Update: May 21, 2020: Feerless is no longer available. You might want to try other trauma-trigger apps like “Warn Me” or “Soothe” at psafe.

Do you watch Game of Thrones, Sons of Anarchy, Boardwalk Empire, or any show of the kind that involves blood, war, sexual assaults, car crashes, pedestrians being flung across the road by a runaway vehicle ? If you have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and react at all like I do when watching those kinds of scenes – head buried into a pillow, hands shooting up to your face to cover your eyes from the gore and violence, fingers stuffed in your ears to block out the screams and sounds of breaking glass – you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why am I putting myself through this? Why don’t I just stop watching this show?” You keep watching because  you are attached to a character, or you must know what happens to Arya Stark or Jimmy Darmody. But you wish there was some kind of warning signal – a flashing caution light, a wave of a hand, anything – to prepare you for, say, an upcoming decapitation or animal dissection. Well, your wish has come true. The signal you have been hoping for is called Feerless, a Google Chrome extension that relies on crowd-sourced data to identify emotionally difficult-to-watch scenes in television shows and movies on Netflix.

Feerless was developed by Danielle Leong, a sexual assault survivor who suffers from PTSD. While watching Sons of Anarchy, a graphic rape scene, which she was wholly unprepared for, triggered panic attacks and flashbacks for Danielle. As she says in her Feerless demonstration video, “I was completely in misery for three days.” If she had been warned of that upcoming scene, she could have looked away from the screen, shut off the television or computer, or fast-forwarded past the scene. She knew she had to do something, create some kind of trigger warning for others suffering from PTSD. A software engineer, Danielle had the answer, and the technical know-how to develop Feerless.

Users download the app, then, while watching shows or movies, they flag disturbing scenes. Once those scenes are flagged, a blue bubble appears at the bottom right hand side of the screen as a warning. The nice thing about the bubble is that it’s not intrusive; yet it’s present enough to catch one’s attention. And it pops up pre-emptively, several seconds before the troublesome scene appears, allowing viewers time to look away, or not. Because Feerless relies on crowd-sourcing, numbers matter. For the blue bubble to appear, we all need to participate: the more we use the app, and report the scenes that trigger anxiety, and/or sensory-related reminders of our past traumas, the more we all benefit.

“Like many Mexican children, I cleaned the piedritas out of the uncooked beans before they went into the pot – my meal-prep duty to help my overwhelmed mother as she spun around in the kitchen. The process was simple, but time-consuming: a pile of beans was placed at the edge of the table. I’d hold a bowl just below the edge to drop in the clean pieces, and I’d pick off the debris – dried-up seeds, miniature twigs, tiny stones – all the undesirable, inedible stowaways. These would be set aside in a pile of their own, to be tossed at the conclusion of the cleaning.

“I refused to dispense with my pile of detritus too soon since these were the fruits of my labor, the nuggets minded out of the sack. They were much more interesting than the beans which huddled in the bowl, boring as clones.”

Award winning author, poet, fiction writer, memoirist, editor, professor of English, and more, Rigoberto González, who identifies himself as a gay Chicano, delivers that compelling narrative in the opening chapter of his book, autobiography of my hungers. The chapter, “allegory,” could not be better titled, for it’s the peidritas, or stones, that are emblematic of Rigoberto: He sees himself as the “debris,” the “undesirable,” “the dried-up seed.” But he refuses to “dispense” with himself, to give in, to give up. Through breath-halting poetry and affecting prose, each vignette in this slim yet lasting memoir portrays Rigoberto’s tumultuous journey through his childhood and beyond. His literal hunger growing up poor morphs into other kinds of hungers – hunger for love, and a lover, for acceptance and recognition, for an attractive body, and a healthy body, for quiet comfort, and for sustained empathy and understanding. Along the way, though, Rigoberto fills the “uninhabited rooms” of his existence with refreshing self-awareness and enduring vision.

