Category: Makes You Think

This category covers things that relate probably require some reflection and some time to allow your brain to process more completely. It will be the largest category because the aim of this site is to get people to shift their thinking in some way and to create a new “normal” state. It is safe to say that any post that is included in this category will probably present you with a new piece of information, a new way of looking at something, or a different take on what is already considered common sense or common knowledge.

Trying Something New

Doing something new is one of the more challenging things that we do as we get older. It seems that our natural tendency to try and make things as unchanging as possible really hurts our motivation to try new things.

But isn’t this tendency just like most of our tendencies in that it exist only because we allow it to exist? There are people who have learned to do new things all the time so our initial fear is not something that cannot be overcome by direct effort to change.

Looking back, if you do find yourself rather unmotivated to try new things, isn’t it also a fact that you were apprehensive to try the thing you most like doing now? For me it is mountain bike riding and I thought about if for a while before I actually started to ride; my friend Chris hounded me for more than a year to buy a bike from him before I relented. Now I can’t imagine my life without it.

The strangest thing about trying mountain biking is where I am now. My life is completely different as a result of my decision to improve my health and fitness, a decision that was the outcome of me loving bike riding. I haven’t taken to anything else in my life like I have taken to cycling. While it is possible that the athlete in me would have come out some other way, I have not yet found or tried whatever activity that is. Regardless of its eventuality, most of my friends are different, most of my activities are different and most of my time is spend doing stuff that I didn’t do before.

It isn’t worth considering where my life would be now if I had not tried, but it’s safe to assume that it would be different.

At least once every couple of days you should try something new. The LuLuLemon people recommend once a day but I’m going to suggest every couple of days. These things really don’t have to matter all that much but they can be big things if you like. Try tanning, a different type of coffee, make a new meal, talk to someone you want to talk to, eat at a new restaurant, try a different type of squat, etc…. The goal of these small things is to keep your brain used to trying new things. You are facing your fear head on and very frequently.

At least once a week you should do something that you don’t really want to do. For many people this should be to complain about poor service or you not getting what you were entitled to. Don’t be a jerk about it, but stand up for yourself. It’s another conflict situation that many tend to avoid because they don’t like the idea of arguing with someone. It’s about tackling something that you know will make your life better once you complete it.

At least once a month you should try something very new. These things should be a little more significant than anything up until now and they should involve some sort of risk, preferably the risk of embarrassment or making a fool of yourself. Karaoke is a good example here, as would be entering an art show. You could take a pottery class, go to bingo or volunteer at the food bank. The thing is to get well outside your normal way of acting and your comfort zone. The goal here is to increase the range of things you feel okay doing. Again, you’re working to face the fear as you increase your exposure to different things.

At least twice a year you should try something that you’ve always been afraid of doing.

At least once a year you should make a list of things that you want to do before you die and make sure the list is disappearing and growing at the same time.

No matter what, your life should be in constant flux trying new things and exposing yourself to as much as you can. I believe this is the only way you are going to be able to determine whenever you have found true happiness and moved towards completion.

Getting Better Result By Giving Better Feedback

I am a compliance practitioner so it is important for me to be able to get people to do the things I ask them to do. This is not evil because I’m trying to get them to do the things they want to do but may lack the belief that they can do. The key things in achieving these results is to provide good feedback. Here are the 5 key elements to offering effective feedback. For clarity’s sake the two players in the feedback session are the giver and the target.

1) Know your goal and clearly define your expectations. Make sure you know how to clearly explain what you are looking for and be prepared to explain how the new behaviour differs from the old behavior, why it is more appropriate and and how it fits into the process.

When I’m instructing a cycling class, my primary goal is to get the target to work slightly harder or modify their position on the bike. If we use hip position on the saddle as an example, I’ll say “move your butt to the back of the seat to make it easier for the big leg muscles to work”. It isn’t much but I know that the legs are able to drive more power to the peddles when the hips are in the right position so I throw it out there. Anyone who grabs onto the advice will improve more quickly.

