out and solve it but i had to learn the hard way that it is not trough forcing myself mentaly/phsyically into stuff that my body/health can't handle.

Why would i need to do 10x-100x times more work and consciously think about attitude for basic human stuff that others dont even have to think about. Theres obviously something fundamentaly not working.

I don't buy the story that modern humans are that much physically weaker than previous generations, I think the change in mindset and lack of experience dealing with hardship leading to learned helplessness is the main difference.

The modern human is more damaged than its predecessors and it is negatively influencing the necessary biological fundamental basis on which this whole personality/attitude is dependend on. Becareful telling a person its all mental as you do not know wether this person has a serious problem with the brain, neurotransmitters or w/e the hell it is thats causing some peoples miserable states.

---

Stop idealizing this "people in harsher/poor countrys" are happier/joyful. Some came out of it better/stronger, some others came out of it phsycially/mentally ill and broken. Cherry picking at its finest.

Certainly physiology/endotoxins/etc. play a big role in this.. when you're in a suboptimal physiological state you may think you're having bad thoughts because that's how you are and they are coming strictly from yourself.. but that's not true. With a proper supplement/food intervention the attitude can shift by 180 degrees quite quickly, and then you are left wondering why you were so miserable - and it seems that the 'happy' you can't understand why 'miserable' you was miserable and vice versa.
Of course there may be situations when you truly are sad for a good reason, but I think it's distinguishable from the 'endotoxin' type irrational sadness.

You described this perfectly. Took me far to long to figure this one out.

 

[Collden]

Everyone trying to get better has the attitude, but it only works for some, so whats the difference? Lets keep the people who don't even try out of the picture because it seems like thoose are the ones you are reffering to.

I used to think exactly what you are describing and seem to propose here. I thought, to become better i just had to learn to keep my mental state/attitude up even in the most dire times. That's what makes all the difference afterall right? No. I did all that for years, working out like a beast, changing habits, conquering every social anxiety or emotional trauma there is/was - head on - like declaring full on war on it, i worked harder on all of these aspects than some people ever had to or ever will and i kept wondering why noone of it is working, why things are getting worse instead of better. The attitude thing destroyed me even further health wise.

It took me many failures and harships to realize i was trying to force all of this attitude stuff with the wrong basis. It was as if i tried to sprint with broken legs.
The only "attitude" that matters to me, is that i will figure this out and solve it but i had to learn the hard way that it is not trough forcing myself mentaly/phsyically into stuff that my body/health can't handle.

I'm not sure if people in general really do have that attitude. Lets take weight loss as an example, most people who try to lose weight tend to go for extreme regimens such as crash diets, ketogenic diets, vegan diets, extreme fasting regimens or vomit-inducing HIIT workouts rather than just mildly restricting calories or increasing routine physical activity or jogging a few times a week, even though the former regimens are not sustainable and far more harmful in the long run. Why? Because the highly stimulating nature of these extreme measures as well as the dopamine rush of quick results means you're actually feeling less pain while doing them.

Going to extremes in terms of diet, exercise or lifestyle changes, as you described yourself doing, is just as much pain avoidance as not doing anything, because going into those extremes puts you in a chronically stressed/stimulated state that dulls and distracts from the pain. According to ancient greek philosophers, the key to health is moderation, but moderation is also what maximally exposes you to pain, so most people, especially most unhealthy people, tend to fall into extremes to avoid that pain by either doing too much or too little, even though that only makes things worse in the long run.

Ok, so you reached the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with your attitude and your problems are entirely physiological in nature, have you then managed to fix your health through physiological interventions, and how? I'm coming from the opposite place of for over a decade having tried a multitude of dietary approaches, stress avoidance methods, hormonal and nutritional supplements, gentle physical activity approaches, etc, and none of it has made the slightest difference to resolving my health issues. In fact, the Peatish philosophy of minimising stress and discomfort has led to slowly but steadily deteriorating health both physically and mentally.

 

[Amazoniac]

Not having a purpose/mission (war) makes you susceptible to get caught on whatever nuisance appears in the way. Fred wrote somewhere: 'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how'. Check this out (alert: contains Jordy and Vik in a motivational package, although this is redundant). People think that the solution to dispersion is to go on a techmology detox, but the most practical antidote against distractions is to have meaningful goals.

