Don’t Be Alone

Frightening fiction provides a safe way to learn how to deal with fear and anxiety.

Anything that is feared, can be tackled with knowledge. Fear during a global crisis generally arises due to lack of knowledge on how to deal with the situation. Helplessness and uncertainty give rise to the feelings of doom and gloom. The way to tackle this is to be completely informed about the situation, and be ‘apocalypse ready’.

Every day there is a particular workout prescribed that is completely scalable based on your skill. For example, if the workout calls for barbell squats with 135 pounds but you can only do squats with the bar (45 pounds), then that’s where you’ll start.

• Beginners to weight training: If you have never weight trained before, CrossFit is a great place for you to start, provided you have a great coach.
• People looking for support and community: Every CrossFit gym has a really tight-knit community feel to it.
• Fitness fanatics: The general protocol is 3 days on, 1 day off, but many CrossFitters end up at the gym more frequently. 
• Masochists: You’ll often be in situations where you use all your effort to finish a workout and continue to push yourself beyond.
• Former athletes: You get to compete with people in your class and go online to see how you did against the world’s elite CrossFit athletes.

HIIT workouts generally only last about 20 minutes, which makes them attractive for busy people (most of us).
A 20-Min HIIT home workout:

1. Dynamic Warm-up
2. Bodyweight Squats
3. Push-ups
4. Star Jacks (or other dynamic exercises)
5. Inverted Row (or other pull exercises)
6. Plank (or other core exercises).
7. A stretching to cool down.

• Gore watchers typically have low empathy, high sensation seeking, and a strong identification with the killer.
• Thrill watchers typically have both high empathy and sensation seeking;they identify themselves more with the victims and like the suspense of the film.
• Independent watchers typically have a high empathy for the victim along with a high positive effect for overcoming fear.
• Problem watchers typically have high empathy for the victim but are characterized by negative effect (particularly a sense of helplessness).

• Dr. Carl Jung believed horror films “tapped into primordial archetypes buried deep in our collective subconscious – images like shadow and mother play important role in the horror genre”.
• Horror films are watched as a way of purging negative emotions and/or as a way to relieve pent-up aggression.
• Horror movies are enjoyed because the people on screen getting killed deserve it.
• Cultural historian David Skal has argued that horror films simply reflect our societal fears.

The theory is that if everyone has high self-esteem, then everyone will be successful and live a happy life. If a society was inoculated with high self-esteem, it would end poverty, crime, and violence.

But, one should take into account that high self-esteem could be the result of success, not necessarily the cause. Also, thinking that only one thing can explain how to be successful, is probably naive.

There’s actually very little correlation between self-esteem and success.  Research on self-esteem strongly correlates with how good people feel, in general. 

Self-esteem is complex and can be a good or a bad thing, depending on what is measured. 

Invest in a good pair of running shoes and a quality shirt made from wicking material to keep you drier.

A sports watch and heart-rate monitor are nice to have.

Running will put you slightly out of breath when you start. It should eventually decrease. You should be able to hold a conversation when you're running a good pace.

Once a week, run a faster speed to increase your fitness level.

1. Eat fewer calories than you burn every day.
2. Eat mostly real food if you want to be healthy.
3. Do those two things consistently for a decade to KEEP the weight off.

When you only eat real food and avoid all unhealthy food, you’re more likely than not going to run a caloric deficit – and thus lose weight.

• Meat – GRASS-FED, not grain-fed. 
• Fowl – Chicken, duck, hen, turkey.
• Fish – Wild fish, as mercury and other toxins can be an issue in farmed fish
• Eggs – Omega-3 enriched cage free eggs.
• Vegetables – As long as they’re not deep-fried, eat as many as you want.
• Oils – Olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil – think natural.
• Fruits – Fruits have natural sugar, and can be higher in calories, so limit if you’re trying to lose weight.
• Nuts – High in calories, so they’re good for a snack only.
• Tubers – Sweet potatoes and yams. Higher in calories and carbs.

... it has to have a monster, which has to be threatening in some way. The monster is often otherworldly or violates the laws of nature, as in Alien or Jaws—but some argue that a human character can be a monster, as in Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Halloween.

The monster generally is otherworldly or violates the laws of nature and is designed to elicit disgust as an emotion.

This is the most popular theory explaining the genre’s popularity and it argues that an unconscious, repressed part of every human is actually savage; that the veneer of civility is very thin, and beneath that is essentially a monster.

Although we consciously disapprove of what the monster is doing, deep down part of us enjoys seeing the murder and mayhem the monster unleashes—because if we could, we would do that.

Contagion's subplots is about one man’s manipulation (Alan Krumwiede) of a climate of fear in order to make money. But it’s also about the way that the social conditions of the pandemic create an opening for the him o rise.
He spreads misinformation in service of selling a homeopathic “cure"; he pretends to be sick and takes the so called cure, to prove that it works.

It has become clear that the parts of the movie Contagion that probably mattered most have taught us nothing.
Compared to a single blogger selling a “cure,” the misinformation (fake cures, conspiracies, etc.) we’re facing today is far worse.

Some derive enjoyment from negative emotional states, as when enjoying a "good cry", for instance.

A study found that people who liked sad films enjoyed a scene relative to how much sadness it elicited. The stronger the sadness, the higher the enjoyment.

Halloween seems to bring out excesses in costumed children and adults.

Several studies revealed that costumed children who were anonymous — by wearing masks for instance — were more likely to take extra candies. In adults, costumed Halloween celebrators tend to have higher blood alcohol readings than people in plain clothes.