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Are you easily distracted? I bet you are. If I told you this link led to a list of funny pics of deranged kittens, you’d likely click through and quickly forget our conversation.
That won’t happen this time!
Interruptions do the most damage when we allow their appearance to affect us long after we’ve returned to our initial task. This can happen for a few reasons:
- We treat any break in our work flow like it’s a fracture in the final product.
- We resent our seeming inability to avoid distractions and end up treating their appearance as a personal weakness.
- We view distractions as a change in our journey instead of just another bend in the river.
What can you do about it?
1. Embrace Your Fear
You are not, contrary to what your mother may have told you, different from the rest of us. We all get distracted. We all get annoyed when a productive moment is interrupted. We all get fed up when scheduled events don’t go as planned. If you allow trepidation to sneak into your mind at the prospect of distractions, you’ll cripple your productive abilities.
Fearing distractions also fosters resentment against the ones doing the distracting. Recognize that you will be distracted sometimes and accept those distractions as opportunities to improve. You can’t stop distractions but you can keep them from taking over your day. This is your time!
2. Plan For Interruptions
Effective planning is a cornerstone of the productive lifestyle. Planning for interruptions might seem impossible. Does it to you? Here’s an easy visualization that will help you get started with your planning:
Start each work session by drawing a few squares on a small piece of scrap paper. These represent distractions that will almost certainly pop up. As you encounter and conquer distractions, put a check mark in the appropriate box. After awhile you’ll be able to do this in your head. Sounds easy, right? An expected distraction has no power over your day. You still have control.
3. Delegate And Postpone
Once you’ve identified an interruption as something that needs attention and not just a nascent longing to goof off, try to postpone your involvement. The brute way of doing this is to shout out, “I don’t have time right now. Don’t bother me!”
The classy option is a bit more involved. Take a moment to understand what the distraction involves. Is somebody dying? Is there a deadline you’ve forgotten? Is there a networking opportunity here? If it turns out that you’re not facing an emergency, postpone your involvement and delegate as much of the detail work to somebody with available resources.
4. Attack Procrastination
It’s safe to say that most of us welcome far more distractions than we should. Why? Because we’re chronic procrastinators and distractions offer us a way to slack off without being overtly lazy. The simplest way to attack procrastination is to synthesize urgency with truncated deadlines. If it normally takes you 3 hours to do something, hit the bathroom, grab a glass of water, set a timer for 90 minutes, and tear into your work! This won’t work for every project but it’s a lot of fun when it does!
5. Split Your Day Into Targets
Distractions are most dangerous to the person working without short-term goals. You can keep yourself out of the danger zone by setting targets throughout your day. You’ll probably only need to do this for tasks you really don’t want to complete. For example:
- Send uncomfortable email by 9am
- Complete meeting agenda by 12pm
- Say pleasant thing to annoying boss by 2pm
The power in this process is that you now have time-sensitive targets to steer toward once you’ve escaped distractions. That 8:45am phone conversation that might have gone on for an hour? Nixed by the email deadline. Crops dying on Farmville at 11am? Overruled by the meeting agenda!
6. Limit Inputs
The more you limit channels people can use to distract you, the less likely it is that you’ll be distracted. It takes strength of character to ignore social media and your ever-friendly smartphone. It takes trust in the people who work for you to step away from the rush of business and crunch numbers in the back room. It’s hard to disconnect because we often feel a tinge of irrelevance when we step out of the rush.
Do it. Your results will be proof that it was worth the effort.
7. Batch Outputs
Responding to emails in batches and scheduling a block of time to make phone calls can seem like a dreary way to do business but it’s a highly effective way to keep distractions at arms length. Batching is even more effective in minimizing the collateral damage caused by Twitter and other social networks if you jump in without a set time frame.
To get started, make a list of the things you must do every day to maintain good communication in your business and throughout your social networks. Give each tool or action it’s own time slot and allow a bit of margin at the end. You won’t get the momentary social high of constant real-time interactions but the long-term benefits will make up for your loss.
8. Communicate Your Schedule To Others
When it comes to managing people-based distractions, communication is key. Need to finish a project? Let the people in your work group know that you’ll be off-limits until a certain time. Trying to finish a freelance project in a houseful of kids? Let them know that unless somebody is dying or the house is burning down, you’ll murder a kitten if they interrupt you.
Obviously, if you haven’t taken the time to create a realistic schedule for yourself, sharing that schedule won’t help as much.
9. Begin With The Main Point
When you encounter a distraction, get to the heart of it immediately. Your “get to the point” style may go over badly with some people who prefer to give back story before sharing their main point. Apologize for any possible rudeness and ask for the main point anyway.
Once you know the main point you can ask for supporting information and make a smart decision about what to do before getting back to work.
Getting back to work is what you were about to do, wasn’t it?
If you’ve found a particular tip or trick helpful in your quest to beat distractions, I hope you’ll take a moment to share it!
