I bought this set of plants as therapy.

They were really pretty when the flowers bloomed.

The web-worms attacked both of them.

I had to trim them down to this.

Hope to see them recover.

Update: Now that I've moved I have to leave them behind.

My dear self, Thank you and goodnight.

謝謝你很努力
Thank you for your efforts
謝謝自己沒放棄
My dear self, Thank you  for not giving up
謝謝你一路堅持到這裡
Thank you for persevering through
太陽依舊會升起
The sun will still rise
希望永遠不滅熄
The flame of hope will always continue
晚安了 親愛的自己
Goodnight, my dear self.

還能大口呼吸，就是幸福的
Every breath is a blessing
還能睜開眼睛，希望就能夠看見的
Hope is always available when we open our eyes,
雖然步伐是小了一點
Your pace may be slow
但我一定會走向前
But you are still moving forward
幸福得更努力一些
Continue with passion

還能夠說感謝，就一直掛嘴邊
Give thanks daily
還能夠有夢想，就要更勇敢的去追
If you can still dream, have the courage to pursue it
我親愛的寶貝，我知道你會累
My dear little one, I know you will tire
生命很困難，但記得要勇敢
Life is hard, but you must be brave

月光依然美麗
The night is still beautiful
好像每一個你
as beautiful as yourself
晚安了親愛的自己
Goodnight my dear self

Ella 陳嘉樺【晚安歌 Goodnight】Official MV

 There's a vending machine in my residential area.
I saw that there's money remaining in the system.
The person before me must have not realised that there's balance in their purchase.
The amount was enough for me to select this chocolate to be pushed out to the slot.
Yippee! Free chocolate!
Just the right reward for my efforts to have exercised this morning.

My mood was so motivated that I was prompted to shop for a pair of running shoes.
I have avoided being in large crowds for months.
I surprised myself by purchasing a pair in the busiest mall in the city.
The last time I bought a pair was in 2013.
I was fortunate to be assisted by a helpful Sports-Wear staff who recommended this.

Gratitude: Housemate made baked macaroni.
Yum ! Free food again!

Wow... I'm editing my blog till 9pm *glancing at the clock.

I shudder to think of my condition just 7 days ago, where I had just hurt myself.

I was lying comatose in bed.

***shudder

A signal not weakness

Taken entirely from Johann Hari - Ted Talk
For a really long time, I had two mysteries that were hanging over me. I didn't understand them and, to be honest, I was quite afraid to look into them. The first mystery was, I'm 40 years old, and all throughout my lifetime, year after year, serious depression and anxiety have risen, in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world. And I wanted to understand why. Why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day? And I wanted to understand this because of a more personal mystery. 

When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling, like pain was leaking out of me. I couldn't control it, I didn't understand why it was happening, I felt quite ashamed of it. And my doctor told me a story that I now realize was well-intentioned, but quite oversimplified. Not totally wrong. My doctor said, "We know why people get like this. Some people just naturally get a chemical imbalance in their heads -- you're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs, it will get your chemical balance back to normal." 

So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat, it's the same thing with different names in different countries. And I felt much better, I got a real boost. But not very long afterwards, this feeling of pain started to come back. So I was given higher and higher doses until, for 13 years, I was taking the maximum possible dose that you're legally allowed to take. And for a lot of those 13 years, and pretty much all the time by the end, I was still in a lot of pain. And I started asking myself, "What's going on here? Because you're doing everything you're told to do by the story that's dominating the culture -- why do you still feel like this?" 

So to get to the bottom of these two mysteries, for a book that I've written I ended up going on a big journey all over the world, I traveled over 40,000 miles. I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and crucially, what solves them, and people who have come through depression and anxiety and out the other side in all sorts of ways. And I learned a huge amount from the amazing people I got to know along the way. 

But I think at the heart of what I learned is, so far, we have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are indeed in our biology. Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny. And there are real brain changes that can happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology. They are factors in the way we live. And once you understand them, it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be offered to people alongside the option of chemical antidepressants. 

For example, if you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed. If, when you go to work, you don't have any control over your job, you've just got to do what you're told, you're more likely to become depressed. If you very rarely get out into the natural world, you're more likely to become depressed. 

