The Relationship Cure by John Gottman | Book Summary
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The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships by John Gottman
From the country’s foremost relationship expert and New York Times bestselling author Dr. John M. Gottman comes a powerful, simple five-step program, based on twenty years of innovative research, for greatly improving all of the relationships in your life-with spouses and lovers, children, siblings, and even your colleagues at work.
Gottman provides the tools you need to make your relationships thrive. In The Relationship Cure, Dr. Gottman-
– Reveals the key elements of healthy relationships, emphasizing the importance of what he calls “emotional connection”
– Introduces the powerful new concept of the emotional “bid,” the fundamental unit of emotional connection
– Provides remarkably empowering tools for improving the way you bid for emotional connection and how you respond to others’ bids
– And more!
Packed with fascinating questionnaires and exercises developed in his therapy, The Relationship Cure offers a simple but profound program that will fundamentally transform the quality of all of the relationships in your life.
“The relationship cure?” It sounds unrealistic. All things considered, no two connections are the equivalent; even to the extent that we can make speculations regarding them, they fall into various classifications. We have associations with our sentimental accomplices, companions, collaborators, family, and kids. There can’t be a one-size-fits-all answer for the issues of all these unmistakable gatherings, can there?
Indeed, yes and no. There unquestionably is certifiably not a sorcery pill that will fix your connections in a single singular motion. In any case, there are some broad techniques you can figure out how to help you manage them better.
Step-by-step instructions to utilize these procedures shift from relationship to relationship and from issue to issue, however, the basic standards are the equivalent. What’s more, they all originate from the examination and thoughts you’re going to find.
Chapter 1 – Individuals don’t shape cozy connections by essentially “opening up” to one another.
What’s the key to having a cheerful, solid, and cozy relationship with someone else?
If you believe it’s a readiness to share your most profound, most close to home contemplations, emotions, and encounters, you’re in good company. Back in the mid-1990s, numerous clinicians thought so as well – including one of the creators. In any case, at that point, he led some examination into the issue, and the outcomes astonished both him and numerous others in the field of brain research.
In 1990, research analyst Dr. John Gottman and his partners at the University of Washington set up an abnormal logical exploration community. They called it “the Love Lab.” within, it resembled a typical studio condo, with a kitchen, feasting territory, cover-up away bed, TV, and waterfront perspectives on a trench.
Over the next year, they welcomed 60 wedded couples to go through an end of the week in this comfortable setting. Each couple was given one basic guidance: carry on with life as you ordinarily would.
There was a trick. The loft was fitted out with four observation cameras and a two-path reflect, behind which eyewitnesses watched the couples for 12 hours every day. The members were likewise manipulated with amplifiers and body sensors that looked for side effects of pressure, similar to increments in pulse or levels of sweat.
Dr. Gottman gathered many long periods of video film demonstrating the couples’ regular associations in moment detail. He at that point checked on the tape, looking for instances of accomplices exposing their spirits to each other. However, he looked constantly, he scarcely found any examples of what therapists call “self-divulgence.” Instead, most discussions went this way:
“Nectar, might you be able to snatch me some espresso?”
“Indeed, dear.”
Or on the other hand:
“Hello, look at this funny cartoon!”
“Shh, I’m attempting to peruse.”
Pretty unremarkable stuff, correct? That is what Dr. Gottman thought, as well. Truth be told, he dreaded the entire test had been an exercise in futility. Yet, at that point, in the wake of investigating the recording for a couple of months, he saw something. The way to framing cozy connections was looking straight at him, not too far off in every one of those dull discussions.
What made a difference wasn’t so much the thing the couples were discussing, however how they were discussing it to one another. What’s more, it’s an exercise that applies to all connections, regardless of whether sentimental or something else.
Chapter 2 – Offers are the most crucial units of passionate correspondence.
A wife requesting her husband to get her a mug of espresso doesn’t seem like the stuff of an extraordinary relationship show. In any case, put yourself in the situation of the wife for a second. Envision that as opposed to stating “Sure, nectar,” your better half reacted by snapping, “Go get it yourself.”
Do you feel the distinction? The primary situation uncovers decent homegrown cooperation – such a thing you’d observe in a caring home. The second is more similar to something you’d find in a playback reel called “Why We Got a Divorce.”
