Making myself ill

[Whattheactual2020]

Please can someone help?
I’ve worked myself up into a frenzy these last couple of weeks, worrying about the future and the great reset etc and what’s actually going on. I’m so worried for my daughters future and can’t stop thinking/worrying about it all 😢

One of the reasons we don't have decent treatments for diseases of the central nervous system like ALS and Alzheimer's is because of how difficult it is to get drugs to cross the blood brain barrier. The idea that some form of magic swab can cross an almost impenetrable biological barrier in the body is laughable. If only it was that easy!

Also OP

Mum had to have a covid test for hospital treatment.

I can confirm her memory is not wiped and she’s still huffing about the shock of second lockdown.

Another positive for people like me - at least we’re not shocked!

Your daughter is born into a far better world than if she had been born 100 years ago OP.

Unless born into a wealthy family she wouuld have had a tough life.
Little say in her future, no access to contraception, unable to buy property or borrow money without her father or husbands permission.
No antibiotics, TB rife, marital assault and rape completely acceptable.
No work after marriage, and even if she did discrimination on sex was the norm. Even if she did get a good job, paid half of what men would earn.
Unable to vote in a general election.
Health and safety poor, food standards low, no access to health care or dental care.
Life expectancy of 45.

I feel my children have been born into a good world- especially my daughter.

many people are now starting to question things-why another lockdown when figures aren’t as high to justify, why are laws being moved in that threaten our freedoms possibly

The lockdown now is to ‘tread water’ so that cases hopefully aren’t too high at Xmas and we can have a vaguely normal Xmas. Most laws taken to the extreme ‘threaten our freedom’ if we think of the worst case scenario. I don’t know much about Walker but he’ll be politicking, shit-stirring and trying to make himself look important, I suspect.

Read about previous pandemics. You can bet there were doom merchants and conspiracy theorists having a field day even then. Now it’s easier for them because they have the internet. Half of them don’t even believe what they’re saying. It’s just a way to make money, reel people in and get a kick out of deceiving the gullible.

Stay off FB, find a better radio station and when you hear something like this, try to think of a more mundane explanation and remember the doom merchants have been wrong in all previous pandemics.

What @speakout said

There have been plenty of completely horrendous things to live through since the begining of time. At least we're not going to be burned as witches. Or all conscripted and sent over the top in WW1. Etc etc . Yes this year is shit, the politicians are useless (as they always were/are/ will be) and in the middle of it it seems hopeless and neverending but it's actually not a bad time to be alive in the grand scheme of history.

The reset stuff is all nonsense - this is an unpleasant pandemic, but no different from other pandemics humanity has survived, other than that this time we have incredible medical science to help us get through it. Yes change is scary, but progress brings things like antibiotics, vaccines, TV, telephones, etc etc. Stop reading stuff on social media, read a nice book and chat with mates.

OP, I mean this kindly. You really don't sound well. Please do go and talk to your GP about your anxiety, I think you need some help.

[quote Whattheactual2020]@Ihaveyourback That’s what I’m scared of, I like life now (well pre March) I don’t want all these weird changes with AI etc, I don’t see why that’s all coming at once? At this moment, all these plans and changes? I’m fact, I want to go back in time to a better time.[/quote]
How far are you prepared to take that? 50 years ago, the things we have now - the internet, social media, mobile phones, microwaves, advances in medical treatments and equipment - would have been science fiction to them. And possibly scared the living daylights out of them. Do you want to do without those things now that you have them?

How about going further back, to when women spent all day on Monday doing the washing, because they (if they were lucky) had only the most basic washing machine, no central heating boiler to provide hot water so done with kettles, and a mangle?

The thing is, where do you draw the line? Technology is moving on and it isn't going to stop, but it's doing so at a faster pace than ever before. So we have to make sure we are ready for it. And that's what governments and others are trying to plan and prepare for.

That’s coming from (I assume!) a sensible Mp, ... not a wacko conspiracy theorist.

The two aren't mutually exclusive!

OP if you are worried about the signs you see in the street - tech surveilling distancing etc I totally understand.

why not join a group like Big Brother Watch to try to inject some balance?

here's the TIME magazine stuff.
time.com/collection/great-reset/

Are there things to worry about? Absolutely.

are there possible benefits? Absolutely.

The thing is to remember how much government can and can't do without consent. There's even been anti lockdown protests in small towns like Stroud today.

@SeaHollyDaiz Exactly. When I think about it, my parents brought us up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over their heads. Their parents had lived through the Second World War. My grandmother had been bombed out of her home and my grandad was nearly killed on D day not to mention what my great grandparents went through in the First World War. We've been lucky to live through so many years of relative peace and prosperity. There will always be good times and bad times but there is no reason to believe the future will be particularly dreadful.

You keep saying you want your old life back - what are the bits in particular that you are missing the most !? Because I found that once the restrictions were loosened up there was heaps of enjoyable things to do over the end of the summer and up until this 2nd lockdown started

I managed to attend comedy shows, met my friends outdoors for picnics and catch ups, started back at my gym classes, went to heaps of exhibitions and museums, pubs, restaurants- even managed a trip back to my family in Ireland for a few weeks as I was able to work remotely - it was the longest visit I’ve managed since moving away 5 years ago!

