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erik@mockerybird.com (Radical Mutual-Improvement)
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Sit still for 15 minutes a day (Exercise #11)
Posted: 05 May 2006 11:36 AM CDT
Meditation is intimidating. To me, it has a magical spiritual quality to it as if it were step one of a grand transformation where ultimately I stop drinking and eating meat, and never get angry, and shave my head. Also, there's this inner doubt that if nothing happens and I continue eating meat and going to bars, that somehow it's not working. Definitely my own issues are involved here… but I don't think I'm the only one with these issues. People who practice and teach meditation of course try to remove these expectations from us amateurs, but it's very difficult to erase meaning and association from a word. Meaning clings like glue. It's easier to just get a new word. Instead of learning how to meditate, learn how to sit still.
There are no social or spiritual implications associated with people who sit still compared to those that are associated with people who meditate. Everyone knows how to sit still and everyone knows that it's not a big deal. In fact, it may have a slightly ridiculous association if any, and one might be tempted to conduct this exercise in the corner while sitting on your hands. It brings back images of childhood and our own reckless unruliness.
And yet, it's still strangely difficult. Why is it so difficult to sit still even for a couple minutes?
Meditation is a momentum killer
I think the difficulty of sitting still is a mental one. Over time we've trained ourselves to avoid sitting still for practical reasons involving motivation, momentum, and getting the many things of the day done. When I think about the thoughts that immediately fill my head when I suggest to myself that maybe I should try sitting still for a bit and doing nothing for 15 minutes, my brain protests and says that it will interrupt the flow of the day. A certain level of buzz and motion in my brain can serve as an energy source for the tasks I'm presented with in the course of the day. To let that spin down might cause my mind to stall out and become unable to continue with the rest of the tasks I've got mindlessly lined up like ducks along the fence. When I've got a few errands to run that I don't necessarily want to run, I start figuratively waving my arms about, running in circles, screaming, and generally spinning myself up and distracting myself from too much mental investigation of true value in the things I'm doing so that I can mindlessly direct the building energy at the few errands and bulldoze them over without thinking about it and talking myself out of it. Does this sound familiar at all?
Positive and negative affect
It's a useful motivational trick to use excess physical and mental energy from one source and direct it at another source that wouldn't have otherwise been able to generate the energy on its own. For many of us, this practice becomes habit and we train ourselves to always have some reserved well of momentum available. This well is a positive affect. It is a resource to tap into and use both as a savings account for difficult tasks, and also a cushion when we're hit with a negative event of any kind. If someone insults you, or things don't go as you've planned, the positive affect can absorb the cost of that blow and you can continue on without too much impact. Negative affect, or motivational debt, is often associated with depression. Every new task seems impossible because there's no momentum or energy to tap into. Everything instead has to rely on its own worthiness in order to bootstrap itself into being done… and this only if there aren't existing tasks that are of higher (if less enjoyable) priority lobbying for that energy for itself. Those people with negative affect become overly sensitive, as every insult sends your energy and motivation into deeper debt and has a visible impact on your ability to get along in normal social situations. Because of this positive/negative affect ecosystem, which we've all experienced high highs and low lows of at some point during our lives, we tend to be very protective of our affect well. This is why sitting still (or meditating) can be seen as a treat.
The truth is that sitting still does have the ability to change your affect. It'll challenge the momentum that you've got going and help you examine why you're doing the things you're doing. It won't drain you, or demotivate you, but rather show you what you're doing… at which point you can decide for yourself if the things you are doing are actually worth doing. Because of the positive/negative affect system, we'll sometimes do things simply to keep momentum up… we all know people who are always occupying themselves and who are constantly busy with something… and we all know that sometimes the things we keep ourselves busy with are not really that important. Sitting still is one way to do some spring cleaning in your motivation and momentum systems. Or, it might just give you a sore butt.
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15 ways to live longer
Posted: 08 May 2006 01:27 PM CDT
Or, a refresher on the common correlation versus causation logical fallacy.
According to Forbes, these 15 things will make you live longer:- Don't oversleep
- Be optimistic
- Have more sex
- Get a pet
- Get a VAP (a cholesterol test)
- Be rich
- Stop smoking
- Chill out
- Eat your antioxidants
- Marry well
- Exercise
- Laugh a little
- Lose weight
- Manage stress
- Meditate
Hey, they forgot some!