Autobiography of my hungers will leave you sated, yet craving more – more of Rigoberto’s “gallery of tiny gems, colorful and edible as gumdrops.”

On February 2, the groundhog declared, “There is no shadow to be cast. An early spring is in my forecast!” This is good news for homeless people, who endure long, cold days trying to keep warm, crouched in the corner of parking garages, curled up on floors of abandoned houses, or huddled together in makeshift tents. But for more than half of homeless men, they have even more to contend with than weather – traumatic brain injuries. With 600,000 homeless Americans shivering on the streets on any given night, this issue commands attention.

Studies have shown that most of the men surveyed sustained traumatic brain injuries prior to being homeless, many occurring during their early teenage years. The most common cause of traumatic brain injuries was attributed to assaults. A large percentage of homeless people studied grew up in chaotic households and experienced chronic childhood abuse, contributing to poor school performance, substance abuse, violent behavior, and arrests – as many as half of New York City teenagers who have been arrested have sustained traumatic brain injuries in the past.

What’s more disturbing is that many individuals reported that the harm they suffered as children, including the neurological outcomes, went untreated because their abusers attempted to shield their injuries from others. The statistics, however, do reveal the magnitude of the impact trauma has on the lives of individuals who have sustained such injuries.

The upside of all this research is the new knowledge we have gained, the knowledge that helps us assist the 600,000 homeless surviving on the streets – the confused, scared, lonely and lost individuals who are as human as the rest of us.

Do you ever berate yourself for failing, tell yourself that you should quite while you’re ahead? Has your writing been rejected by literary journals, magazines, and newspapers time and again ? If you’re a writer, you know what I’m talking about. Yes, we get rejected, a lot. Failure is inevitable. It’s inevitable for painters, dancers, musicians, for all creators. Writer, author, and inspirational speaker, Elizabeth Gilbert, failed – for six years she “failed at getting published.” She received rejection letters in the mail, every day.

Are you wondering where I’m going with this failure thread? Keep reading. As Elizabeth says in her Ted Talk, “Success, failure, and the drive to keep creating,” failure breeds success.”

How so? Elizabeth’s story is the answer:

Nearly a decade ago, when readers from all over devoured her memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, she became an instant success. But with that success, she says, came the hard part: “How in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody.”

You may not be a writer, but does this sentiment sound familiar? You’ve succeeded at something: maybe a record label has finally recognized your music. Or you’ve been accepted into an artist colony after applying countless times. Now that you’ve made it, you ask yourself, What’s next? This isn’t enough. I need to do more. I need to keep pleasing my partner, my parents, my grandparents, my children, my pet goldfish.

So, even if we succeeded, we feel like we’ve failed, because we burden ourselves with having to do better and better, all the time, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But if we believe we can’t keep succeeding, we may seriously consider giving up, which is what Elizabeth considered after publishing her memoir. It’s all in the mind, really. That we can all agree upon, right? We see things in black and white, good or bad. Success equals good; failure equals bad. (Whoever came up with “good” and “bad” should be … Well, I’ll leave it at that.) Of course, the unending praise bestowed on us when we succeed boosts our egos, until we realize that we need to do more, do better, that this, whatever it is, is not enough. Similarly, the lack of recognition when we fail buries our confidence. Either way, when it comes to good versus bad, Elizabeth cautions us: “There’s a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche.”

To stop ourselves from second-guessing ourselves, we need to find a way to forge ahead, to fire-up our inspiration. For Elizabeth, she found that inspiration from past life lessons: the constant rejections she received in the mail each day. Rather than quitting though, she found her way back: “I’m going home,” she says. Not home in the literal sense; home in the artistic sense. Writing was, is, her home. Because writing is what she loves, she returns to it again and again. She went back home after the book she wrote in follow-up to Eat, Pray, Love failed. And she keeps going home.

But how do we find our way back home? Here’s a hint from Elizabeth: “Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself.”

