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Earlier in the week I was making this video, and it's speaking about the need to differentiate between acute pain points in life vs. chronic pain points in life. Acute pain points are like sudden accidents, getting fired, breaking up with a partner, and et cetera. In these scenarios it helps to get some acute help, much like how you'd take a painkiller for sports injuries.

Chronic pain points in life are like, speaking in terms of sports, prolonged wear and tear for shoulders and elbows for baseball pitchers. When the ligaments are out, your career is out; very different from having a sprained elbow or a broken elbow, which you can recover from.

Now, in the video I go into depth about how to work on the chronic pain points (since acute pain points can be remedied with therapy sessions, a good conversation with loved ones, and/or good old fashioned rest). Because chronic life pain tends to reside in the unconscious, you need to really know how to feel into your unconscious. I wanted to dive into a bit of a graphic detail about that in this email. So hence, not safe for work including trigger warning for eating disorders.

When I was young, I didn't know how to throw up. It seemed like a ridiculous thing to learn, how to throw up with ease. And luckily for me I've never really learn how to throw up because I would either end up digesting OR the situation would be so bad, whatever's inside expelled itself.

But on that fateful day during my early teenage years, I had some kind of food poisoning that made me feel horrible. I could immediately tell that I needed to let out what I ate. But it was too early for the signs to really begin, but at the same time too severe for me to just ignore. I hurled and hurled over the toilet multiple times, tears in my eyes and my face full of whatever liquid wanted to come out from all holes, with no vomit coming out of me.

Eventually I was able to get something to come out, and this sounds ridiculous but at that moment I realized I needed to learn how to throw up. So I'm not going to go into THAT much detail about how I taught myself because it's too gross even for me to write out, but as you can imagine it was very effective and later in life I was able to relieve myself of upper GI pain very effortlessly. It helped me greatly when I was a big drinker during my college years, and also made my eating disorder very easy to progress.

Now, whatever judgment about vomiting or my drinking or eating disorder aside, knowing how to stimulate your nervous system in a very particular and specific way is a very useful skill. Is it completely necessary for everyone? No, not really, but it's a higher level of self-connection than what we usually connect to by default.

Onto the second NSFW topic at hand. Let's talk a little bit about masturbation. As I was scrolling my apps while doing the dishes, the page landed on an ad for something. I couldn't tell what the product was about, but I was doing the dishes so I just let the video play. It was about how a man cannot get hard or finish with their partner, but have no problem masturbating and ejaculating.

This video was SO interesting, because it was giving such a rational explanation on why selective ED came about. You see, when you self-stimulate you only look at pornographic content that you favor. When you use your hand to self-stimulate you're going to touch yourself in the way that you favor. And the more you do this and reinforce the pattern of deepening and deepening your sense of self-pleasure, obviously the more and more difficult it will be for other people, who you cannot control, to pleasure you.

The video gave the neuroscience behind it too. As you get more and more reps of targeted self-stimulus, your neurotransmitters are going to be more and more discerning about when it will send the arousal signal. When you're a pubescent teenager and don't know better, just looking at some shapes that vaguely resemble something sexual is enough to get the blood rushing to the penis. But with hundreds, thousands, if not possibly more reps of targeted self-stimulus, the neurotransmitters will just stay quiet even while having a completely nude body in front of you.

This was such a refreshingly unshaming view of masturbation. What a deep level of self-connection and love. Then the video took a complete 180 (in my opinion) and started pitching a pill that rewires the neurotransmitters. Well, that certainly is one way I guess.

Both these examples give you a perspective into how we have, by default, a certain level of self-connection. Call that the baseline.
Then depending on our life choices, we can develop a deeper connection to ourselves in specific domains.
The pleasure and satisfaction we get from these specific deeper connections are enough to keep us pursuing,
sometimes to the point of hurting ourselves. My ease of vomiting ended up with an affinity towards drinking and eating disorders.
Men who over-masturbate can do it to the point of bleeding and tissue death in the penis.

Then what unconsciously drives our lives happens under the layers of detectable self-connection.
But do we actually care to develop the baseline level of self-connection? To see where our life is going, without us realizing it?

When you wake up in the morning, and your brain is fresh for the day, can you recall what you did this morning?
This question may be super simple on the surface: "I reached for my phone". Then, do you recall what you did with your phone?
What did you watch? What did you read? Was it a conscious choice to do them, or were they more like a learned reflex?

What does it take to be able to take a conscious moment for yourself, owning the first five minutes of your time,
instead of letting your phone dictate what you think in the morning?