- Drink more [Miami Herald]
- Win an oscar [Forbes]
- Be a woman [Bloomberg]
- Eat less [The Hindu News]
- Eat sushi [Taipei Times]
- Get married [Jackson Sun]
- Go to church [Warwick Today]
- Play the harmonica [CBS]
- Live in the future [The Telegraph]
- Have a young mother [Health 24]
All I'm suggesting is that sometimes these studies are a bit wacky. For example, people are very bad at confusing correlation with causality. Just because there is a strong correlation between the amount of sleep you get a night and the length of your life does not mean that one causes the other. For example, just because the value of your house and the size of your cat's belly are both increasing doesn't mean that you can increase the valuation of your house by feeding your cat more chow.
Here are three relationships that can be taken (or mistaken) for causation:
- Causation: Changes in X cause changes in Y. For example, football weekends cause heavier traffic, more food sales, etc.
- Common response: Both X and Y respond to changes in some unobserved variable. All three of our examples are examples of common response.
- Ice cream sales and shark attacks both increase during summer.
- Skirt lengths and stock prices are both controlled by the general attitude of the country, liberal or conservative.
- The number of cavities and children's vocabulary are both related to a child's age.
- Confounding: The effect of X on Y is hopelessly mixed up with the effects of other explanatory variables on y. For example, if we are studying the effects of Tylenol on reducing pain, and we give a group of pain-sufferers Tylenol and record how much their pain is reduced, we are confounding the effect of giving them Tylenol with giving them any pill. Many people report a reduction in pain by simply being given a sugar pill with no medication in it at all, this is called the placebo effect. To establish causation, a designed experiment must be run.
(from Correlation and Causation)
Not all of the ways to live longer are necessarily fallacies, I'm just picking on them because lists like these tend to appeal to our view of the world… those of us who drink a lot like to have scientific studies back us up, and those of us who don't go to church might become a little irate when scientific studies back up regular church attendance. In the meantime, let's all buy harmonicas and have more sex (not necessarily at the same time).
Link: 15 Ways to Live Longer [Forbes via Lifehacker]
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Set up your workspace (Exercise #12)
Posted: 08 May 2006 11:27 AM CDT
I enjoyed following Lifehacker's The Coolest Workspace Contest. The winner, Ryan's Orange Simplicity, reminded me a lot of my own home workspace… instead of orange I've got a bright toy store blue on high walls but other than that very similar.
I happened to be simultaneously reading David Allen's Getting Things Done (since I'm going to be seeing him talk tomorrow, and have been meaning to see what this is all about anyway) and have been pleasantly surprised by the well-roundedness of his philosophy. I've always been a big advocate of the power of environment on the quality of life. One of the first steps of the book is to set up your environment… a space all your own both at work and at home that is set up explicitly to aid in your ability to work. A few factors to consider might include:
- Time. Spend two whole days setting this space up. By giving it a good chunk of time you will give it the energy it deserves, while also not letting the task of it burden you too much.
- Space. Make sure that this space is entirely your own, not shared.
- An inbox… something that can hold items that need to be processed.
- A trash can.
- A calendar for time-centric tasks.
- An open space, paper, pens, a whiteboard maybe, for note-taking.
- A filing system and label maker.
These are all very reasonable tools to help set up a workspace in your home and your office. The goal of an efficient workspace is to be able to capture all of the unresolved things that float around in your head. To be able to take ambiguous worries and untie them into individual "desired outcomes" and "next actions".
The power of environment
My outward environment is an incredibly powerful influence on me. Several of my best tricks to happiness involve manipulating me environment: working in a neighborhood that I like, being able to walk to work, using a Mac, etc. Our minds not only derive happiness from our environments, but also project their own inner states into our environments. It's a two-way communication. What do you think happens first: having a disorganized environment or having a disorganized life? It's a funny chicken/egg situation. One will cause the other. Think of the variety of reactions you've had to people's offices, living rooms, and homes over the years. You can tell two things from a person's environment:
- How a person wants to be
- How a person actually is
Isn't that weird? Actually, it's not that weird if you think about it. We are a constantly shifting picture between who we want to be and who we are… and because of the two-way nature of our physical working environments, a close eye can catch pieces of both of our selves as they battle, compromise, convince, and betray each other over time. An environment that is deliberately and wisely set up will be a greatly helpful to the half of you that is the vision of your best self.