On being sensitive to adversities, it can be that the person is on the prowl to grab onto the first thing outside that can materialize or give meaning to internal suffering. Some people lose loved ones without being too shaken by it (imagine how many relatives are lost by those who live long), others use it as a justification to finally give up on life.

The weakening of family and culture traditions can be another hit because it leaves people adrift without the sense of purpose and 'responsibility' in continuing a story carrying a baton, it's easier to get lost in life.

Religion (such as Killciholism) and faith in being part of something greater and purposeful can get you through a lot of hardship (no less than 50 ng/ml).

Having low standards and not many expectations makes everything fine and prevents suffering. There are people living lives that are more comfortable than ours wondering how we are able to put up with our routines. Diokine is at this moment in a palace, panted by 2 slaves (SL and SR) and there's a third one that he refers to as GF, for grape feeder.

A misconception in health circles is believing that, after recovery, stress is going to be handled with grace and it's no longer a concern. However, within limits where the situation is under control, people will settle on a level of stress that's close to intolerance. If you're in robust shape, you'll seek challenges that lead to a proportional rise in stress, it's an endless pursuit to grow and become more. The relative degree of stress experienced by someone who is debilitated when walking on the backyard may be the same as that of someone who is strong and leading a big international project, both are performing on their edges.

How you interpret what happens influences what's perceived to be appropriate physiological response. Actively addressing an issue requires acknowledging its existence, shifting your attention to it, which might give it importance and reinforce it. For example, I cried at the end of Titanic when Rose threw the jewel into the ocean. Instead of thinking that for some reason there was salted water streaming down my face and it shouldn't be a big deal because I trim my nails with teeth, I decided to focus on it and attempt to control it, which only led to more water and a permanent trauma of movie theaters, pointing fingers and laughers. Oh, now there's sweaty palms when around jewelry too.

- Jared Leto - Not Aging Man
- About 40% Of People With Severe Depression Recover Naturally And Completely

 

[Sefton10]

Totally agree. The mantra fake it till you make it, is totally misguided. The ability of one's mind to influence one's body is intrinsically related to one's health status. Some healthy people swear by things like "the law of attraction", like my girlfriend's father, and you know what, I believe him. Healthy people won't understand the innumerable struggles that diseased people experience. I have glimpses of good health, short peaks into a window of might be, but I tell you what, it's a metabolic substance that enabled it. The mind is a wonderfully created illusion by the body, totally worth feeding this wonderful body. But it's the body that came first, and it's the body that leaves last. In between, healthy people are blessed with wonderful thoughts. Ray Peat said something like when thyroid is working properly you can think what you want. That sounds like freedom, to choose your own life. I hope I'll find this place once. And everybody else who's on this journey to improved health.

 

[Collden]

How you interpret what happens influences what's perceived to be appropriate physiological response. Actively addressing an issue requires acknowledging its existence, shifting your attention to it, which might give it importance and reinforce it. For example, I cried at the end of Titanic when Rose threw the jewel into the ocean. Instead of thinking that for some reason there was salted water streaming down my face and it shouldn't be a big deal because I trim my nails with teeth, I decided to focus on it and attempt to control it, which only led to more water and a permanent trauma of movie theaters, pointing fingers and laughers. Oh, now there's sweaty palms when around jewelry too.

Interesting post, on the subject of how interpretation matters, stress researcher Kelly Mcgonigal has argued that the only difference between anxiety and excitement is in your mental interpretation of the situation - biochemically the two states look the same, yet frequently being anxious is harmful while frequently being excited is health-promoting.

I believe the same often goes for stress more generally. Two people could have a wildly different subjective experience of a tough situation - and consequently wildly different effects on their mental/physical health - depending on their mindset. One is "Woe is me, why do I have to suffer this torment?", the other is "Woah! I'm clearly not adapted to this situation, what a challenge for me! Next time I'll be able to face this better".

This is another reason how being spoiled and growing up expecting that life should be effortless can over time lead to you becoming even more stressed and unhealthy over time. A person expecting life to be effortless will be frustrated any time things become tough or painful, and this frustration, this negative rumination "Why me, why do I have to suffer through this crap?" just adds another layer of stress to any tough situation you're going through.