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. ~Thomas Edison
Seth Simonds is an editor here at Lifehack.org. Get even more tips by following Lifehack on Twitter or subscribing via RSS.
This article is © Rick Hanson, PhD, 2008 and is from www.RickHanson.net
1. Do the right thing. The bliss of blamelessness. Practice the virtues that are the
foundation of any psychological growth or spiritual practice.
2. Tend to the causes of accomplishment; do the things that will legitimately earn
you success. All you can do is feed the fruit tree; you can’t make it give you an apple.
Take initiative, be “ardent, diligent, resolute, and mindful,” and be at peace with
whatever happens. As Meher Baba said: “Don’t worry. Be happy. Make efforts.”
3. Love. Practice lovingkindness for everyone, including (especially?!) neutral and
difficult people. Feelings of love neutralize feelings of shame.
4. Do things that ground you increasingly in a sense of your own beingness,
always already awake, benign, and contented. For example, meditate, spend time in
nature, cuddle your children (or sweetie), do yoga, etc.
5. Relax “self.” Take things less personally. Give up trying to perfect yourself;
that’s like trying to polish Jell-O.
6. Accept yourself as you are. You are what you are, and you cannot change how
you are in this instant, though you can create the causes that will develop you in the
future. But at any moment of now, there is nothing you can do besides accept it and
act to improve it. In particular, try to accept the vulnerable or not-so-pretty parts of
your self; everyone has these; for example, it is not bad to be anxious, sad, or needy.
7. Accept where you are in the four natural, unavoidable stages of learning and
getting better at anything: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence,
conscious competence, unconscious competence. The second stage – conscious
incompetence – is the hardest one, and it’s where people are prone to quit, but keep
going toward growing competence, which will support your sense of worth.
8. Serve the world. Donate to charity. Tend to your friends and family (including
animal companions). Be nice to strangers.
9. Exercise your capacities. If you have talents lying fallow, start using them. “The
most expensive piece of equipment is the one not making any money.”
10. Reflect on your accomplishments and good qualities each day. Perhaps take
brief inventory before going to bed each night, answering questions like these: What
did I get better at today? How did I act with good character? What have I gotten
done? In what ways did I help others?
11. Be in reality about the facts of who you are, and what you have done in your
life (the good and the bad). See yourself as a mosaic with a hundred tiles, and tell the
truth about what is actually there; it’s always mostly good.
12. Be fair. You would want to be fair in your judgments of others; why do you,
another human being like them, deserve any less?
13. Take in the evidence of your own contributions, skills, accomplishments,
loveableness, value to others. Fill that hole in your heart so that you become less
hungry for “narcissistic supplies” over time.
14. Spend more time with people who like you. Perhaps even identify a kind of
“go-to” or support team of key people who are major and credible validators of you,
and deepen your involvement with them.
Spend less time with people who are neutral, indifferent, or negative toward you. If
people are critical, it can help to reflect on the myriad factors that led them to treat
you that way, which can put it in context and make it feel less personal. If
appropriate – and not just getting sucked into wrestling with the tar baby – stick up
for yourself. If appropriate, ask others to stick up for you, too.
15. Ask for appropriate positive feedback. It is a lot more useful to know what you
are doing right than what you are doing wrong, since the latter only tells you that
you’re missing the target, not where it is or how to hit it.
16. Get a sense or image of internal nurturing and encouraging figures, such as the
loving eyes of your doting grandmother, a guardian angel, or simply a clear voice of
reason in about your good qualities. Build up the realness of those internal
“nurturing parent,” “protector,” or “guide” figures, and listen to them more often.
17. Sort criticisms about you into four piles – “not valid,” “valid but to heck with it,
I’m not going to change that one,” “not a moral fault but worth putting in correction
from now on,” and “deserves a healthy wince of remorse” – take maximum
reasonable responsibility for the third and fourth piles, make the appropriate
changes sincerely and diligently (perhaps even specific amendments or expiations
for serious wrongdoings), and move on.
18. Forgive yourself your past misdeeds and your present faults. This does not
mean letting yourself off the hook for them, but means instead not berating or
whipping yourself over and over for them. In a way, self-flagellation is a kind of
avoidance of responsibility; when we take true responsibility, there is a kind of
forgiveness, an honest facing and then a moving on. If you like, write out sentences
like, “I forgive myself for ______ .” Or imagine others forgiving you, like the other
people involved, or beings who have a powerful meaning to you (e.g., a teacher,
Jesus, the Buddha).
19. See the empty nature of both your good qualities and your bad ones. They are
all compounded from smaller parts, they’re the result of ten thousand factors (give or
take a few), and they arise and disappear interdependently with the whole wide
world; therefore, they have no inherent static independent existence. They are simply
qualities, some good, some bad. The good ones are worth encouraging, and the bad
ones worth discouraging – for the sake of yourself and all beings – but none of them
is worth identifying with.