Read up more on setting up your environment:
- Creating a Productive Workspace [Steve Pavlina]
- GTD Primer [Black Belt Productivity]
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Working memory (Definition #4)
Posted: 11 May 2006 11:31 AM CDT
Your working memory (some people call it their short-term memory) is one of the weirdest tools of the mind. It is that mental space at the forefront of our minds where we put everything that we want to have available to us but don't yet know if it's important enough to keep in longer term memory. A few characteristics of this mental fanny pack (David Allen calls "psychic RAM") include:
- Urgent, unfinished: The information is usually attached to some urgent, unfinished, task. Your brain assumes that it will get done soon, so doesn't bother trying to find any more permanent storage for the information.
- Constantly recalled: This information acts like a rotating merry-go-round of information constantly circling back around to consciousness. This needs to happen or else it will fall out of memory and be lost. As a result, information in your working memory is constantly distracting you.
- Stressful: Each piece of information carries with it a teaspoon of stress… this stress is the energy that it sends to you in order to give in another ride on the merry-go-round. Without the stress, you would stop caring about the information and it would fall out of memory. With the stress, you give the information a ticket to ride the merry-go-round one more time and hope that next time it comes around you might be more inclined or able to resolve the issue that the information is being saved for.
Realizing the characteristics, limitations, and strengths of your working memory is essential to making sure you use it correctly. For example, because this information literally uses distraction and stress as the mechanism for keeping itself in memory, you should make sure that the information you keep there is not only urgent but also important. Or, if you subscribe to the Getting Things Done model, you should attempt to remove almost all information from your working memory and capture it in ways that do not rely on stress and distraction for their survival. The desire to call your mom for Mother's Day need not make 100 cycles through your mind before you actually do it… just capture that information on a calendar once, make sure that you regularly check this calendar, and make it through the next three days with that much less stress and that much less distraction.
Link: Working Memory [Wikipedia]
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Set up your mind’s workspace (Exercise #13)
Posted: 12 May 2006 01:00 PM CDT
Unfortunately, it isn't possible to have guests over in your mind. But wouldn't that be neat? At the very least, if it were possible, perhaps we would tidy our mind’s workspace as frequently as we tidied our home and office workspaces. As it is, the mind’s workspace is more like that basement closet that we stuff thing’s into in order to hide them from guests, investors, friends, family, etc. It is the black box of a productive environment, and as such one of the most neglected aspects of our daily maintenance, weekly reviews, self-evaluations, life hacking, and attempts to get things done. At the same time, the roots of most of our problem can be traced (like a bad smell) back to the mind’s workspace.
Some of the moving parts involved in your mind’s workspace include:
- Working memory
- Habits
- Visualization
- Bodily and mental stress
David Allen in Getting Things Done does a great job of addressing the mind’s workspace with a couple key phrases. The subtitle of the book is even “the art of stress-free productivity”, which encapsulates both the method and the result of setting up the proper workspace in your mind. Turn your mind into a beautiful room that you are comfortable sitting in. Another great phrase is “mind like water” which is about having an organized mental workspace that is able to react to every event in perfect proportion to the event’s weight. It doesn’t overreact or underreact. Both of these phrases emphasize the aesthetics of a well set-up mind. Perhaps they are a bit too zen wacky for some though, so I’ll try to come at it from a couple different angles.
What is your mind's workspace like?
How does it feel to sit in your mind's workspace? Try it. What do the walls look like? What kind of chair are you sitting in? How does the desk look? Do you have 12 monitors up… each blaring different scenarios, conversations, reminders, news reports, and soap operas? How much information is there lying around, and how organized is it? Is it sunny or dark? Warm or cold? Crazy or calm? All of this is simply an exercise in confabulation of course, as the real structure of working memory is mostly obscured from us. But hopefully what it can help reveal is how your mind feels. Most likely, unless you've already learned the art of mental clarity, this space feels a bit like a dark room full of wild yet familiar things. The cobwebbed attic of the brain metaphor is overused, but strangely appropriate for most of us.
As was mentioned in the post about setting up your physical workspace a couple days ago, there is some projection of your mind's workspace out onto your environments. If you need some help knowing exactly how your mind's workspace is, then, it doesn't hurt to look at your home and office workspaces. What does your desk look like, what does your wallet or purse look like, what does your garage look like?
What do you want your mind's workspace to be like?