 

[gaze]

Not having a purpose/mission (war) makes you susceptible to get caught on whatever nuisance appears in the way. Fred wrote somewhere: 'He who has a why to live can bear almost any how'. Check this out (alert: contains Jordy and Vik in a motivational package, although this is redundant). People think that the solution to dispersion is to go on a techmology detox, but the most practical antidote against distractions is to have meaningful goals.

On being sensitive to adversities, it can be that the person is on the prowl to grab onto the first thing outside that can materialize or give meaning to internal suffering. Some people lose loved ones without being too shaken by it (imagine how many relatives are lost by those who live long), others use it as a justification to finally give up on life.

The weakening of family and culture traditions can be another hit because it leaves people adrift without the sense of purpose and 'responsibility' in continuing a story carrying a baton, it's easier to get lost in life.

Religion (such as Killciholism) and faith in being part of something greater and purposeful can get you through a lot of hardship (no less than 50 ng/ml).

Having low standards and not many expectations makes everything fine and prevents suffering. There are people living lives that are more comfortable than ours wondering how we are able to put up with our routines. Diokine is at this moment in a palace, panted by 2 slaves (SL and SR) and there's a third one that he refers to as GF, for grape feeder.

A misconception in health circles is believing that, after recovery, stress is going to be handled with grace and it's no longer a concern. However, within limits where the situation is under control, people will settle on a level of stress that's close to intolerance. If you're in robust shape, you'll seek challenges that lead to a proportional rise in stress, it's an endless pursuit to grow and become more. The relative degree of stress experienced by someone who is debilitated when walking on the backyard may be the same as that of someone who is strong and leading a big international project, both are performing on their edges.

How you interpret what happens influences what's perceived to be appropriate physiological response. Actively addressing an issue requires acknowledging its existence, shifting your attention to it, which might give it importance and reinforce it. For example, I cried at the end of Titanic when Rose threw the jewel into the ocean. Instead of thinking that for some reason there was salted water streaming down my face and it shouldn't be a big deal because I trim my nails with teeth, I decided to focus on it and attempt to control it, which only led to more water and a permanent trauma of movie theaters, pointing fingers and laughers. Oh, now there's sweaty palms when around jewelry too.

- Jared Leto - Not Aging Man
- About 40% Of People With Severe Depression Recover Naturally And Completely

purpose is a big one. take this guy for example, hes a bull rider where you're pretty much guaranteed to get hurt every time but the adrenaline rush, and glory and toughness (and the money) that comes along with it can make people accept the extreme pain with open arms. Hes 5'10 140 pounds so hes super scrawny and has broken nearly every bone in his body yet hes able to endure because of passion. I think also the lack of hypochondria is also a big one, people with more knowledge about disease, know that they are in the process of degeneration when something goes wrong, so theres a fear of it spiraling out of control. The people who can take on the most usually could care less about longevity, but ironically they end up living the longest, possibly because of the low expectations out of life and health.


View: https://youtu.be/_kQl6BnDRQg?t=308

 

[Ben.]

I'm not sure if people in general really do have that attitude. Lets take weight loss as an example, most people who try to lose weight tend to go for extreme regimens such as crash diets, ketogenic diets, vegan diets, extreme fasting regimens or vomit-inducing HIIT workouts rather than just mildly restricting calories or increasing routine physical activity or jogging a few times a week, even though the former regimens are not sustainable and far more harmful in the long run. Why? Because the highly stimulating nature of these extreme measures as well as the dopamine rush of quick results means you're actually feeling less pain while doing them.

Going to extremes in terms of diet, exercise or lifestyle changes, as you described yourself doing, is just as much pain avoidance as not doing anything, because going into those extremes puts you in a chronically stressed/stimulated state that dulls and distracts from the pain. According to ancient greek philosophers, the key to health is moderation, but moderation is also what maximally exposes you to pain, so most people, especially most unhealthy people, tend to fall into extremes to avoid that pain by either doing too much or too little, even though that only makes things worse in the long run.

I agree that extremes rarely lead to success. Moderation and consistency is where its at. Requires hard lessons one needs to learn especially the younger one is.
To be honest, the most extreme things i did, was when my health has been at its worst. The healthier i was, the less likely i was doing the extreme stuff, and if i did something very stressful, i could take it and get back on my feet quickly.

