Shank's Journal

Journals
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Shashank Hi .
i think i have the same condition as you .
would you please provide any updates or new information regarding this condition .
thank you

Hi @leila … I’m replying here as it was flooding @jamesjjoo journal

So my condition is that over the past decade, my number of loo visits in a day have gone up bit by bit…but without diarrhoea. After doing tests, at least no serious issue was found so that was a relief…so the docs suspected IBS.

One of the doc was putting me into a chemical called Otilonium Bromide for 3 months but after a few days of trying I felt I was getting constipated and so out of concern that I’ll have a new lifelong problem, I stopped that…because getting constipated n blocked is much worse than multiple visits to loo hehe

Now I’ve joined a 4 month gut healing program which basically gives food suggestions that are low in inflammation and also to restrict certain foods that can cause more inflammation (which is mainly milk and wheat and few legumes)…Apart from that there are few supplements which supposedly lower inflammation(Omega 3 capsules from fish oil and Flaxseed oil capsules) and a few probiotic supplements along with yoghurt ocassionally

Overall there is a bit of an improvement and those dietary changes make me feel a bit better but nothing remarkable yet after 2 months of the program…I"m suspecting it is more of a lifestyle and anxiety issue thats leading to these problems…but for now I"m going to complete the 4 month gut heal program and see if something improves the situation permanently

If you can share, what kind of issues do you have ? Have you done any tests so far ?

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Thanks for sharing all the details Leila…Yes, I agree with what you and Geoffrey are essentially saying - that one should eat what suits one’s body…I’ve learnt this the hard way myself !

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Hi @Vineeto … Your posts have been really inspiring and btw welcome here !..I really appreciate your participation here and that you have highlighted the importance of appreciation here because in my original days with Actualism I was much more appreciative and had connected to that idea very well but somewhere lost track of its importance

I’ve been enjoying all the posts from everyone here and they are really encouraging… currently in a bit of a lurker mode as I tackle a few health issues in particular…Its an interesting thing that when my gut issues aren’t present, then mostly I am feeling good by default regardless of what is going on…and not just feeling neutral/ok.

Yesterday night after reading @Ian’s recent post about the magical world, I could connect more towards sensuousness aspect especially since its monsoon time here and the water droplets all around create a more clear and sparkly atmosphere !

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I hear you about your problems with the gut microbiome and its importance in our overall health and well being. I have found that fermented foods are good for the gut. I am using sauerkraut but that may not work for you because it has a laxative effect so I can’t use too much. There are other fermented foods that are good. Also, I have read that plenty of the right kind of fiber is good for the microbes. Especially prebiotic and probiotic fiber. Also, you said you are using wheat and I have read that is bad for the gut. Mainly fiber and fermented foods are what’s good. The fiber feeds the microbes.
You also said that your lifestyle could be causing it. What is it about your lifestyle that you think is causing it? You can answer this privately if you wish. I made it public because I thought there might be others that could help. I’m just throwing out what has helped me with the gut. You can use or discard. I’ve seen a lot on You Tube about the extreme importance in the gut microbiome that we don’t know about and how it effects us. I hope you find improvement with your problems.

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Hi James…Thanks for your pointers…So my regular diet already has plenty of fibre and on top of that I’ve been trying few probiotics + prebiotics supplements but there isn’t any significant improvement in the symptoms, so I’m guessing it might be more due to my lifestyle

When it comes to lifestyle, I mean it could be physical or mental/ emotional issues that may have happened due to the way I lived life…physical issues for instance I realized I have a lifetime habit of subconsciously tucking in my tummy very often without realizing which in turn may have lead to what is know as Hypertonic pelvic floor muscles issue…I’m slowly learning to not keep tucking in the tummy but it takes conscious effort n reminders.

By emotional issues, it could be that I have some level of generalized anxiety disorder which in turn leads to gut issues due to the whole gut-brain axis.

