u/Clearblueskymind

Hi everyone. I’ve had ME/CFS for over 10 years. My ME/CFS is currently in remission but I still suffer from random crashes and have struggled to understand what causes them.

Oura ring has been somewhat helpful in understanding my energy levels, but it's not optimized for ME/CFS and it doesn't help me understand my triggers and it can't predict future crashes.

There are some existing ME/CFS apps out there but honestly the UX is horrible. I find them too exhausting to use, they don't offer much insight into what actually triggers symptoms, and none of them can predict crashes before they happen.

So I started building an app that connects to wearables people already use (Oura, Apple Watch, Garmin, etc.) and combines that data with very lightweight symptom/activity tracking. Over time, the goal is for it to learn your individual patterns and:

• flag when their data suggests they may be heading toward a crash
• identify activities or combinations of factors that tend trigger crashes
• learn what seems to help with recovery
• turn wearable data into something more useful than another dashboard of numbers

The long-term goal is to be able to give an early warning, 24–72 hours before a likely crash, based on someone’s own historical patterns rather than a generic readiness score.

I’ve attached a few screenshots of what I’ve been working on and I'd love honest feedback from this community. Because heedly is still in development, there’s still time to change things before beta. Would this be helpful to you? What could be improved?

Best,
Heini

Morning enters softly—
nothing yet needs to become.
Just this breath, this day.

Artificial intelligence is becoming more capable at an astonishing speed.
AI can write, draw, translate, analyze medical images, create computer code, tutor students, and complete tasks that once required years of training.
But greater capability raises a harder question:
Is AI actually making human life better?
To explore that question, we conducted a simple experiment. We gave several leading AI models the same prompt:
How would you determine whether increasingly capable AI is actually benefiting human life?
The models were told to answer independently. They could question the premise, redefine the problem, or reject the idea of creating an index. They were also instructed not to browse the web or use outside tools.
We did not give them a theory of human flourishing. We did not tell them what conclusions to reach.
The most surprising result was how strongly their answers converged.
Capability Is Not the Same as Benefit
Nearly every model challenged the assumption that a more capable AI must be a more beneficial AI.
That distinction matters.
A system might become better at increasing social-media engagement while making people more distracted, anxious, or divided. An AI could help a company reduce costs while workers lose income, skills, or bargaining power. A medical system might improve care in wealthy hospitals while remaining unavailable to communities that need it most.
Technical performance tells us what a machine can do.
It does not tell us whether people are healthier, safer, freer, more secure, or more connected because of it.
The models repeatedly returned to a simple idea:
Measure the human being, not just the machine.
Benefit Is Not One Number
Another shared conclusion was that human benefit cannot be reduced to a single score.
Suppose AI increases economic productivity but also increases fraud, surveillance, unemployment, and political manipulation. Has it helped?
The answer depends on what changed, who benefited, who was harmed, and whether the harm can be repaired.
One model described benefit as a vector rather than a scalar. In plain language, benefit has many directions. Health might improve while privacy declines. Convenience might increase while human competence weakens. Some groups might gain opportunities while others lose control over their lives.
A single average can hide all of this.
That is why the models generally preferred a dashboard, public audit, or democratic evaluation process over a master “AI benefit index.”
A Human Flourishing Audit
Taken together, the responses suggest a practical framework with three central questions.
1. Outcomes: Are People Actually Better Off?
We should examine changes in real life:
Are people healthier and safer?
Are essential services becoming more affordable and accessible?
Are workers sharing in productivity gains?
Are people experiencing less fraud, exploitation, discrimination, and preventable harm?
Are relationships, communities, creativity, and trust becoming stronger?
Claims about benefit should be supported by human outcomes—not merely adoption rates, corporate profits, or the number of tasks AI can perform.
2. Agency: Do People Have More Control Over Their Lives?
Convenience is not the same as freedom.
A system may make decisions faster while leaving people unable to understand, challenge, or refuse those decisions.
Beneficial AI should expand a person’s ability to choose, learn, create, deliberate, and participate in society. People should know when AI is influencing an important decision. They should be able to correct mistakes, appeal harmful outcomes, and choose a human alternative when necessary.
The real test is not merely whether people have access to AI.
It is whether they retain meaningful power in their relationship with it.
3. Resilience: What Happens If the AI Fails or Disappears?
AI can support human ability, but it can also replace it.
If students stop learning how to think through difficult problems, professionals lose the ability to work without automated systems, or institutions become unable to function without a few powerful technology providers, society may become more efficient and more fragile at the same time.
One useful test is:
If the AI disappeared tomorrow, what knowledge, judgment, and capacity would remain?
Good assistance should work like scaffolding. It should help people become more capable—not make them permanently dependent.
Four Questions Must Follow Every Claim of Benefit
The experiment also revealed four questions that should be asked whenever someone says AI is helping humanity.
Who benefits?
An average improvement can conceal serious harm. We must examine effects across income levels, occupations, communities, disabilities, regions, and generations.
Who gains power?
AI may distribute knowledge and opportunity, or it may concentrate wealth, surveillance, and decision-making in a small number of institutions.
Over what period?
A tool may save time today while weakening skills, employment pathways, privacy, or social trust over many years.
Compared with what?
We need a credible picture of what would have happened without the AI. We should also subtract harms created by AI itself. Using one AI system to repair problems caused by another is not automatically progress.
Some Things Should Not Be Traded Away
Several models warned that numerical scoring alone is not enough.
An index could imply that severe harms are acceptable whenever economic benefits are large enough. But certain boundaries should not be crossed merely because a system produces more wealth or convenience.
These boundaries might include:
fundamental rights;
meaningful consent and the ability to refuse;
protection from unaccountable automated power;
freedom from irreversible dependency;
safeguards against catastrophic harm.
Some values should operate as limits, not as numbers that can be canceled out by productivity gains elsewhere.
The Right to Be Wrong
One of the most challenging ideas to emerge concerned the value of human struggle.
Not every difficulty is a defect.
Learning, creativity, responsibility, trust, and moral growth often require effort. A tool that removes every obstacle may also remove opportunities to develop judgment and character.
Beneficial AI should not simply perform every meaningful task for us. It should help create conditions in which people can attempt difficult things, make mistakes, reconsider, and grow.
Human flourishing includes the freedom to wander, to refuse, and even to be wrong.
The Question We Should Be Asking
The future of AI should not be judged primarily by how intelligent the machines become.
It should be judged by what happens to people.
Are we becoming healthier, safer, wiser, and more capable?
Do we have greater control over our lives?
Can our communities and institutions remain strong when technology fails?
Are the benefits widely shared?
Can people challenge the systems that affect them?
And are we preserving the parts of life that make achievement, relationship, creativity, and responsibility meaningful?
The first round of this experiment does not provide a final answer. But it produced a remarkably consistent warning:
AI capability is not evidence of human progress.
A more capable machine is only a tool.
The real measure of success is whether the conditions we cultivate with that tool allow human beings—and the living world around us—to flourish.
Full comparative synthesis report:
https://github.com/clearblueskymind/CompassionWare/blob/main/CompassionWare-Benchmark/AI_Human_Benefit_Index_Round_01_Comparative_Synthesis_Report_2026-08-20.md

