I Think All Humans Have All Psychiatric Diseases, in a Mild Form

I have never met anybody without OCD. The difference is that it’s a mild form of OCD. The one that almost goes by unnoticed.

Same with ADD: I have never met anybody who isn’t dreamy some parts of the day (you just don’t notice it when you do the dishes). Never.

The difference is the outliers. The people we diagnose right now are the extremes.

But everybody has every psychiatric trait, most in a mild form.

So what we perceive to be 0s and 1s are actually all on the same spectrum. It’s how you look at it.

Besides that, it strikes me that people don’t see the value in psychiatric traits. If I were to create an army, I would always take somebody with:

  • OCD (a simple way of ‘boxing’ reality via mechanics) – super useful

  • somebody with germophobia (fear of contamination), attention to details

  • somebody with ADHD, since they have the most energy and are creative

  • same with ADD. Distracted is a weird word. Distracted from what? Maybe forming new connections.

  • Autism. Nothing beats somebody who loves a certain hobby.

In fact, you could argue that a lot of important things in the world get done by people who are extreme outliers.

This piece is obviously not disrespecting people who actually “have” something. That’s not the point. The point is that everybody has (almost) all psychiatric diseases. I get that it becomes a definition game, that we only call OCD OCD when it becomes a real problem for somebody. The thing is that if all other people have it too, that actually goes by unnoticed.

Life has a certain rhythm.

For me, my rhythm goes like this:

I read (I like physics and religion), I read, I think, I think, and after that I verbalize out loud to myself what my opinion is. I do the latter when I am washing dishes. I verbalize everything I have observed, all inspiration. It's a process that almost goes by unnoticed.

Sometimes no one is doing anything wrong.

When you watch the news, it seems as if 95% of everything that happens is unpleasant.

So if you watch the news all day and hardly ever go outside, you draw the “correct” conclusion that this is true. Because that is what you have seen.

But if you go outside often and never watch the news, you know that it isn’t true. Maybe 1% of all interactions are unpleasant. Or 10%. In any case, certainly not 95%.

Whose fault is that?

Not the people who make the news. They have no choice: you want to show people suffering and draw attention to it, so that maybe something will be done about it.

It’s also not really the fault of the viewer, who watches.

The confusion lies in what we think the news is. We think the news is a reflection of reality. But the news should have a disclaimer: “We show the worst things that are happening on Earth, and the important things. But the news is not a reflection of life. It is related to it, but also not at all.”

 

From here on I don’t fully understand it anymore; this is where it becomes too difficult. I think a brain is a relationship machine, not a command center. Or consciousness is that. One of the two.

Be careful not to build this relationship with your own thoughts.
The connection between our thoughts and reality is a bit like this. Your thoughts may show the unpleasant things first, because they are important. If you notice that the relationship we have with the real world is disturbed, then restore it. Be aware of it.

How to move from 3D to 4D

Your body is a 3D object. When going from 3D to 4D, you have to add a dimension.

There are multiple ways of doing that.

1#
My favorite one is adding a spatial dimension.

Can you point where all thoughts in your body are? Hint: not every thought is in the same place, and not all thoughts are in your head. You can find them, one by one.

2#
Relocate your feelings by moving them from one body part. This means that you alter the starting point of where things happen in your body to one spot.

For example, your stomach. When you start from your stomach, you feel with your stomach first. Or you feel with the inside of your knee.

3#
Another good one is to add time spent on thoughts:

How much time did you spend on which thoughts? And what does that say about you?

Let’s say you worry a lot—about school, study, work, or other people.

That means that you are a responsible person. That’s fine; it means certain things are important to you. There is nothing wrong with worrying.

I like to think about thinking. I always think about what I think about. And besides that, I think endlessly. I love it. When you think a lot, the quality of your thoughts improves over time. Things I used to think about don’t bother me anymore.

My thinking is usually blocked into three chunks of ‘big thoughts’ during the day, plus a lot of small ones. Those small ones are new connections or jokes I make with myself, in myself (I am funny). Lately I was very sad, so I had a lot of sad thoughts and was thinking about why I was sad.

4#
‘Toning’. This means that you take the generic tone of all your thoughts and feelings and go by feel. It’s like taking an average “I am feeling like this and this” and then going on with yourself. Here, thinking is less centric. But you have to be careful that you don’t miss big things in your body that go wrong.

5#

Moving bilateral (this one is only in your brain). You can read these words focusing on what the words and text mean. But you can also focus only on the shape of the letters, without meaning, or only on punctuation. By altering your focus, you move bilateral, meaning you centralize energy in one specific region of your brain.

If you believe for a while that you are a higher power, you start to see the world differently.

What you believe is the most important thing there is.

If you believe you are worthless because you grew up in the wrong environment, you will start to behave that way, and then you become it. You act like that because you believe that’s what you are.

While you could also have been—and become—many other things.

Belief doesn’t work for everything: you can act as if you are happy, but if you’re not, it stops there.

But if you believe you are of little worth, it’s as if you always carry a small, invisible prison with you—one you can’t get out of without facing it.

“Sometimes we forget how badass we are.”
— Goggins

“Life is a craft,” Mary says.

Is a thought as real as a plant?
Yes. A thought is exactly as physical as a plant. The difference is that a thought is faster. Treat them both as things that are in your room right now. It takes the fear out of the question.