2) When it is possible, tell the target how their actions made you feel. We are an emotional species so most of us tend to feel stuff; always assume the target deals with emotions until you learn otherwise. If we realize that the tone of our voice make someone feel like we are angry, we’re able to draw the connection between the stimulus and the response.

Compare the following two statements, “why are you angry?” and “when you use that tone, it makes me feel like you are angry.” Which do you think will facilitate the quickest change?

Letting the target know how you feel also transfers a lot of the responsibility of the outcome over to you. This will help to keep them open to the suggested changes while giving them valuable information to help modify their behaviour.

3) Get them to project themselves into the future to try and feel what it will be like when they are more successful at the task. This will help to motivate the target to adopt the suggested chances because they will pair the changes to the desired outcome.

To go back to the hips on the saddle example, I’ll say something like “strong leg muscles make those hills easier this season” or “work hard like the quality of your life depends on it”. The goal is to try and help them see the value tomorrow of working hard today. When it’s done effectively, facilitating change is a piece of cake.

4) Let go of judgement. Always assume that the target is acting in their best interest and, when their behaviour goes against their best interests, assume it is because the target doesn’t have enough information to make the right decision. The role of the giver is to provide the target with the information they are lacking.

You can say things like:
Did you know that…, here is something that may help…, here is another option for that…, I have found that doing…, that’s the way I used to do it until…,

5) Be honest but caring. People know a line of BS when they hear it and will resent you for it. You need to be truthful with them but you need to be caring about it because the target may take the feedback as a statement that their actions were wrong. If this happens, it can start an unconscious defense reaction that will cause the target to close up. You will minimize the risk of this by telling them how their actions made you feel.

33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity X 2

This week Steve Pavlina posted 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity and 33 Rules to Boost Your Productivity – Volume 2 and both are exceptional. 66 tips to help you get more out of your life.

My three favorites are:

Nuke it! The most efficient way to get through a task is to delete it. If it doesn’t need to be done, get it off your to do list.

Minuteman. Once you have the information you need to make a decision, start a timer and give yourself just 60 seconds to make the actual decision. Take a whole minute to vacillate and second-guess yourself all you want, but come out the other end with a clear choice. Once your decision is made, take some kind of action to set it in motion.

Troll hunt. Banish the negative trolls from your life, and associate only with positive, happy, and successful people. Mindsets are contagious. Show loyalty to your potential, not to your pity posse.

Imagine what 63 more of these could do?

NOTE: there are a lot of trackbacks to Steve’s site so be sure to follow a few of them to see how others are using his information.

Consequences Of The Brain Treating Reality And Thought As The Same

Brain scans can show us exactly which part of our brain is active. One thing that these test have uncovered is that the brain will be almost as active when someone thinks about doing a task as it is when they are doing the task. The motor cortex that controls movement is not active but the rest of the brain appears to be as engaged in the activity as it would be if you WERE engaged in the activity.

Now take a second to think about that. The brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is thought. What is the difference between doing something and thinking about doing it? I think only the movement portion, and the motor cortex is the only portion of the brain that shows a decrease in activity when we only think about something.

Have you ever had a dream that impacted the rest of your day? No matter what you do you’re left with a lagging feeling that started with the dream. Would having that same experience in real life have create a similar impact, maybe not the same but one as equally profound? I’ve had dreams that stayed with me because they felt so real – it was as though I had actually had to run for my life or jump from a building. That’s because my brain DID response as though I was running for my life or jumping from a building. Technology shows us that this is how the brain works.

I’m sure you’ve had the experience of thinking about something that makes you angry and gets your blood boiling. The response is exactly the same as the real thing, you get an adrenalin spike as you charge up for action. You’re having a real physiological response to a mental stimulus. You can create whatever emotional response that you like by thinking about things that evoke that response.

It really is a stimulus response world. No matter what it is, it you are old enough to read and comprehend what I’m saying here, you probably have had enough experience to create 10000’s of response / stimulus pairings. Very rarely will you be faced with a situation for which you do not have a response.