And one thing unites a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about. Not all of them, but a lot of them. Everyone here knows you've all got natural physical needs, right? Obviously. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd all be in real trouble, real fast. But at the same time, ever human being has natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people see you and value you. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And this culture we built is good at lots of things. And many things are better than in the past -- I'm glad to be alive today. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs. And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's the key reason why this crisis keeps rising and rising. And I found this really hard to absorb. I really wrestled with the idea of shifting from thinking of my depression as just a problem in my brain, to one with many causes, including many in the way we're living. 

And it only really began to fall into place for me when one day, I went to interview a South African psychiatrist named Dr. Derek Summerfield. He's a great guy. And Dr. Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, had never heard of these drugs, so they were like, what are they? And he explained. And they said to him, "We don't need them, we've already got antidepressants." And he was like, "What do you mean?" He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba, something like that. Instead, they told him a story. 

There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off. So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's super painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb, and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression. The Cambodian doctor said, "This is when we gave him an antidepressant." And Dr. Summerfield said, "What was it?" They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense -- it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life. One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, "You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn't have to go and work in the rice fields." So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone. They said to doctor Summerfield, "So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that's what you mean, right?" 

If you'd been raised to think about depression the way I was, and most of the people here were, that sounds like a bad joke, right? "I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively, based on this individual, unscientific anecdote, is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, based on the best scientific evidence. 

If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the main, a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And it's just as important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying. They did not say to this farmer, "Hey, buddy, you need to pull yourself together. It's your job to figure out and fix this problem on your own." On the contrary, what they said is, "We're here as a group to pull together with you, so together, we can figure out and fix this problem." This is what every depressed person needs, and it's what every depressed person deserves. 

This is why one of the leading doctors at the United Nations, in their official statement for World Health Day, couple of years back in 2017, said we need to talk less about chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live. Drugs give real relief to some people -- they gave relief to me for a while -- but precisely because this problem goes deeper than their biology, the solutions need to go much deeper, too. 

But when I first learned that, I remember thinking, "OK, I could see all the scientific evidence, I read a huge number of studies, I interviewed a huge number of the experts who were explaining this," but I kept thinking, "How can we possibly do that?" The things that are making us depressed are in most cases more complex than what was going on with this Cambodian farmer. Where do we even begin with that insight? 

But then, in the long journey for my book, all over the world, I kept meeting people who were doing exactly that, from Sydney, to San Francisco, to São Paulo. I kept meeting people who were understanding the deeper causes of depression and anxiety and, as groups, fixing them. Obviously, I can't tell you about all the amazing people I got to know and wrote about, or all of the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about, because they won't let me give a 10-hour TED Talk -- you can complain about that to them. 

But I want to focus on two of the causes and two of the solutions that emerge from them, if that's alright. Here's the first. We are the loneliest society in human history. There was a recent study that asked Americans, "Do you feel like you're no longer close to anyone?" And 39 percent of people said that described them. "No longer close to anyone." In the international measurements of loneliness, Britain and the rest of Europe are just behind the US, in case anyone here is feeling smug. 

I spent a lot of time discussing this with the leading expert in the world on loneliness, an incredible man named professor John Cacioppo, who was at Chicago, and I thought a lot about one question his work poses to us. Professor Cacioppo asked, "Why do we exist? Why are we here, why are we alive?" One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time, they weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. This was our superpower as a species -- we band together, just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And it is making us feel awful. But it doesn't have to be this way. 

One of the heroes in my book, and in fact, in my life, is a doctor named Sam Everington. He's a general practitioner in a poor part of East London, where I lived for many years. And Sam was really uncomfortable, because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, he thinks they give some relief to some people. But he could see two things. Firstly, his patients were depressed and anxious a lot of the time for totally understandable reasons, like loneliness. And secondly, although the drugs were giving some relief to some people, for many people, they didn't solve the problem. The underlying problem. One day, Sam decided to pioneer a different approach. A woman came to his center, his medical center, called Lisa Cunningham. I got to know Lisa later. And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years. And when she came to Sam's center, she was told, "Don't worry, we'll carry on giving you these drugs, but we're also going to prescribe something else. We're going to prescribe for you to come here to this center twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how miserable you are, but to figure out something meaningful you can all do together so you won't be lonely and you won't feel like life is pointless." 