Ok, so you reached the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with your attitude and your problems are entirely physiological in nature, have you then managed to fix your health through physiological interventions, and how? I'm coming from the opposite place of for over a decade having tried a multitude of dietary approaches, stress avoidance methods, hormonal and nutritional supplements, gentle physical activity approaches, etc, and none of it has made the slightest difference to resolving my health issues.

My conclusion was that after all this mental work i did, from countless therapy sessions which cost me a fortune, all the books i read, all the mental work i did, all the approaches i could of thinked of, all the hardship i purposefully subjected myself to and endured i realized that there is another thing i have to fix first, or atleast along side it. Don't get me wrong, the work on attitude, what you describe, allowed me to become a much better and capable person, but i think what you describe will work magnitudes better (atleast in my case) when the underlying physiological issue is fixed.

I am glad you found something that helped. There is no right or wrong in this. I dont want to persuade anyone, i just want to go away from this tunnel vision that all is just mental or that it is all just about attitude. If a person, for example, has a sever endotoxin issue due to one of many potential causes, feeding chronically poision into the bloodstream and affecting thyroid and the brain itself, telling this person that it will fix itself with a positive mind alone can be fatal.

This whole thing is extremely complex and i personally think that both, attitude and physiological health is deeply interconnected. I found that some people were fine mentaly/attitude wise but have gotten very ill and with it the attitude/mind has changed after suffering over years and years. What you describe would be the other way around, which ofcourse is/can be also true.
It also is harder and harder to keep the attitude or mindset up when the physiological health is detoriating progressevily to unacceptable levels. Vicious cycle ...

In fact, the Peatish philosophy of minimising stress and discomfort has led to slowly but steadily deteriorating health both physically and mentally.

Realy? Mhhhh ... i wouldn't have interpreted minimising stress with "avoiding everything". But i guess one can become to careful/scared of stress in that sense? Good point.

What you and amazoniac describe above is actually minimising stress by changing the internal response to a stimulus which is hard mental work. Changing the subconcious physiological response from the body by relearning/reteaching yourself with specific benefital thoughts trough creating new habits in thinking and breath work/parasympathetic trigger work.

I actually wrote quit some text in this regard somewhere else:

Other than bodywork, yoga, breathing, listening to music, taking hot/warm baths, walking in nature, meditating, eating/consuming specific stuff, having a good time with people you like, sex?

The only other thing that comes to mind atm on the top of my head that is realy powerful imo and i would recommend everyone regardless of their health issue to try, is mentaly working out so that your body/subconcious is not overresponding to stressors. Building new habits with thoughts and our subconcious,

In terms of hair loss, seeing the hair falling out, in the sink, on the pillow on the hands etc. is an stressor in and of itself. Get rid of responding like that. First thing i did to deal with it was shaving down so that when hair fell out, i couldn't see it because the hair was to short to be seen (due to lockdown this was easy to do). That already reduced the stressload i had during that time. Next thing is, that when it falls out, to not respond as intensely/stressed.

It is one of the reason why i think wim hof for example is succesful in the first place with many health issues in his followers. Not the cold or breath itself but actually teaching the people to mentally shut off the overblown stress response to the cold. Teaching people to controll/reshape their stress response. Think of a person having a panick attack towards a trigger that he/she cant control(many people in a small room for example can trigger that), learning and teaching the body to not respond like that anymore basicly.

This can be applied to anything but to get an idea on how this works, a cold shower practicing can be helpful (works with heat or noice or smell too). Go under the cold shower, most people immeaditly react like "oh my god this is so cold, oh my god oh my god, holy ***t is that cold" while breathing as if they are hyperventilating. Once you notice/realize that you do react like that, you go out of the water stream, tell yourself in your head "it is ok, this will be cold, we can handle it" while simultaneously trying to keep the breath as calm as possible and get back under the water stream and you will immeaditly notice it is not as cold as you thought/experienced it was.

One can apply this to anything, for instance food which may be problematic or not (think like blessing the food or having thoughts of gratidude or have your inner voice tell urself this is safe and nutritios to consume).