If this is how the brain works, how do we put it to work for us?

Start changing your thought patterns. Stop thinking thoughts that create negative emotional reactions. Think of kittens, or stake, or something that causes you to respond in a positive way. Start thinking thoughts that foster the emotional state that you need to perform at your best at every moment. I do my best blog writing when I think of things that give me hope and optimism. My best song writing comes out when I’m feeling down or heart broken. When I’m at the gym trying to lift heavy I need to manufacture feelings of personal injustice to give me something to rise against. When I’m engaging someone in a discussion, I’ll picture myself being open and receiving their knowledge. Whatever it is, if I can perform better in a different state of mind I’ll work to find that state.

It only makes sense to do this. Find what makes your performance better and hack your brain to manufacture the emotional state that will allow you to tap into it.

Finding Control With Food – Eating Disorders

For a very long time I had an unhealthy relationship with food. Since I’m feeling much better about it now I’m going to be honest with myself and explain how and why it was messed up.

My relationship with disordered eating stems from a control issue that I didn’t realize I had. I’m not sure where it came from but I think it has something to do with me moving from Ireland when I was 9 and it was aggravated to problem status when a really close friend was killed by a drunk driver when I was 22.

The death of loved one is pretty hard and particularly so when they are only 21. The seemingly normal and predictable world came undone when I was 22, calling many of my world view rules into question. Natalie was a really nice girl. Liking everyone, she engaged everything with a passion for fun and happiness. I don’t think anyone deserves to die that young and least of all someone who just seemed to light up the world with their presence. It was really sad. Apart from all the grief that her death brought to her friends and family, the world continues to suffers because it goes without her joy forever. It’s really hard not to cry when I think this deeply about it because she had that old soul wisdom that seemed to cut through the unimportant stuff and leave you seeing only the silver lining. I’ve not met anyone who could do this before or since. She had a gift and I wish the world still had her in it.

But it doesn’t and the day she died was the beginning of the end to my control issue. Unfortunately, like most issues, I was years away from seeing it. I needed to hit a bottom before it became visible and I was able to make enough sense of things to move past it.

In the days immediately following her death, I spend a lot of time in my own head. In between bouts of intense pain, I ran through many of my understandings about the world trying to pull something together that allowed me to make sense of what I was feeling and what had happened. First off, I realized that no one was answering my prayers. Secondly, I realized that all the compulsive behavioural patterns that I had developed to safe guard my life from suffering were ineffective. Third, my belief that the world looked after the good and punished the bad was eliminated completely. I was alone and powerless to prevent my death. The understanding of the world that I had been nurturing was wrong. I had no control over anything.

Over the next few years, life recreated itself around me. I had been burned but I went on living because that’s what human beings do. However, things were different. Having lost the sense of control that I had about the world, the rules I created were based on the assumption that I could be killed at any instant. While that is true, it isn’t very likely. It’s so improbable as to be wrong from any practical perspective; logically I knew this but my life experience had shown me something very different. This single cognitive distortion manifest itself all over the new world view rules that I created. I started to do a lot of things that were hurting my chance of living a long time because I believed that there was a great chance that I would be dead well before the consequence came back to haunt me. I took up smoking, skipping a lot of classes, stopped working out and started going to raves. I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t think I was going to live that long regardless of what I did.

I became addicted to nicotine during this period of time. This was my first experience with addiction and my first conscious experiences with changing my physiological / emotional state with chemicals. Before the smoking, I got drunk when I drank alcohol, I got full when I ate food and I got tired when I worked out. I hadn’t noticed any emotional change in response to doing these things but with nicotine there was a big difference, the dose frequency. I was smoking about 15 cigarettes a day which loosely equates to about 450 dose per day (I’m basing this on the assumption that I took 30 pulls per cigarette). While I am not sure exactly how nicotine impacts the body, it, like most drugs, stimulates neural activity in the body and brain. Over time and repeated exposure to the drug, the body will adapt to the new internal environment that you are creating. As a consequence, normal function will come to depend upon the presence of the drug. When your body makes this adjustment, you learn very quickly just how chemicals can change your emotional state. The negative emotional state that nicotine withdrawal creates disappears INSTANTLY when you inhale the smoke. It happens so quickly that it’s almost impossible NOT to make the connection that smoking makes you feel better (of course it does, it make you feel normal).

