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I’ve been having such weird thoughts lately, really negative thoughts. Normally my negative thoughts are more outward, or if they are about me/my death they are more in the shape of things like when I’m driving I picture hitting the guard rail and then that’s it, my life is over. And I start thinking about the idea of multiple universes and how I wonder if that is true, and if it is true I wonder if my tire popped and I did in fact swerve into the guard rail and die in one of those alternative universes and I kind of “felt” or sinced that in some way. That’s usually the type of bad thoughts I have in my head, and by thinking of the alternative universe concept the thoughts usually just kind of pass through my head from time to time. It wasn’t always like that, I used to get stuck in a thought loop with these thoughts. Overall they don’t affect me a ton but they also can start to tip me into a bit of a downward spiral, where I start to over analyze life/death. If that happens I can slide into a bit of a bad state where my mind starts to basically accelerate and think about all the possible negative things of dying. Never seeing any family or friends again. Being alone and conscious of it. Being not conscious of it but just gone, erased and nothing. Everything I ever did had no reason, no meaning and it’s all just over. If my mind accelerates into this space it’s typically not great and it can be hard for me to snap out of this line of thinking, it can be a process of several hours before I’m able to stop having these bad thoughts. Luckily I have developed a lot of techniques to try and combat these thoughts and to speed up the process of calming down, I can usually stop thinking about it with some effort, and once I stop the “warp speed” thoughts I can just ease out of it and then go on and not have these types of thoughts for long stretches of days/weeks/months.

Recently I’ve started having these negative thoughts more and more, and I’ve even started slipping into the “Warp speed” negative thoughts during the day, something which is almost exclusively reserved for night time, right when I’m about to fall asleep. I’ll start to think “shit what if I don’t wake up tomorrow” and then I will tip into the spiral of negative death thoughts, this especially happens if I feel like I wasted the day.

It’s pretty rare for these thoughts to happen during the day, but they have been lately. And another odd thought/feeling is I’ve felt the presence of the guns in my house a lot more. I’ve not had any real thoughts about killing myself, other than having like a deep seeded worry about dying. The best way I can describe it is an analogy to harry potter. Lately I’ve felt like the guns in my house are similar to a horricrux, I can just feel that they are in my presence and I start to think about their destructive power. I don’t really picture using them on myself, but I also have this like very low pitched worry of “why even have them here, why make anything related to dying easier”. I can counter that thought with “well I would 100% want them here if someone broke in, so were fine just keep it moving brain”.

I really just wanted to write these thoughts down, so now they are saved and I can tell my brain to simply stop having these thoughts, I can always come back to this page and read these thoughts since they will be saved here forever, I don’t have to spend any more time thinking about these negative thoughts.

If anyone else out there has similar types of thoughts, I wanted to end this with a few helpful ideas you can try if you are looking for a way to stop them or put them on pause at least. The ideas below are a bit of a jumble of thoughts from my sisters and I:

#1 Multiple Universe: It turns out this concept has a name, the Multiverse. you can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

How this relates to our negative thoughts well, I started thinking and somewhat believing maybe people who have these types of thoughts just have a closer connection to the Multiverse. I don’t know if I actually fully believe this, but I believe it enough that it calms my mind down which is super useful. The way I believe in this is relatively simple, we see examples of animals “feeling” things that humans can’t feel all of the time. There are countless examples of elephants running to high ground before a tsunami, of other birds and animals fleeing before earthquakes ect… so I think it is plausible that some humans can feel or since things that others can’t, and maybe people who have these types of negative thoughts are really just more sensitive to their existence in other universes, and therefore if every possible variation of our lives is playing out in real time across all of the multiverse, its plausible that we might feel actions that happen in some of those other worlds.

#2 Thought Control: I tell myself; ok you can have these thoughts later, I just don’t want to have these thoughts right now. Right now I’m going to take a deep breath and calm down, I’m in control of my mind and what I think about. These thoughts are not serving to make me happy or enjoy the day so I’m going to stop having them right now, and I can always come back to them later.

