Everything Is Exactly the Way It Has to Be

If it were even a little different, it wouldn't be right anymore.

Sometimes it's nice to look at reality through that lens and simply pause for a moment. Of course we can change things—we do it all the time—but not everything has to change. Sometimes it's good to stand still and realize that.

Everything—yes, everything—is perfect the way it is.

I'm happy that, for a moment, I don't have to change anything about myself.

I was just about to do this and that, and then I thought: what if it's already perfect the way it is?

Humanity

With many things related to psychiatry, or the medical side behind it, the humanity disappears. The humanity behind things. The emotion. The fact that we are all human beings and all have these kinds of emotions.

It almost becomes robotic. "Your serotonin. Your dopamine receptors. Autism." However it all works, and whatever it all is, the humanity quickly disappears. There is a human being behind it, with human emotions. It is not a label, not a disease, not a diagnosis. It is a human being (or an animal) who also has preferences or likes ice cream.

Don't get me wrong. I truly know that everyone means well and that everyone in psychiatry works incredibly hard. But when you lay someone down on a cold clinical bed, something quickly disappears. Something that also disappears when we only communicate through our phones. Or when we are only occupied with religion. The ordinary, human side of things.

In humanity there is also a certain childlike innocence. Curiosity. The idea that you're allowed to make mistakes and feel disappointed in yourself because of them. Or, when you're a bit older, even laugh about them. Be careful not to lose that. Sometimes it seems as if there are people who do everything perfectly. They don't exist. Once perfection becomes the goal, the humanity disappears.

It is important in psychiatry, and I know this from personal experience, that alongside clinical diagnoses, you appeal to the humanity in someone as quickly as possible. Because that is exactly what people have lost, or forgotten, themselves.

Why I Can't Stand ADD and ADHD Diagnoses

You can say to a child:

"I see that you can't focus for a long time."

Or you can say:

"I see that you can work unbelievably hard and fast when you're doing something you love."

It's exactly the same thing, just from a different perspective.

Children with ADD or ADHD can be unbelievable when they are in hyperfocus. So why not switch the focus to that?

My thoughts are going very fast one after another at the moment. When I notice that, I slow down for a while, until I can see them moving more slowly again.

How do you explain to someone that they should do it by feel, the way they used to when they were younger?

Reflections

Hello, since I was little I have been obsessed with consciousness and how the brain works from the inside out.

I am not talking about textbook knowledge, but about getting my body into as many states as possible and then seeing what would happen in my brain.

In my opinion, there is only theoretical information about the brain, or "brain scan" type of information, but not very many people want to analyze their own thoughts. In fact, what a lot of us do, and what I used to do as well, is numb everything that happens in the brain, for example through escaping, drinking, Buddhism, whatever. There are numerous ways to try to cheat your way out of thinking. The art is just to playfully look at how your own thoughts work, and then learn how you produce your own thoughts, etcetera. It's a lot of fun. You can discover bizarre things that are possible within this universe.

What is consciousness?

Consciousness is the dance you have with yourself in order to get to know yourself. This sounds vague, but it's essentially your body explaining to you how it works, until you realize you are partly the thing on the other side as well. You might think that everything there is to know about the body we already know. We don't. Nobody really knows how a brain works. I bet that most people can't tell which part of the brain they are using right now. Or which parts of their brain are their strong and weak parts. Or in which state their lungs are right now. This is a delicate art. When you become good at that art, you know why sometimes you have mental problems or why you are sick sometimes, which is very important information in day-to-day life.

A step back

I don't really care about convincing you. This is my hobby, and I don't really need to bother others with my hobby, so pas de problème. The thing is that I see a lot of very basic mistakes being made when it comes to understanding the brain. I really believe that people think you can't understand the brain from the inside out because we are the brain, which is, well, very superficial. A brain is a part of you. A smaller part of the bigger you. Saying that you are your brain is like saying that you are your little toe. Which is true and not true at the same time.

You are your whole body. Your whole body at once. This is very important, because if you see the brain as the central part of your body, it becomes too important. You lose contact with your body easily.

I made the mistake when I was younger that I got disconnected from my own body too much. That was because I grew up in an environment where my opinion and energy were not valued. So I learned to shush myself, generating tremendous stress in my body. Because every time you want to speak out, but you don't, this gives a lot of tension in your body. Over the years, this tendency can physically make you sick. It's like suppressing emotions: you get away with it for some time, until you don't. And then you collapse.

The problem is that this happens over a very long period of time. You teach yourself to suppress your own voice, you suppress it for 10–20 years, and boom, now you are in psychosis. This is because, in every second of your life, in every situation, you haven't spoken out. It's only when you start fixing that that you can fix yourself.

You can compare this with anorexia. If you teach yourself to deal with emotions a certain way, it takes years before you get into real trouble, but it also takes years to unlearn it. If every time you deal with emotions by restricting your food intake, this is a very hard thing to unlearn.

Why is unlearning things so hard?

Because we humans are extremely energy-efficient. We do millions of things simultaneously right now. You are reading, but also adjusting your posture. So when you want to unlearn "bad" behaviours, it takes hundreds of mistakes before you realize your mistakes and fix them.

