Public Comment

It is common for working adults to decompress and desensitize by consuming alcohol on weekends or when they get off work. I drank beer for a short while when I was in my twenties. At best, it numbed me out so badly that I yearned for the hour when I would return to normal, as I know it to be. I take psych meds and mixing alcohol with them utterly shuts everything down, and worse.

Alcohol doesn't mix with antipsychotics. But if taken in combination with many other psych meds (It is hard to be sure of which ones), you can die from it. Many celebrities and countless others have died because of this. You don't mix alcohol with medication. Don't try it. And since you'd better not stop medication, you should stay entirely away from alcohol.

But the abovementioned is not the main thrust of this week's column...

People need to relax. Even people with mental illness must relax. I recall going swimming with a friend and getting a back massage. This type of experience is a thousand times better than drinking a beer or smoking a joint. Physical contact, play, rest, are things human beings must have. If we don't get that, we will die an early, miserable death. 

When people socialize, it can bring joy and it can relieve the mundanity of too much drudge work or too much doing nothing. Being too much alone is unhealthy. And that said, I am one of the worst examples of following that lesson. My writing is a solitary, albeit enjoyable activity. When something is published, it is shared with others, but I usually can only get a concept of that via my imagination. 

The most recent family gathering of the Bragen's was great for me. It was Hannukah of 2022. I got to see family members and some friends of the family. The Thanksgiving gathering was fun, a lot of great food and some joking around with my younger brother. And I caught sight again of my niece's young son. 

Desensitizing can happen in the course of the normal. In this case, hard times are bringing desensitization, and not "good" times. I've shed some of my shell of fear, and I'm diving into the unfamiliar. I've been getting in some good interactions with people. It isn't the same deal as "partying", but that was never my thing. There are a lot of ways that a person can desensitize. 

What is desensitizing? It is where you are not so preoccupied with a tiny sphere of existence. It is where your normal bounds are expanded, and where you are not so afraid of everything and everyone. It can be where you are pleasantly numb. But it doesn't require drugs and/or alcohol. Fun kills fear. And alcohol kills brain cells. 

Second lesson: "De-emphasizing": This can comprise a mental exercise in which you attenuate the influence of a category of internal or external perception. If you have constant anxiety and you de-emphasize it, it has less power over you, and you might be able to get it to go away completely. De-emphasizing is less powerful and more contrived than decompressing. But it has its uses. De-emphasis, to me is often an exercise. On the other hand, desensitizing and/or decompressing are usually play activities. 

If you need to set aside a category of thoughts or feelings to do something else, de-emphasizing might be just the tool to use. Again, no drugs or alcohol needed. Deemphasizing can also be used to ignore something that's bothering you, such as a neighbor's dog's barking or loud music. You may sometimes be able to use the method to reduce physical pain. 

I don't have space here to go into the "de-emphasis" technique. Yet if you experiment with autosuggestion and use percentages to tell yourself a stimulus is less and less important, that's the general way I approach it. 

The above are some ideas to which I've given a lot of thought. But sometimes I must remind myself to stop all the thinking and just do something unintellectual. Watching professional basketball has come into my life in the past year, because my wife and the next-door neighbor were watching it, so I watched it too. The players deserve every penny of the hundreds of millions they get.