Someone wants to thank you!

Author

Caimile Loy
September 21, 2024

We want to thank you for reading our emails. Having your support means a lot to us, truly.

When’s the last time you thanked a friend, family member, classmate, or professor? Send gratitude to someone you know :)

In today’s email…

  • 🙋🏻‍♀️ Raise your hand if you talk out loud to yourself. Don’t worry, this is a good thing. Yapping out loud when you’re the only one in the room has some sizable mental health benefits.

  • 💄 Very Demure, Very Mindful: From viral catchphrase to legally-recognized slogan—the race is on to see who will trademark it first.

  • 📸 Snapshot of this week’s clippings: Dress up as a Chipotle burrito this Halloween. Schools are rethinking homework policies and their impact on students’ mental health. Arizona State just released a new course—for parents.

BE WELL

Here’s why you should yap out loud to yourself

This is going to sound ridiculous, but bear with me. Last week, I recorded a 55-minute voice memo (alone, in my room) to send to a friend. In the recording, I talked about life, lessons, my convictions about the world, etc… It was an hour long, so I’m sure I talked about anything and everything. When I went to send it, I got a message saying that the file was too large to send. No biggie. But what happened next made me very, very sad.

After I closed out of that message, the entire voice memo was automatically deleted. (Thanks, Apple).

Regardless of whether or not I could actually send it to anyone, I had decided that I wanted to save the voice memo to my phone anyway as something to reflect back on later in life. I had spent nearly an hour recording a session of introspection, and in a flash the entire recording disappeared, as if it had never existed in the first place.

What a complete waste of time, right?

Maybe.

…Or, maybe not.

I was reminded of a talk that I attended during my freshman year of college by a professor whose main hobby was playing guitar.

He told us about a personal project he took on over the summer where, after coming home from work, he would pick up his guitar, start recording, improvise an entire song for an extended period of time, stop the recording, and then delete it. He did this every single day for months.

The point of telling us this story was so that the professor could talk to us about our society’s perception of productivity and how we hold oddly specific standards to measure good and bad uses of our time. Whenever we do something, the world expects—in some way, shape, or form—a deliverable to be the focal point of our activities. There needs to be something to indicate that progress has been made.

The broad, social consensus believes that without a physical representation of our work that can be shared with others, our activities remain meaningless.

The professor giving the talk had produced hours upon hours of recorded music, with some recordings possibly capturing award-winning melodies or tunes that thousands of listeners would have connected with (we’ll never know). But every .mp4 file that professor had to show for his creativity and musical talent was lost to a bunch of 1s and 0s—on purpose.

And yet, the professor didn’t mind, because he wasn’t making music for anyone but himself, and that’s all that mattered.

When my voice memo was automatically deleted, annoyance wasn’t the only thing I felt. I also felt… fulfilled.

Sure, I recorded it with the intention of sending it to a friend. But after yapping out loud to myself about everything in life that was weighing me down in that moment, I came to realize that just verbalizing my thoughts in a way that was meant to benefit no one else but myself was incredibly cathartic and relaxing.

I’d also like to add that talking out loud to yourself is a completely normal behavior that many people partake in, and experts have agreed that there are numerous health benefits to doing it.

A lot of times, in order to “get something off our chest” and relieve ourselves of whatever stress we may be feeling, I think we believe that someone else has to hear what we say. But perhaps they don’t.

When we talk out loud to a room full of no one but ourselves, we’re able to cognitively work through our emotions at our own pace and level of comfortability, in addition to receiving a handful of other benefits:

  • Increased mindfulness

  • Reduced anxiety and stress

  • Self-regulation of thoughts and emotions

  • Meta awareness—we can ponder our own thought processes

  • Enhanced problem-solving and creativity—forced to verbalize our thoughts and life experiences on our own

  • Exercise our critical thinking skills

So, maybe what we crave sometimes isn’t a listening ear but rather language that can reify and bring into existence the innermost thoughts and feelings that we’re having. And that language does not, necessarily, have to be communicated to other people—perhaps it can just be something that we produce only for ourselves.

CHECK THIS OUT

Race to trademark: ‘Very Demure, Very Mindful’ becomes hot property

Nope, this phrase is not going anywhere: ‘Very Demure, Very Mindful’ might be here to stay. At least, the handful of people trying to trademark it hope to make sure it does.

Jools Lebron, the TikTok creator responsible for making the phrase go viral, filed to trademark the phrase on August 29, 2024 with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. As it turns out, however, Lebron was a little late to the punch—three others, who seemingly have little to no connection to the phrase, filed to trademark it before she did.

Since the phrase was not initially tied to a good or service when it went viral, the water for trademarking it is a little murky.

According to Axios, Lebron intends to trademark the phrase for “promoting the goods and services of others” as they relate to the hair and beauty industries. It’s possible that the other individuals who filed to trademark the phrase did so as “bad-faith filings,” which can be punishable through fines or, in the most extreme cases of fraud, even imprisonment.

“Very demure, very mindful” is only one of many viral catchphrases and terms, however, that people have sought to capitalize on.

🌯 Thought about your Halloween costume yet? Check out Chipotle’s bodysuit meme products. For $39.99, you could dress up as a Chipotle Burrito, Fork, Napkin, Water Cup, or To-Go Bag.

📝 My dog ate my homework: Since what feels like the beginning of time, people have debated the usefulness of homework. Now, more than ever, schools are pondering how homework impacts mental health.

💭 Not to scare you, but… This is a really thoughtful article about how to figure out what you want to do in life. It’s a little entrepreneurial, but it can be applied to all sorts of situations and preferences.

🗣️ Shift your mindset: Here’s some motivation to get you going today.

🪹 Tell your parents: Arizona State University just released a new course… but it isn’t for students. The school wants to support parents who are transitioning to becoming empty-nesters.

‘SUP

PSA: When cooking mac and cheese, use a colander. I accidentally poured boiling water on my hand last weekend and now the back of it looks like charred snake’s skin.