I am by no means a doctor

I have a lot of experience with mental problems, though. I fought myself out of a psychosis. In my family there is a lot of ADHD on one side of the family, and autism on the other side. I got both diagnoses, including a generalized anxiety disorder diagnosis. Now I have a good job and I own two houses. This is not to brag, but to show you how you can alter your life in a few years of readjusting. I was in a psychiatric ward twice. I got picked up in a van. And here I am, drinking coffee and writing this. So at one point in my life I thought I was being chased by helicopters, and now I am enjoying a hot beverage.

We should fear our own shortcomings less

I hardly know anyone who doesn't have some form of psychiatric disease. I work in a decent office job right now, which is almost as weird as being in a mental institution (I am not joking). I have seen people go crazy because they had to sit at another desk that day (flex work). The difference a lot of the time between "having a psychiatric disorder or not" is self-reflection. If you have self-reflection, you see yourself having some weird tendencies. People without self-reflection (which I have seen in the highest corridors of life) don't think of themselves as psychiatric patients.

How to use self-reflection and consciousness in day-to-day life

I love to spend energy on these things. If I feel something is off in my brain, I study it for hours, write things down, keep diaries, etcetera. This is important. Especially as your self-reflection grows over time, when you get older, it's important to know what goes on in your body. If I notice that my memory is off, I write that down and start altering my diet (or drinking habits).

Also, I feel like some people mistake the self-reflection part for the part that thinks, so to speak. It's not that they biologically differ, but they do in practical terms. If you spend a part of your own energy on yourself, we call this self-reflection, and you can use this to analyze yourself and help others.

I deliberately kept this piece as raw and intact as possible. It's not polished. But it helps transfer the emotion from me to you.

I am extremely worried about kids

Kids that get ADHD medication, for example. If you have a lot of energy, and your energy is not self-reflective by nature, there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of ADHD kids smash their whole energy outward. A lot of ADHD kids use a lot of their internal energy to do creative things. When you give people ADHD medication, you turn off one of the most beautiful things in nature: pure energy and pure creativity. Not everybody is made to listen to somebody else for hours. I don't think I have ever listened to somebody for more than a few seconds.

I am a huge fan of religious traditions

Without the higher power. No disrespect to religious people, but I personally don't care about the higher power. I love religion as a very good life rhythm, though, and I think that would help a lot of people.

For example:

• You work hard for six days; you take one day off.
• You pause your day a few times a day.
• You take small moments of silence.

This helps tremendously in pacing your thoughts. And it brings the energy expenditure of your whole body temporarily to zero.

Appendix 1 – Tutorial: "I Don't Really Understand How to Feel"

If you're feeling bad, try, as it were, to sink into your body. Try to feel your whole body at once. It is very common to want to get away as much as possible from what is happening inside your body. But you should actually go into it. As if you let yourself fall into your knees.

I think this is the level that took me the longest to master. What I used to do whenever something unpleasant happened in my body was to "leave my body." I would go into my head a little. As if there was automatically a distance between me and my body.

Now, when I notice that happening, I switch everything off and go into my body. To wherever the tension is, for example. It is very strange to teach yourself the opposite. Especially if you have been through unpleasant things, because then you quickly want to leave your body again.

These are also exactly the kinds of things that a psychologist or doctor cannot see. They cannot see from the outside that someone has taught themselves to switch themselves off.

For me it goes like this:

Something unpleasant happens → I quickly push it away → tension in my body → wanting to get away from that.

I had to learn to reverse that whole mechanism, which took hundreds of repetitions. Now, when it happens, I do this instead: "Oh yeah, I'm doing it again. I need to go back into my body."

I also had a few unpleasant surgeries when I was young. Maybe that had something to do with it as well.

Notes – Not Sure Whether This Was During the Mistake Phase

How normal people go through life

Do something → doesn't feel quite right.

Why not? → Think about it.

If, from a young age, you have learned to switch off your emotions, you don't do this. You literally don't feel the sensation of, "This doesn't feel quite right." The result is that you keep crossing your own boundaries and eventually end up in a psychosis.

You keep your emotions stuck in your belly. You push them back down into your stomach. But they need to flow from your stomach to your hands and feet.

Being a free thinker and being free in practical terms means that you get so annoyed by some things you think that you turn your own brain inside out until you fully get how it works and understand the magic of it. This can be a brutal process. It's almost like physical labour. I got so mad about some thinking patterns that I almost squeezed out the thoughts literally. Until you figure out that it's a double-level game, you trying to get rid of them tells you everything about you. After that comes level three. And thousands of levels more, including diagonals.

It's a very sexy game. Sometimes I see people walking on the street who are playing the same consciousness game. Thinking about the same thing, but from a different perspective.

It has something very religious about it too, but without the higher power.

I had thoughts with repetitive behaviour in them. I got so mad that I increased the repetitiveness of them. Instead of every ten seconds, I made them repeat every five seconds. It's that street-kid mentality that you have to learn if you want to understand how a brain works.

We Create Time

Time is perspective.

Both me and somebody in Australia look at the same moment, but at a different time.

Somebody with a different physiological trait processes the same reality in the same amount of time, but at a different depth.

We slow down and accelerate ourselves.