Dr. Andrew Belaveshkin

  How to stop rumination in 30 seconds. Overthinking your thoughts exhausts you and degrades your mental health. Stress is not as dangerous as endlessly scrolling through stressful thoughts. It’s like you’re reliving the stress a thousand times. You need to be able to stop this.😬 The flow of our thoughts is synchronized with the movements of the tongue, hands and eyes. To instantly calm down, you need to stop all muscle movements. So: ✅1. Fix your eyes at one point (the bridge of your nose) and hold them there. ✅2. Press the tip of your tongue against the hard palate and hold it there. ✅3. Press the back of your hands (palms up) to the front surface of the thigh and hold them there. Did you feel it? The stream of thoughts stopped. Enjoy it!     Quick stress relief here and now: 12 Ideas 1. Restore sensory connection: Focus on external stimuli instead of internal emotions. Use the 5–4–3–2–1 technique: 5 things you see, 4 things you touch, 3 things you hear, 2 th...

The dangerous myth of the noble savage. One of the most widespread and extremely dangerous myths is the myth of the noble savage, who is unspoiled by civilization, represents an example of morality and ethics, and lives in harmony with nature. This myth is universal for all times and cultures, whether it be the story of the Garden of Eden, the Sumerian Enkidu living with animals, or Roman historians praising barbarians and deriding decadent Rome. Modern narratives, such as the movie Avatar, exploit this same myth.     How did this myth originate? "Before being open, the savage was first invented." Its widespread dissemination suggests probable biological reasons, something akin to escapism, infantile regression, dopamine-induced self-deception fantasies (imagining oneself as better than others), or the fact that we forget bad things faster than good things (thus creating a cognitive illusion that the past was better)—such is the protective mechanism.   The image of the "...

Improvement through destruction. One of the most dangerous and persistent cognitive illusions is the belief that people (organizations, markets, things, books, cities, etc.) can be improved by destroying (humiliating, demolishing, violating, etc.) them. Such views are very characteristic of barbaric primitive thinking, which is currently the most widespread and has a biological nature.   Here are the main components of this illusion: all problems arise from something bad, and you can improve your life simply by destroying it; once you destroy the bad, the good will appear by itself; it takes a lot of effort to destroy the bad, while the good grows easily and quickly.   1. Childish thinking.  According to Jean Piaget, children are egocentric in their perception of the world until a certain age. They think that if something exists in their environment, it must simply be there (like air or the sun). Children under 7 years old (and adult "savages") exhibit magical thinking, i...