400mg theanine and/or 2g Magtein. Melatonin didn’t work for me and I dislike the effect of cannabis and its derivatives on my body.

Icelandic chic.

“I don’t feel that I need to explain my art to you, Warren.”

OP said wrong answers only.

I’m pushing back on the notion that telling someone “don’t stress” is in any way helpful.

They would already be not stressed if an obstacle didn’t come up. Telling them to not stress is akin to telling them to not be depressed or to just chill out. There’s no pathway to how. There’s no meeting someone where they’re at. There’s just a well-meaning person lacking emotional tooling to support another.

There are lots of ways to actually provide the support. There are lots of ways for a person to reset their nervous system. “Don’t stress” isn’t either.

“Don’t stress” is terrible advice to someone who has no experience of control over what upsets them, which seems to be an issue OP deals with.

You’re a human being in the body of a human animal. While you can try to use your thoughts to fix/rationalize/justify your feelings, I suspect you’ve already made those attempts with limited success.

OP, here are 2 implementable suggestions:

• DO stress. If you’re already in that state, trying to force yourself to feel another way will make it worse. Let yourself feel what you feel. Have the experience of allowing the sensations in your body to be what they are. If the sensations involve pressure, heat, discomfort, tension, etc, have them. If you find yourself having new sensations in reaction to the feelings you experience, have those new ones too. This kind of somatic practice can help you discover a new way of experiencing life that your mind doesn’t dominate.

• Pick a breathing exercise and do it for 2 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever works. Doesn’t matter which one, as long as it doesn’t have an end goal. Breathwork can help you discover the different modes of being in your experience.

Look at what Hamas could extort from the Israeli government with one hostage (see: Gilad Shalit).

At a certain point, the Netanyahu administration needs to sit down with its military apparatus and get answers to hard questions like:

• how many are captured?
• where are they?
• any VIPs?
• what will it cost us to get them?
  • In the short term, tactically?
  • in the medium term, with respect to our ability to disincentive future attempts to kill the people we are ostensibly accountable to protect?
  • in the long term, with respect to our strategic geopolitical position projecting our power in the region?
• what’s the accuracy of our intelligence feeding all of the above in our decision-making nexus?

It’s not hard to imagine a calculated decision around a table where the outcome favors eradicating Hamas over recovering hostages.

And with respect to

But are Hamas going to be blamed for those deaths? When in reality the hostages were killed due to an aerial bombardment coming from Israel?

It seems like academic distinction at this point. There is casus belli for Israel to attack Hamas. Now there’s a war. War sucks for many, many, many reasons, among which is collateral civilian damage. Made even worse when the Israeli military fights against irregular forces who have deliberately embedded themselves into and under high-density vulnerable targets amongst their own population. Do you blame the missile striking its target? The institution with justification to launch them? The deliberate design decision for the Hamas government to bunker up their terrorist leaders underneath civilian hospitals?

What are you trying to sort out for yourself by deciding how to mete out the blame?

War is war. Innocent people will die. So it goes. “Poo-tee-weet,” as Vonnegut wrote about the whole disgusting affair.

Eliminate Hamas > free hostages