This lesson stuck. I realized that I could bring stuff into my body that would not just make me feel good, but which would change the way I felt emotionally. Hmmmm, that was good because this was the first time since Natalie had died that I felt I had some control over something. What else did I have easy access to that I could use to change my emotional state? Well, food. I could buy a chocolate bar for 50 cents, eat it in 20 seconds and change my blood chemistry in such a way as to experience a physiological reward. That was fun so I did it, a lot.

If you’ve eaten a pound of chocolate, or even just a half pound (about 3 chocolate bars), you may have noticed that logical thinking about what you’re doing begins to disappear. The more you do it, the less you need to eat before your thinking is impaired. You find yourself in the zone and the chocolate stops being chocolate and starts being just something you are consuming because it makes you feel a particular way. I’ve spoken to some gamblers about the sensation of betting chips on poker and they describe it in very much the same way, over time, the chips stop being money and start being the fuel that drives the positive sensations of gambling. The more you do it, the better you get at finding the reward. Once you acquire that level of skill you can are free to use the food to evoke that emotional state for the reward or escape. I was about 25 now and this is about 3 years after Natalie died.

Things get foggy here and I’m a little disappointed about that because I don’t have a lot of memories from this period of my life but I didn’t do anything worth remembering. I was basically spinning my wheels until I learned some computer skills and got a job working for an IT company. I was living with my folks at the time to save money to pay off some student loans, so my eating habits had returned to normal. There were still times when I would over eat but they were on special occasions or when I would stay at my girl friends, so it didn’t impact my life at all. My body was changing though and my once iron stomach was starting to have difficulty digesting some of the meals I was eating. In hindsight, I think it was the quantity of food that I was eating in these meals because I am still able to eat smaller amounts of these food now without any difficulty. The IT boom was in full swing and when I got a promotion to manager I moved out. This was a few months after I got my first mountain bike and started riding.

I moved in with Tony and Beth again (2nd time) and we shared a 3 bedroom townhouse in Burlington. This was a fun time because I was making a lot of money and I was very good at my job. I felt like I was on my way again, that life had returned to normal after the death curve ball from 6 years ago.

But things weren’t back to normal. My relationship with food was deteriorating as I was starting to over eat more frequently and suffering indigestion more often. There were a couple of meals a week that didn’t get processed. To me it was normal to get sick when you are feeling sick. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t normal to feel sick so often. I figured it would pass on its own and I didn’t alter my eating habits.

It wasn’t the stereotypical binging and purging that you see on “The Intervention”. The purging wasn’t a conscious “hey, I need to get rid of this meal” thought, it was a “I will feel better if I throw this up” thought. And it was true, I always did feel better. I viewed the over eating as me just having a big appetite. Since I wasn’t gaining any weight, I was healthy. No one said anything to me for a long time, they didn’t have any reason to. It wasn’t as if I was sick or had a problem. 8 chocolate bars here, an extra large pizza there, 65 doughnut bites on the couch while playing Madden on the PS2, whatever. It was just food and I was hungry, and sometimes I ate too much.

Tony was the first to ask me about it. I remember him saying “do you think it’s normal to get sick as much as you do?” I said “yeah, I guess. It must be because causes it’s happening.” Then it was my girl friend’s roommate. Her comment about “getting that checked out because it ISN’T normal for someone who is healthy to get sick very often” didn’t immediately change anything and of course, I didn’t bother getting it checked out.

