Dear Cia Column

Dear A4,

Well yeah, that's a stretch, but okay.  XD

Longest ever I've stayed awake was about 2 two days (2 nights without sleep), back when I was a stupid freshman college student.  I would have stayed up even more, in fact, had it not been for the very obvious deterioration of health I felt by the third day, which scared me so much I practically said "screw it" and went to bed.  I would rather have done poorly on the final than die.  

Turned out I didn't do all that badly, certainly better than the Finals I worked with under duress... guess sleep is important after all.  


--Cia

Dear Rad,

Wholly smokes, how did that even happen?  D:

Well it's the first time I'm seeing it, so I'm going to guess it's some font setting in your browser or computer.  >.<


--Cia

Dear Ice,

Hahaha, if I knew the answer to that, I think I'd be a much happier person. XD

I would guess meditation and dream journals, but I typically don't bother.  You can check with the experts...

http://www.wikihow.com/Lucid-Dream


--Cia

Ok thanks.

Dear Cia,

How do you usually handle stressful, real-life situations that require an immediate reaction? I always do something stupid and make everything worse...

Hi Avocado.  

Ooh!  What a responsible question.  <3

While historically I've not been the best person to ask this question given I used to get quite depressive or freakish during stressful situations like that, I have in fact improved... A LOT... in how I handle stress.  Often times I feel I'm the only person in my workplace that isn't suffering from chronic stress, and while nowadays that gets interpreted as being "lazy", I simply prefer to think of it as being simply more "human" -- we're not designed to have our fight-n-flight response activated all the time, it's unnatural, unnecessary and dangerous.  

But anyway, you want practical solutions on how to get there, and I can certainly help a little. ^^

STEP 1:  "ROEGASC and IYIOF"
The two best acronyms I never grow tired of repeating.  If you don't know what the acronyms mean, shame on you. XD
But if you really REALLY can't remember them, foine... look up this answer on the previous page and find a reference to one of your questions...

https://bigsister.forumotion.com/t419p375-dear-cia-column#8615

But yes, while it's not going to help you with immediate response, how you handle stress will improve considerably if your body and mind are sound.  After all, haven't you ever noticed that people who are sick, nutrient deficient or hungry also tend to be very irritable and cranky?  

Biochemistry matters, and in fact stress is simply a biochemical reaction... wiki "cortisol".  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortisol

Of interesting note from the article is that extended periods of stress (aka, cortisol release) do, predictively, damage memory retention and learning, which might explain why so many people nowadays have problems concentrating and have such short memory spans.  Perhaps schools trying to teach through abnormal stress are being counterproductive.  D:

But I sort of digress... ^^;


STEP 2:  "I do"
No, I'm not getting married. XD
What I mean is if something requires an immediate reaction, I usually... take action.  I don't sit around and lament or bemoan it or procrastinate it till later... at least not anymore.  Stress becomes diminished if I take action immediately and see my problem get chipped away into something that's nowhere-near as threatening as it once was.  Be proactive, not reactive.  


STEP 3:  "Share with others"
Especially considering tha tmost of my RL stressful moments are at work with projects I share with other people, I very rarely go it alone in trying to solve them (unless I really am alone, in which case so be it).  I'll drag along a coworker, we sit down, we try to solve the problem together, and all through that we'll swap whining, complaining, stories, funny jokes, lunch, and ulltimately high fives and feelings of triumph.  Two minds are better than one, after all, and this is ESPECIALLY true of stress management.  

STEP 4:  "Giggle at the Stressy"
Humor is a very POWERFUL ally in the war against stress, and it's certainly what probably defines me at the workplace.  I get things done and I know how to be tough, but I also try to be funny and irreverent doing so (again, not unlike how you may see me here).  Granted you can't always joke your problems away (and heaven knows there are some cases, such as bereavement, where it wouldn't be appropriate to laugh, but in which case you'd instead have the comfort of tears), but that's certainly not the point.  The point is to avoid making the stress the biggest most important thing in your life ever, and to reduce it down to the small transient problem that it SHOULD be... and one great way to do it is to make fun of it, and even better, get you and your friends ot laugh at it together.  It certainly would pair wonderfully with steps 2 and 3.  

In any case, I think it's only appropriate to insert this now...




