Trying Desperately To Quit Smoking

I have long been a believer in a healthy body, healthy mind. Although I know that this is not always true, I have come to the conclusion, and not recently, that I need to quit smoking for my overall health--mental and physical.

It was only Wednesday of last week that I quit....until today when I took up smoking again. During the two and a half days that I was smoke-free, I found that I needed less of my neuroleptic medication, as well as functioned psychologically at my peak.

I have a demanding job with plenty of stressors and when some of them get too much, I turn to smoking cigarettes. Research shows that people with mental illness smoke cigarettes much much more than the average population and there is something to it. The smoking seems to TEMPORARILY improve cognitive functioning. However, that is not to say that a person that has mental illness that smokes should not quit immediately.

As I said, my psychological functioning as a WHOLE improved greatly. In fact, I felt as if I was released from a cloud of smoke!

Party Party Party

I just attended two parties with my two-and-a-half year old son yesterday. I went alone with him so for someone that deals with Schizophrenia on a daily basis, it was a bit of a stretch of my abilities. However, I ended up having fun at the parties and then getting a little bit paranoid on the ride home. Thankfully, my son slept on the ride home and I was able to take some medicine and get better as I drove back from Cherry Hill to Hackettstown, NJ.

All is well that ends well....that's what they say, anyway!

Black holes....a lot like a mental illness episode

In the universe, there are these things called black holes. They are at huge centers of the galaxies and have incredible gravitational force--it's part of their nature. There is something around the perimeter of the black hole called the event horizon--but I call it the point of no return. When something ventures too close to the "point of no return" around the black hole, it gets sucked into the gravitational center of the black hole and then something remarkable happens. All the "space" between the atoms that is there normally, disappears and the unlucky heavenly body get squished to 1/1,000,000,000 of it's original size at the center of the black hole.

To illustrate this, if something the size of the Earth crossed the "point of no return" in a black hole, it would be "squished" to approximately the size of a NBA sized basketball. However, no mass would be lost, and the gravity exerted by the "Earthy basketball" would be the same, but we would certainly be finished!

Thankfully, the chances of this actually happening are infintesimily small, so we do not need to worry about crossing the "point of no return" anytime soon!