The distinction comes down to what the creators call an “offer” and how your accomplice reacts to it.
As indicated by the author, an offer is any endeavor to build up an enthusiastic association with somebody through verbal or nonverbal correspondence. It very well may be an inquiry, as “Hello, did you see the game the previous evening?” A shout, similar to “Goodness, take a gander at that dusk!” A motion, for example, offering somebody a seat, or even only an outward appearance, similar to a straightforward grin.
However, whatever structure it takes, and whatever its surface-level significance, the basic message of the offer remaining parts as before. It says, “Hello, I need to associate with you.” The other individual would then be able to react in one of three different ways: moving in the direction of, getting some distance from, or betraying the offer.
Envision you’ve quite recently perused a fascinating news story, and you need to impart it to a companion. “Hello,” you state, “look at this present.” That’s your offer. Presently, envision your companion puts down his telephone, and happily asks, “What’s going on?” That’s him moving in the direction of your offer and reacting decidedly to your endeavor to build up an association.
Paradoxically, envision your companion keeps gazing at his telephone, claiming not to get with you. Or then again he attempts to change the subject by asking, “Do you understand what time it is?” all things considered, he’s getting some distance from your offer by disregarding or avoiding it.
At last, envision he reacts by saying, “Ugh, wouldn’t you be able to see I’m sincerely busy something?” A negative response like this is betraying your offer.
Through his examination, Dr. Gottman found that such offers, and the three sorts of reaction, speak to the key structure squares of enthusiastic correspondence and human association. Furthermore, as you’ll see, these offers and offer reactions can represent the deciding moment of your connections.
Chapter 3 – Offers as a rule contain concealed messages.
“How’s your day going? Do you have any plans tonight?” These aren’t significant inquiries. Truth be told, they may seem like simple “casual chitchat.” And yet, as offers to build up an enthusiastic association with somebody, each can assume a significant part in fortifying or debilitating that relationship.
The explanation these inquiries are so significant is that there’s something else entirely to them than meets the eye.
Envision a sentimental couple, Mary and Jeff, sitting on a couch in their parlor. Mary hangs over to Jeff and says, “It’s somewhat nippy in here, wouldn’t you say?” This is her offered.
To start to translate its concealed message, we should look underneath the outside of this basic connection.
It couldn’t be any more obvious, it isn’t so much that Mary simply needs to reveal to Jeff that she’s cold or see whether he concurs with her appraisal of the temperature. Mary has an implicit goal: she’s trusting that Jeff will give her a nestle. All in all, she’s offering him to draw nearer to her, both in a real sense and metaphorically.
So for what reason doesn’t she simply state, “Hello, Jeff, give me a snuggle?” Well, now and again we make clear offers. However, normally, we make them more inconspicuous and ambiguous – and all things considered.
By outlining her offer for actual friendship as an assertion about the temperature, Mary has an approach to hide any hint of failure and feels to a lesser degree a blow if Jeff rejects it. Suppose she says, “Give me a snuggle,” and Jeff answers, “No, I’m not in the disposition.” Ouch.
Then again, on the off chance that he reacts by throwing her a sweeping, she’s as yet not getting what she truly needs. Yet, in any event, she’s receiving something positive consequently, and it’s a ton better than by and large dismissal.
Mary is likewise giving Jeff an approach to easily decrease her offer. Regardless of whether he realizes she most likely needs a snuggle, he doesn’t need to experience the ungainliness of saying no on the off chance that he’d preferably mind his own business. He can decide to decipher Mary’s assertion in a real sense and react in like manner.
As such, the ambiguity of our offers is an element, not a bug, and it regularly serves us well. Shockingly, it can likewise prompt a few issues, as we’re going to see.
Chapter 4 – The shrouded messages of offers can be difficult to decipher, so react to them cautiously.
Up until this point, we’ve zeroed in on a portion of the more direct offers that individuals may toss your direction. Certainly, there are concealed messages behind inquiries like “It’s somewhat nippy in here, wouldn’t you say?” But you don’t require a Ph.D. in brain research to translate them. The shrouded messages aren’t excessively covered up.
