Matty's weblog of doom

Today’s lecture was on psychopharmacology.

I love psychopharmacology.

I hate lectures though. So while the lecturer was going on, I was busy talking to someone on facebook and then the lecturer starts going on about neurotransmitters.

I love neurotransmitters. They do lots of stuff. Control your mood, how motivated you are, etc. Most recreational drugs also work with neurotransmitters, like MDMA works on serotonin and speed words on dopamine. That’s a really basic description, but I don’t care and you can figure out the rest yourself.

So around a year ago I had discovered that you could get 5-HTP pretty easily off eBay. For less than 20$ a bottle, you could have a pill that makes you happy when you feel depressed. Oh BTW, 5-HTP is a precursor for serotonin.

Then today in class they were talking about dopamine.

This is why I love the internet – I fired up wikipedia, loaded up the page for dopamine and read all the information. Looked at the bottom and saw that supplements were available for sale (I remember back in the day, when I was really into all this kinda stuff, you couldn’t even get 5-HTP in shops. Now, with the internet, you could get anything). Went to eBay, searched L-dopa, found a decent price and now I have a sachet of pure l-dopa heading my way*.

All this during a lecture? Excellent.

-Matt

*I wouldn’t suggest anyone do this unless they knew what they were doing. L-dopa can cause a million bad side effects if you don’t dose it correctly and you could probably die from it. Or become psychotic. Don’t do things just ’cause I do them because I know I’m smarter and more capable than you are. Kthxdisclaimer.

I started from zero once, I can do it again.

When the male brain is under high emotional stress, it’s actually harder for the guy to talk and express how he’s thinking. I learnt this in counselling school. The reason for this escapes me right now, but from what I remember, it’s because the male brain has less connective tissue between the brain (smaller corpus collosum) and so when there’s an overload of emotion, information and communication between the brain is restricted.

Language is stored in the left half of the brain, and emotion is generally in the right half. So you may feel all the emotion in the right half but the brain can’t communicate with itself so it’s difficult for the guy to put his emotions into words.

So if you were wondering why it’s hard for a guy to express himself when he’s feeling a lot of emotions, this is why.

kthxbi.

Also known as, Matty’s essay writing method.

First, you need a plan. Basically, before I wrote the essay I sat down and decided what I was going to write about first. Sounds simple, but I used to just start writing and then formulate a plan afterwards and there was a lot of clutter involved in that. I wrote the plan on paper and stuck it on the wall next to my computer for quick reference and editing.

Basically it says:

Intro
- notes on what to write in intro i.e. essay structure
- hypothesis

Part 1
- what the main argument is here

Part 2
- Main argument

Part 3
- main argument

Overall
- rehash hypothesis and intro

Then I wrote out word count estimates for each section. This makes it so I’m basically doing 5 mini essays instead of one big essay, which makes it a lot easier mentally.

Intro – 500
Part 1 – 700
Part 2 – 700
Part 3 – 700
Conclusion – 400
= 3000 words

A 700 word essay? I could do that easily in an hour or two.

Divide and conquer.

- Matt

Counselling skills in the club. Definitely not to be mixed with alcohol.

Here I am getting all me over nothing, and then I decide to go out to clear my head. Talk to randoms, my favourite people. Then I start talking to this guy, and this really changed my perspective.

This guy:

- Got hit by a car
- Lost his fiance because she cheated on him with his best friend and dumped him
- Lost his best friend in a car accident
- Lost two other friends in another car accident

All in the previous few weeks. Oh and his dad beat him too.

And what did he have to say to it?

Paraphrased: “I could sit around and be depressed about it all and cry I guess. But, you know what? You never know what’s going to happen. You need to live life to the full.”

Enjoy the moment, be happy for what you’ve got.

Whenever things change for me, I seem to have massive frame snapbacks. This week’s was a huge snapback, reverting my mindset back to everything that happened almost 2 or 3 years ago. You know what? I’m a totally different person now, in a totally different situation and this is definitely a much better one. Frame snapbacks are for losers.

So yeah, inspired me to write something. Which is good.

- Matt

PS. I can totally rock my competency interview for counselling after this.