20. Stick up for yourself within yourself. Talk back to irrational or self-critical
thoughts. Classic examples: Comparing yourself to others (especially unfair
comparisons); equating the worth of who you are with the success of what you do;
21. You should treat yourself as if you matter. Listen to your innermost hopes and
dreams, don’t dash them, don’t rain on that parade, but encourage them in realistic
ways. Give yourself empathic attunement – which may have been in short supply
when you were a child – for your own feelings, being mindful of them, friendly
toward them, and accepting (meditation is great for developing this ability). Let
yourself let down sometimes; drop the load, put your feet up, and relax; maybe you
need a good cry, for real; build in routine times for rest and respite; take more long
baths, long walks, long lovemaking, long board games with the kids, long chats with
good friends.
…
I love Chuck Palahniuk… I also read Men’s Health… so, when I saw this article in the magazine I knew it had to live on my blog!
Yes, this process feels like a huge humiliation, but what do you have to lose? Forget your defensiveness.
By: Chuck Palahniuk, Illustrations by: Matt Dorfman
In addition to exercising regularly and eating right, I make it a top priority to commit suicide every couple of years. Little girls might dream of the picture-perfect wedding, planning and envisioning the ideal bridal gown and the glorious release of white doves, but since I was little I’ve been planning my supreme self-murder. I’ve edited and honed the tableau: me as corpse with as little mess as possible. Nothing fancy, no shotguns or nooses, no swan dives from high windows of the Chrysler Building.
As a newspaper reporter, I was sent several times every winter to cover the same scene: a family found dead after they’d tried to heat their home by bringing a charcoal barbecue indoors. In each case, the carbon monoxide had suffocated them while they slept, and I’d visit the location with paramedics and police. And those dead nuclear families, Mom and Dad and the kids tucked into their beds, they looked . . . really great. So peaceful. Without any sign of rictus, vomitus, or spasm. Their faces so smooth and relaxed they might still be asleep.
If you ask me, that’s the way to go. I’m probably prejudiced from living in a state where it’s legal to ring down your own curtain, next door to another state where you can choose to die. Sometime I should tell you about being invited to a going-away party where the host drank phenobarbital. I didn’t know a soul there, especially not the host, who was only weeks away from a natural death from colon cancer. A friend of a friend of a friend had phoned me in tears and begged me to escort her, because it seemed bad form and a touch pathetic to show up stag for such an event. It’s amazing, but between Judith Martin and Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt, no one has covered the etiquette for this situation–what to wear, what to bring as a bread-and-butter gift, how to address the dying stranger. What’s worse is I didn’t know about the Final Exit aspect of the party until the guests were asked to join hands and light candles. This was my blind date with death.
Self-euthanasia is major trend in the making. Each year in the United States, some 26,000 men die by their own hand, including some smarter, braver men than you and me. Hunter S. Thompson. Kurt Cobain. Spalding Gray. David Foster Wallace. These were men of infinite accomplishment, finances, and talent, and we will miss them. But if you’re going to check out, you must first promise to take on a more difficult task. You’ll have to wait 7 days, and in that last week of your life, you’ll have to perform what I glibly refer to as the Three C’s. Don’t worry, the time will fly by. Like the final week at a job you hate, every moment will be gilded with nostalgia and sweetened with the knowledge that you’re a dead man walking. The Ultimate Temp. The game’s almost over, and you’re just running out the clock.
The first C stands for Clean. Clean your bathroom. Clean your car. Do the laundry and scrub the grout. Pull out the refrigerator and wipe behind it. Wash the windows. Do everything. The second C stands for Cull. Ransack your files and discard everything except your most important papers. The same goes for your closets and memorabilia — really, all your possessions. If you haven’t looked at it recently, toss it. Donate it. Destroy it. Throw all your history and secrets into the garbage. Do the same with the aged contents of your medicine cabinet and kitchen. Also, spring for a really good haircut. Despite popular superstition, human hair does not grow beyond death, so you might as well look good. Treat yourself. Pamper, pamper, pamper; you have my permission.
Any man will tell you that it’s not the big disasters that finish you. No, given an invasion by hostile space aliens or an attack of flesh-eating zombies, most guys will grab their coats and hats and run out to join the fray. Even a run-of-the-mill earthquake or forest fire constitutes a nice change of pace. Instead, what grinds us down are the parking tickets. The spoiled food in the back of the fridge. The dirty clothes at the bottom of the hamper that haven’t seen daylight since 1995. Once you allow a critical mass of these petty annoyances to collect, you’re sunk.
Regarding Culling, my point is: If you can shave, you can live.
The third C stands for Connect. This means contacting everyone you’ve known and saying something nice. No matter how much you hate them, let go of that bitterness. Identify some aspect of each person, something you’ve secretly admired or envied or coveted, and praise that something. Say how jealous you were of his career or happy marriage or a particular merino wool mock-turtleneck sweater.
