Defense Mechanisms

Defence mechanisms:
Repression:
An unconscious mechanism to keep disturbing and or threatening thoughts from becoming conscious. These can be repressed due to otherwise feeling guilty about them. It's not very effective however, because whilst forcing the memories into your unconscious, they're still technically there, and they'll still create anxiety.
Projection:
Projection relies on taking their own thoughts and feelings, gathering them all up and dropping them on another person. For example if you hate someone, you can pick up this feeling of hate, and drop it on them, saying/believing that they hate you instead.
Displacement:
This is simply the redirection of an impulse onto a weak, helpless or defenceless target. To be perfectly honest this sounds incredibly like bullying. The idea, is that with aggression, you displace the feeling by punching a wall for example.
Sublimation:
Juuuust like displacement, this works on creating a constructive outcome by displacing emotions. For example, something like sport can be a good use of the emotion.
Denial:
Involves the blocking of events from awareness. If it's too much to handle for someone, they can just refuse to experience it. It's a fairly primitive response to danger, and no one can really avoid reality for very long.
Regression:
Something bad happening? Just curl up into a ball and start sucking your thumb. Regression is the defence mechanism that is happening when you regress to a point of childlike mentality and behaviour over a particular situation.
Rationalization:
A distortion of the facts to make something less threatening. Similar to sanding down sharp edges on a chair.
Reaction formation:
Beyond the point of denial, the individual reacts in different/opposite ways to how they actually feel. The easiest way to explain this, would be if a homosexual man, adopts a anti-homosexual attitude to convince themselves of their supposed heterosexuality.

If you are feeling a little down, maybe constantly finding yourself depressed. Or do you perhaps know someone that constantly looks glum? Then you might be suffering from depression, and THIS might be because of a lack of Vitamin D. Certain studies have shown that a deficiency in Vitamin D is very much linked with depression. My advise, if you're seriously depressed and can't think why, or if something bothers you much to much and/or makes you very anxious, go to your local doctor and ask for a Vitamin D level test. If you are suffering, then it's a simple fix of getting more sunlight, or vitamin D supplement tablets!

Illuminati confirmed joke

Dogs have four legs and one tail. Four take away one is three. God has three letters. God is split.... I got stuck here on an illuminati confirmed joke, ask my gf for help and she's like "shut up."

Values and stuff

I read something today that got me thinking. The post I'd found essentially had a little description as to the benefits of writing down your own core values and living by them. So basically since then I've been debating what things are most important to me and what rules I should live by. So basically a couple main things are, honesty, loyalty to friends and closer, and never giving up no matter what. Pretty obvious things but until very recently I can remember times when I might not have followed these.

I had my first running session the other day. Naturally I got angry every time someone walked past at god knows o'clock.

I'm starting a new routine that I'm hoping to be able to stick to. It's quite a way out for me, and probably quite impossible given my track record of giving up. But I'm optimistic. So here we are in just three simple goals.

• 500 press ups.
• 500 sit ups.
• 2 miles in 15.00 - 13.00 minutes.

Yeah they're pretty intense goals, but that's why they're goals and I'm not bragging about already doing them or running laps around Usain Bolt.

Randomly occurred to me that I eat an excessive amount of food and I'm rarely full, and that got me thinking that if by some freak accident I were stranded on an island or in an isolated area with family or friends I'd probably be forced to turn to cannibalism. To avoid that I've found this page on doing taste tests, to see which plants are edible or not. http://www.ehow.com/how_2156033_perform-universal-edibility-test.html

Basically you don't eat anything for half a day, you cut up the plant into it's main parts, you test each part for fifteen minutes at a time by pressing them against your lips, and then if there's no stinging or burning you can move on to testing them the same way but against your tongue.

After that if there's no stinging or burning reaction you can take one portion of the plant and chew a small amount without swallowing. You wait three minutes, and if there's no reaction you can swallow it. Once you do that you've got to wait another half day until you're sure there's no reaction. If there is one you've got to throw it up somehow.

If it's successful, you eat a larger amount of that plant, and wait ANOTHER half day, waiting to see if your stomach commits suicide. Obviously then if that produces no reaction that part of the plant is safe! But then that still leaves the other parts to test... like the leaves, stem, flower, fruit... it's a good thing we can survive eight weeks without food!

It's always nice when the largest topics in a subject at school, are actually the easiest and require common sense. All it means is you too need a sizeable amount of common sense. Now I see where everything's going wrong for me.