It began to change though, I started being more aware of what and how I was eating. I started to notice that once I began eating sugary high fat foods, a sensation gripped me that wasn’t there before. It was a drive or compulsion to keep eating. The only things I can compare it to are the drive to have sex or the drive to have a cigarette. Eating was the only thing I could do to make the thoughts go away so I kept eating. Maybe Tony was right, maybe there was something wrong with what I was doing.

Tony and Beth bought there first house and I moved out. I lived between my folks and my girl friends place. This meant that I wasn’t feeding myself anymore, so my diet improved. I was back to the gorging occasionally and didn’t get sick nearly as often. I also worked a lot and didn’t have the chance to lose myself in food.

A few months later I moved in with my friend Deb to be closer to work. My eating habits remained fairly good, but I was starting to gain some weight because I had been spending more time working and less time riding my bike. I decided to try the Atkins low carb diet because I had friends who had lost a lot of weight with it. It was fairly successful with a drop of about 12 pounds in 3 weeks. But the biggest thing I noticed was that my desire to eat sugar disappeared after about a week – I knew I was going without something, the diet wasn’t completely effortless but I wasn’t hungry. Again, the feeling was something like day 7 of quitting smoking – you physically don’t need anything but you are going without something that you find rewarding. The switch had been thrown and the light had gone on, I had drawn a connection between eating sugar and my drive to keep eating sugar. I did what most people do in a situation like this, I went over board. I developed a fear of carbohydrates and took deliberate steps to eat less of them.

Another stint living with Tony and Beth and then back to my folks place to regroup and figure out what I was going to do next. My IT management job had come to an end so I got a job with GoodLife Fitness Clubs and my issues with eating just seemed to disappear. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I still like to over eat occasionally but I work out a lot so I have a lot of opportunity to burn off the excess. I consider the whole thing history because I don’t get sick very often anymore.
Looking back, my disordered relationship with food was a behaviour learned in the time following Natalie’s death. It seems almost too simple to say it, but I was trying to find something to control. The predictable satisfaction of binging and my ability to prevent weight gain gave me these things. Over time, experience provided me with more information and I’ve modified my understanding. As I’ve grown past it I now try to control my eating habits and my fitness, not my mood and my weight.

And I’m really happy that it is behind me now.

I Hear Voices, They Tell Me It Is Called Thinking

One of the worst things I ever heard happened during my last year at university when I was 24. I was living with Tony and Beth, a couple, in a two-bedroom apartment and had fallen asleep on the couch. The lights were off and the sleep function of the TV had turned it off so I was in almost complete darkness. Tony has a great sense of humor. He will say almost anything and make it funny.

Initially I thought he was playing a joke on me because I was woken up to hear someone saying “you are a loser, you will never make anything out of your life, you’re worthless.” It was dark, so when I sat up and turned around to tell him to piss off, it took me a while to notice that I was alone. In fact, I could still hear the voice telling me that I was a failure as it dawned on me that there wasn’t anyone else in the room. I was completely alone and all I could hear was this voice reminding me of my shortcomings as a human being and my complete lack of worth as a person.

It was rather disturbing to realize that the voice was coming from inside my head. First off, what it was saying bothered me because I felt that it was probably true. Secondly, why am I hearing voices and finally, why is the voice telling me that I am so pathetic? I sat their scared and angry until I was fully awake. Once I calmed down I went to bed and hoped I would sleep it off.

The next morning was very different. The voice was still there but it wasn’t telling me that I was useless. Instead it was telling me that I needed to get up, that I needed to go to school, that last night I had woken up last night hearing a weird voice dictating negativity at me, that I needed to do laundry, etc…. It seemed to be saying all the things that I was thinking. I dressed, ate breakfast and left to catch a bus to school. I recall feeling kind of weird, that I was out of place somehow. It wasn’t a bad feeling other than making me feel a little uneasy, but things weren’t wrong.

Looking back now I know exactly what was happening. I had an experience that would lead to an epiphany and one that created an awareness of who I was and why I was the way I was. The voice had been there for a long time. I’m not entirely sure just how long, but it years, probably since 12 or 13. That night was the first time that I became aware that it existed. Up until them it would do its thing without me even being aware that it was there. Becoming aware of the voice was the experience.

