AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
A message to Hollywood and the narrative media.
Merely race or gender swapping established characters is not innovative or imaginative.
It is an exercise in politics, not art.
It is proof of creative bankruptcy, which will lead to financial bankruptcy.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
🚨This needs to go far and wide to put pressure on the government to do the right thing and save lives. 🚨
This evening, from a Peak Prosperity member to me via PM at my site:
Them: I can’t post this online because it’s not quite public yet, but government officials had a town meeting with all of the residents of chimney rock and basically told them the town was being bulldozed, bodies and all and the land was being seized by the federal government they would not be able to move back and basically their homes the ones that were standing were no longer theirs and the federal government owned it all. I don’t know what crazy play for land this is, but there’s a lot of conspiracy about lithium mines and let me just tell you, as someone who lives in Charlotte and has friends who live in the area of Western North Carolina, they are not being helped and this is actually being a stand down operation by federal government
Me: What the heck…? That's quite disturbing. Is this first-hand, second-hand, or more distant info?
Them: Our friend owns an Airbnb in Chimney Rock. They had a town meeting yesterday and someone from the federal government told them all of those things in the town meeting, but doesn’t want the information getting out. Also, they are not picking up the bodies. The stench of the bodies everywhere is insane and for some reason, the government does not want to pick up the bodies. One pastor of a local church was going to order to door delivering water and they changed their delivery request to body bags because so many of the homes that they’ve gone to have needed body bags, we’re trying to keep the body count. They’re not picking up the bodies. They don’t wanna identify the bodies and they’re just leaving them to rot in the streets.
Me: I…can't…even. I'm stunned. This is beyond anything I could have imagined even very recently. You always pick up and bury the dead. It's what humans do. They are violating every possible custom … on purpose. Thank you for keeping me informed. People need to know about this. Let me know when you'd be comfortable with me posting to our forums in an anonymized fashion, of course.
Them: You can post it the message needs to get out. Something evil is going on in the NC mountains. I just didn’t want to be identified. Just today we filled up a trailer for a shelter in Hendersonville NC that had no food for tons of moms and babies. All the stores round are empty or locked. In Chandler NC 2000 people haven’t eaten anything or drank in 6 days and just got an SOS message out for help. I’m trying to tag the Cajun navy and operation airdrop but people are dying by the minute.
Multiple tuckers have reported having tires slashed. Our friends from Chimney Rock said they have heard multiple stories of people being robbed at gunpoint making supply runs. Two people that drove down to Charlotte yesterday and today one that we helped said bodies in trees, all over ditches in major roads back. Something weird is going on here in NC.
Me: God bless you. Let me know if I can help.
Them: Someone with a large national megaphone needs to amplify how bad it is. People are now starting to die trapped. My town is Operation Air Drop NC central command. They need pilots with planes and now are asking just for trucks. People with big equipment are needed but more than anything the nation needs to put pressure on Washington to deploy the National Guard asap. The 82nd was begging to go since Saturday but has been told to stand down. Every fucking Apache we have should be flying rescue missions. Please amplify the message!!!
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
"We need to love our children, more than we hate each other." - @RobertKennedyJr
Beautifully said.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
Do not retweet this video unless you want the British Stasi to extradite you…
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.”
― Roger Scruton
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
People grow up when they get married.
It is probably better to get married when you are young because then you grow up. And then what else matures people? I have met very few people who have fully matured who do not have children. I think there is a reason for that, a real technical reason. You are not mature until someone else matters more than you—period. Maybe that will be your wife or your husband, but probably not. They might matter as much as you, and maybe that is the right amount. But when you have children, they matter more than you, unless there is something seriously wrong with you.
Very few parents, if push came to shove, would not die for their children. As soon as someone else matters more than you do in some fundamental sense, you have taken another step toward a true, mature responsibility. I do not see that you can do that without necessity, and there is nothing that screams necessity more than an infant.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
Every parent should watch this
It’s the movie they really don’t want you to see: #WhatIsAWoman?
Watch the explosive documentary starring @MattWalshBlog FREE on Twitter for 24 hrs. teapawt.net/realDailyWire/status/1…
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
JFK: "Freedom of information is a fundamental human right...for a nation that is afraid to let its people to judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
Mask your toddlers so we can study the effects of pulmonary microplastics over a lifetime.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
OK, so I've used this platform long enough to make some observations. Here are seven Habits of Twitter best REJECTED: 1) The worst possible way to read a tweet is the right way. 2) If I can impute bad motives to you I don’t have to deal with your argument.
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
apparently tweets citing official documents are getting labeled wrong think now for challenging the narrative, very cool thanks twitter!
FDA produces first 91+ pages of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine documents. It reveals that Pfizer, after just 2 ½ months of vaccine use, received 25,957 reports of “Nervous system disorders.” Only 54 years, 11 months to go for the remaining pages… bit.ly/3cxOUhA
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
I’ve got a pair of #kubball tickets to giveaway for Thursday’s game against Stony Brook!
Retweet this and give me a follow and I’ll pick one random winner
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it” -- any time I can sneak a GK Chesterton quote into a major publication I'm a happy Mann
AJ Vanderhorst retweeted
If you would be willing to give my Chesterton audiobook a listen and give it a review send me a DM and I’ll send a code for a free download audible.com/pd?asin=B09JPC9X…





