Yes, this process feels like a huge humiliation, but what do you have to lose? Forget your self-pity. Forget your anger and defensiveness. Forgive everybody and forgive yourself. In another week they’ll be gazing down into your casket, feeling just awful. So for now, throw them a bone. Give them a break.
Beyond that, fully imagine your death: the cozy warmth, the pleasant wooziness. The sound of your favorite film or music playing in the background. Envision your sparkling bathroom and empty filing cabinets. Then imagine the world without you. The same traffic jams and famines. The same political crap fights and your team never making the playoffs. People will forget you. Everyone will forget you. You’re no Kurt Cobain, so just light your barbecue and toast a marshmallow. . . .
But if you’ve completed the Three C’s, chances are good that you won’t bother. Because by then you’ll be surrounded by friends who now recognize you as a valuable, sensitive guy. Your oven will be clean, your car vacuumed. In the same way you procrastinated on your taxes, you can procrastinate on your death. And, at least for the moment, your hair looks . . . really great.
10 things worth living for
1 The word “sex” plus any of the following: sweaty, grinding, make up, exculpatory, oral, and, of course, hot monkey.
2 The sweet torque of a perfectly thrown ball: curve, foot-, bowling, doesn’t matter.
3 Your favorite band’s next tour. Why the hell didn’t you go last time?
4 The new: People. Places. Tastes. Sensations. Profanities you haven’t tried, like “Balls!” Gadgets. Cars. Players on your favorite team. Blacktop on your street. Information. Instruction. Friends. Lovers. Things that grab your imagination, even fleetingly, and make you hunger for more.
5 The surprise of receiving something unsolicited from a woman.
6 Inception’s release. Don’t know it? O brother, go forth and google.
7 Midsummer, when you can slap an obscenely thick tomato slice on every meal for a week.
8 Novels way better than their movies: The Beach, by Alex Garland; A Simple Plan, by Scott Smith; and Leaving Las Vegas, by John O’Brien.
9 The morning after uninterrupted sleep.
10 Sticking around to stick in the craw of those who cannot stand you
Hypersuccessful men in sports, business, and entertainment all lack a trait you may possess — one that could be holding you back
By: Mike Zimmerman, Illustrations by: Noma Bar
I FIGURED IT OUT IN A WHITE VAN heading west on I-10 halfway between Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Matthew McConaughey was at the wheel. We’d been at Sinatra’s old house in Palm Springs all day. And if this sounds like one of those “I had the weirdest dream last night” scenarios, I’m not messing with you. The whole thing was for a Men’s Health cover shoot, and I was doing the interview portion on the road with him. Good talker, McConaughey. We rapped about topics across the board: achievement, friendship, integrity, the gender fraternity that is being male. Positive stuff.
Now if you bring up any of those subjects — including McConaughey — as a sincere conversation piece, in a lot of rooms you’ll get snickers, eye rolls, and those disbelieving sneers that say, “My God, you’re serious.” And on an even deeper level: “My God, you’re stupid.”
So in the middle of a positive and sincere conversation in that van, the epiphany hit me: There are no successful cynics. Think about it: Real success, any way society measures it — money, fame, happiness, family — cannot be achieved in the presence of cynicism.
Why? McConaughey put it pretty well: “Cynics love to put their finger on disease before they put it on health. It’s the easy way to go. Play the blame game: ‘I got screwed, that should’ve been mine.’ They’re all dead-end answers. For me, ‘Just keep livin’,’ as a creed and a compass, is about making the evolving choice, the forward-moving, life-giving choice.”
If that quote made you wince, you probably have a healthy cynical streak. But I can say, as a guy lucky enough to interview upward of a hundred hypersuccessful people — from billionaire CEOs and future Hall of Fame athletes to doctors and teachers you’ve never heard of — that if successful people have one common trait, it’s an utter lack of cynicism. The world owes them nothing. They go out and find what they need without asking for permission; they’re driven, talented, and work through negatives by focusing on the positives. Being stupid, it took me years to figure this out, and being deeply cynical since high school, the moment was a pie in the face — with a lead pie pan.
McConaughey spoke as we drove into the sunset in a van he’d customized himself. Above the actor’s head, embedded in the roof upholstery, was a voice recorder. A tour-bus-style microphone hung from the roof as well. He talks into it during long, solo drives between Los Angeles and his home state of Texas, he said, to record his thoughts.
A cynic would masturbate to this information. But then, cynics specialize in the self-pleasuring gesture that fertilizes nothing. Meanwhile, McConaughey has money rolling in. He has multiple film projects, his own production company, a beautiful house, and a growing family with his best girl — and he continues to work to make himself better in every aspect of his life. I know this because he tells me, and I believe him because I’ve seen that microphone.
NO QUESTION, WE LIVE IN CYNICAL TIMES. A revealing stat: The Booth Chicago/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index, an ongoing joint survey by economists at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, shows that at the end of the third quarter of 2009, only 22 percent of Americans trusted the financial system. That’s like four out of five dentists not recommending sugarless gum to their patients who chew gum. Even worse: The index reveals that the average American trusts a stranger on the street 55 percent more than a stockbroker, and 48 percent more than a large corporation.