The voice is an internal monolog that is the literal representation of my immediate emotional state. It allows you to think literally about an emotional experience. In many ways it allows you to engage your emotions in a logical way because it makes them something that you can think about in tangible terms – it’s hard to capture the essence of grief on paper unless you have the vocabulary to describe what the experience is like, once you do, you can reference the feelings with words that will allow you some access to the emotion itself.

I say that the voice had been there since I was 12 or 13 because that was the first time I started to feel shame. In order to manufacture shame, you need to have some understanding that you are an individual within a community of other individuals. This type of abstract thought does not develop until 12 or 13 years of age. I may be wrong with this, but so far no one I’ve talked to about this recalls hearing the voice before their mid to late teens and most become aware of it in their early twenties.

Leading up to that night when I heard the voice, I had been playing around with mediation. I had never been very good at it because my mind was always very active and all over the place. Any time I felt that I was getting close to having a meditative experience I would be drawn away from it by some thought. It never made sense to me how I could think something when my eyes were closed and it was quiet. Up until that point I believed that I thought in images and not in words – it’s weird to write this now because of course I can think in words, but back then I didn’t realize it was the case. After I heard the voice, the source of my distraction was obvious, random words or phrase would pop into my head or I would begin to narrate my immediate emotional state e.g. “I want to go to a rave” or “oh, this is starting to feel like I’m mediating” or “I want to have sex with my girlfriend.” You can’t achieve nirvana with all that stuff floating around in your head.

Anyway, that day at school was interesting. I noticed that the voice would paint a darker picture of what was really going on. It would put a negative spin on stuff that happened, particularly when it dealt with other people; it seemed to come alive when I was interacting with other people. Usually making guess about what people thought about my actions or about me. It threw out a lot of judgment and hearing it made me think that maybe this was why I felt lousy around people most of the time. In fact, it didn’t seem to ever say anything that was positive, at best it was neutral, but mostly it was just negative.

Over the next few weeks, while the experience was still fresh in my mind, I paid a lot of attention to what it said and how it made me feel. The strangest part was how easily I would accept the conclusions or observations that it drew. To not do so felt completely pointless because the voice was coming from me. If I didn’t accept what it said, it would mean that I was wrong or that there was some part of me that was trying to sabotage my fortune. There was definitely a relationship between what the voice said and how I felt, but the relationship was a two way interaction – sometimes the voice would say something that would make me feel bad, other times I would feel bad and the voice would say something about it. It seemed that it would either dictate how I should feel or it would observe what I was feeling.

The experience faded and after a while I stopped thinking about it. I accepted that the voice was there and that there wasn’t very much that I could do to stop it. In time, however, I learned to talk back to it and to question it. After a lot of work it became easy to discredit it. I realized that since it came from me, it knew exactly as much as I did, so it didn’t have any special powers. Once it became evident to me that it was a reflection of my immediate emotional state and that that was within my control, what the voice said must also be under my control, if not completely, at least in terms of tone. For a while, it became something that was there that I tired to ignore and not let affect me. I think it took about 5 or 6 years before it stopped making me feel anything.

About 2 years ago, I was having pho with my brother and he started talking to me about sociobiology / evolutionary psychology. When I mentioned the voice and the experience that I had years before it was cause for us to stop and reflect on the reason for the voice. The part of evolutionary psychology I like is the fact that if a trait exists within an individual, there is a survival reason for it. The challenge was for us to come up with the survival reason for it. It turned out that he has the voice as well and that it does basically the same thing for him that it does for me. He gained power over it the same way I did, by challenging it and the observations it comes up with.

