The human brain is wonderful.

So in short - I don't think I fully believe what they have found. I think the problem is that the extra Serotonin papers over the cracks well enough to work for most people. So, maybe my experience is just due to the fact it made me relax and that was the reason for my issues in the first place? Who know, I'm not a doctor. All I know is that more Serotonin felt better than less at the time.

Can you tell me about the mechanism that helps you?

Another thing she recommended which I just started doing was exercising regularly. I just started lifting a few weeks ago with a friend at the gym, and already its had a huge boost on my confidence levels.

Sorry if you've heard these before, but they do help a ton, trust me.

Think of it as a form of meditation, without the sitting and relaxing part. It is hard to explain because there are many layers to the technique, but keeping different aspects of your life in isolation is another important factor.

Bad day at work? When you walk out of your office, throw it away. Argument with your partner? When you leave your house, don't dwell on it. Stop beating yourself up about things... materialism isn't jut about physical objects, it's also about your environment. If you feel self entitled, you feel like things conspire against you more frequently. Accept that you're no better than anyone else, learn to love the incomprehensible..

There's no magic fix. Accept that. Drugs can mask your symptoms, but they can't fix the underlying problem if your attitude towards life doesn't also change.

This is all pretty vague I know, but without trying to sound like psychobabble - take what you can from my suggestions and reject what you doesn't work. And never let anyone tell you you're cured or still ill... you're cured when you feel cured. You will relapse, but if you fall back to your mecanism to survive all should fall back in to place.

Perceive -> accept -> insight. This is in the context of a reaction to a stimulus.

1. Perceive the feeling and its reaction. First step is actually recognizing that I feel something and that I have a reaction to it. When something makes me anxious, I have a deeply uncomfortable physical reaction that starts in my diaphragm and radiates outwards. It's a cold, empty, hollow feeling tinged with fear. Before I started being aware of my reactions, I'd feel something and it might only be "bad" or "good." Focusing specifically on the reaction has allowed me to identify physical responses to feelings, which has helped me identify the feeling. This was a long and hard (but fulfilling) process for me which by its nature was very fraught - to practice this, I had to feel negative emotions. But with deliberate practice, and deliberate probing, I started to identify patterns and was able to 'map' reactions to the stimuli that produced them.

2. Accept the reaction. I used to spend a lot of energy avoiding the "bad" and increasing the good. An obvious lack of confidence in my own ability to deal with emotions. It's not possible to avoid "bad" emotions; you're going to feel them. Much better to learn how to accept them so they don't kill your entire day. I like the analogy of living in a city where it rains: It's going to rain whether I want it to or not. I can spend all my time indoors not getting wet and also not experiencing anything. I can try to be a badass and walk around without an umbrella and get soaked; now I don't ever have to check the weather and I don't need to invest in rain gear, but whether I get soaked or not is completely at the mercy of some other force. The ideal way is to accept the rain, put on a raincoat, and go about my day. In this case, the rain coat is the ability to accept a reaction to a stimulus, accept that it might have been negative, then let it pass.

3. Insight. For me, this is all about why I felt a certain way, what underlying values were being stressed for me that caused me to react. It's also about preparing myself to feel those emotions again, and trying to react better the next time. I do a lot of visualizing and projecting here. I try to think of someone, be it a real person or a character, who reacts the way I'd like to react. I imagine the stimulus that upset me, then try to picture myself reacting like they would.

I hope this is helpful. It's a high level, general way to change your behavior. I've done a lot of work with therapists and life coaches to suss this out. If you're on the fence at all about getting help, do it. Easily one of the best decisions I've ever made. At the very least, a book called the Power of Habit by Charles Duhig (kind of pop-sciency, but insightful) might be worth reading.

Also, as other people have suggested: Exercise, but the one most people forget: Sleep. When I start prioritizing 7 - 7.5 hours a night (can't really sleep longer) my mood drastically improves. Getting a good night's sleep is probably the biggest bang for your buck, by a long long margin in the mental health department. If you are getting sleep, exercise is next. When I lift weights 3x a week, I have more energy, I sleep better, my mental reflexes are sharp (I don't feel foggy or hazy).

And acceptance: that is crucial as well. This is the fact: "I feel bad. OK, now what was I about to do with my classes today?" (This is a very simplified figure obviously).

I wonder whether serotonin is really the magic trick to increasing moods or whether it's just a stop-gap solution that works well enough for most.

You’ll find a stack of articles on this topic in amongst the others at http://slatestarcodex.com/ Maybe start with http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/ssris-much-more-than-yo... ?

Timex's Basic really only added a few extra commands (on err, stick, delete, free, reset and sound IIRC.) Everything else was identical.

However the demos for the sound chip were great.

It seems to be that the current 'style' for this is to use their name as of now. See the reporting about Chelsea Manning.

VB.Net is a horrible language that lets developers get away with some really awful practices. The fact that the various Options are still present, and not on by default, is a recipe for disaster. That this is legal:

Sub Main dim x as boolean = false ''or true... dim y as integer = 0

select case y case x Console.Write("What does this even equate to???") end select End Sub

end case

or that this is legal:

    Class SomeArgs
        Inherits EventArgs
		
		public Property Message as String
    End Class

    Class HorribleCode
        Public Event Blah(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As Someargs)

        Public Sub Doit()
            RaiseEvent Blah(Me, new SomeArgs with { .Message = "Wow... YUCK!!!!"})
        End Sub
    End Class

    Public WithEvents ThisSucks As HorribleCode

    Public Sub ThisReallyWorks(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As Someargs) Handles ThisSucks.Blah
        System.Console.WriteLine(e.Message)
    End Sub


    Sub Main()
        Dim h As New HorribleCode

        ThisSucks = h

        ThisSucks.Doit()

    End Sub

The second example was mainly because the off shore coders didn't realise AddHandler/RemoveHandler existed... le sigh

In fact I must say one of the things that I appreciate the most about VB, beside case insensitivity is the IDE. I think c# is catching up now but the VB IDE is incredible in term of how much help you get, immediate feedback on what went wrong, rich auto-completion of code.

Are you confusing Mono for Xamarin?

Yes, iOS was a lot of work. Yes, if they want to make it a commercial venture, that is their right, but Miguel has gone on record stating that no one else can do this due to the way the Mono runtime is licensed. They refused to give a static linking exception, as some other libraries do, so basically your only option is their solution or your own written from scratch. This is why the CoreCLR is cool.

Also - did you notice Mac is in there too? If you build a self contained package using Mono (embed the runtime in the App Bundle) they want you to pay for that now. Even though this has about zero to do with static linking.... I had a 10 minute long argument with a Xamerin representative about how retarded this was, as people have been embedding the Mono Runtime in their Mac apps for quite a long time now. But no, apparently we now pay for that.

I was on the Monotouch Beta and it looked so good. It's a pity the initial pricing was so absurd and even all these years later, it is still impossible to build an app for iOS with the Mono framework without a fee on top of the Apple Developer license. This is why I stuck with Objective-C.

Microsoft's CoreCLR is MIT licensed. Nice. :-)

I remember seeing PL/SQL circa Oracle 8i and it looking a lot like ADA.

Not a coincidence. The designers of PL/SQL were largely inspired by Ada's basic syntax and structure.

It's not an acronym, by the way, so no need to all-caps it.