This is where we are as a society. Hell, that’s where I’ve been for years. You can’t calculate my trust index because I don’t have one. I’ve seriously contemplated selling a T-shirt that says, “It’s all a bunch of lies.” I know a platoon of talented people who’ve lost their jobs, as do you. My own career and financial picture have been kicked in like some old-school rock star’s hotel TV. I’m more than just pissed off — I’m enraged, with the bone-deep anger you can’t defuse with a deep breath and a 10-count. Ask me for one good reason why everything about us sucks, and I’ll give you 20: Talent doesn’t always count. Dedication guarantees nothing. The system exists for screwing the many and fellating the few.
All true. But what do those facts get you? Anger, sure. But even worse, distraction, as you waste time railing about things out of your control. In the worst cases, especially of men removed from the jobs that gave their skills legitimacy, or employed men who’ve been flash-frozen in a new career reality of slashed salaries and heavier workloads, it can make men turn against the industries and companies that represent their best chances at future success. Their cynicism prevents any return to that state of sincere belief in what they do.
It’s a kind of death.
HERE’S A USEFUL EXERCISE: NAME SOME successful cynics. You can’t. Look at some of the most successful people in the past 10 years: Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, the Google guys. They’re not too cynical. George Clooney, Bono, Pixar’s central creative team. They’re about as genuine about their lives and work as you can get. Love him or hate him, George W. Bush is no cynic. Cynics don’t become presidents of the United States. They don’t become top CEOs, entrepreneurs, or researchers either.
Cynics are brambles, quicksand, and snot. They ply their drug one-on-one: Come on, et’s sit here and be cynical together. It feels good to stay angry, to stay in one place forever. They specialize in what a friend of mine calls “the bitch spiral,” which occurs when like-minded people get together and complain with such intensity that every slight against them becomes a gigantic conspiracy. They attack the successful under the banner of hypocrisy and injustice: “The Yankees’ payroll is ruining baseball!” “The Goldman Sachs bonus system is ruining society!” “My boss is ruining my life!”
Here’s the thing: Whatever you do, elite performance (which is the delivery vehicle for success) requires a sincere belief — in the cause, of course, but also in your own ability and the very system in which your performance happens. Cynicism cannot exist in the same space as sincere belief. Cynicism is not disbelief, but unbelief, a refusal.
That’s why cynicism is so dangerous to the average guy. If you lose that sincere belief — at your job, in your relationship, as a son or sibling or parent, anywhere — you’re worthless, no matter how talented you are.
AT THE RISK OF SOUNDING TOO EARNEST, let me say this: Cynicism is caused by broken hearts. Sincere belief in a company, a group, a system, or another person forces you to put something real on the line, something with deep tethers to your emotional core. If you offer that up, and you fail — or others fail you — your heart shatters.
Then the choice emerges. Either you fall into a fresh bitch spiral, or you do the most difficult thing any man can do: Believe once again. That means moving forward through the things that broke your heart in the first place: hypocrisy, injustice, venality. A few of the men I’ve spent time with for Men’s Health stand out in this regard.
Derek Jeter: I’m sitting in my living room during the World Series last November, a devoted Phillies fan watching Jeter use his bat to pound nails into my beloved team’s coffin. I knew the Phils were doomed, because I’ve been in Jeter’s living room. He told me, while lounging in his easy chair, that being clutch simply means believing — that because you’ve been successful in the same situation before, you will be successful again. That magnificent bastard, who works under the most cynical media microscope in sports, always believes he will get the hit. Does he always? Of course not. But his belief never wavers, and it’s contagious. And I think, Why does it take the rest of us — not to mention Cole Hamels — so long to figure this stuff out?
Jason Kamras: This former Washington, D.C., middle-school math teacher was named 2005 National Teacher of the Year. His case really defines sincere belief for me; after all, who’s riper for cynicism than a teacher? “Do I leap out of bed every morning with utter excitement? No. But I do get up every morning with a sense of purpose and passion,” he told me. “If you’re not doing that, then be honest with yourself. At some point we have to stop and say, ‘Look, I really want to be passionate.’ I don’t think I’ve ever said, ‘Gosh, it’s terrible that I can’t buy this beautiful house I want.’ ”
The businessmen: I’ve interviewed dozens of CEOs and other top bosses. Netflix’s Reed Hastings, who has rendered Blockbuster impotent. Blake Mycoskie of Toms Shoes, who donates a pair of shoes to needy kids for every pair he sells. Jim Koch, who quit a six-figure job to brew Samuel Adams beer. These men’s big ideas were met with skepticism. Each man blossomed through sincere belief.
Chuck Palahniuk: “As a writer, I felt compelled to toe the publishing line until I realized I was flushing away all my free time. I was starting to really hate writing,” he told me. “It looked like just another f–king job where I was trying to please some boss. There had to be a way for writing to be fun.” So he wrote Fight Club.