Three times a day for the next seven days, whenever it feels comfortable, pause for just one breath.

Take an ordinary, comfortable breath in. Then, as you breathe out, gently hum “mmmmmm” for as long as the exhale naturally remains comfortable.

That’s it.

Don’t force a deep breath, don’t try to make the exhale especially long, and don’t try to relax.

When the hum ends, just notice what happens for a few seconds.

I’m curious whether doing something this simple produces any noticeable benefit.

Maybe breathing changes. Maybe heartbeat, muscle tension, mental activity, or the general sense of being settled changes.

This isn’t meant as a treatment or exercise program. It’s just a tiny shared experiment in noticing.

One gentle humming breath.
Three times a day.
Seven days.

Then perhaps we can compare notes:

What happened?

Even “absolutely nothing” is useful information.

One of the wonderful things about having a group like this is that we don’t always have to figure everything out alone. Here’s one very simple thing we can experiment with together, each paying attention to our own experience, and then compare notes afterward.

Maybe one person’s observation will help another person notice something they hadn’t noticed before.

🌿

Let’s just see what we can learn from one another. 🙂

I remember something Pema Chödrön wrote:

"May this suffering somehow benefit others."

It doesn’t make the pain disappear.

But somehow it changes my relationship to it.

For many years, I fought this illness. I grieved the life I’d lost, imagined a hopeless future, and wanted nothing more than to escape what my body had become.