If all offers were that basic, connections would be anything but difficult to explore. Be that as it may, truly, offers are frequently hard to react to. Truth be told, they regularly don’t seem like offers by any stretch of the imagination.
To some degree, we all have sentiments and wants that we don’t have the foggiest idea of how to communicate – in any event not helpfully. Also, on the off chance that we don’t comprehend our feelings, it makes sense that we’d struggle to convey them to others.
At the point when a kid pitches a temper fit since her dad will not get her a toy, you may think the fit of rage is a declaration of outrage at not getting what she needs, yet it could likewise be an offer for her dad’s solace.
At the point when a wife asks her husband other a stacked inquiry – “Why not ever call me when no doubt about it?” – it’s not simply an allegation; it’s an offer for more correspondence. Inadequately communicated, however, an offer in any case.
At the point when sensations of misery, outrage, or dread are included, individuals’ offers can seem as though regrets, reactions, or grievances. What’s more, they can be hard to perceive and react to. The key is to recollect this and rather look underneath the outside of what the other individual is stating.
Envision you’re the dad or wife in these models. Rather than protectively clarifying why you won’t accept the toy, give the kid an embrace and recognize her neglected requirement for comfort. Rather than grumbling that you’re excessively occupied at the workplace to settle on close to home decisions, organize a set time when you’ll quickly connect with your accomplice, and recognize his requirement for correspondence.
By zeroing in on the fundamental offer, you’re bound to figure out how to react that will construct associations – moving in the direction of the offer, rather than away from or against it.
Chapter 5 – To comprehend individuals’ offers assists with realizing where they’re coming from.
As we’ve seen, offers are frequently obfuscated articulations of neglected feelings and want, which might be indistinct even to individuals communicating them. Maybe that brain research Ph.D. would be helpful all things considered!
Be that as it may, shy of taking a crack at a graduate school program, you can at present give yourself a significant advantage in deciphering others’ offers – you simply need a superior comprehension of their passionate cosmetics.
In this part, we’ll take a gander at one approach to pick up that.
Have you ever gotten into a battle with somebody and felt that you two were truly contending with a third individual who wasn’t in the room? That is the thing that it resembled for Rick and Sarah, a couple that came to Dr. Gottman for treatment.
At the point when Rick was a kid, his mom left him, thus he was raised by his grandma. She detested caring for him and continually revealed to him he was useless. Thus, he built up a delicate ability to be self-aware regard – which came to torment his relationship with Sarah.
Each time she submitted a question about his conduct, maybe Rick heard his grandma’s voice. Sarah would get frantic at him for turning on the TV as opposed to conversing with her – yet as opposed to hearing a message about disliking the TV, or needing to invest more energy with him, Rick heard her state, “You can’t do anything right!”
Concerning Sarah, one of seven kids, she’d experienced childhood in a helpless family and was instructed to hush up about her requirements. So she did exactly that in her relationship with Rick – in any event for up to 14 days, after which her dissatisfactions would detonate into grievances.
On account of the TV, what she truly needed was to have a closer association with Rick, yet sadly, she communicated this longing in a way that sounded harsh and accusatory.
Like Rick and Sarah, we as a whole convey stuff from our past connections into the present. It’s what the author call our enthusiastic legacy, and it influences our collaborations with others if we understand it. So it makes sense that the more you think about somebody’s experience, the more you’ll comprehend where they’re coming from, and the more fruitful you’ll be at deciphering their offers.
Chapter 6 – When causing offers, to ponder your necessities, and express them through delicate language.
We should recap what we’ve realized up until now. To start with, basic cooperations between individuals are frequently offering for the passionate association. Second, these offers regularly contain shrouded messages. What’s more, third, these hidden implications are regularly formed by an individual’s enthusiastic legacy and past connections.
On the off chance that you recollect this and attempt to study the notable individuals in your day to day existence, you’ll become better at reacting to their offers helpfully.
Yet, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take care when making your offers and ought to depend on others to translate what you mean. There are things you can do to make yourself bound to be perceived, and such that meets your feelings – a mutual benefit for everybody!