Another example at work for this would be consciously (takes practice/effort) the inner voice to say "we will do one thing at a time, we managed worse" instead of thinking "oh my god this is to much to do, i can't do this, my boss is going to fire me". Doing stuff like this over and over whenever it is possible will overtime create a habit of thinking and responding with more resilence. Basicly one will have a better baseline towards this stuff.

---

One of the issues is, we didn't have these issues and overblown stress reactions before. It is happening/caused by to much stress, infection, to much emotional/traumatic events or w/e and suddenly one finds him/herself having panick attacks in buses, reacting with intense stomache pain towards food that havent been problematic for the past 40 years and now one is trowhing tons of meds/supplements down the throat in hope of healing, meanwhile all the people around you think you are a hypochonder or its genetics or it is "all in your head". It actually is a biological/biochemical/physiologial reaction from a stimulus picked up by one of the many sense we have.

---

It is not easy. These things are deeply intertwined. Which one came first or which one is the causation and which one is the symptom is hard to figure out. Think of a person who has been raped while smelling .. idk ... hotdogs nearby -> subconcious traumatic response whenever the person smells or hears or sees something accociated with the traumatic event. These things exist on a smaller, less intense scale that they are not aware of.

Getting rid of this and relearning/teaching someone with such an issue is insanely difficult. I got some great books here with interesting approaches.

This is probably from all the stuff i try the hardest to learn and be consistent with. For this to work or before someone does work on this i would still think that taking care of any underlying physiological issue should be done first and foremost so that healing is possible in the first place. Microbiome Gut dysbiosis, diet, parasites, Reducing chronic daily stressload, hormonal issues, postural damage (fascia/muscle tension or impingement can be a chronic stressor), environmental stuff both chemicaly and socialy (work or family stressing someone out) etc.

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Had immense success with this in terms of tolerating foods again, lowering the intensity of my tinnitus to a bearable volume and get almost entirely rid of my hyperacusic. I personaly found some stuff that i feel are causing issues beyond psychological/mental issues but i think working on both is the best bet one can do.

Uhm, if it is helpful im glad. Take what is helpful and discard the rest.

I hope i explained it correctly. It feels like a switch one is mentaly switchin on/off. Like contracting a muscle in your head/brain if that makes any sense. This seems to work for premature ejaculation, cold/heat exposure and alot of other stuff. Feels a little like numbing onceself against a stimulus. It makes me think of the saying "pull yourself together!" and then you just ... do that mentally.

I am not saying you should do alot of cold showers, it is just a example to illustrate what i ment. I actually think cold showers/cold exposure to often to much is insanely stressfull and might be counterproductive in excess.

Shaving the head was just a emergency call i did because at that time i was stressed out by to many things at once and it simply helped me during that time to reduce the stressload from the visual stimulus of my hair falling out and focus one by one in dealing with my issues. It ofc is not a solution to hairloss.

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I am by no means an expert in this, it is a daily effort/struggle. if my explanation doesn't make to much sense i guess one could read him/herself more into stress/trauma release work/therapie concepts and stuff like that.

Wish you the best in your endevours.

 

[Digital Samurai]

You have it upside down.

People who seek challenges are those lucky enough to have good health no matter what they inflict to their body.

When your body is full of endotoxins, you are depressed and feel like doing absolutely nothing.

I've experienced both in a very short period of time thanks to supplement, and can guarantee that the power of the mind is nothing against endotoxins.

When I'm on antibiotics and testosterone, I can lift mountains, be creative, travel the world, seduce women with wit.

When full of endotoxins, I don't even have the energy to watch TV.

Life is easy for the healthy. They think they are trying harder than the sick, they just don't know that it's all facilitated by how well their brain and body chemistry works for them, not thanks to their willpower.

This 100%. Couldn't agree more.

 

[orangeUglad]

Life is mostly pain, most of our basic pleasure-seeking behaviours such as eating and distracting ourselves with media consumption are simply trying to alleviate the pain of existence. The older you get the more life becomes about duties, responsibilities, compromises and learning to subjugate your instinctual urges. Does being spoiled as a child and never learning that getting what you want requires effort and suffering correlate with being less happy and healthy as adult? In the past, men particularly became adults by being forced into war or at least doing military training where learn that they cannot always get what they want and need to endure suffering to reach a higher goal. Is the lack of these kinds of experiences making modern people soft and sensitive and more prone to becoming stressed and miserable from trivial things?

