Don’t Let This Phrase Keep You Down: “Don’t Be Stupid”
We often let those three words stop us from trying and achieving, “Don’t Be Stupid”.
Sure it keeps us safe but I entered my 30′s with no police record, no embarrassing pictures to be found on the internet, so scars, no near-death experiences, and really no stories to tell.
The movie “Along Came Polly” encapsulates many of the risk-averse calculators. At some point in my 20′s I realized all of the cool stories I told happened to other people. But golly if I wasn’t really smart and mature – maybe even smug.
I wanted my own stories but I had missed my youth where it was more forgivable to be a dumbass. That left me wondering (calculating) if it was too late. At some point I started questioning if I was being so smart was actually dumb. Each experience leads you to learn and, hopefully, able to handle more of life’s ups and downs. I also realized I respected the people who pushed the limits more than the people who were like me, boring and sitting on safe edges of life. It’s safe but it isn’t living.
I am now a recovering risk-aversive and have some stories. One involves Vegas, some involve Mexico (where I never thought I would ever go due to my fear of foreign prisons), and others involve spontaneity which is not easy to calculate, and I am happier because of it.
If the above video isn’t enough to push you out of your comfort zone check out the book “Yes Man”. The movie didn’t do it justice.
Is It A Coffee Addiction Or A Ritual?
“We found a large a variance – larger than we anticipated – in the caffeine content in each of the espressos,” he said.
“The range was 25 milligrams to 214 milligrams, which was far greater than we’d anticipated.
That is an amazing variance. Other searches online found smaller variances but the point is maybe you don’t need coffee. Maybe it is more of a ritual than an addiction which creates a placebo effect.
“But it is a proven drug. It has to work,” you think. Not so fast. There are over 1 million Google search results for “caffeine contradictory results“. Here is one:
http://www.pe2000.com/caffeine.htm
New research into the effects of caffeine continues appear every few months and these reports frequently contradict one another – depending on who did the research, how many people were evaluated and, of course, who funded the research… So the definitive word on caffeine has not yet been agreed upon.
Caffeine affects each of us differently – a hit of caffeine that will cause insomnia in one person but can be a great nightcap for someone else.
So if there isn’t a taste issue and drinkers get different levels of caffeine with each cup, it isn’t about the jolt to the system. It is about a ritual. The ritual most likely started while watching parents and adults drink coffee – another one of the many things we do to feel like an adult as soon as we can.
Still unsure if it is a ritual? Tell a coffee drinker, or more suiting, yourself, to take a tablet form of caffeine like No-Doz or Vivarin instead of your hit that you need so bad. And few will do it, otherwise there would be Vivarin shops on every corner instead of Starbucks.
Instead of labeling it as a need, be honest and label it as it is, a want. The more things that you can pull out of the need category the more control you have in your life and with your mind.
Multitasking Is Official Over
Damn it! Stanford did a little study about multi-tasking, it didn’t bode well for us. Here are the headlines,
“Multitaskers Pay A Mental Price”
“Masters of Multitasking Fall Short”
“Multi-tasking Muddles The Brain”
You get the picture and I am sure you want to argue; so did I. Except I kind of already realized it in the back of my mind. I would turn down the speakers when I was writing something of great importance or putting together a thought.
They do say that multitaskers like to scan for information. So maybe it isn’t about us getting so much done but about us finding more information. I run my laptop and desktop at the same time. I am constantly bouncing between the two. Often one has a video and the other has work on it. I realize I am not as quick with the work as I previously believed but I understand I like the flood of information.
Now this may go along with the memory issue. I like to take in tons of information like Cliff Clavin, but I can’t regurgitate it all back to you. I quickly forget much of it. I know random things and I know useful stuff too. Twitter is like crack for my brain.
So maybe multi-tasking is really about keeping our brains occupied and not about us doing more which brings us back to Zen and the monkey mind racing around. So what do we value, grabbing information from everywhere while finding the nuggets or diligently sitting down and doing one thing at a time until it is done? I don’t have the answer yet. Do you?
New Researching On Breaking Habits
Habits may never go away
Do you eat popcorn at the theater even though you just finished dinner? Do you consciously know you don’t need it and aren’t hungry but buy it anyway? Researchers at Duke University used this scenario to understand habits.
People who had a popcorn-movies habit seemed to eat the popcorn simply because they were at the movies: They ate just as much regardless of whether it tasted good or, as Wood termed it, “disgusting.”
I have this same relationship with soda. I often resolve to not drink it and that worked once for a year but I haven’t been able to duplicate it. I often find myself hours later buying a soda and thinking, “What the _____ am I doing?
This very insightful but concise article explains much about habits, breaking them, and how they never truly go away. I was heartened that a study done with mice showed that even if their food pellets were making them sick some would continue to hit the food bar at the same rate. This shows a hole in the aversion therapy theory. Long term habits won’t be broken that way while it is probably perfect to stop a new habit from forming.
I have dealt with both sides of this. At times I have felt some consequences to drinking too much soda which I thought would help me break the habit. It didn’t. On the other side my parents were smokers when I was a child. At age four my Dad let me take a puff of his pipe which lead to a spectacle for all watching. I have never smoked and feel that is part of the reason.
The unfortuate finding is that habits don’t completely disappear. Over time I have learned to hate popcorn. It gets stuck in my teeth, grabbing on like a barnacle. It annoys me until I get home and floss, or dislodges 2 hours later. I still have the urge to buy something when I walk into a movie theater but the urge is low it isn’t more than a passing thought. But if someone offers me some I rarely pass while still knowing the likely outcome.
The upshot? Our brains are built to overvalue the rewards we can get right away and undervalue those we might only receive later. Similarly, we tend to avoid any small unpleasantness we’d have to face now even if we know it may mean bigger difficulties down the road.
Over the ages, humans have learned to think about, and plan for, the future. It’s still not easy for us, though. “If you’re not motivated,” Volkow says, “there’s a real danger of giving in to immediate gratification.”
Please read the full article. You should find it fascinating.
photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/duke_lenoi