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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • I hired the personal trainer too. I just kept thinking I was doing something wrong and I should just follow his schedule. So I did exactly what he said, and that did not work either. I even did worse on the stamina test after training with him for a while than on the test at the start. That is when I quit.

    Ihave tried bicycling and I had similar issues with that. But maybe I did not keep enough to my own pace. That was back when I did not understand how it worked and just tried a schedule to build up stamina. You are exactly right, it should not be about performance. Maybe I should try it again with my new mindset. Thanks!

    Swimming does work if I go slow! So, I am in the lane with the elderly and just go slowly back and forth. The physiotherapist did tell me I should not go into water that is too cold, because my stress might increase from that as well. So, I found somewhere to swim when the water is warm. I try to do it once a week.



  • Yes, my first psychologist really was terrible. She really made things worse. She just always made me feel like I just should try harder and like a failure. That was the opposite of what I needed.

    I was actually much too harsh on myself. I am trying tor learn to be more kind to myself and to take how I feel seriously. It is difficult if you are not used to it, but that helps me really well. My physiotherapist keeps telling me that I only have to do things I want. This sounds like a very basic thing, but it is quite new to me to ask myself “do I want this?” instead of just pushing myself because I think I should.

    I am glad exercise works fine you. I think it works for most people. However, I have never in my life felt good after exercise. So, I think that is the difference.

    If it helps for you, definitely start doing it again. Maybe you can be kind to yourself too and see how you can make your life easier in another way to have more room mentally to get yourself to start.





  • I had the same experience. I think exercise works for a lot of people, but not for everyone. The people who it does not work for het pressured into doing it anyway, which is harmful. In my case, my stress levels were consistently extreme and exercise would put it into an even higher zone where my body was unable to deal with it. All the pressuring me into exercising really harmed me. It took me years until a specialist explained this to me and all this time I felt like a failure and I tortured myself with exercise.


  • No, not at all. It made things worse. I really think it is very good that many people benefit from exercise. However, it can in some cases also harm your mental health. I think it is important for people to know this. The benefits of exercise are so well known, that the people who it is harmful for often are pressured into exercising anyway and made to feel like a failure if it does not benefit them. It took me a long time and a lot of pain to find this out. I want to tell my story in case someone is in the same boat as me.

    Years ago I was feeling so bad I could not get out of bed for a couple of months. The psychologist I was seeing kept pressuring me to exercise. So, I tried it and I hated it. I really had a lot of trouble even doing the smallest things, like making food for myself or go to the supermarket. It all seemed like an impossible task. Now I had to spend the little energy I had to regulate myself to go to the gym or to run.

    When I was exercising, it felt like genuine torture. I just hated every second. Afterwards, I would just feel extra tired and very sad about the pain Inhad been in and anxious about having to go again next time.

    I was too timid to really stand up for myself and I did not want to fail at yet another thing. I thought it was just my fault and I just was too lazy and should be harder on myself. So, I tried to keep going, even though I could not sleep the night before and I went there crying. When I said something about it, the psychologist kept pressuring me to do it like it was some magic fix for everything. I just needed to do it often enough.

    On my way to the gym, I started to wish more and more that I would be in an accident and get wounded so I did not have to go anymore. One time, on my way to the gym, I tripped and fell. I had a big bruise on my knee, but it was not bad enough to not have to exercise anymore. So, I sat on my knee on the bruise the whole night in the hope that it would get worse. It hurt, but it was not nearly as bad as exercising. When I told my psychologist she said that she could not help me if I self-harmed and I should go somewhere else. However, I was not self-harming to harm myself. I was actually protecting myself against something that was bad for me. I could not explain that at the time.

    Years later, I went to a psychosomatic physiotherapist. In the years in between, I got the advise to exercise for my mental health numerous times. Each time I tried it, I failed. No matter how much I tried, it keep feeling like torture, my mood got worse and physically I did not improve at all. I always kept thinking that it was my fault and just not trying hard enough.

    So, when I went to the new physiotherapist, I started out with telling him that I knew I should exercise and that I was stupid foe not doing so. He immediately stopped me and told me I should not exercise at all. He explained to me that when you exercise, your stress levels go up temporarily and then they go down and usually lower than they were before you started exercising. That is why most people benefit from stress reduction after exercise.

    However, in my case, my stress levels were extremely high, all the time. They were so high that if I started to exercise, they would be pushed up above the maximum that my body was able to handle (he drew a chart where the line hit the top of the chart). So, for my body, exercise did not feel like a temporary increase in stress that would go down after a while, it felt like an extreme emergency situation that it could not adapt to. This would further disregulate my stress system. That is why it felt like torture, and why my mood got worse and why I did not have any physical improvement from exercise.

    He told me moving was good to calm my nervous system. So, slow walking in the forest and things like that. And just quit as soon as I did not feel like it, or it gave me stress and just try some other time when I felt like it again. And that worked like a charm. I walk now for 4 to 6 hours a week and it calms me down. I do not have to push myself. I just feel like doing it and if I don’t, I just won’t go.

    So, the point is that exercise can be great to help with stress, if your stress is maybe at 70% or 80%. However, if your stress level is consistently at 95% then it is harmful and you should not do it. (Mindfulness probably will not help either in that case btw.) If exercise keeps feeling like torture and it does not help you, do not feel like a failure and keep torturing yourself. It is not your fault if it does not work for you! Go to a psychosomatic therapist instead that has expertise in stress management. They might be able to help you.




  • I actually agree with this. This technology should be open. I know that there are arguments to keep it closed, like it could be misused, etc. However, I think that all the scary stories about AI are also a way to keep attention away from the fact that if you have a monopoly on it, you have enormous power. This power will grow when the tech is used more and more. If all this power is in the hands of a commercial business (even though they say they aren’t), then you know AI is going to be misused to gain money. We do not have clear insight in what they are doing and we have no reason to trust them.

    You also know that bad actors, like dictatorial governments will eventually get or develop the technology themselves. So, keeping it closed is not a good way to protect it from that happening. At the same time, you are also keeping it from researchers who could investigate how to use and develop it further to be used responsibly and to the benefit of humanity.

    Also, they relied on data generated by people in society who never got any payment or anything for that. So, it is immoral to not share the results with that same people in society openly and instead keeping it closed. I know they used some of my papers. However, I am not allowed to study their model. Seems unfair.

    The dangers of AI should be kept at bay using regulation and enforcement by democratically chosen governments, not by commercial businesses or other non-democratic organisations.


  • I think they have instructions on the website on how to unlock the bootloader etc. There is also a lot on how they support open source with their own OS. I think that your warranty also remains valid after you unlock the bootloader and install another OS, as long as you revert to theirs when asking for support. I can sortof understand that, as it would not be feasible to support all sorts of custom ROMs.


  • I can definitely recommend getting a Fairphone. I quite happy with my Fairphone 4. Bloatware is limited to Google stuff and they even give instructions how to easily install a custom ROM (have not tried that yet though).

    The specs are not great, but good enough for me. But the main advantage for me is that it does not break that easily. I drop my phone all the time. My Samsung phones and Pixel phone I have broken within the first few weeks. Usually I dropped it and the screen cracked, even with a protected case.

    I have had this phone for a lot longer now (maybe years by now) and I dropped it like a 1000 times and it is still fine. The screen has not cracked, it still works. Only the side is a little chipped. I don’t even use a protective case. And even if it breaks, I can just buy the broken component from their website and easily replace myself using normal tools. So that is really nice.