Currently my plan is to eliminate all dietary causes as much as possible…and then perhaps visit a psychiatrist and get some sort of a minimum dose of SSRI to see if that improves the situation

The thing about my gut situation is that I don’t experience any major physical symptoms like severe pain or diarrhoea etc…but it dips my mood and makes me more prone to irritation and thereby not able to consistently feel good…Comparatively speaking, I have seen that physical pains like back or shoulder pains are much easier to bear !

Hi @Vineeto If you can share a bit…what sort of painkillers did Richard have to take for his back situation and was it something he had to take daily ?

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Hi Shashank,

Thank you for your welcome.

@Shashank: […] By emotional issues, it could be that I have some level of generalized anxiety disorder which in turn leads to gut issues due to the whole gut-brain axis. Currently my plan is to eliminate all dietary causes as much as possible…and then perhaps visit a psychiatrist and get some sort of a minimum dose of SSRI to see if that improves the situation.
The thing about my gut situation is that I don’t experience any major physical symptoms like severe pain or diarrhoea etc…but it dips my mood and makes me more prone to irritation and thereby not able to consistently feel good… [link]

Knowing that you “have some level of generalized anxiety disorder, which in turn leads to gut issues”, then why are you contemplating all sorts of plans to deal with the symptoms, your gut issues, rather than addressing the cause, your “generalized anxiety disorder”, which as you say yourself, lies at the core of all the resulting physical problems? Doing so at an actualist mailing list, which offers the very solution to a life without anxiety, does not make sense.

Only one month ago you reported that –

Shashank: It’s an interesting thing that when my gut issues aren’t present, then mostly I am feeling good by default regardless of what is going on…and not just feeling neutral/ok. [link]

So you do know how to feel good and appreciate being alive, yet the moment your gut gives you trouble you revert back to feeling bad. Have you thought about (when you feel good) to dispassionately contemplate this underlying source of your gut problems, i.e. the “generalized anxiety”, in order to find out if it is worthwhile maintaining it? If you find out that it is not worth maintaining, what is the real reason why you still hold onto it? Is it like Linus’ security blanket [link] which now has become a painful burden, or is there some other really serious and convincing reason to feed this anxiety, so much so that whenever it occurs you feel bad – instead of perhaps deciding that enough is enough?

To explain – anxiety has most likely been a survival pattern that was at some time necessary when you were very young, but now that you are old enough to be able to think and fend for yourself it is no longer useful, in fact it has become a painful and habitual obstacle to enjoying and appreciating being alive. This aspect of your identity can safely and sensibly be abandoned – all you need to do it to see it, with the intent to abandon it, and become aware whenever it pops up wanting to reinsert itself into your life.

One possible beneficial result of this course of action is that you might be able to avoid taking some “minimum dose of SSRI” with serious side-effects[link] and also relieve your poor gut from unhealthy chemicals (like adrenaline and cortisol) produced by a constant feeling of anxiety.

You may remember what I wrote to James on July 14 –

You can also acknowledge and realize the fact that pain is part of being alive, especially when getting older. You take care with what is medically possible, but even more importantly, you stop objecting to having pain simply because it is useless and therefore silly to do so. You will also be surprised how much the feeling of pain is reduced when you no longer object to it. Miguel only recently confirmed this to you (link). [emphasis added].

As a feeling being ‘Vineeto’ has experienced this time and time again, and nowadays any pain that occurs is simply something going on in the background which does not interfere with thoroughly enjoying and appreciating being here. [link]

It is indeed possible to enjoy and appreciate being here even when pain is happening –

[Richard]: In other words, an apperceptive awareness of an actual happiness/ felicity is not dependent upon experiencing sensate (bodily) pleasure; an apperceptive awareness of an actual happiness/ felicity occurs all the while sensate (bodily) pain is happening as well. [link]