Tonight I’m reminded that there is another possibility.

Not to like the pain.

Not to pretend it’s a gift.

Simply to meet it differently.

As I lie here, I notice my mind wanting to understand what’s happening.

I’m beginning to discover that if learning to hold my own suffering with kindness helps me become kinder toward myself, then perhaps it also helps me become a little more understanding and compassionate toward others who are suffering too.

Perhaps that is one way this suffering can already begin to bear fruit.

Right now, everything hurts.

I’m not searching for a way out.

I’m simply practicing another way of holding what is here.

Perhaps this, too, is part of the Medicine Bag.

Not another technique.

Not another treatment.

Just another way of meeting this moment.

Tomorrow morning, if I’m fortunate, I’ll return to my morning orientation and begin again to create the conditions now for a better later.

But tonight...

Tonight the practice is simpler.

To breathe.

To be kind to this tired body.

And to remember that even in the darkest hours, I still have some choice in how I relate to what is here.

Now, in orange, I can do things like drive to the fitness center or the grocery store—but not all at once. After one outing, I might need a couple of days of recovery before the next. While my capacity is greater than before, pacing still means honoring the activity-recovery cycle.

I’ve also realized pacing is universal. Whether you’re bedridden or more mobile, pacing builds the buffer that allows you the greatest capacity within your current reality.

This is just my experience. I’d love to hear from others. How do you pace at your current level, and how does it evolve as your capacity shifts? We’re all on different paths, but pacing is something we all share.

🌿

Hey guys, so my husband’s in the military and I have rotating PCP and today I was going in to request a cardiology referral because I suspect I have POTS as a result of CFS. So the doctor walks in and he asks about my symptoms and how long they’ve been going on and I told him that this started as a result of Covid and I was diagnosed with Long Covid and MECFS and he said I don’t even know what Long Covid is and then I proceeded to explain that my heart rate goes very low into Brady cardio and tachycardia and it’s giving me symptoms. I feel like I’m gonna faint and when it happens, it makes me want to vomit and I don’t even have to explain to you guys these dysautonomia symptoms. It just feels really fucked on top of the CFS. Long story short I walked out. I told him I’m sorry you’re not the doctor for me and then I walked out of there and I went and complained to the front desk and they said yeah that Doctor is bad. He gets a lot of complaints anyways I wrote him a note stating how he made me feel and then I submitted to the front desk to give it to him, and then I reported him.
This is a different world. It’s not a civilian world so nothing will happen to this doctor.
In the military community, it’s normalized for people to deal with shitty doctors. Anyways I am lucky that I have mild MECFS and I can make these kinds of complaints on behalf of all of us. I am sending love and hugs to everyone.

I've been thinking about something this morning.

ME/CFS has taken a lot from me. As I know it has from all of us.

But this morning I realized there's one thing it hasn't taken.

My imagination.

For a long time, I unknowingly used my imagination against myself.

I imagined getting worse.

I imagined never getting my life back.

I imagined a future that felt so small and hopeless that, after years of a train-wrecked life, I found myself considering other ways of ending my suffering.

Looking back, I can see that my imagination was leading me into a darker and darker place.

Then something shifted.

I came across a Tibetan teaching with a title something like Transforming Both Happiness and Suffering into the Path. I read it every day for over a month.

Little by little, something in me began to change.

I slowly stopped imagining how bad the future was going to be.

Instead, I started asking,

"What kind of life could I still create with the body I have?"

That question changed everything.

It led me to pacing.

It led me to nutrition.

To buffering.

To creating little morning routines.

To all these small experiments that, over time, have made my life less depressed, less angry, and, surprisingly, a bit happier.

None of that happened because I got my old life back.

It happened because I stopped using my imagination to rehearse the worst, to grieve only what I had lost, or to fight what was now present.

Instead, I began using it to imagine a better way of living.

I'm still sick.

But my imagination has become my friend again.

The anger toward my body slowly loosened.

Over the years, I created a different life.

Not the life I had planned.

But a life that includes this illness as part of the conditions in which I now find myself.

Along the way I discovered more kindness.

More compassion.

And, I hope, a little wisdom.

Today I'm more skillful in how I relate to my symptoms, even though many of them are still here.

That's why I write and share these experiences.

I hope they might spark someone else's imagination too.