At whatever point you’re attempting to get something throughout everyday life, it assists with understanding what you need. The equivalent is valid for offers. Whenever you end up going to dispatch into contention or submit a question, stop and ask yourself: What’s my neglected psychological condition here?
Frequently, it will be established in a principal human motivation, similar to the need to feel that you and your friends and family are protected. For instance, if a wife is doubtful of her husband’s choice to purchase a gun for their family, it very well maybe that she’s stressed over what will occur on the off chance that one of the children gets hold of it.
If that is the situation, as opposed to offering a bare expression about firearms being perilous, she should make an offer communicating her dread. That way, rather than getting into a warmed contention about the option to remain battle-ready, the couple can address her interests and discover a trade-off, such as purchasing a lockbox to keep the weapon put away unattainable.
Mellowing an offer additionally goes far to make it more tasteful. Once, the author was holding back to eat with his family, yet his better half was caught up with working in the cellar. “Hello, Julie,” he yelled cruelly. “Quit working! It’s family time!” Understandably, Julie felt assaulted and scrutinized; and she reacted protectively, saying, “I can’t! I must complete this!”
All things being equal, the author might have opened his offer by calling out, “Hello, Julie, we miss you! Come up and eat with us when you can.” Imagine the amount more certain Julie’s reaction would have been.
Chapter 7 – If you get your underlying offered and offered reaction right, you give yourself a greater open door for the association.
The underlying offer and offer reaction that commencement the main rounds of passionate correspondence between two individuals are somewhat similar to the beginnings of a neighborly round of tennis. You can consider them the services and bring volley back. If either player mishits this previously shot, the game could go to an abrupt end. However, if they’re fruitful, the activity is simply beginning.
To comprehend this better, how about we do a little in-depth examination of some passionate correspondence in real life. Two associates, Jim and Linda, are in the workplace. Jim approaches Linda’s work area and makes his underlying offer, asking, “Things being what they are, do you have any designs for lunch?”
Linda answers that she’s brought something from home and will eat outside. Understanding the concealed significance of the offer, she moves in the direction of it. “Need to go along with me?” she inquires.
“Sure,” says Jim. At that point he tightens the offer up an indent: “I’m going to the candy machine to get a beverage. You need anything?”
“Better believe it, perhaps a Coke,” Linda answers, moving in the direction of Jim’s offered indeed. “Gracious, and I’ll discover those photographs I outlined for you. I need to show them to you!”
“Extraordinary!” says Jim, “I’d love to see them!”
Notice how the positive reactions expand on one another, bringing Jim and Linda closer together. Presently, how about we witness what may if, all things being equal, Linda betrays Jim’s underlying offer.
“Have any designs for lunch?” Jim inquires.
“Lunch?! In this office? Who has the time?” Linda snaps, proceeding to gaze at her PC screen and leaving poor Jim despondent.
Now, Jim may mutter something about eating together some other time, and Linda may react with a short “Definitely, sure.” But in every way that matters, the correspondence between them is finished – just like any opportunity to the interface. In the interim, in an equal universe, the previous renditions of Jim and Linda are perched on a recreation center seat, chuckling at photographs of her canine and building a relationship.
We’ve said it previously, yet it bears rehashing: there’s much more to offers than initially meets the eye. How they are made and reacted to can have an immense effect on how connections unfurl.
Chapter 8 – You don’t need to acknowledge an offer to face an incentive to react decidedly.
“Uh-oh” you may be reasoning. “Does this mean I need to acknowledge each lunch greeting that comes in my direction? It seems like on the off chance that I decrease an offer, or even neglect to get on one, I’ll be conceivably harming my connections and driving individuals from me.”
Try not to stress. The circumstance is far less extraordinary than that. Luckily, you can in any case move in the direction of others’ offers and construct associations with them while simultaneously declining the solicitations you’re reluctant, incapable of, or just uninterested in tolerating. Everything boils down to how you react.
We should return to Jim and Linda and their lunch plans. In this rendition, it turns out Linda truly doesn’t have the opportunity to take a break today, so she can’t acknowledge Jim’s offer at face esteem – that is, as an encouragement to eat together on this specific day.