Not that there are any hard and true answers with things like this, but we came to the conclusion that the natural tendency towards the negative interpretation of others perceptions of us makes us work harder to gain their approval because if we have the approval of others in our social group, we will be able to remain part of that group and will have an improved chance of surviving. It’s an antiquated approach because all you need to survive in today’s society is money, but with millions of years of evolution behind it, getting rid of this trait isn’t going to happen any time soon. If you are able to isolate the voice and observe it without reacting to what it is saying, you will find that it does alert you to a lot of odd things. When something isn’t right, this is usually the first way you’ll realize it. It will say something that lets you know that something is going on or that you feel a particular way about something.

At worst you are not aware of the voice as it dictates negative observation and social pessimism un-molested into your conscious awareness making you feel guilt and shame. Maybe it isn’t that bad. Maybe you realize that it is there and that you have learned to ignore it, remaining more or less unaffected by it. Or maybe you are lucky and you have challenged the voice and found out that it is full of crap most of the time. Maybe you have found out what it is good for and are able to use it as a perceptive tool to help you uncover the truth of the world. I’m somewhere between ignoring it and knowing what it’s good for but every now and then I still have to tell myself to wise up and stop reacting to what the voices inside my head are saying.

Stop Looking So You Can Find It

Last Friday night I was hanging out with Deb. We watched Manufactured Landscapes and I recommend it for anyone who doesn’t mind thinking a little to make their entertainment. We made dinner and chatted in the kitchen for a while before.

One of the things I said to her was that I understood what people meant by “once you stop looking for someone, the right person will come along”. She laughed and said “yeah right, that’s not how things were working with either one of us”. Her statement was correct, but I wasn’t meaning it the way she took it.

What it means is that once you stop looking for someone, you become open to finding the right person. When you are looking, you are seeking out something in particular. As a consequence, you are eliminating those who do not match on any of the desired characteristics. Their smile may not be bright enough, they may have a boring job, they may not talk to their mothers very nicely…. Once you stop looking for someone to fill the void, you automatically become open to everyone who may make you feel good.

I might have heard it compared it to a big ball of yarn that is unravelling. When you’re looking for someone, you’re trying to stop the yarn from coming off. But when you stop looking, the yarn unravels and once it does, the ball is gone. So too is the need for someone to hold it together. Then you are free to find happiness and unconditional love.

Stop Thinking About Cuteness

I was having Pho with Des today and he told me about an article he read. The article was about a movie the blogger had watched was particularly disturbing. When he went to bed that night, he was having trouble falling asleep because he couldn’t stop thinking about what he had seen. He asked his girlfriend if she ever had trouble falling asleep because she couldn’t let go of a thought. She said not any more because she plays the cuteness game.

The cuteness game starts by thinking of something cute and then trying to think of something that is even cuter. Then try to think of something that is cuter still, and so on. The game ends when you fall asleep.

It is immaterial that cuteness is subjective, all that matters is that you try to think of something that is cuter and cuter and cuter. The point is, when you’re thinking of cute things you’re not able to think about the creepy movie you saw.

I laughed when he told me, then he told me what Sarah said, she plays the size game. Same sort of thing, pick something and then think of something that is smaller or bigger than it, then continue in that direction. Not that you need an example, but a bread box is bigger than a loaf of bread which is bigger than a jar of peanut butter which is larger than a salted cracker, etc…. Again the game ends when you fall asleep.

I laughed even louder at that game because the whole idea of it is so profoundly simple that I feel like a moron for not thinking of it myself. Up until today I worked to silence my mind when I found myself thinking things I didn’t like. It had never occurred to me to just think of something else. I liken this to a bad smell. When faced with a bad smell you have two choices, you can try to get rid of the smell or you can try to cover over the smell with a better smell. Which one do you think is easier? It works the same way with thinking. You’ll have an easier time thinking about a litter of puppies playing than you will of turning your thinking off. Thinking is natural, not thinking isn’t.

We can control our thoughts and so we should take an active role in what we allow ourselves to think. There will be times when you will need to worry about something, to make sure you have addressed all of the known knowns, but at some point you will start to over think it, triggering a feedback loop that keeps you worrying about it. Even if you did leave the stove on, so what? You cook with it, it’s designed to be on. Make the decision about what you are going to do about it and start trying to think of three things that are cuter than a kitten. Smile and go back to living outside your head.

