I changed the rear tube on the Gunnar and took a quick spin around the (admittedly capacious) âhood. This was fun and a first of sorts: I havenât been on a bike at this weight since maybe 5th or 6th grade. Effortless isnât the word⊠sinuous perhaps.
In "Wake Up Routine" I shared a screenshot from OneNote of my wake-up routine since I started my new gig. Because I have to wake up a bit earlier to get to work (due largely to an earlier start time), I hit the Concept2 within minutes of rising. Contrast this with my previous routine:
I had a good 30 minutes after rising to drink some coffee (and sometimes house a banana) before rowing. I attribute to this my more lackluster rowing performance (at least compared to my previous efforts): I was up, well caffeinated, and alert by the time I was downstairs.
I added this little twist to my routine in order to get my body and mind up to speed more quickly:
It’s pretty good and seems to be helping me warm up more quickly.
I was listening to the Mind Pump Podcast and in the course of the conversation, one of the hosts asked what everybody’s favorite dinosaur was. He added that this was important. I chuckled about this diversion, as I think most kids (especially boys) have an opinion in this space.
My answer is easy: I always preferred the brontosaurus, now known as the apatosaurus. I liked the idea of a quiet, gentle giant pensively chewing plants in a body of water. This creature always stood in stark contrast to the T-Rex, the aggressive bully of childhood’s dinosaur landscape.
I consider these kinds of preferences a kind of projective test, telling you a bit about the person sharing their preference. I’m not an in-your-face kind of person, and am not likely to (purposefully) rock your world with a phone call or email. I always had a more mild personality, and even at a young age, the apatosaurus drew me in.
And the same host who asked the question? He described persons who answer “T-Rex” to be a “generikid,” a portmanteau I’d never heard but found satisfyingly succinct. The apatosaurus fans among us appreciate this kind of comeuppance.
Bonus: What Dinosaur Are You?
I wrote about feeling your feelings as an important piece in developing a healthy emotional gestalt. Some suggestions for dealing with negative feelings or emotions include allowing yourself to feel them, and reapprising your interpretation of them, to name a couple.
But there is a dark side to feeling, and it involves rumination, which is associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
What is rumination? It is effectively dwelling on a theme or thought.
I found a site by Dr. Michael Greenberg about the topic, and his advice flies in the face of more common "cures" (I’m looking at you, Mindfulness.)
When I talk about rumination, Iâm talking about any type of mental engagement with the problem; put another way, Iâm talking about shifting into problem-solving mode. This includes analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem.  Crucially, all of these mental processes are controllable. They donât happen to us; we do them on purpose.
Rumination comes in a number of insidious flavors:
There’s a lot to write about Greenberg’s conception of rumination and its consequences, but I want to focus on three aspects: problem solving, directing attention (or just stopping), and the Core Fear.
Problem Solving
This is the root of your suffering if you are prone to ruminating. As mentioned above, shifting into problem-solving mode is " analyzing, mental reviewing, mental checking, visualizing, monitoring, and even directing attention toward the problem" Having thoughts isn’t rumination (you can’t help having thoughts), but trying to figure out what the thought means is. Neither is having a problem or a question. But trying to solve or answer it is.
For Greenberg, this is the cornerstone of OCD (and anxiety): controlling mental processes that you can’t control, while failing to control those you can.
So what processes can you control?
Directing Attention
Greenberg is critical of mindfulness-based strategies because they, by their design, either attempt to distract you or encourage you to stay in problem-solving mode. And his simple exhortation, challenging in practice, is to just stop directing your attention to the problem you are trying to solve.
So what are you supposed to do? Nothing. Greenberg writes that "instead of looking for an antidote, just stop eating poison." To stop ruminating, you don’t have to do anything. You just have to stop ruminating. Don’t direct your attention to the thought. This is where I think the feeling your feelings angle comes in, because not directing attention doesn’t mean thought stopping or trying to force yourself to stop feeling a certain way. You can’t do that. But you can make a simple choice: to not direct attention to the thought. Here’s how.
The Core Fear
Greenberg attributes the Core Fear to Dr. Elna Yadin. Examples include:
OCD symptoms are strategies designed to help the person avoid ever feeling the Core Fear. For Dr. Yadin, there is one most common Core Fear: being a bad person. (Others include fear of dying, suffering eternally, ruining one’s life, and remaining alone).
This is how I described gardening to Rhonda when she was talking about all of the animals trying to boost her crops.