From my observations, people from developing nations who have experienced tremendous hardship and suffering by western standards seem to more easily find joy in life, and healthy people more willingly subject themselves to stressors such as exercise, spicy/complex foods or seeking out challenging experiences, whereas unhealthy/unhappy people seem to mostly seek out quick gratification such as junk food, media consumption and avoidance of any kind of effort. Is the trick to happiness to learn to enjoy pain, to become joyful by overcoming suffering, rather than by trying to avoid it?

I'm wondering about this as someone who has frequently been called spoiled and sensitive by people close to me and is often not in the best of spirits. Just the other night I had a terrible take-away meal for dinner that gave me an upset stomach and put me in an outright depressed mood for the next 24hrs, whereas my friend, who grew up in a poor family and had the same meal also noted the low food quality but was still in usual good spirits the next day. Is the difference between us just our attitude in how we deal with adverse experiences?

This is a great post. My boyfriend grew up in a third world country where once you are old enough to walk and talk you will be treated (to a certain extent) like an adult and in many scenarios be given lots of responsibility in work and helping the family etc..he definitely wasn't spoiled...he grew up eating (and still does eat) pro-metabolic foods..lots of tropical fruits...organ meats...cow skin...root veggies...he grew up (and still is) an extremely spiritual person...meditating all the time ..even in his sleep...He's the most positive and easy going person I have ever seen. I have never seen him sad or cry..hard for me to imagine him angry or upset. Even though he hasn't exactly had the easiest life he is happy and very much at peace I believe because the combination of these things: #1 the peace he has in God...nothing can sway him because of that peace he has #2 his diet throughout his life. #3 the fact he's always had to work, help his family and go through various struggles in a way makes life beautiful (specifically helping others gives a person purpose I think)...I believe to an extent the more pain or struggle a person goes through the more they will be able to feel joy...especially if they can overcome the struggle...and overcoming the struggle may not be possible if the person was raised to be lazy, is in a toxic environment, eats bad food, has spiritual strongholds etc

 

[Collden]

purpose is a big one. take this guy for example, hes a bull rider where you're pretty much guaranteed to get hurt every time but the adrenaline rush, and glory and toughness (and the money) that comes along with it can make people accept the extreme pain with open arms. Hes 5'10 140 pounds so hes super scrawny and has broken nearly every bone in his body yet hes able to endure because of passion. I think also the lack of hypochondria is also a big one, people with more knowledge about disease, know that they are in the process of degeneration when something goes wrong, so theres a fear of it spiraling out of control. The people who can take on the most usually could care less about longevity, but ironically they end up living the longest, possibly because of the low expectations out of life and health.


View: https://youtu.be/_kQl6BnDRQg?t=308

Thanks, great example. I want to relate this to something Peat said in his latest interview:

PT (41:20)- How big of a deal do you think it is when people get to like 60 or 70 and people start thinking they have nothing to live for? I mean that’s gotta be huge on the organism, isn’t it?

RP (41:41)- Yeah, animal experiments show that isolation, or the creation of hopelessness or the expectation that you don’t have a future, that very proccess of isolation, the expectation turns on the pro-inflammatory processes which creates tissue inflammation, accelerating tissue degeneration

PT (42:05)- So that idea, I don’t have anything to do, maybe I’ll just watch T.V., it’s going to damage the tissues?

RP (42:25)- Yeah, turns down the energy system, raises the inflammation processes.

PT (): Fascinating

RP (42:27): It’s part of the adaptive processes. If you don’t intend to keep adapting to interesting, exciting stuff, then...

PT (42:45)- New stuff. So if we tell our body we’re not interested in adapting, we’re just gonna go hide or escape, then the body will get weaker?

RP (42:53)- Yeah, It accommodates the process and gets weaker, turns down your interest and ability to keep adapting

PT (): So what would be the opposite way? So that could be the hypochondriac kind of like you try to do so much stuff, you get afraid of stuff.