[Richard]: And it is such good fun! Then, everything you do in your daily life, moment to moment, is taking advantage of multiple opportunities. Every moment again is an occasion to improve your lot … when you are interacting with someone, either face to face or on the telephone … or a back-ache: ‘Oh god, how terrible!’ … another opportunity. It is bad enough to feel pain, why make it worse by adding an emotional suffering like ‘I feel terrible’? To feel terrible, emotionally, on top of the physical pain is simply silly when it is possible to disentangle oneself, emotionally, and still feel good about being alive, about being here. This is being sensible, is it not? To feel good, if not happy, all the time? [link]

Comparatively speaking, I have seen that physical pains like back or shoulder pains are much easier to bear !
Hi @Vineeto If you can share a bit…what sort of painkillers did Richard have to take for his back situation and was it something he had to take daily ?

Here Richard explained about his back-pain – it doesn’t sound like “much easier to bear! “ to me –

[Richard]: […] without going into too many details MRI scans showed what CT scans did not reveal (spondylolisthesis of L5, displaced forward at age 24, nowadays complicated by age-related bone stenosis pinching the right sciatic nerve … resulting in a ‘breathless’, debilitating pain all the way down to the small toe).
For instance, towards the tail-end of the DVD video-shoot taken on the river bank (in which I did not talk much) it became increasingly difficult to stay sitting there … indeed, I had to call an abrupt halt to the video-shoot, eventually. [link]

There is no benefit telling you what medication Richard took – you will have to discuss your personal situation with your own doctor.

Cheers Vineeto

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Thanks @Shashank, There is something else I wanted to mention. I found a lot of videos on You Tube about the microbiome from experts that were very informative. The gut could very well be causing your emotional issues.
As far as my back issue the mri showed that I have bone on bone arthritis in my spine. They are going to give me an injection next week directly into the location which should help. In the meantime thanks to @Vineeto the pain has become much more tolerable already and not a big problem.
Good luck with your problems my friend.

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Whenever faced with the question of whether some fact about the physical world might be causing an emotional issue, I just ask myself the hypothetical: “If a person were actually free, and that happened to them, would they have emotional issues?”

As the answer is always obviously “no”, then it cannot be that the gut is the root cause of the emotional issues, which would mean that the only way to fix the emotional issue is to fix the gut.

Of course, one’s reaction to and relation to the fact of the situation with the gut may well be an emotional issue, but that is a very different thing entirely – and one that you can fully resolve without having to change a fact about the physical world, which may or may not even be possible.

This does not mean one should not take sensible steps to resolve any actual issues such as gut issues… but one can do it while feeling good in the meantime. Why wait?

Cheers,
Claudiu

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Can gut health affect mental health?
Search Labs | AI Overview

Learn more…Opens in new tab

Yes, gut health can affect mental health. The gut and brain are connected through the brain-gut axis (BGA), which allows the gut to send signals to the brain directly or indirectly. These signals can include hormones, neurotransmitters, and immune system factors that may trigger mood changes.

[image]

Johns Hopkins Medicine

The Brain-Gut Connection - Johns Hopkins Medicine

For decades, researchers and doctors thought that anxiety and depression contributed to th…

[image]

ZOE

How Are Gut Health and Mental Health Connected?

Apr 17, 2024

[image]

National Institutes of Health (NIH) (.gov)

The Role of Diet on the Gut Microbiome, Mood and Happiness

The gut microbiome may be both helpful and harmful, and not only is it affected by diet, i…

[image]

Queensland Health

The links between your gut microbiome and mental health

Aug 26, 2022 — But they also influence your brain function. Research reveals that this brain-

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Like you said, it could be different if one is af.

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If you go with this one then you might as well go on to say that eating sugary foods affects mental health, and so does insufficient sleep, and so does lack of sunlight or exercise and so on it goes until you settle for the belief that you ‘can’t change human nature’.

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You write it “could be different if one is af”. You are equivalently saying that it may not be different if one is af.

Are you really saying that for an actually free person, who has no moods by the very quality of their way of being conscious, issues with their gut “may trigger mood changes”?