I’ve sat down with many others — LeBron James, David Beckham, Jamie Foxx, Anderson Cooper, Aaron Eckhart, and dozens like them — and the theme runs through the conversations like a power line. One of the great summations of their collective approach came from the actor Mark Wahlberg: “All I can do is try to point out the obvious,” he told me. “If you’re motivated and doing the right thing, good things are going to happen.”
CYNICS HAVE AN OLD CLICHE FOR WHAT I’M talking about: drinking the Kool-Aid. Well, this particular flavor is low in sugar and high in nutrition. Sure, you can abstain out of pride, anger, fear, or insecurity. This Kool-Aid is no guarantee, after all. You can still take the wrong roads, monumentally screw up, or just plain fail with your best effort. Abandoning cynicism is just a tool.
But recently, I have chosen to drink the Kool-Aid. Trust me, it’s not easy to swallow. My favorite sport is scoffing. I fight the bitterness in me every single day the way an alcoholic fights the minute-to-minute urge to chug. And yet I rely on this catalog of past encounters with successful men to keep myself oriented. I’m not saying “think positively” or “be optimistic” or some other self-help nonsense. I’m not saying I have a sincere belief in myself or my talents or the American Dream. I’m saying I have a sincere belief in sincere belief. I’ve seen it work too many times for it to be coincidence. Cynics are fakers. But to keep pushing yourself in the face of failure, that’s real.
Hell, I’ll bet you a 12-pack and a 2-hour bitch spiral that there are no cynical offensive linemen in the NFL.
Your optimism optimization plan
Even levelheaded men can become bitter under stress. Here’s how to see through the cynicism.
You can’t keep a girlfriend
The cynic thinks: All women are crazy
Instead, ask yourself: What about me is driving women crazy?
Conduct a relationship autopsy, says Salvatore Maddi, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California at Irvine. A few months after a relationship ends, have a heart-to-heart (e-mail is fine) about what drove her away. “No matter what she says, be grateful and humble,” Maddi says. “What you learn may very well save your next relationship.”
You hate your job
The cynic thinks: My sweat is making my boss and his cronies rich
Instead, ask yourself: How can I be promoted to crony?
Many of us are working multiple jobs these days, and job stress is high. “Corporate cynicism occurs when there seems to be a gap between rhetoric and reality,” says Ben Dattner, Ph.D., an adjunct assistant professor of organizational psychology at New York University. “So ask your boss to clarify your duties, as well as your opportunities for growth once the economy rebounds.”
Your kid’s underperforming at school
The cynic thinks: The education system sucks
Instead, ask yourself: What have I taught him lately?
School is just a tool. Learning begins at home. Ask your child’s teacher to walk you through the curriculum, Maddi says, and suggest ways you can build upon class work at home. Then meet again in 4 weeks to discuss progress. If your child hasn’t shown improvement, hire a tutor. But don’t give up on the school until you’ve exhausted every other option.
chelsea reynolds
“If you board the wrong train, it’s no use running along the corridor in the other direction,” said famed World War II German resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We in IT boarded the wrong train a long time ago. It’s the “standard model” of information technology organizations — the familiar litany that says CIOs should run IT as a business, meeting the requirements of its internal customers. This refrain has been endorsed by our holy trinity, too: analyst firms, most consultancies, and ITIL.
They call the standard model “best practice.” When they’re in a different mood, they also call desktop lockdown a best practice, leaving you to figure out how it is that you tell your customers what they can and can’t do.
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So we’ve had to run along the corridor, trying to make sense of it all. But you can’t make sense of nonsense.
I admit this conclusion is not a growing consensus. It isn’t even an emerging trend. It’s more a guerilla movement, promoted covertly by some renegade CIOs and supported by a few consultants and commentators who have rejected the conventional wisdom and industry punditry in favor of what their experience tells them works in real organizations.
Bassam Fawaz, CIO of a large global logistics company, is one of the renegades. According to Fawaz, “The IT conventional wisdom that is generously dispensed by many IT think-tanks and opinion makers is largely theoretical and offers little or no practical value.”
Businesses are starting to shake off the recession and think about the future instead of simply making it to next week. It’s the perfect time to board the right train — the one headed to the promised land, where IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.
Want to board the right train?
Your ticket to the promised land begins with this: No one inside your company is your customer.
Thinking that they are is the core fallacy of the standard model, and it has caused no end of trouble.
Take the common complaint voiced by (among others) Dirk Huggett, an IT business analyst for the North Dakota Information Technology Department: “You are always too expensive. One classic example is PCs,” he says. “Executives get flyers from different vendors for $299 laptops and get upset when the ones they buy cost them $800. It is tough to explain why the cheaper PC won’t run their mission-critical application.