Yet, that doesn’t mean she can’t react decidedly and move in the direction of the offer. “Goodness, I’d truly love to eat with you,” she could state, “yet I’m so overwhelmed with work at present. Possibly tomorrow? Or then again we could snatch an espresso and make up for a lost time after work.”
Notice how Linda confirms her longing to associate with Jim even while she decreases this specific chance. She likewise offers some elective ways for them to associate. As such, rather than closing the allegorical entryway between them with a dull dismissal, she leaves it open and calls Jim closer.
Jim would now be able to continue with his offer, consenting to one of her other options, and expanding on his underlying suggestion. For example, he could offer to carry her something to eat, giving her more opportunity to control through that heap of work.
A similar exercise applies to any offer that requests that you accomplish something that you can’t or just don’t have any desire to do. Rather than stressing over tolerating it at face worth, or saying no and harming your relationship, utilize the occasion to console the other individual of your longing to associate.
Recall the sport of tennis from prior? Saying no in this manner is the thing that permits you to keep that bundle of amicable correspondence noticeable all around and flying to and fro across the net.
Chapter 9 – Our examples of reacting to individuals’ offers can affect our connections over the long haul.
Recall your latest connections with the individuals in your day to day existence. Did you move in the direction of, away from, or against somebody’s offered?
Whatever your reaction, don’t lose an excessive amount of rest over it. Regardless of whether you respond to an offer decidedly, an erratic trade won’t save or devastate your relationship. Connections get developed or worn out over the long haul, through numerous offers and offer reactions.
However, your activities do add up, so while one unforgiving word presumably won’t do a lot of damage, don’t fall into a propensity for cruelty.
If a relationship is set apart by an example of one part of the two individuals reacting contrarily to the next, they’re probably going to float separated. If the example is positive, they will in general turn out to be nearer.
There are two or three explanations behind this. To start with, moving in the direction of one another’s offers prompts more occasions to interface while dismissing or against them does the inverse. As we saw with Jim and Linda, it can spell the distinction between having, or not having, that lunch with your colleague.
Second, similarly, as offers pass on shrouded messages, so too do our reactions to them. If you move in the direction of an offer, you’re certainly saying, “I esteem you. I like investing in energy with you.” But on the off chance that you get some distance from or against an offer, you’re possibly sending unintended messages, as “I don’t like you” or “I need to hurt you.”
Put these messages on rehash and in the long run, you’ll have an example that sinks into the other individual’s brain as an impression of how you feel about them. On the off chance that it’s good, they’ll feel a ton of kindness toward you, which can help when you face clashes. Yet, if it’s particularly negative, they may wind up feeling like you scorn them and abandon making offers for the association through and through. All things considered, why?
It should not shock anyone, at that point, that an example of negative offer reactions is a solid indicator of issues. As indicated by the author’s exploration, relationships made a beeline for separate, wifes contrarily respond to their husband’s offers for association a shocking 82 percent of the time. In stable relationships, that figure drops to a simple 19 percent.
So no, you don’t need to get things right constantly – however, more often than not is certainly an objective worth focusing on!
In Review
If you break down others’ correspondences with you, you’ll see that they’re frequently making offers to associate. These offers may come as obscure language, or they might be veiled as protests or analysis – so you’ll have to decipher them cautiously.
Whatever you do, recall that your decision to move in the direction of, away from, or against an offer is something that can majorly affect your connections.
Try not to pause.
Our individual offers and offer reactions accumulate after some time, however, to get the show on the road you need to begin someplace. Will that lunch with your collaborator lead to a long-lasting fellowship without anyone else?
Likely not – however it very well may be the definitive initial step to a profound and enduring relationship.
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Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke | Book Summary
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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke
This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli- drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting… The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.
In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain…and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.
Summary of Dopamine Nation Written by Anna Lembke
Introduction
The Problem
We’ve transformed a world of scarcity into a world of abundance that delivers dopamine 24/7.
You should know that:
- Dopamine is the “universal currency” to measure the addictive potential of an experience.
- The brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place.
- Pleasure and pain are the opposite sides of the same balance.
- When we want a good experience to continue, the balance tips to the side of pain.
Part I: The Pursuit of Pleasure
Chapter 1: Our Masturbation Machines
Addiction broadly defined is the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behavior (gambling, gaming, sex) despite its harm to self and/or others.