Are you concerned about how much you’re spending on health care? Are you wondering if the blood test, X-ray, or MRI your doctor recommends is absolutely necessary? Maybe you don’t make it a habit to discuss the pros and cons of testing with your doctor because, after all, he or she is your doctor and always chooses wisely what is best for you, right? I do trust my own primary doctor’s recommendations, because she listens to me, closely. And she carefully considers whether or not a test is needed, then explains to me the reasons for her recommendation. Here’s the rub: We have a conversation about evidence-based practices before making any final decisions. In other words, she engages with me, as a human being – someone with worries, fears, doubts, and needs. So why am I sharing this with you? Last fall my husband went to his primary doctor for a physical exam. A month later we received a bill from the hospital she is affiliated with; the charges for routine blood work were far greater than I had expected. Though we have health insurance, like most people, we must first fulfill a yearly deductible, which doesn’t include copays and coinsurance. When I asked a representative from the health insurance company how they arrived at the number my husband and I were responsible to pay, and who decides on the formula, he answered with what amounted to the following: hospital charge – some random number chosen by a faceless person = contracted rate – deductible – ten percent co-insurance. I had no choice but to reach for the Advil in the kitchen cabinet nearby.

There’s more. Health insurance company administrators treat people not as human beings but as fixed codes that should fit snuggly into pre-printed, micro-millimeter boxes. So, since my husband’s doctor advised him to take Vitamin D supplements, because his lab work showed it to be low, we received another bill charging us a nominal fee for what our health insurance called a “consult.” (That single blood test alone cost us a chunk of $125.29.) It didn’t matter that the “consult” took place during his physical – it didn’t fit into the insurance company’s pre-fab, coded square for “preventative care.” But isn’t that why we have physicals, not only to be examined, but also to discuss what measures we can take to improve our overall health? That sounds a lot like the dictionary definition of “preventative”: the branch of medicine concerned with prolonging life and preventing disease.” If my husband’s doctor didn’t speak with him about his Vitamin D level, how else would he have known that he needed supplements? Health care has become much like an a la carte menu.

Here’s the good news: A friend and author at Strategy Health Care, Dr. Gene Lindsey, led me to a handy resource when I reached out to him with my concern about health care costs. That resource is Choosing Wisely. Launched, in 2012 by Advancing Medical Professionalism to Improve Health Care (ABIM), the goal of Choosing Wisely is to encourage dialogue between providers and patients in an effort to prevent unnecessary medical tests, treatments, and procedures. A practitioner of cardiology for nearly four decades, and President and CEO Emeritus of Atrius Health and Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, I trusted Dr. Lindsey’s recommendation, as much as I trust my own primary doctor.

Choosing Wisely offers lists of health-related topics created by medical specialty societies, and represents evidence-based recommendations providers and patients should discuss. Topics range from plantar fasciitis to cancer drugs. Each topic includes information about when tests and procedures are deemed appropriate. The recommendations should not be relied upon to decide health care coverage, but to provoke conversation about whether or not particular treatments are necessary.

While reading through the list on Vitamin D testing and supplementation, this is what I learned: Testing doesn’t improve treatment. Most of us have low Vitamin D levels, but not “seriously low levels.” It’s recommended that we get a little more sun, eat foods rich in Vitamin D, and if we don’t get a lot of sun or eat enough D-rich foods, we should talk to our doctor about supplements. According to Choosing Wisely, “Getting tests that you don’t need often leads to treatments you don’t need, or treatments that can even be harmful. For example, if you take too much vitamin D, it can damage your kidneys and other organs.” And “doctors are ordering tests six times as often as in 2008.” Of course, there are conditions that warrant Vitamin D supplementation, like osteoporosis, and any disease that damages the body’s ability to absorb the vitamin.

Take a look at Choosing Wisely, and look out for yourself, your body, your health, because it’s you that matters.