STEP 5:  "Limit Break!"
And finally, be honest with yourself, and don't try to push yourself to do unnatural things all the time until you find yourself without a platform to stand on and no way to get back.  This is why it's particularly stressful for "yes-men" and "doorstops" who agree to everything that's asked of them often to the point of abuse, until they end up working till 2am in the office as the cornered, helpless, anti-social, pathetic personal scapegoats of their bosses, underappreciated and stressed to the point of despair.  

Sometimes you have to learn to say "no".  Sometimes you have to choose sleep or food over some transient deadline.  Sometimes you have to make your voice heard and negotiate a compromise between expectation and reality.  I say there is no weakness in being honest -- and if you do ultimately decide to go above and beyond your own potential, at least it will be your choice and your own responsibility to bear having understood the consequences to your health and well-being.  


Anyway, that should about cover the basics. ^^


--Cia

Dear Cia,

Why do you think we have dreams and what do you think they mean?

Dear Cia,

Can you explain to me the effects of not getting enough sleep? (And maybe how to solve sleep problems... ugh.)

Dear Ice,

I do have my own metaphysical beliefs about dreams; but, lack of proof aside, I don't like to share these with just about anyone.  So for now, I'll just say they're a kind of exercise for your unconscious mind as it is liberated from the constraints of your conscious mind, almost like it's time to shine.  

As for meanings... well I'm certainly no Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung, so I'm not going to assume all dreams can be interpreted uniformly.  They're just too complex for that, although I can say that some nutritional impairments, such as a lousy gut or too much blood sugar (especially when eating sweets at a late hour) can lead to nightmares, given how much influence your gut (the so-called "2nd brain") has on your real one.  The reverse is true too... when your gut is happy, you will have more vivid and pleasant dreams (as well as deeper sleep).  



--Cia

Dear Avocado,

Oh my, now that's a very important question, and one that everyone should be mindful of given how much we like to abuse of our own bodies.  ^^

Well, listing out the effects of chronic sleep deprivation is easy and scary, I'll try to list them from less bad to horrible....

- Lack of Focus
- Poor Memory
- Forgetfulness
- Impaired Cognition (aka, stupidity)
- Impaired sexual function (for older people, of course)
- Skin Problems
- Moodswings
- Impaired Judgement (difficulty telling right from wrong)
- Impaired Immune System (easier to get sick)
- Weight Gain 
- High Blood Pressure
- Depression
- Hallucinations
- Paranoia
- Suicidal Thoughts
- Irregular HeartBeat
- Heart Disease
- Heart Attack
- Stroke
- Heart Failure (aka, Death)

So yeah, sleep deprivation is no joke... GET SOME SLEEP. And if a work or school institution poos on the concept of sleep, then they're idiots.  

Anyway, as to how to solve sleeping problems... hmm, well I'd need to know more details to recommend something to your specific circumstance.  

But first and foremost, you have to actually sleep; remember, 8-9 hours is ideal, but 6-7 hours is the base minimum to keep you functioning.  Anything below that will incur a sleeping debt and a gradual reduction of function.  

Next you have to improve your diet, as the wrong food WILL cause you to have insomnia, disturbed sleep, or even hypersomnia (causing you to sleep excessively or have problems waking up, and not really getting much out of it).  I used to have tons of problems getting up in the morning, enough to even miss whole tests and everything -- after I dropped the wheat and grains, though, that problem has seemingly disappeared, and now I can actually wake up with my alarm clock!  It's a wonderful feeling since I used to think that problem was my fault, and that I was simply dumb and lazy.

Now I don't have to rehash my usual advice, just look up the magic acronyms....

"ROEGASC and IYIOF"

Yay. ^^



--Cia

Bah, that explains my memory problem.

Dear Cia,

Why do you think that most middle and high schoolers prefer to finish their homework at home instead of at school during given worktime or "study hall"? (My classmates just talk during these times and take their work home... and then complain about having homework and don't do it anyway.)

Dear Avocado,

hehe, well I can't answer two questions in one day, it's against the rules.  XD

But this subject hits close to home, so I'll make an exception and simply answer it passionately.

Off the bat, I don't recall having that kind of study period where I went to school, so it doesn't sound that normal to me.  Either way, I always found homework to be redundant and counterproductive, precisely because it can disrupt sleeping habits, because it wastes children's talents in largely unproductive and unparticipatory work, and it instills a general disdain for learning.  What the school may consider "learning" is simply rote memorization, which MAY be effective to some minority of students but certainly not all.