The first time this group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety, it was so overwhelming for her. But people rubbed her back, the group started talking, they were like, "What could we do?" These are inner-city, East London people like me, they didn't know anything about gardening. They were like, "Why don't we learn gardening?" There was an area behind the doctors' offices that was just scrubland. "Why don't we make this into a garden?" They started to take books out of the library, started to watch YouTube clips. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful antidepressant. But they started to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe. They started to form a group. They started to care about each other. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them -- "Are you OK?" Help them figure out what was troubling them that day. The way Lisa put it to me, "As the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom." 

This approach is called social prescribing, it's spreading all over Europe. And there's a small, but growing body of evidence suggesting it can produce real and meaningful falls in depression and anxiety. 

And one day, I remember standing in the garden that Lisa and her once-depressed friends had built -- it's a really beautiful garden -- and having this thought, it's very much inspired by a guy called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia. I was thinking, so often when people feel down in this culture, what we say to them -- I'm sure everyone here said it, I have -- we say, "You just need to be you, be yourself." And I've realized, actually, what we should say to people is, "Don't be you. Don't be yourself. Be us, be we. Be part of a group." 

The solution to these problems does not lie in drawing more and more on your resources as an isolated individual -- that's partly what got us in this crisis. It lies on reconnecting with something bigger than you. 

And that really connects to one of the other causes of depression and anxiety that I wanted to talk to you about. So everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. I don't say that with any sense of superiority, I literally came to give this talk from McDonald's. I saw all of you eating that healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way. But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick. For thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money, and status and showing off, you're going to feel like crap. That's not an exact quote from Schopenhauer, but that is the gist of what he said. 

But weirdly, hardy anyone had scientifically investigated this, until a truly extraordinary person I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, and he's been researching this for about 30 years now. And his research suggests several really important things. Firstly, the more you believe you can buy and display your way out of sadness, and into a good life, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious. And secondly, as a society, we have become much more driven by these beliefs. All throughout my lifetime, under the weight of advertising and Instagram and everything like them. 

And as I thought about this, I realized it's like we've all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul. We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places, and just like junk food doesn't meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible, junk values don't meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life. But when I first spent time with professor Kasser and I was learning all this, I felt a really weird mixture of emotions. Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging. I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution. And I could see why that did not work well for me. I also thought, isn't this kind of obvious? Isn't this almost like banal, right? If I said to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got, you're going to think about moments of love, meaning and connection in your life. I think that seems almost like a cliché. But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying, "Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?" And he said, "At some level, we all know these things. But in this culture, we don't live by them." We know them so well they've become clichés, but we don't live by them. I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound, but not live by it? And after a while, professor Kasser said to me, "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life." I had to really think about that. "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life." 

And professor Kasser wanted to figure out if we can disrupt that machine. He's done loads of research into this; I'll tell you about one example, and I really urge everyone here to try this with their friends and family. With a guy called Nathan Dungan, he got a group of teenagers and adults to come together for a series of sessions over a period of time, to meet up. And part of the point of the group was to get people to think about a moment in their life they had actually found meaning and purpose. For different people, it was different things. For some people, it was playing music, writing, helping someone -- I'm sure everyone here can picture something, right? And part of the point of the group was to get people to ask, "OK, how could you dedicate more of your life to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose, and less to, I don't know, buying crap you don't need, putting it on social media and trying to get people to go, 'OMG, so jealous!'" 

And what they found was, just having these meetings, it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism, right? Getting people to have these meetings, articulate these values, determine to act on them and check in with each other, led to a marked shift in people's values. It took them away from this hurricane of depression-generating messages training us to seek happiness in the wrong places, and towards more meaningful and nourishing values that lift us out of depression. 

But with all the solutions that I saw and have written about, and many I can't talk about here, I kept thinking, you know: Why did it take me so long to see these insights? Because when you explain them to people -- some of them are more complicated, but not all -- when you explain this to people, it's not like rocket science, right? At some level, we already know these things. Why do we find it so hard to understand? I think there's many reasons. But I think one reason is that we have to change our understanding of what depression and anxiety actually are. There are very real biological contributions to depression and anxiety. But if we allow the biology to become the whole picture, as I did for so long, as I would argue our culture has done pretty much most of my life, what we're implicitly saying to people is, and this isn't anyone's intention, but what we're implicitly saying to people is, "Your pain doesn't mean anything. It's just a malfunction. It's like a glitch in a computer program, it's just a wiring problem in your head." But I was only able to start changing my life when I realized your depression is not a malfunction. It's a signal. Your depression is a signal. It's telling you something. 

