BREATHE N BOUNCE

Spotify Knows You're Depressed Before You Do: What Mood-Tracking Playlists Get Right (and Wrong) There is a strange little moment that happens when Spotify serves you a playlist called something like Sad Girl Autumn , Songs to Cry in the Car , or Deep Focus for When Your Brain Is Absolutely Fucked . You look at the screen and think: Okay, rude. Who told you? Did I search for this? Yes. Did I listen to the same depressing song seventeen times after midnight? Also yes. Did I skip every cheerful song like it personally owed me money? Unfortunately, yes. But does that mean Spotify knows I’m depressed? No. Not clinically. Not in the way a therapist, doctor, or trusted friend might recognize depression. Spotify is not sitting there with a tiny clipboard, diagnosing us between Phoebe Bridgers and Kendrick Lamar. Still, it knows things. It knows what we play, what we skip, what we save, what we repeat, what we search for, and what time of day we keep returning to the same emotion...

 One of the worst truths I have had to learn how to accept over the last year or so in some intense therapy is that I am not like other people.  There are things wrong with my programing and it all started when I was young.  Maybe I was set up to fail, or just full of bad decisions.  I hurt people.  I have hurt myself and I need to know why and the paths to those answers start here. MUSIC FROM THIS EPISODE SEE THE LIGHT - Swedish House Mafia STRANGERS - Portishead LET YOU DOWN - NF WONDERFUL NOTHING - Glass Animals ALONE - Edgars Bukovskis LOVE IS GONE - Slander WHOLE AGAIN - Matisse and Sadko

I think we all come to a point in our life where we feel that we're not supposed to be here. We feel like we don't measure up. We feel like we might be doing a job that we are not meant to do, or that we're not supposed to do. We're in a position, in a marriage, in a relationship that we're not supposed to be in, because we have done many bad things with ourselves. We have fallen hard, and we keep finding ways to fall deeper. So what does that mean? We like to tell ourselves that we don't deserve anything. We like to tell ourselves that we should be miserable, that we should punish ourselves. And to be frank, that's exactly what I have done for a very long time. I withhold a lot of fun things from myself, and then I started doing fun things for myself, and then I felt guilty. I tried to do things to make myself well, and it also made me feel like I shouldn't be doing it. And sometimes that's because of the people that we hurt and the people that we...

What the Iso Principle Taught Me About My Bad Days: You Can't Skip the Feel , But You Can Steer It There are days when I wake up already losing. Nothing dramatic has happened. Nobody has called with terrible news. The house is still standing. The coffee is technically coffee. And yet, somehow, my brain has opened the day by handing me a thick folder labeled Reasons This Is All Going to Be Too Much . You know those days? The kind where answering one text feels like a major administrative task. The kind where the smallest inconvenience makes you want to crawl under a blanket and become a rumor. The kind where somebody says, “Just cheer up,” and you briefly consider launching a pillow at them. I’ve had plenty of those days. Depressing moments, panic attacks, anxious spirals, the whole weird parade. And for a long time, I thought the goal was to get out of the feeling as quickly as possible. Sad? Find something happy. Anxious? Calm down. Angry? Let it go. Simple, right? Exce...