“Or try to explain your file and print server hosting rates. It doesn’t matter that part of that rate is full backup and off-site storage. Or as part of a clustered environment you have built-in redundancy and that ensuring the server is updated and secured appropriately is part of that cost. Their friend Joe hosts these things on the side, and it is much cheaper.”
Original article first published: Bob Lewis, InfoWorld
From Mercola.com here.
Noted British psychiatric researcher Malcolm Peet conducted a provocative cross-cultural analysis of the relationship between diet and mental illness. His primary finding was a strong link between high sugar consumption and the risk of both depression and schizophrenia.
There are at least two potential mechanisms through which refined sugar intake could exert a toxic effect on mental health. First, sugar actually suppresses activity of a key growth hormone in the brain called BDNF. BDNF levels are critically low in both depression and schizophrenia.
Second, sugar consumption triggers a cascade of chemical reactions in your body that promote chronic inflammation. In the long term, inflammation disrupts the normal functioning of your immune system, and wreaks havoc on your brain. Once again, it’s linked to a greater risk of depression and schizophrenia.
It’s already known that many additives, preservatives and food colorants can cause behavioral changes, and sugar should definitely be on this list as well. One of the most recent and highly plausible theories that explain sugar’s impact on your mood and mental health is the connection between sugar and chronic inflammation.
The Central Role of Inflammation in Depression
Chronic inflammation in your body disrupts the normal functioning of your immune system and can wreak havoc on your brain.
Chronic inflammation is also associated with heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer. So consuming excessive amounts of sugar can truly set off an avalanche of negative health events – both mental and physical.
Keep in mind that “sugar” refers not only to refined sugar, but to many other sources as well, including high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and starches in the form of grains and potatoes. (Following my nutrition plan is a simple way to automatically reduce your intake of all these sugar sources.)
Another major culprit that encourages inflammation in your body is rancid or oxidized omega-fats (think trans fats), whereas a diet rich in omega-3 fats helps to reduce inflammation. Healthy omega-6 fats like gamma linoleic acid (GLA), found in evening primrose, black currant seed and borage oil can also help counteract inflammation.
As you may already know, I recommend taking animal-based omega-3 supplements for many types of inflammation, and for optimal brain health. Most alternative health practitioners are also well aware of the benefits of omega-3’s for depression.
While all omega-3 fats possess immune-boosting qualities, omega-3 fats from marine sources (EPA and DHA) are more biologically potent than omega-3 fat ALA found in plant sources such as flax seeds, and are more potent inflammation fighters.
My favorite source of omega-3 fats is krill oil, as it has several advantages over fish oil.
The importance of reducing inflammation when dealing with mental health issues is also evidenced by another recent study.
Published in the International Breastfeeding Journal, the study entitled “A new paradigm for depression in new mothers: the central role of inflammation and how breastfeeding and anti-inflammatory treatments protect maternal mental health” discovered that inflammation may be more than just another risk factor. It may in fact be THE risk factor that underlies all others.
The researchers’ stated:
“The old paradigm described inflammation as simply one of many risk factors for depression. The new paradigm is based on more recent research that has indicated that physical and psychological stressors increase inflammation. These recent studies constitute an important shift in the depression paradigm: inflammation is not simply a risk factor; it is the risk factor that underlies all the others.
Moreover, inflammation explains why psychosocial, behavioral and physical risk factors increase the risk of depression. This is true for depression in general and for postpartum depression in particular.
Puerperal women are especially vulnerable to these effects because their levels of proinflammatory cytokines significantly increase during the last trimester of pregnancy–a time when they are also at high risk for depression.
Moreover, common experiences of new motherhood, such as sleep disturbance, postpartum pain, and past or current psychological trauma, act as stressors that cause proinflammatory cytokine levels to rise. “
In the case of post partum depression, breastfeeding is the most obvious remedy of choice as it naturally eases stress and modulates the inflammatory response.
Improve Your Mental Health by Ditching Sugar
Other studies have also found significant links between high-sugar diets and mental health problems such as depression and schizophrenia, even though they were not focused on the presence of inflammation per se.
For example, a 2004 study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry found that a higher dietary intake of refined sugar anddairy products predicted a worse 2-year outcome of schizophrenia.
In addition, a low dietary intake of fish and seafood (sources of healthy omega-3 fats) predicated high prevalence of depression.
The authors also pointed out the link between depression and physical illnesses such as heart disease and diabetes, stating that they all share epidemiological features.
And what do diabetes and heart disease have in common?
Both are caused by and/or worsened by a high intake of sugary foods.
It is a proven fact that sugar increases your insulin levels, which can lead to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, weight gain, premature aging, and many more negative side effects.
Sugar can also cause a rapid rise of adrenaline, which leads to hyperactivity, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating.
Reduced-Sugar Diet Also Shown to Decrease Anti-Social Behavior
As explained by Dr. Russell Blaylock, high sugar content and starchy carbohydrates lead to excessive insulin release, which can lead to falling blood sugar levels, or hypoglycemia. Hypoglycemia, in turn, causes your brain to secrete glutamate in levels that can cause agitation, depression, anger, anxiety, panic attacks and an increase in suicide risk.