What does a perfectly productive mind feel like to you? A good exercise for this is to imagine a virtual reality machine that you can design for yourself. This virtual reality machine will be replaced with your own mind when you are satisfied with it. You'll never need to set another alarm clock because your new mind will have an accurate clock in it that will let you know when to wake up, or when that next meeting is, or when the headlining band is really going on. You'll never need another PDA or pocket book because your new mind will be able to store grocery lists, email addresses, phone numbers, names and faces, and personal affirmations appropriate for every adversity or problem that might come your way. Your mind will have the ability to remember things it wants to remember, and forget things it wants to forget. It will be able to filter out all information that it doesn't need, and focus on tasks that are set when they are set. It will remind you to buy batteries for the dead flashlight when you are at the store passing the battery rack, not when the thunderstorm knocks the power out of your house. It will be an awesome mind, and it will never accidentally fall in the toilet or get left in the cab.
But that mind doesn't exist!
After you've designed the perfect mind, perhaps you're now saying that the exercise was futile because that kind of mind isn't possible. In Getting Things Done, for example, one of the primary goals of the system is to remove all of these distracting and stress-inducing things from your mind because it is not the right tool for the job. I don't actually think this is always the case. Getting your mind in order may allow your to reap wild benefits in productivity and focus in proportion to the level of disorganization it is currently in. The truth is that people are often failing at creating a good GTD system simply because they can't afford to take the productivity hit of writing each thing down when just remembering them seems to work so well. Only, it doesn't always work. And it causes stress. But how much of this is just because we don't know how to use our minds?
Memory is the best list-making tool
What's easier: keeping a grocery list on a piece of paper, or keeping a grocery list in your mind? Well, it depends. Factors include:
- When you realize you need to buy something, is it easier to find the paper and write it down, or easier to remember it?
- When you're at the store, do you have the piece of paper or can you recall the list.
There are two actions involved: saving the list and retrieving the list. Both tools have their pros and cons both for saving information and retrieving information.
To save something to a list, you need to make sure the list is with you. It might take physical energy to find the list if it's nearby, or otherwise you'll have to remember to put something on the list. If you can remember to put something on the list, how much easier is that than simply remembering the thing that you were going to put on the list? To save something to memory, on the other hand, you need to have memory tools at your disposal, which we'll talk about soon. This also takes energy to do, but it's mental energy.
To retrieve something from a list, you again need to make sure the list is with you when it's needed. This, again, will take physical energy, and, it might take additional mental energy to remember where the list is, as well as a mental reminder to get the list before it is needed (it's no good if you remember to get the list when you're already at the store, unless it's already with you). To retrieve something from memory requires mental energy as well as confidence that your list was properly saved into memory.
Another way of thinking about it is this: why does each method fail? Physical memory fails when they are incomplete (you didn't add something to the list when you were supposed to either because you didn't want to expend the physical energy or because you didn't successfully remember to add something to the list) or not present when you need them. Mental memory fails when an item isn't properly saved or is lost before it is retrieved.
How to improve your memory
Most people will say that they don't have a good memory and that's why they have to write things down. But how many of us have really worked on improving our memory? How many of us were taught to memorize things by repeating them over and over? That's actually one of the worst ways to memorize something, especially because our brain learns to ignore things that are repeated repeatedly… in the same way that it'll learn to filter out noise from a loud room. It's possible to remember something the first time you encounter it… if there's a vivid sensation attached to it. Particularly powerful sensations include:
- A striking image
- A powerful emotion
- A new smell
All you have to do to remember something is associate it with a striking image, a powerful emotion, or a new smell. Using these techniques, people have recited the first 83,431 digits of pi, the entire Koran, the entire Guinness Book of World Records, the weather and day of the week for any date in a person's life, and many other ridiculous things. These people are labelled as having photographic, or eidetic, memory.
But, even more amazing and not as much of a scientific anomaly is the fact that each of us can remember an insane amount of information every day without any effort at all. You can remember scenes from movies, quotes from television shows, the lyrics to songs, the clothes people wear, people you've run into at a coffee shop or bar, and any number of details. What separates this information from your grocery list and what you had for lunch last Tuesday? The former are associated with striking images, powerful emotions, and (okay, maybe not that often) new smells. The later, are not.
Here's how you remember something after experiencing it once
Associate it with a striking image. Of the three options given above, this is the one that is most universally applicable. It's not that easy to evoke a powerful emotion or new smell on demand… but it is easy to think of a weird striking image on demand (after a little practice).
There are several well-established ways to do this. Here are a few pointers to great resources:
- Memory Master — I love this site! [via Steve Pavlina]
- The Memory Book [Harry Lorayne]
- The peg system [Wikipedia]
- The major system [Wikipedia]
I'll be exploring some of these techniques more in future entries, as well as ways to continue to explore the possibility of using your brain instead of, and in addition to, technology and things that are expensive and which you are suspicious of.