We feel this way for reasons, and they can be hard to see in the throes of depression -- I understand that really well from personal experience. But with the right help, we can understand these problems and we can fix these problems together. But to do that, the very first step is we have to stop insulting these signals by saying they're a sign of weakness, or madness or purely biological, except for a tiny number of people. We need to start listening to these signals, because they're telling us something we really need to hear. It's only when we truly listen to these signals, and we honor these signals and respect these signals, that we're going to begin to see the liberating, nourishing, deeper solutions. The cows that are waiting all around us. 

Thank you. 

The masseuse massaged the center of my neck, "Aiyo miss, how come your muscle here so stiff? Young lady like you shouldn't have such stiff muscles."
"Are you very stressed?"

She isn't the first masseuse to say so.
I had another who pointed out that my stiffness is a ''storage of the negative emotions that I carry''.
She even made me realised that my lymph nodes between my chest and armpits are unnaturally swollen.
"Do you get anxious easily?"

Although usually I rather enjoy this 'me' time silently resting, sometimes I open up to them too.
And they would cheer me up with positive comments.

These sessions are very therapeutic.

Child abuse leaves mysterious physical scars in adulthood: psychiatrist

Taken entirely from http://www.smh.com.au/national/health
The scars of child abuse linger in the bodies of victims long after they've grown up, manifesting in physical symptoms that hint at their trauma, an Australian psychiatrist says.
It could be pelvic pain and stomach aches in a woman who suffered repeated sexual abuse as a young child, or back pain in a man who was beaten by his father, or more-complex conditions such as autoimmune disease, asthma, psoriasis and type 2 diabetes.

"There's something about early childhood trauma that makes you more vulnerable to illness later in life, independent of coping mechanisms like smoking, alcohol or overeating," psychiatrist Dr Michelle Atchison told delegates at the Royal Australian College of Physicians congress in Adelaide this month.
The younger a victim is and the more frequent the abuse, the more likely they are to develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder, Dr Atchison said.

"It's not just the ongoing psychological impact victims have to deal with, there seems to be actual biological changes that occur when you've experienced repeated childhood trauma."

The pain and illness can be real or imagined, where psychological distress presents as physical symptoms, she said.

The psychiatrist spoke of one patient, a woman who had experienced terrible and persistent oral rape as a child.

"She now has major difficulties eating certain types of food, or tolerating eating at all."

Another woman, who was in her 20s, presented repeatedly to her doctor with stomach aches and headaches.

It took 18 months for the woman to reveal she had been raped.

"That was bad enough, but when you bothered to look back to what else had happened in her life, you learn her father was a violent man who spent much of her childhood in prison, and her stepfather sexually abused her from the age of 8 to 13," Dr Atchison said.

"The only sexual relationship she ever had apart from her stepfather was the man who raped her," she said.

The woman's stomach pain and headaches were eventually recognised as somatisation: physical manifestations of her psychological trauma.

"When you put it all together there's no wonder that her abuse resulted in such persistent physical symptoms."

Between 7 and 36 per cent of females have been the victims of serious child abuse, and 3 to 29 per cent of males, international epidemiological studies suggest.

But only 38 per cent of victims report the abuse – either because they're too young, they want to protect the offender or they worry they won't be believed.

Patients whose child abuse manifests as physical symptoms could be suffering from complex PTSD, Dr Atchison said, a contentious diagnosis that is being considered for inclusion in the psychiatrist's bible, the DSM-5.

Like PTSD, patients who are subjected to frightening, often life-threatening events re-experience it through nightmares, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks.

But C-PTSD, often misdiagnosed as borderline personality disorder, is more specific to experiences of serious and repeated trauma when a child is going through emotional and physical development, she said.

Another patient, a 45 year-old man with terrible back pain, found opiates gave him little relief. His doctors had focused on his physical symptoms.

"But when you bothered to talk to him [we discovered] he had a father who would beat him and not his two siblings, for absolutely no reason. He couldn't understand why that was happening all the way through his childhood," Dr Atchison said.

Once the man could talk through his trauma, his treatment team focused on stepping down his drug use and trying to reframe his body as a healthy tool rather than a damaged object, she said.

Although the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood, researchers have suggested that trauma whittles away the body during the critical stage of hormonal, neurological and immune system development.

Repeated trauma is thought to affect the central nervous system, endocrine system, and the body's stress response.

