Why aren't I tired? I woke up early for class and everything. Grrrr.

[elsajeni]

Chicano Lit: exciting, with dorky overenthusiastic young professor. Also, both of the girls who are in EVERY SINGLE ENGLISH CLASS I TAKE are also in this class. Man, it's a good thing I like them.

Chinese: as expected. Had to introduce self and discuss what I did over the summer. Everyone but me did research to cure cancer; I went to Minnesota with my mom. I lose.

Linguistics: why do I always, always have a class with That One Guy? [Note: all college classes and many high school classes contain That One Guy. Think of the classmate of your worst nightmares. Now make him ten times more pretentious, and a pre-med, and inclined to make an enormous deal over how you're MISPRONOUNCING his NAME, which means DESTINY in SANSKRIT and is VERY IMPORTANT TO HIM. Now imagine he sits right next to you. Then stab yourself in the eye, because compared to listening to him blither about how brilliant he is for two hours, it's the better choice.] Later I'll try to recreate the delightful comic strip I drew about this during class on the computer, so I can post it here.

Biofeedback, which is not a class I'm taking but is something fairly major going on in my life at the moment: oddly enough, totally working. I'm not accustomed to shrinks actually, like, having an effect. I have been instructed not to obsessively check the door locks while driving my car, but instead to label the obsessive thought as such, remind myself that it is not real, take a deep breath, and think about something else. Bizarrely, this is totally working and I have not re-locked the doors even once since last Wednesday.

YMCA: awesome. They have a program where I get points for exercising, which eventually build up enough to where I get prizes. PRIZES, PEOPLE. HOLY CRAP. I LOVE THE YMCA EVEN IF THEY ARE A LITTLE WEIRD SOMETIMES. So far I have about 3600 points; the first prize is at 15000. I should be getting it around... ten weeks from now, I think? I'm not sure. I can't seem to make the number of points I earn per workout session work out properly in my head. I'm also having a fun social exercise time, because I've always worked out with my mom, but lately Luan and her husband Simon have started coming to our neighborhood Y as well, so now I meet my mom and Luan up there and we debate which weight machine looks most like a medieval torture device. Tomorrow I plan to ask her whether she thinks my plan for where I'd like to get a tattoo is a good idea, which I think she is qualified to answer on the grounds that she has A CRAPLOAD of tattoos. One of them is of BATMAN. It's pretty fucking awesome.

Oh, also. At the Y tonight, my mom and I were talking about the whole biofeedback thing, and how it really seems to be working out well, and how I have repeatedly mentioned being interested in going to teach English in China for a year after college, and she suggested that, if I keep up doing well in the biofeedback and eventually successfully start flying again, she might reward me with a trip to anywhere I want to go. Admittedly, rewarding me for costing a small fortune in therapy bills strikes me as somewhat counterintuitive, but on the other hand, I might get to go to China or somewhere else awesome at a time when I definitely would not be able to afford it on my own, which would be ten times more fucking awesome than Luan's tattoo of Batman.

Comments

[ravenrae.livejournal.com]

What exactly is biofeedback? I'm interested.

Here, have a much more detailed answer than you wanted.

[elsajeni.livejournal.com]

What I'm doing is biofeedback techniques combined with cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is generally a technique that works well for obsessive-compulsive disorder, phobias, and other anxiety- and panic-type disorders. The part that's really causing me to be able to do things like not re-lock the car door over and over is the cognitive-behavioral part; in that, you expose yourself to the situation that causes anxiety (maybe your therapist will have you touch something dirty, or ride up in an elevator, or sit in the same room with a snake, or whatever, depending on what it is that you're afraid of) and are prevented from reacting fearfully; that is, you force yourself to breathe deeply and try to relax some muscles, and that helps to relax your body, which helps to relax your mind. The reasoning behind this is that, in a lot of anxiety and panic disorders, what's actually happening is that you're reacting to the knowledge that you are about to be afraid, which feels physically horrible (heart racing, feeling like you can't catch your breath, dizzy, legs all wobbly, etc.), because you did this before and "something bad (the physical unpleasantness) happened to you", and if you can do the thing that makes you afraid but control the horrible physical symptoms of fear and anxiety, then the next time you have to do that thing, it'll be easier for you to stay calm because you'll be able to remember that, the last time you did this, it wasn't so bad. Obviously, this takes a lot of practice, and it has to be done slowly; in the case of a phobia of snakes, you might start out with looking at a picture of a snake just for a few seconds, then look at it for longer, until you're comfortable with the picture; then sit in the room with a snake in a cage far away for just a few seconds; then move the cage closer; then let the snake out of the cage; then touch the snake... you get the idea.

The idea of forcing yourself to relax is where the biofeedback techniques come in. Basically, biofeedback is a technique for teaching yourself how you can consciously exert control over things like your heart rate or the constriction of your blood vessels, which you can't control directly. You get hooked up to something that measures your heart rate, or the temperature of your fingertip (which changes based on the constriction of your blood vessels), or the sweatiness of your palms, or something like that, and then the biofeedback therapist, who's trained in this sort of thing, instructs you on things to do -- typically breathing deeply and focusing on making your stomach, not your chest, rise and fall as much as you can. When you do that, it has a physical effect on the other systems of your body, slowing down your heart rate, easing up the constriction of your blood vessels, and so forth, and you can see that visibly represented on the monitor that's hooked up to you. End result: you learn how things you can do consciously affect the things that happen unconsciously in your body, which makes it much, much easier for you to relax on purpose.

Re: Here, have a much more detailed answer than you wanted.

[ravenrae.livejournal.com]

Wow, that was a good explanation, thanks =) I think perhaps i might try it someday.