What I’m saying is - you need to focus on the positives / things you can do when we aren’t in full lockdown - and you need to find something useful it fun to do during lockdown - I’ve got the sewing machine out and am getting back into knitting As well

The other night I made some tie dye baby grows for some friends who are expecting

Husband and I are doing loads of cooking together and learning to make heaps of new meals!

I rarely watch the news, deleted socially media and don’t use you tube - it’s not a reliable source !!

“ went to heaps of exhibitions and museums, pubs, restaurant”

I couldn’t do that because T&T meant the risk of being asked to isolate for 14 days was too high. Everyone who avoids doing stuff for that will have reasons, but I’d be stuck in a tiny flat and need to sort emergency care for mum, so it just wasn’t possible.

@AcornAutumn It wasn’t me who said about the testing thing 🙈with all due respect to that poster, as crazy as people might think I sound at the moment, I don’t believe that.

Thank you all (well, most) for the words of reassurance, we went for a lovely play in the playground near the beach (don’t live in the uk) and I felt a lot better after that.
I’ve been trapped inside due to rain and feeling unwell for a couple of weeks (long covid relapse) could also explain the increased anxiety as it tends to flare up a little when I start to feel again, admittedly this time has been off the scale.

I guess I really miss the ease of life before all this, I got ill with it in March, still suffering at times, I’m a worrier anyway but being far away from my parents wondering if they’re okay, face masks, the suspicion of some people walking around...just the massive fear about everything...it’s messed with my head a little.
During summer was better but my fear goes back again to the scary reports and if it will go back to something resembling old/normal life, that’s my worry.

@Whattheactual2020

I honestly have no idea what’s wrong with me that I’m being so susceptible to this stuff.

OP, there could be a lot of things. Some could be clinical or medical. But also don't underestimate the effects of stress from the past six months. If this is a recent thing, you have to give yourself a bit of a break. Counseling might help too. Certainly, get off social media--it's not useful to you right now, and the algorithms will just give you more and more of what you're already worried about.

Re: cashless society--actually, people had a similar panic about switching to a cash society. They preferred coins that were made out of actual precious metals and they thought relying on useless bits of printed paper was a way to con them out of their money and force them to rely on banks. There was serious pushback about it. Change always seems hard, is I guess what I'm saying.

I did a graduate degree in a neuroscience field. My dissertation was on the neurotransmitter serotonin and its relationship to mood disorders in women, and briefly touched on the blood-brain barrier and the difficulties the blood-brain barrier poses in creating effective drug delivery systems for SSRI-class antidepressant drugs. I'm not an expert at all but I know a reasonable amount about it and certainly far more than the layman.

The blood-brain barrier is an extraordinary thing which protects our brains from pathogens. However it has no relationship to memory (except in advanced Alzheimer's disease) and doesn't provide the brain with any protection against physical damage (like TBI). TBI, as well as aging-related conditions like dementia, are the leading causes of memory loss. There are many forms of memory loss/amnesia, but none are selective in the way this conspiracy theory claims -- there is no physical way of making someone forget "how life was before" short of inducing such severe brain injury as to cause total amnesia! And actually memories from one's earlier life are most deeply rooted in the brain (that's not a scientific way of wording it, but it'll do) and the last memories to be lost. Talk to anyone who has an elderly relative with dementia or Alzheimer's, even in advanced cases where most of their memory is shot, dementia patients can still sometimes have startlingly clear memories of events that happened decades earlier. Even if there was some kind of magic drug or technique to induce memory loss (there isn't, short of just banging someone on the head really hard a hundred times) it would damage your memories of the recent past long before memories of your younger life were affected.

Besides it's simply not physically possible that a nasal swab could have any effect on the blood-brain barrier in any way - that's like trying to carry out an abortion by sticking something inside your big toenail. And damage to the blood-brain barrier wouldn't make you "forget how good life was" - memory loss is associated with physical damage to certain areas of the brain like the hippocampus. Damage to the blood-brain barrier presents with more like Multiple Sclerosis symptoms.

The only way a nasal swab could even hypothetically have any effect on the blood-brain barrier is if it was infected with some kind of prion (super dangerous lethal pathogen). But first that would be insanely, suicidally dangerous to anyone who came near it. Second if you were infected with a prion disease you'd know about it pretty soon since your brain would turn into overcooked couscous. Third recent-ish research conducted on mice genetically engineered to have increased blood-brain barrier permeability suggests prions actually might not enter the brain that way anyway. And fourth the easiest transmission method for prions is through food (BSE was a type of prion disease, for anyone old enough to remember the 'mad cow' scandal) so if the government really wanted to conduct a mass conspiracy to damage the blood-brain barriers of the population it'd be a million times easier to just sneak something into Big Macs than stage an entire global pandemic.

awaits new "COVID swabs are infected with BSE!!!111" conspiracy theory