Mindfulness Medication

Hey team, I have been back into my understanding of authenticity and wrote this as a collection of different ideas I've taken in and conclusions I've come to. Accepting your authenticity, exactly as it is and nothing more, emerges as the remedy for suffering. This acceptance extends to acknowledging the limitations and randomness of your origin. Birth thrusts individuals into the privilege lottery, encompassing both known hardships associated with factors like skin color and family wealth, and more profoundly, the unique personalities of parents, siblings, teachers, and friends that significantly shape one's worldview and expectations. These expectations become ingrained, influencing the persona we construct and how strongly we identify with it. They often manifest as conditional love, implying acceptance only if certain criteria are met. While this might align with societal norms, it is not the true essence of love. True love is the acceptance of someone at every new momen...

Hey team!! I just finished "Endocrine Psychiatry," a book by Edward Shorter and Max Fink, and I'd like to share my understanding of endocrinology in psychiatry from what I took away from this book and add some of my own insights to the findings presented. To start, let me define endocrinology as the field of medicine dedicated to studying the various hormone systems in our body. Hormones are signaling molecules that a certain gland will secrete into the blood, where they enter general circulation and can affect every organ with receptors for that specific hormone. Cortisol is a glucocorticoid steroid, meaning it's an alteration of the typical 4-ring steroid structure. It is secreted by your adrenal gland during times when your body needs to focus, keep its eye on the prize, and deal with the here-and-now stressor. Cortisol is activated by the HPA axis (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal), and through a negative feedback loop, it turns off its own response. So when cortiso...