RP (43:20)- Uh yeah, a part of the same process, looking at the body as a machine rather than a self with plans

Basically, there is a tendency for people recovering from stress-induced disease or injury to look at the human body as a self-repairing machine, as if your organism possesses a blueprint of what the optimally functioning body should be like, and all you have to do is give your inner repairmen enough time, food and rest and they will restore your body to that innate perfection. But I think the body doesn't actually possess any such blueprint, instead it relies for all its restorative functions on continuous input from the external world to judge what is needed of it. Without sufficient external stimulation that tells your body that any given functionality is needed, that function will just slowly deteriorate. Put a man into zero gravity and his bones will eventually dissolve. Put a man on a couch with UBI, Netflix and door-to-door food delivery, and both his body and mind will eventually turn into a useless blob of fat because he isn't signalling to his body that anything more is needed for survival.

So you could argue that the reason this bull rider is able to withstand such astonishing amounts of stress and still come back every time is because he was just supernaturally healthy to begin with, but another way to look at it is that his lifestyle full of regular crippling injuries is actually stimulating his body to rise to the challenge. More generally, your metabolism will only be as strong as your body deems necessary for survival. Maybe, after a certain point of recovery, clearly signalling to your body that it has to up-regulate its metabolism is the only way it can do it.

Similarly, catering to your health issues and simply avoiding all situations that challenge the limitations imposed by your ill health, your body will never receive the proper motivation nor the necessary information to actually do anything about the problem, which is how chronic injuries can persist indefinitely when people just stop being active from fear of pain or re-injury. Of course this can go too far as happens with certain athletes, but even in such cases where more rest and recovery is needed, your body will still also need proper stimulation to maintain its functionality.

Up until quite recently we all had to work, be active and compete with others just to survive. But in modern times, it really is up to each individual to find a strong enough purpose and stimulation in life to convince your body that it actually needs to stay strong, healthy and well-functioning, otherwise it will just deteriorate no matter how much good-quality food and rest you get.

 

[Collden]

I agree that extremes rarely lead to success. Moderation and consistency is where its at. Requires hard lessons one needs to learn especially the younger one is.
To be honest, the most extreme things i did, was when my health has been at its worst. The healthier i was, the less likely i was doing the extreme stuff, and if i did something very stressful, i could take it and get back on my feet quickly.



My conclusion was that after all this mental work i did, from countless therapy sessions which cost me a fortune, all the books i read, all the mental work i did, all the approaches i could of thinked of, all the hardship i purposefully subjected myself to and endured i realized that there is another thing i have to fix first, or atleast along side it. Don't get me wrong, the work on attitude, what you describe, allowed me to become a much better and capable person, but i think what you describe will work magnitudes better (atleast in my case) when the underlying physiological issue is fixed.

I am glad you found something that helped. There is no right or wrong in this. I dont want to persuade anyone, i just want to go away from this tunnel vision that all is just mental or that it is all just about attitude. If a person, for example, has a sever endotoxin issue due to one of many potential causes, feeding chronically poision into the bloodstream and affecting thyroid and the brain itself, telling this person that it will fix itself with a positive mind alone can be fatal.

This whole thing is extremely complex and i personally think that both, attitude and physiological health is deeply interconnected. I found that some people were fine mentaly/attitude wise but have gotten very ill and with it the attitude/mind has changed after suffering over years and years. What you describe would be the other way around, which ofcourse is/can be also true.
It also is harder and harder to keep the attitude or mindset up when the physiological health is detoriating progressevily to unacceptable levels. Vicious cycle ...



Realy? Mhhhh ... i wouldn't have interpreted minimising stress with "avoiding everything". But i guess one can become to careful/scared of stress in that sense? Good point.

What you and amazoniac describe above is actually minimising stress by changing the internal response to a stimulus which is hard mental work. Changing the subconcious physiological response from the body by relearning/reteaching yourself with specific benefital thoughts trough creating new habits in thinking and breath work/parasympathetic trigger work.

I actually wrote quit some text in this regard somewhere else:

Thanks, to be clear I think both attitude/stimulation and sufficient physiological resources are both required factors for health. I think just providing enough resources wont automatically fix your problems unless you properly stimulate your body and mind to use those resources correctly. Proper attitude (ie, challenge rather than avoidance) is required to seek out the proper stimulation to induce recovery to health. But of course, even with proper stimulation you cannot recover unless you provide adequate resources in terms of food and rest, balance always required.