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@Kub933 Good point, I do see what you are saying.

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@claudiu I stand corrected. I am changing the word ‘could’ to ‘would’ : " It ‘would’ be different if one is af.

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Good! So now you know for a fact that whatever may be happening in the gut, it does not necessarily, causally lead to any emotional turmoil, in the causal way that dropping a ball will lead to it falling to the ground due to gravity.

And you know it for a fact because you see that for an actually free person, it would not cause emotional turmoil.

Now that you know there is not an intrinsic, physical link between a gut sending a signal, and a brain receiving it and triggering emotional issues – you have to look for another answer as to what is causing the emotional issues.

In other words, it does not have to do with the physics and biology of the gut and the brain as it relates to humans. It has something to do with the particular human experiencing the gut issues.

I’ll just re-present what I wrote earlier, now that you see this salient fact:

In other words, the key is to look at how one reacts to and relates to the fact of the gut issues, as there will lie the root cause of the emotional issue – not in the physical fact of the state of the gut.

And the same, of course, applies to any physical ailment or issue.

Which is truly wonderful – we are not fated or doomed to be miserable in this marvelously grand and complex universe of ours!

Cheers,
Claudiu

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Thanks @Vineeto @jamesjjoo @claudiu @Kub933 for your replies…I’m feeling additionally inspired now to look deeper into this issue while keeping all the replies in mind

@Vineeto About Richard’s pain medication, I wasn’t planning to take it myself but that was just a curiosity to know his situation…But then now I realise that there is a bit of a danger inherent in revealing those Richard’s pain meds because who knows at some point in time some enthusiastic feeling being may mistakenly take it to be a sort of a “Richard pill” to actual freedom and perhaps even overdose on it :stuck_out_tongue:

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Hey y’all, I might have some anecdotal information on this topic. For my entire life, I was anti-psychiatric medicine. After reading Richard’s writings I realized that I had beliefs in this area. I had made a judgement about SSRIs based on beliefs and factoids. It was this quote in particular:

I am more happy to go direct to the chemist. Researchers have sorted them all out and synthesised what is in the herbs. Live herbs – or dried herbs – are imprecise. It depends upon the growing season, climatic conditions, environmental factors and so forth, for the strength of the herb. There are many incidences of people taking herbs and finding them too strong – or too weak – for their illness … with deleterious effects. Chemists are precise and one can be assured of the correct dosage. I have nothing against herbs per se, of course they have medicinal properties; it is just that the whole business is imprecise and it is easy to over-dose or under-dose.

Western medicine is not perfect, but it is not as bad as those people who object to it make it out to be. What I find interesting is that those rich people who live in countries like China or India who get some particular disease have this remarkable habit of flying to the US or the UK to get the best medicine, the best surgery that Western medicine can provide. They know that that is where they can find a cure. I find that quite indicative. They do not rely upon the traditional healing of their own country – that ‘healing’ that is so revered by those reactionary and disgruntled persons brought up in this land of plenty.
A Lot Of Nonsense Passes For Sagacity

As you can see, this isn’t an endorsement of psychiatric medicine. However, it did cause me to reflect on my attitudes regarding medicine and illuminated that I had beliefs in homeopathic remedies that were unexamined. These manifested as a preference for “natural” remedies and an avoidance of chemical remedies.

This lead me to be open enough to trying an SSRI. The reason being was because for my entire life, as far as I can remember (I think the age of 5), I would wake up with an incredibly intense sense of longing best described as depression. As the day went on, it would subside, but no matter how good I felt at the end of the day, I would wake up in the depths of sadness and longing. This sadness and longing intuitively seemed to have something to do with existential matters - but I could never navigate to the root of the issue. I have theories, and I think I have found out why - - but I mostly want to focus on my experience with SSRIs.