It's easy to lump these kids to the category of lazy, annoying brats -- and I'm not saying they aren't or at least have become it -- but I don't want to deny the possibility that their instinct is inherently telling them that something is very wrong.  But absent the means to identify the problem or to treat it like the harmful thing that it is, and absent some means to escape from their unnatural predicament, they have no real choice but to complain or rebel about this ephemeral "something wrong", be it by not doing homework, dressing up goth-style, giving their parents a hard time, or joining a gang.  

Properly raised and nurtured with real education and real responsibilities (and... *cough cough* real food *cough*), no kid would have to be FORCED to learn something,... they'll BEG to learn and do it on their own!

So yeah, homework can go suck on a toad for all I care. >v>


--Cia

Dear Cia,

What is the best advice to surviving High School and life in general?

Dear Cia,

What are the effects of getting too much sleep?

Dear Ice, 

Another very subjective question, you really don't like specifics.  

Well as I've said a few times before, the best approach to life in general (and by extension, the prison system known as "school") is to a) recognize that there IS a problem, and b) set out to fix things one problem at a time.  

For a more detailed explanation, see my reply to Ishida-kun a few months ago...

https://bigsister.forumotion.com/t419p15-dear-cia-column#6708


--Cia

Dear Avocado,

Well, too much sleep in and of itself is not a problem... because normally, the human body is not physically able to oversleep.  It will go through the motions and wake up naturally within 7-9 hours after it sleeps, especially if it has a reliable trigger (ie, sunlight).  So I would say that oversleeping (or hypersomnia) is similar to obesity or skin disease -- it is not a disease in and itself, but rather a symptom of a  bigger underlying problem.

For instance, it's not uncommon to sleep 10-13 hours while recovering from the flu... this doesn't mean oversleeping is making you sick or you're lazy, but simply that your body needed sufficient rest to combat the virus.  Same with hypersomnia, although depending on how often it occurs it can certainly indicate a bigger and often invisible problem such as GI inflammation or sleep apnea that is disrupting your standard sleep cycles, and so (like with obesity) your body is trying to compensate by extending your sleeping time to compensate.  Or in other words, if your body can't get quality sleep, it tries to switch to "quantity" sleep instead.  

As for what are the side-effects of oversleeping...

Online articles claim the effects are similar to those of sleep deficiency...

- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Headaches
- Back Pain
- Depression
- Heart Disease
- Heart Failure
- etc

But I call partial bull on this because we've seen these issues before with sleep deficiency, and sleep deficiency -- either by not getting your ideal sleep time, or getting poor-quality sleep -- can cause a 9-hour sleep to be downgraded to something like a 4-hour experience, and so it tries to squeeze out 12 hours to try to at least get to a 6-hour experience.  Of course by then we'd most likely get kicked out of bed to go to school/work, and so from a qualitative standpoint you'd still be operating on a kind of sleep deficiency. Rinse and repeat by weeks, months and years, and you're going to be far more susceptible to the same problems as sleep deficiency.

Or are you're going to miss work projects, tests, morning get-togethers and so forth, as I used to do. [hehe] XD

So bottom line is:  too much sleep is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.  Fix the cause, and that symptom WILL go away eventually, even if it takes a few weeks for your body to normalize itself (in my case, it was roughly 2.5 weeks).  


--Cia

Dear Cia,

How superstitious are you? Do you believe in ghosts/spirits/etc.? And do you believe that we're all fated to do something, and we can't change it? Or do you think life just happens? >w<

Personally, I do believe luck exists, but things like walking under ladders or black cats don't change it. In fact, seeing black cats have either given me nothing, or I might bend over and see a penny or a nickel on the ground. ^-^

For ghosts/spirits, sure they exist! Are they the poltergeists that wreck up people's houses? Nah, that's just Hollywood magic. I think they're just peaceful little spirits (or they just literally can't do anything, watching like a spectator-sport, one of the two).

And as for fate: Personally, I think life just happens, but there's no way to control it. Maybe my belief in forwards/sideways-only time-travel causes that, but that's a topic for another question. >w<

Dear Cia,

If I was still a Novice, there is a rule where I can not advertise, but, if I advertised Little Brother, would it still count as a broken rule?

