Think back to your childhood and try to recall some of the strongest memories.....
Think back to your childhood and try to recall some of the strongest memories. You’ll notice almost all of them will be of an emotional nature: perhaps a particularly frightening experience of being separated from your parents, or almost being hit by a car.
Also notice, however, that your recall of these detailed memories is no longer accompanied by the same degree of emotion that was present at the time. They are no longer emotional memories. Instead, they are memories of an emotional event, but lack the original emotional charge.
It is not, therefore, time that heals all wounds, but instead time spent in dream sleep that provides emotional convalescence. To sleep, perchance to heal. Dreaming is emotional first aid.
Sleep, and specifically Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, is needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.
We require REM sleep with a very specific kind of dreaming: which expressly involves dreaming about the emotional themes and sentiments of the difficulties we experience when we are awake.
Facial expressions represent one of the most important signals in our environment. They communicate intent of an individual and influence our behaviour in return.
There are regions of your brain whose job it is to read and decode the value and meaning of emotional signals, especially faces. And it is that very same essential network of brain regions that REM sleep recalibrates at night.
The internet, almost everyone agrees, can be a terrible place. You can’t move for trolls - malicious actors out to ruin your day with an argumentative tweet or a Facebook post.
The simple answer is to keep shtum. Don’t feed the trolls as there’s no benefit to it. You’re not going to be able to change anybody’s mind.
Trolling is no longer limited to bored individuals deciding to ruin someone’s day: misstep and you can come under fire from the combined forces of an entire country.
Sea lioning is the process of killing with dogged kindness and manufactured ignorance by asking questions, then turning on the victim in an instant.
Rather than ignoring the trolls outright or devoting precious time to discussing the individual merits and drawbacks of a point with them, courteously directing them to a third-party resource - a couple of links to news stories about the matter at hand - can help nullify their attempts to derail your day.
The technique, using the sharp pinprick of sarcasm to deflate equally over-the-top arguments, is a method as old as time: using humour to pop the pomposity of a manufactured argument or to counteract malicious actors has been going on since the Greek comedies.
Compiled by: Usama Rasheed