They worked. I stopped waking up incredibly sad. I wasn’t “numb” as some people describe. I still had a full range of emotions and I could still get incredibly sad with the right triggers. But I didn’t start my day in that space. And since I was doing the actualism method at the time, I was able to leverage this space to make progress more rapidly.

I didn’t go in blind, however. I researched my options thoroughly, and I tried to understand how SSRIs work. It helped me have an intelligent relationship with my doctor. I had to try a few different ones, and one in particular, did make me feel “numb.” Side effects of some were more pronounced than others. The side effects of some SSRIs toned down, while other SSRIs did not. But in the end, I found something that was effective.

My current opinion is this: if someone wanted to get the most out of an SSRI, it needs to be combined with CBT, or better yet, the actualism method. They will not, however, “cure” the human condition. It would be nice if we had a somatic answer, and maybe we will one day, but as of now that is wishful thinking.

I don’t recommend Benzodiazepines and I do not think they have much to offer other than a rapid sedative effect - so their usefulness is limited to panic attacks at best. It’s easy to become dependent on them and the withdrawal can be life threatening. They will absolutely make you feel “numb” and “foggy” and “out of it.”

I personally recommend SSRIs with long half-lifes. If you miss a dose you likely won’t notice, and they are much easier to taper off of in my experience. By example, a drug like effexor has a half-life of ~10hrs, so if you miss your morning dose, you may find yourself wanting to puke by the end of the day. Prozac has a half-life of 4-6 days so you could miss doses for weeks before withdrawal symptoms appear.

I currently take 20mg of Prozac and 300mg of Bupropion (a dopamine reuptake inhibitor). I’ve quit both of these cold turkey at one point - and symptoms were easily managed by taking a dose whenever I noticed withdrawal symptoms (vertigo, weakness, nausea). It was a cakewalk to manage compared to coming off Benzodiazepines in my 20s. (also cold-turkey)

I also believe that this combination has helped me learn more rapidly than I ever have. Though if you’re of a normal disposition, I cannot recommend using them for this purpose. And it’s entirely likely that being able to learn more quickly is due to the clarity that the actualism method affords. (It’s much easier to read, listen, observe, reflect…)

I’d be happy to elaborate more in a separate thread if there be interest. For now, I wanted to offer a perspective from personal experience.

Fundamentally, however, medication cannot resolve issues with the human condition. And I often wonder if I was somehow born deficient, or if my existential sadness was caused by my upbringing in the Christian faith as that will retard someone’s development in my opinion.

I just got back from a long flight, so apologies for any grammatical errors as I do not have the energy at the moment to re-read this.

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This phrase I’m finding good to instantly pull me back here because I find that often the mind just wants to fall into lower feeling places by default and get stuck in endless thought loops aka the inner dream world which lives in past n the future…It isn’t a present moment mindfulness thing though but a quick jab of sorts…

“And then I’m back here…where things are actually happening”

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Why should there be a point ? This is a good point :grinning:

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So a while back I had 2 bigger breakthroughs in my sense of national identity…As I’ve found out often that sometimes it takes more “hits” to remove some particular identity

Its very obvious that belonging and being patriotic to one’s country would mean to be forever at a psychological war with someone from another country(which in turn can and does lead to physical wars with horrible consequences) but this simple observation didn’t do it for me

The first dent came about quite interestingly because of the Russia-Ukraine war…It occurred to me that what a country actually needs to have a good chance at winning is the weapons and the tech and the intelligence and surveillance and such…Just an emotionally charged chest-thumping jingoism won’t work…or in other words, more than the tribalistic feelings of patriotism, its intelligence and tech that raises the odds of winning…so there it goes - I don’t need to have patriotic passions to defend the land if it really comes to that…intelligence and tech can do a much superior job at that.

The next one came about in a bit of a deep flash of insight a few weeks back - there is this body and the national identity…and without that sense of national identity, this body will be directly with the actual universe…its a fictitious blocking presence that is felt and it has to go if this body has to be with the universe directly !