Want To Be Happier? Keep Working At It

People will often talk about their weight being a “set point”. The notion is that we each have a specific weight and body composition that is predetermined by our genetic code. The idea has some merits because there are people who have a very difficult time increasing their body weight and have even more difficulty keeping gained weight on. The opposite is also true, there are individuals who are very active and eat a clear diet but who have difficulty keeping body fat off. The only thing that works for these people is to stick with what they are doing (exercise and purposeful dieting). Over time, months to years, they will usually find that maintaining the body composition changes becomes easier as the body adapts to being a lower or higher weight. Humans can, in essence, move their set point if they put sustained effort towards that goal. This makes sense because the body is always going to try to maintain stasis. It doesn’t care what the physical state is, it’s just going to try and keep it.

The same applies to emotional states. Marina Krakovsky’s article The Science of Lasting Happiness reveals that sustained effort can alter your emotional set point – this shouldn’t be surprising given that emotions are regulated by chemicals and are, as such, actually physical states. In fact, the amount of influence you have over your emotional states is very large:

Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people’s differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? “Because nobody had put it together before, that’s unexplained,” Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be “intentional activity,” mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation’s downward pull.

40% is enormous. This opens the door for a lot of improvement. It may take a little work and sustained effort but in the long run you can be happier because of it.

You Cannot See What You Do Not Know Can Be Seen

This is a very similar post to “You Are Seeing What You Want To See” in which I spoke about Rachel’s people watching habit of not making any predictions about the nature of the people who are engaging each other. I wrote that one because I found her NOT making predictions to be unusual because it isn’t how I watch people. But as timing would have it, as I was writing that post I was listening to a book and a section in it struck me as extremely relevant.

The following quote is from Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe and Everything (Chapter 12):

At this point Arthur noticed a curious feature to the song that the party were singing. The middle eight bridge, which would have had McCartney firmly consolidated in Winchester and gazing intently over the Test Valley to the rich pickings of the New Forest beyond, had some curious lyrics. The songwriter was referring to meeting with a girl not “under the moon” or “beneath the stars” but “above the grass”, which struck Arthur a little prosaic. Then he looked up again at the bewildering black sky, and had the distinct feeling that there was an important point here, if only he could grasp what it was. It gave him a feeling of being alone in the Universe, and he said so.

“No,” said Slartibartfast, with a slight quickening of his step, “the people of Krikkit have never thought to themselves `We are alone in the Universe.’ They are surrounded by a huge Dust Cloud, you see, their single sun with its single world, and they are right out on the utmost eastern edge of the Galaxy. Because of the Dust Cloud there has never been anything to see in the sky. At night it is totally blank, During the day there is the sun, but you can’t look directly at that so they don’t. They are hardly aware of the sky. It’s as if they had a blind spot which extended 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.

“You see, the reason why they have never thought `We are alone in the Universe’ is that until tonight they don’t know about the Universe. Until tonight.”

He moved on, leaving the words ringing in the air behind him.

“Imagine,” he said, “never even thinking `We are alone’ simply because it has never occurred to you to think that there’s any other way to be.”

This reinforced the value of Rachel’s approach, or at least, pointed out a shortcoming of the approach to make predictions – in order for this approach to be effective, you need to be able to make the accurate prediction and this means you need to be able to see all of the potential outcomes and possibilities. If something is in the realm of possibility and you don’t consider it, the accuracy of your predictions will be called into questions.

This fact has been known to us for a long time and it is part of the reason why seniority and experience play a big role in business and the work force. It is why many company’s will hire externally for senior management positions – the assumption being that experience in other areas will open ones mind to the big picture and eliminate erroneous decisions resulting from too narrow a scope.

In the book there are devastating consequences to the people of Krikkit realizing that there was an entire universe outside of their planet, ones that I don’t think would have happened had they been aware of it all along.