#3 The whole idea is to just kind of be an observer of your thoughts instead of getting tangled with them. a metaphor of it would be a train leaving the train station- the train is all your intrusive thoughts and you can decide if you want to hop on board with them or just watch the train go by- non judgmentally. “There’s one of those thoughts again. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn’t- I’m not going to try and figure it out right now” and then use mindfulness to bring you back to whatever’s going on in the moment. You can name off each of your 5 senses- something you see, hear, touch, smell, taste to kind of ground you back to the present moment. And when the thoughts pop back up again ( which they will bc it’s just your brain being creative) just acknowledge the thought is there but remind yourself you do not have to stop it or interpret it. It takes a lot of practice and I know in the beginning I was so confused by it bc it seemed like I was accepting the awful thoughts but it’s not accepting the content of the thoughts, just accepting I have these thoughts and I don’t have to figure out what they mean about me. Accepting uncertainty And another important part is accepting feelings. So the thoughts may make you feel anxious or scared but just leaving room for those feelings to be there instead of trying to get rid of them helps. Basically the more you fight with thoughts or feelings the more you are telling your brain that this is something to be on alert about so it’s going to focus more attention on it. Just accepting thoughts, feelings will let them pass easier.

#4 The metaphor i really like to think of my mind like a river after a storm. It’s fast and full of water and debris will come by pretty often. The debris is the thoughts/ideas; but I am not the debris. I am sitting on the shore and I can make the decision to either let the debris float by or grab it and pull it out (i.e. focus more on the thought and start obsessing

— Other Great Articles & Thoughts From Others —

My sister recently sent me these articles by an ex NHL hockey player that were amazing, I honestly never really stopped to think about if any other people had these types of thoughts. I assumed they did not, and I also assumed that I had to figure solutions out on my own, for some reason it never dawned on me to ask anyone else about techniques they had to try and overcome these types of thoughts. It is really pretty funny how the brain works sometimes, I do wish I had seen this article when I was growing up, but better late than never!

From sister: Accepting the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen and moving on with my day is probably what my therapist would tell me to do. Because all these scary thoughts we have are unsolvable and that’s why we get stuck in a loop with them. No matter how long we think about it we will still never have an answer the satisfies the ocd part of your mind. We want to have proof or an answer to something that is scaring us but there is no answer. So there’s no point in ruminating on it, just move on. And keep reminding yourself “oh there’s one of those thoughts I’ll never know the answer to. I could sit here and get myself worked up about it trying to figure it out or I’ll just leave it and move on with my day

We had an interesting request come in from a client today. They have a big list of user birthdays that they want to display on the front end of the ir employee intranet site. In order to protect employees actual age they only want the month and day of the employees birthday to show, that way people can essentially wish them happy birthday but not know their true age. In essence the client wanted a list of birthdays like this:

Employee 1 12/1
Employee 2 12/4
Employee 3 12/5

To add a little complexity to this task the client wanted us to sort the birthdays by day so that they were listed in chronological order. Sorting this list is pretty easy with the orderBy command, this is what we came up with first:

$birthdays = User::where('birth_month', $current_month)->where('active', 1)->orderBy('birthdate', 'asc')->get();

The issue we ran into with the code above is that it sorted by year, then day. Even though we are not showing the year on the front end, it is still saved in the database as a full date/time string of day-month-year. The code above ended up giving us a list like this:

Employee 1 12/4/1990
Employee 2 12/1/1992
Employee 3 12/5/1992

Any employees who had the same birth year were grouped together and then sorted by date. To fix this we had to change from orderBy to orderByRaw. In practice the code we ended up using looks like this:
$birthdays = User::where('birth_month', $current_month)->where('active', 1) ->whereMonth('birthdate', $current_month) ->orderByRaw('DATE_FORMAT(birthdate, "%m-%d")') ->get();

The code above ended up working perfectly for the client. You will see that the orderByRaw code above uses the m-d portion of the date/time string but it does not use the year portion. With this code we are left with a list like this:

Employee 1 12/1/1992
Employee 2 12/4/1990
Employee 3 12/5/1992