Prolonged cortisol elevation triggered by repeated traumatic events can cause withdrawal and dysphoria that protects a victim during the abuse. But sustained and repeated trauma can lead to hypocortisolism, damaging the immune system, Dr Atchison said.

Another patient, a man in his 60s, had spent a traumatic period of isolation in a full body cast at a hospital in the UK separated from his family and with little human contact when he was six years old.

"He remembers purposefully soiling his cast so he could get his cast changed and actually talk to someone.

"Over the years, he had struggled with poorly controlled type 2 diabetes, hypertension and chronic headaches, that didn't respond to treatment," Dr Atchison said.

The unresponsiveness was a red flag for C-PTSD, she said.

"If doctors suspect a patient has somatisation, they should take a developmental history, and ask with they had experienced abuse and trauma growing up.

"The load of childhood trauma may help explain the chronic pain they find so difficult to manage."

Went swimming.
There were a lot of kids and tweens (between kids n teenagers) in the pool.
I was very amused to see how comfortable they were goofing around in the waters.
Most of them can't swim well but they know how to move around the water well enough to have a good time.
There was no fear at all.
So unlike me.

I remember watching a video on how the little babies learn to swim or at least stay afloat should they wander off to the pool.
The teacher told the parents never to display anxiety when their babies are in the water.
The babies will know if the parents sense danger, hence the babies too will think there is danger and panic.

This goes to show that great things can happen in the absence of fear.

I went swimming yesterday.
I'm still very wobbly but at least I'm moving in the waters.
Suddenly, I recalled the time when I first started testing the waters - literally.

Indeed, I've come far.
I will continue moving forward.

How Emotionally Intelligent People Handle Toxic People

By Dr. Travis Bradberry, taken entirely from www.talentsmart.com

Toxic people defy logic. Some are blissfully unaware of the negative impact that they have on those around them, and others seem to derive satisfaction from creating chaos and pushing other people’s buttons. Either way, they create unnecessary complexity, strife, and worst of all stress.

Studies have long shown that stress can have a lasting, negative impact on the brain. Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of neurons in the hippocampus—an important brain area responsible for reasoning and memory. Weeks of stress cause reversible damage to neuronal dendrites (the small “arms” that brain cells use to communicate with each other), and months of stress can permanently destroy neurons. Stress is a formidable threat to your success—when stress gets out of control, your brain and your performance suffer.

Most sources of stress at work are easy to identify. If your non-profit is working to land a grant that your organization needs to function, you’re bound to feel stress and likely know how to manage it. It’s the unexpected sources of stress that take you by surprise and harm you the most.

Recent research from the Department of Biological and Clinical Psychology at Friedrich Schiller University in Germany found that exposure to stimuli that cause strong negative emotions—the same kind of exposure you get when dealing with toxic people—caused subjects’ brains to have a massive stress response. Whether it’s negativity, cruelty, the victim syndrome, or just plain craziness, toxic people drive your brain into a stressed-out state that should be avoided at all costs.

The ability to manage your emotions and remain calm under pressure has a direct link to your performance. TalentSmart has conducted research with more than a million people, and we’ve found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions in times of stress in order to remain calm and in control. One of their greatest gifts is the ability to neutralize toxic people. Top performers have well-honed coping strategies that they employ to keep toxic people at bay.

While I’ve run across numerous effective strategies that successful people employ when dealing with toxic people, what follows are twelve of the best. To deal with toxic people effectively, you need an approach that enables you, across the board, to control what you can and eliminate what you can’t. The important thing to remember is that you are in control of far more than you realize.

They Set Limits (Especially with Complainers)

Complainers and negative people are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. People often feel pressure to listen to complainers because they don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their negative emotional spiral.

You can avoid this only by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary. Think of it this way: if the complainer were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers. A great way to set limits is to ask complainers how they intend to fix the problem. They will either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive direction.

They Don’t Die in the Fight

Successful people know how important it is to live to fight another day, especially when your foe is a toxic individual. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

They Rise Above

Toxic people drive you crazy because their behavior is so irrational. Make no mistake about it; their behavior truly goes against reason. So why do you allow yourself to respond to them emotionally and get sucked into the mix?

The more irrational and off-base someone is, the easier it should be for you to remove yourself from their traps. Quit trying to beat them at their own game. Distance yourself from them emotionally and approach your interactions like they’re a science project (or you’re their shrink, if you prefer the analogy). You don’t need to respond to the emotional chaos—only the facts.

