Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.
Work is the manifestation of value, and anyone who tells you that a person whose mind is 50% occupied with anxiety is more likely to manifest value is a person who isn’t manifesting much.
That is, addiction in general and information/Internet addiction in particular.
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40…
My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption…
We’ll increasingly be defined by what we say no to.
Apparently creative people share a brain structure with schizophrenics:
“We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia…Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box.” – Dr. Fredrik Ullén
Well, that would explain Dr. NakaMats:
(This just keeps getting better…)
Sometimes it feels like you are trapped by your own body–by aches and pains, by sickness, by physical abilities.
But somehow practicing yoga makes it feel like instead of the body’s desires dominating the mind, the mind is able to control the body.
Today I stopped myself from sneezing during yoga by recognizing it was just a false trigger from my body.
I suspect that meditation works similarly, by training the soul to direct the mind instead of the monkey mind trampling the soul. But I’m not quite there yet unfortunately…
“On the average, A students get 15 minutes more sleep than B students – ‘every fifteen minutes counts’…Edina, MN moved its start time an hour later – the top 10% of graduating class went up 200 SAT points on a 1600 point scale.” – Ashley Merryman at Pop!Tech.