It refers to the fact that feelings are not a reflection of the outside reality, but a reflection of one's perception of it. According to OP, this is proven by how feelings completely change by simply changing the way the brain perceives reality, via a psycotropic compound, while actual reality remains unchanged.
This is a well known scientific and philosophical fact, that OP has only come to know recently thanks to personal experience with psycotropic drugs
Such epiphany resulted in the shower thought we are commenting.
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It doesn't really matter what's happening, with regards to how you're feeling. You can be going through shit and having a good time, or king of the world and just miserable.
IMO this is such an important thing about life. You can't control most of what happens to you, but what you can control is your attitude & your reaction. You often don't need to have an opinion, a preference, or a response to a situation/event.
I assume they refer to smoking weed. It can show you the mountain before you is not always high, and that it is not always a mountain.
Sober, you might feel completely different about some specific problem, but with this you can actually take a look at it and deconstruct the problem in peace
In my experience, it made it very clear how easy it is to have a disconnection between what is happening in the "real world", my perception of it and what happens in my brain.
Basically your brain is a big box of chemical reactions that happen regardless of what's going on in the world, and you unconsciously interpret the world through whatever your brain makes you feel at the moment. (For example, think about the fact that you don't notice your nose most of the time, it's there at all times but your brain filters it)
I don't think you even need to get high. Financially I'm earning the most I ever have. However, emotionally I'm the worst I've ever felt. My circumstances should, in theory, mean that I should feel the best I've ever felt and yet that isn't the case.
The reason is pretty simple though, my mental health isn't being treated with medication right now. I've had to accept that for myself, I can't therapy and self-help my way out of my mental health problems and that medication is the only way for me to continue to survive. Thankfully I'll be starting again next week and I'm looking forward to feeling good again.
I'm literally losing friends by nature of death. It's been humbling and horrifying, and I don't know how to make sense of it. I'm terrified and there's no getting out of this roller coaster.
I'm sorry friend. Sometimes we can't make sense of things and that's okay. It's also okay to be terrified. I hope you're hanging in there. The pain you're feeling must be immense
As I've gotten older, this is true, but in the reverse of what is implied. I can be like "man, what a great day, I got a ton done, I'm feeling very proud of myself, I think I'll hit the vape."
Cut to two hours of anxiety about a misspoken word in the midst of the aforementioned day punctuated by two panic attacks about tomorrow.
Man I'm sorry that that's how you experience it. When I'm high I listen to my favorite music and zone the fuck out. The real world rarely enters my thoughts.
Often I'll think about projects I want to work on and get mega inspired from random stuff I find on the internet. Of course, the motivation evaporates when I'm sober, but at least I took notes while I was blasted 😂
It doesn't happen every time, and it happened a lot less when I got high more often. Now that it's rarely (more like once a week instead of once a day) it seems to happen more. I think it also has something to do with being older and having significantly more responsibilities.
I do sometimes miss getting high more often, but I actually find I'm overall much happier with my life. I'm not saying that happened because I'm high less. The opposite really, I think I feel the need to get high less because I'm generally just happier with my life.
I also know it fits into peoples' lives in all kinds of different ways. I'm friends with all day, every day smokers who are quite happy with their lives, quite accomplished, and have tons of responsibilities, so I don't think there is a correlation in that sense. I just don't want you to think I'm trying to subtly criticize! I'm not. 🙂
I noticed, when I smoked like a fish -- taking a hiatus from October 1 through the end of the year -- I noticed a lot more connections between bullshit than when sober. It offers you a bit of insight that either makes you say, "hmm," and move on with your day, or drives you to anger that you can't see such things while sober.
I'd argue that drugs can help the individual do things opposite their current nature. To shake them out of the box they're currently stuck in. Some people can see how the way they feel doesn't match their current situation on their own steam. Some need drugs to help them focus on that. The questions we don't ask ourselves when that connection is noticed are the ones that have the strongest possibility of allowing us to change our views and remove that which is unhelpful from our lives so we can be the best version of ourselves.
I've been noticing in my own life lately that things are going great on all fronts and yet I'm miserable. I had not paid close enough attention until I had to bring up the discussion of how our language (literal words) shape our perception of reality with my kids. Now I'm seeing why I'm mostly miserable because I'm actually hearing what words I use daily. Language shapes us more than we realize.
Concentration skills gained through meditation and self contemplation can help us without drugs. Though I'd argue that drugs are often key to breaking cycles so we have the energy less spread out and we can focus on the issues we actually have. There is a time and place for them. They cannot become a crutch.
Yeah, mindset and words definitely matter. I used to roll my eyes at people that would talk about gratitude, but starting your day by writing three specific things you're grateful for helps reframe how you look at the rest of the day.