Serial Sunday:
If there’s one thing I didn’t learn growing up, and I’m making up for it now, is being OK with my feelings. That is, the negative ones. I have waged a nearly fifty-year battle against acknowledging my feelings and more importantly, accepting them. Anxious? Someone, probably me, is to blame. Self-doubt? It must be true, else I wouldn’t think it. Insecure? Must be a personality disorder or a statement of my value to the tribe.
None of those are true, and more importantly, not helpful. This doesn’t mean that you have to feel this way forever, or even long; in fact, just sitting with your feelings is therapeutic.
What is the healthy response to feeling emotions?
âIf youâre feeling sad, allow yourself to cry instead of holding back tears,â Viñas says. âIf youâre feeling happy, smile and let others know. The sooner you acknowledge the feeling, the sooner you can move through it.â
Feeling negative emotions helps you move through them.
Interestingly, and this shouldn’t be surprising to students of psychology, is that emotions aren’t really designed for the sake of feeling them: they are designed to motivate us. And negative emotions are quickly reinforced by those two most rewarding of behaviors: (escape and avoidance. But outside of some truly awful situations, neither condition is preferable to patiently dealing with yourself.
So why feel them? (Why not escape or avoid?
It is also a cruel irony that while striving to avoid emotions may bring some brief relief in the short-term, it doesnât really work over the long-term. This is because we really donât have direct control over our feelings (if we did, weâd all be hanging out in bliss). So when we try to reduce or avoid emotions, we get stuck on the hamster wheel of trying to control something we really canât. The resistance takes up much of our attention and energy, while the core issues remain. As we say in the trade: what you resist persists.
The first step? Name the feeling. Another step: talk to yourself in the way that you would someone for whom you care. This is because you may criticize yourself for feeling something negative.
An important hack with feelings emotions is to engage in "(reapprisal)." This is because you can’t control your feelings; you are going to have feelings whether you want to or not. (I think this has been my hangup.) Reapprisal involves recasting your feelings in a more positive light. This helps you avoid attempting to express feeling.
What about "bad" feelings?
This is a meta-cognitive take on the topic, but appreciating that your feelings aren’t good or bad is important: they are all able to help you, but experiencing your negative feelings fully [can help you feel less negative emotions](What You Think About Your Emotions Matters (berkeley.edu))… down the road, at least:
Her study supports other research showing the benefits of believing that all emotions are useful and equally valuable. For example, one study found that participants who thought emotions were helpful also reported being happier and having more social supports than those who found emotions a hindrance. Additionally, the more participants viewed emotions as helpful in their lives, the better they performed on a timed reasoning taskâwhich is somewhat surprising, given how often people pit reason against emotion.
This isn’t a screed against reason and logic; those two are still your friends. But you have to sit with your feelings if you want them to teach you something.
I have something of an affinity for novelty; I am not upset when my day’s plans are interrupted by something emergent (usually, and depending upon deadlines and competing expectations), and often embrace the sudden change. I know plenty of people who are not like that, though; they hate anything that is unplanned or an interruption.
Writ large, people actually prefer familiar activities:
In a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people prefer old and familiar activities over hedonic ones that are new and exciting. This means people might prefer revisiting a favorite spot rather than exploring a much-hyped restaurant.
"The research is especially interesting because, on the surface, it runs counter to the idea of the bucket list, whereby people tend to pursue novelty — things they’ve never done but have always wanted to do — as they approach the end of life," study author Ed O’Brien of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said in a press release. "Here we find that, at least in these more every day ending contexts, people actually do the opposite. They want to end on a high note by ending on a familiar note."
People Prefer Familiarity Over The Excitement Of Novelty
I have a food and dining bucket list in OneNote, sorted by kind of food, and to some degree, location! We do tend to stick to old favorites, but I’m always game to try something new. I don’t look at a bad experience as something to lament; I consider it a piece of data I benefitted from acquiring. Mostly.
I was not surprised to learn that dopamine causes us to search for novelty…exploring leads you to expect a reward:
You’ve probably heard about dopamine before, and its effects on the brain. It’s often touted as a ‘reward chemical’ or part of the brain’s ‘reward center,’ but more recent research has shown that, like novelty, it’s actually more closely related to our motivation to seek rewards rather than being a reward itself.
Why Getting New Things Makes Us Feel So Good: Novelty and the Brain
So novelty is related to reward seeking.