They Stay Aware of Their Emotions

Maintaining an emotional distance requires awareness. You can’t stop someone from pushing your buttons if you don’t recognize when it’s happening. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in situations where you’ll need to regroup and choose the best way forward. This is fine and you shouldn’t be afraid to buy yourself some time to do so.

Think of it this way—if a mentally unstable person approaches you on the street and tells you he’s John F. Kennedy, you’re unlikely to set him straight. When you find yourself with a coworker who is engaged in similarly derailed thinking, sometimes it’s best to just smile and nod. If you’re going to have to straighten them out, it’s better to give yourself some time to plan the best way to go about it.

They Establish Boundaries

This is the area where most people tend to sell themselves short. They feel like because they work or live with someone, they have no way to control the chaos. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Once you’ve found your way to Rise Above a person, you’ll begin to find their behavior more predictable and easier to understand. This will equip you to think rationally about when and where you have to put up with them and when you don’t. For example, even if you work with someone closely on a project team, that doesn’t mean that you need to have the same level of one-on-one interaction with them that you have with other team members.

You can establish a boundary, but you’ll have to do so consciously and proactively. If you let things happen naturally, you are bound to find yourself constantly embroiled in difficult conversations. If you set boundaries and decide when and where you’ll engage a difficult person, you can control much of the chaos. The only trick is to stick to your guns and keep boundaries in place when the person tries to encroach upon them, which they will.

They Won’t Let Anyone Limit Their Joy

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from the opinions of other people, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something that they’ve done, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or snide remarks take that away from them.

While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what toxic people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within. Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain—you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.

They Don’t Focus on Problems—Only Solutions

Where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions and stress. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and reduces stress.

When it comes to toxic people, fixating on how crazy and difficult they are gives them power over you. Quit thinking about how troubling your difficult person is, and focus instead on how you’re going to go about handling them. This makes you more effective by putting you in control, and it will reduce the amount of stress you experience when interacting with them.

They Don’t Forget

Emotionally intelligent people are quick to forgive, but that doesn’t mean that they forget. Forgiveness requires letting go of what’s happened so that you can move on. It doesn’t mean you’ll give a wrongdoer another chance. Successful people are unwilling to be bogged down unnecessarily by others’ mistakes, so they let them go quickly and are assertive in protecting themselves from future harm.

They Squash Negative Self-Talk

Sometimes you absorb the negativity of other people. There’s nothing wrong with feeling bad about how someone is treating you, but your self-talk (the thoughts you have about your feelings) can either intensify the negativity or help you move past it. Negative self-talk is unrealistic, unnecessary, and self-defeating. It sends you into a downward emotional spiral that is difficult to pull out of. You should avoid negative self-talk at all costs.

They Limit Their Caffeine Intake

Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re surprised in the hallway by an angry coworker.

They Get Some Sleep

I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present.

A good night’s sleep makes you more positive, creative, and proactive in your approach to toxic people, giving you the perspective you need to deal effectively with them.

They Use Their Support System

It’s tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To deal with toxic people, you need to recognize the weaknesses in your approach to them. This means tapping into your support system to gain perspective on a challenging person. Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insight and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as explaining the situation can lead to a new perspective. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can’t because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation.

Bringing It All Together

Before you get this system to work brilliantly, you’re going to have to pass some tests. Most of the time, you will find yourself tested by touchy interactions with problem people. Thankfully, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold and change as you practice new behaviors, even when you fail. Implementing these healthy, stress-relieving techniques for dealing with difficult people will train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects.

I was having a good time doing Zumba at the gym.
It is very rare to have such an exuberant instructor.
I don't think I've had such a good Zumba time since I've left KL.

There was a sexy Salsa move in one of those songs.
The male instructor was playfully enticing one of his male friends to be more bold with it.
The male friend playfully retaliated by kicking.

What a fun scene to watch.

"Your head will go where your eyes are looking,"

"You must do this self-care exercise EVERYDAY. This is important,"

said the chiropractor.

This Saturday will be my last BodyCombat session with Ax.
I've been attending his classes for approximately 18 months (my gym contract duration).
Today, during class, I looked around at my gym acquaintances.
I don't know most of their names, and yet, I said my silent goodbye-s to them.
Gosh, I'm so sentimental !

I'm grateful for....