Two studies that confirm this theory go back several years.
A 1985 study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that reducing sugar intake had a positive impact on emotions:
“… Subjects reported many symptoms and/or presented a distressed profile during baseline assessment. However, following a 2-wk dietary change symptoms declined, and the MMPI or POMS profiles reflected a more stable and less distressed individual.
Results suggest that a dietary change can remediate the emotional distress exhibited by some individuals…”
The dietary change consisted of a high protein, low carbohydrate diet void of sucrose and caffeine.
The other, the Los Angeles Probation Department Diet-Behavior Program: Am Empirical Analysis of Six Institutional Settings, was published in 1983.
This study included a before and after comparison of 1,382 juveniles who were detained in three juvenile halls, and a before-after comparison of 289 juveniles who were confined in three juvenile camps.
The dietary modifications were designed to lower the daily consumption of sugar in all six settings to see if it had an impact on behavior.
In the three juvenile halls, a 44 percent reduction in the incidence of antisocial behavior was found during the subsequent 3 months. And the 289 juveniles in the probation camps showed a 25 percent reduction in the incidence of antisocial behavior during the 9 months after the implementation of the revised diet.
The authors concluded:
“Although it is clear that the diet change caused the improvement in behavior, it remains to be determined if the relationship between sugar and antisocial behavior is causative.”
The Most Powerful “Drug” to Heal Depression
If you are following the traditional paradigm you will most likely receive a prescription for antidepressants. Unfortunately, most of the time they simply don’t work any better than placebos, and there are many studies that clearly document this.
Physical exercise, on the other hand, is one of the most powerful anti-depressants there is. Numerous studies show that aerobic exercise can improve your mood and is an antidote for mild depression and anxiety.
Dr. James S. Gordon, a world-renowned expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, uses exercise extensively when treating depression.
“What we’re finding in the research on physical exercise is that physical exercise is at least as good as antidepressants for helping people who are depressed. And that it’s even more important for older people,” Dr. Gordon says.
Physical exercise changes the level of serotonin in your brain. It changes, increases your levels of “feel good” hormones, the endorphins. And also, it can increase the number of cells in your brain, in the region of the brain called the hippocampus.
These studies have been first done on animals, and it’s very important because sometimes in depression, there are fewer of those cells in the hippocampus, but you can actually change your brain with exercise. So it’s got to be part of everybody’s treatment, everybody’s plan.”
If you’re not sure how to use exercise like a drug, including the correct variety, intensity, and frequency, please review my Exercise page for more in-depth recommendations and guidelines on how to incorporate it into your life.
Please, don’t delay starting an exercise routine. Many Americans don’t get enough exercise, but this problem is easily remedied if you view exercise as a crucial part of getting healthier and happier.
Other Key Factors to Overcoming Depression
Clearly by now you will have realized that radically reducing or eliminating all forms of sugar is an important step to address the root problem in your body that may be significantly contributing to your depression.
That, plus exercising, may bring you a lot more relief than most conventional strategies used against mild to moderate depression.
Here are four additional strategies that can help you even further:
- Address your stress — Depression is a very serious condition, however it is not a “disease.” Rather, it’s a sign that your body and your life are out of balance.This is so important to remember, because as soon as you start to view depression as an “illness,” you think you need to take a drug to fix it. In reality, all you need to do is return the balance to your life, and one of the key ways to doing this is by addressing your stress levels.
Stress can produce depression of all kinds by affecting your neurotransmitters, but stress is also a contributor to inflammation, which may be one of the most significant risk factors for depression.
There are many ways to address stress. Meditation or yoga works for many. Sometimes all you need to do is get outside for a walk. But in addition to such stress reduction strategies, I also recommend using an energy psychology system that can help you address buried emotional issues that you may not even be consciously aware of. For this, my favorite is the Meridian Tapping Technique (MTT).
- Eat a healthy diet – As discussed, foods have an immense impact on your mood and ability to cope and be happy, and eating whole foods as described in my nutrition plan will best support your mental health.
- Support optimal brain functioning with essential fats – Again, I strongly recommend supplementing your diet with ahigh-quality, animal-based omega-3 fat like krill oil. This may be the single most important nutrient to battle depression.
- Get plenty of sunshine – Making sure you’re getting enough sunlight exposure to have healthy vitamin D levels is also a crucial factor in treating depression or keeping it at bay.One previous study found that people with the lowest levels of vitamin D were 11 times more prone to be depressed than those who had normal levels. Vitamin D deficiency is actually more the norm than the exception, and has previously been implicated in both psychiatric and neurological disorders.
These six primary strategies – avoiding sugar, exercising, addressing emotional stress, eating right, and optimizing your omega-3 and vitamin D levels — are the lifestyle changes that offer you the greatest chance of restoring and maintaining your mental health.
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