Dear Flamm,

Mmm, well I wouldn't call myself superstitious per se, but I have a very strong belief in a spirit world.  Not quite another dimension per se, simply another energy spectrum that courses through us, and connects us with each other, other animals, plants, fungi, the Earth and so forth.  Rather than being some mystical "other" that is only interacted with occasionally, this "spiritual"-ness constantly interacts with us in every second of every day, as normally as nerves setting off synaptic impulses or your thyroid secreting hormones.  Since our modern minds are best geared towards certain spectrums and energetic states (a trade off to having more control of our environment), we are not as tuned to this "spirit world" as, say, other animals that can detect a para-abnormality or sense an earthquake; but we do catch glimpses of it, especially in our dreams, feelings of clairvoyence, sighting of spiritual apparations, and of course the unconscious inheritence of memory and talents. 

The idea isn't new, of course; it's been conceived of in many ancient religions and traditions, as well as Carl Jung's "Collective Unconscious", Nikola Tesla's insights into the Schumann Resonances, and the concepts behind the "Electric Universe Theory", to name a few.  Death is really more of a recycling of energy, both in the physical and metaphysical sense, although like with any nutrient derived from decomposition of detritus, the free energy that belongs to a living being is not necessarily available for immediate transfer back into another living organism, or even a living entity at all!  It can be part of the Earth or the sun or any cosmic transferrence of energy that goes on beyond what we care to measure.  It can even be its own kind of life, simply different from our own biased notions of carbon life and in a different plain of existence; and communication with so-called "ghosts" could simply be communication with these beings we can't normally interact with.

As for fate... no, that's just wishful thinking from people who want to live lazily.  The only guaranteed fate for any living being is that it must die, because in order for life to exist, death has to exist, and vice versa.  When and how that happens is fluid, although how you interact with the so-called "spirit world" plays a much bigger role than I feel we give it credit for.  It's the reason I believe in karma, as a negative action will invite a negative reaction, or in this case attracts negative spirits (like sharks to bait).  It's also why I feel that happier and healthier people who have many friends and give back to their community tend to live more, as they amass a protective, symbiotic barrier of positive "spirits".  This is what I would generally consider "luck".  

Well I could say more, but this is all metaphysical stuff anyway, so we could make up whatever makes us feel spiritual and happy, and that's kind of the point of making up these stories.  We all feel (or should feel) like we belong to something grander... and absent the technology to see it for ourselves, we interpret it with stories or theories to interpret that feeling into something we can share or follow.  In that sense, creativity is almost a spiritual necessity.  


--Cia

Dear Brave,

I think you're mistaken, we have no "rules" on Big Sister. We have Rights and Responsibilities that put the onus on YOU to follow them, and as far as I can tell there is nothing that specifically says you can't advertise.  I know there is admonishment against it and it can be considered annoying, in which case a player or mod will ask you to refrain from doing it -- but it's definitely not a bannable offense to mention other servers (that would be idiotic, IMHO).  If other players during the Skycraper era DID get banned for mentioning other servers, it was because they were doing many OTHER stupid and damaging things WHILE they were also poaching players for their own nefarious purposes.  

Also, all of you continue to have the misinterpretation that I run Little Brother and the creeds apply to it.  The truth is that Little Brother is YOUR server... the People's server -- and it's up to you guys to come up with its own rules and such.  But since none of you like democracy apparently, Little Brother is generally rather lawless -- and it relies on the best judgement of its moderators (Invisi, Flamm, and now Tex ^^ ) to make a judgement call on whether advertisement should be allowed or not.  I can't rely be a part of that, as I come to LB as a player, not a mod.  


--Cia

Dear Cia,

How and why did Groundhog's day originate?

Dear Ice,

I wouldn't know for sure, I wasn't there.  
But according to popular belief, the holiday actually originated in Europe from a popular seasonal custom of weather prognostication, although different hibernating animals were used such as bears or hedgehogs.  Like most ancient European holidays, it eventually merged with the religious holiday of "Candlemas", and so the act of observing a hibernator's reaction to its shadow simply became part of that custom.


Groundhog's Day itself began in the United States during the 19th century, during a Candlemas celebration by Pennsylvania Germans where a groundhog was recorded in the literature of the time as being used.  Perhaps because of the cuteness of the concept and the importance to farming and agriculture, the groundhog was more popularly associated with that date by Americans, and eventually overtook it as a wholly secular "Groundhog's Day" pseudo-holiday.  


Eventually the practice gained popularity in other parts of the world as well... http://sputniknews.com/art_living/20150202/1017660774.html
...so in a strange way, we've kind of come full-circle.  ^^;


--Cia

Ok, thanks . I wonder what happened to the ones who poked the sleeping bear. XD

Dear Cia,

How can daily meditation help the average person?