(1)I was about to leave the gym when suddenly I had the urge to chat with Ivy.
"Maybe I can just let her know about my plans of moving next month. She'd definitely notice my absence in the Zumba classes," I thought.
My relationship with Ivy has always been on Hi-Bye basis.
So, I was rather surprised that she invited me for dinner after I prompted the chat.
At dinner, I learnt that she is still recuperating from her 6-year relationship breakup.
We chatted about positive energy, books, and of course gym.
I have to say, among all my attempts in socialising with gym friends, this has got to be the most successful one.

(2) Sw came over to my department to tell me that she is able to make it for the group dinner next Friday.
"Yipee ! That's great ! That makes everyone then! *I counted with my fingers** So, now there's 6 of us!"

(3) I had a very good dinner with M and Mn. M joked about being able to hear if the Asian spices are ready using the pestle and mortar. Her exaggerated expression made me choked.
Mn shared with us her challenges at workplace and we recounted her 4-year milestones.

(4) I was quite bored at the staff lounge when suddenly 3 male colleagues greeted me from behind. I didn't realise that they'd remember my name and I was very pleasantly surprised.

(5) My cousin X gave me a very nice Esprit watch.

(6)Attended a public forum on suicide prevention. I am in awe how many people are willing to volunteer their time and effort for the betterment of others.

(7)Went for a run with SY. We had breakfast too.

"You can do it. Try." says the Yoga instructor, while the majority of the beginners were allowed to take the easier option.

"Come on, jump!" says the Body Combat instructor, again, while the rest were allowed to take the easier option.

"It's not that you can't. You just don't want to. Lazy maybe?" says LC.

........Oh dear.

I found a mysterious dead (moth? Butterfly?) at the gym studio. How did it get there?

I wanted to jog beside the mirrors in the gym to evaluate my running style.
There were a lot of mirrors.
I could even see the 45 degree back view of myself.
...Gosh, my ass is huge.
...My legs are so fat.
...Eee... this is how I look when I run?

Too many thoughts in my head that the 1km was too exhausting.
I changed my treadmill to another one which has a nice outside view from the building.
I ran 2km without much effort.

See the difference?

I bumped into an old classmate at gym.
It's very cute that we called each other out by our full name.
We were doing Zumba together.
Being in that room with her, reminded me so much of our primary school years together as netball team mates.
She was the captain. MwH had always been the most calm and collected player in the team. She was mature beyond her years.
As we were dancing to the moves, I kept glancing at her to see how she was doing as it was her first time in the class.
Though she can't follow well enough, but boy ! she had the confidence to style her own moves and was visibly having a good workout.
Yup, that's the captain of the team alright.

There are indeed some fundamental things that will never waver.

Below is the excerpt of a post that was written more than a year ago for a yoga blog.
*************
I will never forget my first enlightening Shavasana experience. It was during my first ‘serious’ yoga session. I was terribly unfit back then and had to try real hard to keep up with the other more experienced practitioners. When it was time for Shavasana, I basically ‘collapsed’ on the floor. Suddenly, I felt a tear dropped at the side of my ear, but I wasn’t sobbing.

I realised that I was releasing negative energy; pent-up sorrow which I didn’t even knew I had. I had a mental image of a lost little girl at the bus stop. I saw the situation that I was in back then clearly. I could see what was causing my unhappiness and what I needed to do to move on and be kinder to myself. 
***************
During one of those Shavasana rest last week, I 'saw' CLY's FB messenger icon on 'active' mode.
I was disappointed that that should appear.
Perhaps my subconscious mind was trying to point out to me that my attachment with CLY was merely a gateway illusion that I had created to fill the void in my life?
Anyway,
I had another moment of clarity during my workout this evening.
As I was dancing Zumba halfheartedly, a memory came to mind.
I was playing with my neighbours.
I was very eager to be accepted by the group and tried my hardest to be liked by them.
But there was a brat who punched me in the nose because he lost a match between us.
My tears were streaming down due to the pain and yet, I stayed on because I still wanted to play with them.
But no one was in the mood to play with that brat anymore.
So, I walked back home, in pain and disappointed that playtime ended so soon.
This memory did give me some clarity.

It's time to let my heart return home.

During Zumba, our instructor made us turn around during the dance.
When we turned behind, the gym cleaner, who happened to be walking past the studio, surprised us with his moves.
He was really at it!
"Look at him, he has more energy in his moves than you guys!", said the instructor.
We all had to agree.

Such a pleasant surprise.