Seeking novelty, or "neophilia," has classically been associate with troublesome behaviors. But coupled with two other traits–persistence and self-transcendence–novelty seeking leads to greater happiness:
What was the secret to their happy temperament and character? A trio of traits. They scored high in novelty-seeking as well in persistence and âself-transcendence.â Persistence, the stick-to-it virtue promoted by strong-willed Victorians, may sound like the opposite of novelty-seeking, but the two traits can coexist and balance each other.
I worked with someone who used to repeat the clichĂ©, "Perception is reality." I don’t doubt the limited veracity of that statement; that is, for some people, their perception is the only reality. When you’re dealing with other people, it’s certainly worth knowing this truism.
But it’s only half of the story. There is, on the one side, the invocation that all sentient people are called to: bettering yourself. Evolving. And understanding that your perception is not, in fact, reality, but as noted in this video, unique to you. And while it’s debatable what the definition of the truth is, it is certainly not unique to you.
The other side is the persuasion angle, the sales tactic: advantaging your influence by understanding the other person’s perception. This is the crucial difference between perception and perspective.
It is certainly possible to shift a personsâ perspective on an issue. In order to do so, itâs important to understand why they feel the way they do. What are the perceptions and beliefs that are giving them a particular perspective? Once those perceptions are clear you can begin to change their perspective. Heed my warning when I say that people hold onto their beliefs and perceptions tightly so be careful in how you approach them. 1
There’s no doubt the world would be a better place if we all could move off of perception and move into perspective. But you can’t control other people. You can, though, do this for yourself.
I was mesmerized by this movie as a child; my mom got a reel-to-reel projector for a birthday party when I was just a squirt and we all watched this.
Amazing notes and examples of the animation from the film.
I posted quickly the other night that [I love pears][1]. That’s true, and the post stands. Pears are delicious.
But I like them for another reason.
When I find myself thinking about eating something after dinner (an activity about which I am circumspect, having effectively not done that deliberately as part of a larger weight-loss strategy), the usual suspects fall into my mind: That can of Virginia peanuts in the pantry! Liccorice! A nub of chocolate!
Depending upon what FoodNoms tells me is my calorie balance for the day, I often spring for frozen blueberries, or more recently, a pear. Rhonda loves them, too.
Grabbing a pear isn’t so simple as plucking one from the crisper and chomping down, though. I have a process that involves a few curated steps:
OK, so why enumerate such quotidian steps? I like the routine. Maybe it’s a sign of middle age, or an expression of my overly-active left brain (my brain is a loud mash of language, all day. All day.) It’s a process entirely spatial and physical in its completion. It involves some work and care in its preparation, in contrast with the quick hit of dopamine you get from unwrapping something sugary. It takes a little time before you can enjoy it.
Coffee is like this, for me, too. So many people jam a plastic cylinder in a machine, pull a trigger, and ruefully gulp down tepid brew in a litany of morning ablutions. For my parent, I adore the weighing, grinding, and measuring that goes into my morning jag, via pour over. Good beans, simple tools, time, and attention.
Happy Mother’s Day! Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:
I have to rise a bit earlier to stick to my am rowing routine. This pretty much how it’s going:
How do you know you’re misusing due dates in your task management app? You’re setting due dates that are I wan to do by dates but that have no externally corresponding due date. In English: you’re assigning due dates to tasks that aren’t actually hard deadlines.
And a good sign that you’re doing that is you find yourself looking over your "Today" list and moving the date to the next day. Again. And again.
What’s wrong with this?
Nothing, really. But ultimately, due dates are when something is actually due. It’s a deadline.
"But I set a deadline for myself!" you might object.
Don’t do that.
Simpler task managers don’t offer many ways to bubble a task up to your awareness outside of due dates. But apps with more robust metadata, like Todoist and OmniFocus, to name a couple, can help you focus your attention on urgent and important tasks, while not tricking yourself with due dates.
My current example: I wrote about applying the Eisenhower Matrix to Todoist here on Uncorrected a while back. My particular system is a mashup of GTD and this method. Besides organizing tasks into projects with corresponding tags (context, in GTD parlance), I apply a P1 tag to things that are urgent and important (things I should do as soon as possible), P2 to things that are urgent but not important (things i have to plan), and important but not urgent (P3, not important but urgent), and can be delegated.
That organization scheme adds another processing step when getting things out of your inbox, so there’s some friction there. But it helps you focus when you find your "Today" perspective full of things you can keep pushing off to tomorrow. Working out of your P1 or Important/Urgent perspective keeps you moving forward, while things that are actually due today can appear in Today.