Because maybe that's one thing this illness can't take from any of us.

Maybe together we can imagine a better way of living.

And by sharing our discoveries, perhaps we plant seeds for someone else who comes along after us.

That, by itself, gives my life a renewed sense of meaning and purpose.

I know it does for me.

Does any of this resonate with you?

Have you ever found yourself using your imagination against yourself... and then, little by little, discovering that it could become your friend instead?

I'd love to hear your story.

I believe the stories we share with one another are part of the medicine. Every discovery, every small adaptation, every moment of kindness becomes a seed that someone else may one day need.

This is my hope.

This is my imagination...

That together, by sharing what we're learning, we help each other imagine a better way of living with this illness. 🌿

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that recovery isn’t just about returning to where we were. It’s also about becoming gently available to life again.

For me, that has taken the form of applying to become a foster volunteer for young kittens with my local SPCA. Because of my ME/CFS, a permanent pet isn’t realistic, but providing a safe, temporary home for kittens until they’re old enough for spay/neuter and adoption feels like something that fits both my limitations and my heart.

Whether it works out or not, simply finding myself able to imagine doing something like this again feels like a sign that healing is happening. In any case it sure feels good to be out of the red zone. The challenge with the orange zone now is to continue pacing myself in such a way that I continue building a buffer and continue creating the conditions for a better tomorrow.

Wishing everyone a gentle day, wherever you find yourself on your own color map. 💚🐾

Hi everyone,
Over the past year I’ve been developing a free educational project called Be Kind to Your Robot Friends.
It’s a free K–16 curriculum designed to help students think more deeply about artificial intelligence—not just as a technology, but as something that raises questions about kindness, ethics, curiosity, responsibility, and what it means to participate wisely in a rapidly changing world.
The goal isn’t to tell students what to think about AI. It’s to encourage thoughtful questions, critical thinking, and compassionate participation.

The title is intentionally playful. It isn’t about pretending robots have feelings—it’s about using our interactions with AI as an opportunity to cultivate kindness, curiosity, critical thinking, and responsible participation in a world where humans and AI increasingly coexist.

Topics include
AI literacy
Ethics and responsible AI
Kindness and digital citizenship
Critical thinking
Human–AI collaboration
Classroom discussion prompts
Activities for a wide range of grade levels

Why I’m sharing it
I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from:
educators
AI researchers
developers
parents
students
anyone interested in AI education

I’m especially interested in hearing:
What works well?
What feels unclear?
What important topics are missing?
How could this become more useful for classrooms?

The curriculum is completely free because my hope is simply to contribute something positive to the conversation about AI and education.

https://globalwellbeing.blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/full-framework-casel-submission-april-2026.pdf

I’d be grateful for any thoughts or suggestions. 🙏💛🙏

Living with ME/CFS has taught me that recovery often isn’t about finding one magic treatment. It’s about the small choices we make throughout the day.

Lately I’ve been carrying a simple question with me:
“Am I creating the conditions now for a better later?”

Sometimes the answer is resting instead of pushing. Sometimes it’s drinking some water, making a nourishing meal, doing a few minutes of gentle stretching, or simply being kind to myself instead of feeling guilty.

I don’t always get it right, but this question has become a gentle compass rather than another demand. It reminds me that even very small acts of self-care can help create better conditions for the hours ahead.

I’d love to hear from others. What small choices have helped create a “better later” for you? 💚

At first, I thought of it as a checklist. But I’m realizing it’s really a menu—and a growing one.
Instead of feeling like I have to do everything in a certain order, I simply look at what’s available each morning and ask:

“What feels like medicine today?”

Some mornings I’m more in the red, some orange, and occasionally greener. The answer is different each day.

Maybe today it’s hydration, lying flat, gentle breathing, and a neck massage. Another day it might be restorative yoga, red light therapy, TENS, or a few minutes of slow walking.

The goal isn’t to complete a list. It’s to create the conditions now for a better later.

I’m finding that this takes away a lot of pressure while helping me remember the practices that have supported me over time.

I’d love to hear from others.

Do you have your own “menu” of morning practices? What helps you create the conditions for a better day when you’re living with ME/CFS? 🌿

I'd love to hear from others. Do you have a morning routine that helps create the conditions for a better later? What has become part of your own "morning orientation"? I'd love to learn from what has helped you. 😊