The first cause for the development of an addiction is the availability of the addictive product. The less of it there is, the smaller the risk of getting addicted.
While alcohol thrived in the black market during the prohibition in the US, there were much fewer alcoholics than now.
When it became legal again, alcoholism increased.
In our society, technology made everything
- More available.
- More addictive.
Eg:
- Morphine, heroin, and fentanyl
- Cigarettes
- Weed
- Food (fried, sweet, etc)
- Digital products: videos, porn, games, gambling, etc.
The act of consumption itself has become a drug.
Seventy percent of global world deaths are attributable to smoking, physical inactivity, and diet.
The poor and undereducated, especially those living in rich nations, are most susceptible to the consumption of addictive products.
They have easy access to high-reward drugs whose consumption is indirectly encouraged by the lack of access to meaningful work, safe housing, quality education, and affordable health care.
Whatever the product consumed, addicted people’s stories are all similar: they just want to feel good.
Chapter 2: Running from Pain
The second factor that creates addiction is the obsession with maximizing pleasure and decreasing pain.
Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.
We mostly focus on getting pleasure while trying hard to avoid all of the pain that goes with it.
Today, parents raise kids without any willingness to put them through difficult situations that fortify them. As a result, kids become lazy and afraid every time they need to go through a tiny bit of pain.
This makes them soft.
In the past, doctors believed that pain healed patients faster (they were hence unwilling to prescribe painkillers).
While this has never been proven, the opposite has: painkillers make for a slower recovery…
Today, it’s the opposite of the past. Pain is bad and must be alleviated directly. As a result, the use of anti-depressants has exploded in recent decades.
Beyond extreme examples of running from pain, we’ve lost the ability to tolerate even minor forms of discomfort. We’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.
Eg: most people cannot eat or walk without listening to or watching some sort of entertainment.
The “pain” of boredom is too strong.
Unfortunately, avoiding being miserable is making us miserable.
Both psychological and physical pain have been rising since we have been measuring them.
Chapter 3: The Pleasure-Pain Balance
By better understanding the mechanisms that govern pain and pleasure, we can gain new insight into why and how too much pleasure leads to pain.
The brain is made out of neurons that communicate with each other by sending electric signals and neurotransmitters along cables called synapses.
An extremely basic drawing of a neuron communicating with another.
Dopamine is one of these neurotransmitters. It’s the most important one when it comes to rewards and motivation.
In fact, it plays a bigger role in the action that leads to the reward (wanting. Eg: getting up to get an ice cream) rather than the reward itself (liking. Eg: the ice cream).
Labs mice modified not to make dopamine did not seek food and starved to death, even if the food was located right next to them…
The more dopamine the brain releases upon doing something, the more that thing becomes addictive.
Here’s how much increase in dopamine the following activities lead to for rats.
| Activity | Increase |
| Chocolate | 55% |
| Sex | 100% |
| Nicotine | 150% |
| Cocaine | 225% |
| Amphetamine | 1000% (aka 10 orgasms) |
The Pain-Pleasure Balance
Scientists discovered that pain and pleasure work like a balance.
The pain/pleasure balance.
The problem is that this balance wants to constantly remain in equilibrium.
As soon as it tips on the side of pleasure…
The pain/pleasure balance, on the side of pleasure
It automatically comes back into equilibrium by manufacturing pain to do so (this principle is called homeostasis).
The pain/pleasure balance reequilibrating.
Then it further tips towards pain (of course).
The pain/pleasure balance, on the side of pain.
This effect is called the opponent-process theory.
“Any prolonged or repeated departures from hedonic or affective neutrality . . . have a cost.”
That cost is an “after-reaction” that is opposite to the stimulus. “What goes up eventually comes down”.
The natural solution to avoid the pain is to repeat what initially gave pleasure.
The problem is that the brain builds tolerance to what gives it pleasure. As a result, the amount of pleasure we experience weakens, but the amount of pain increases.
The amount of pleasure we experience then gets weaker and weaker, and the amount of pain bigger and bigger.
Therefore, you need more and more of the pleasurable stimulus to achieve equal pleasure.
If you go too far in your consumption, the balance gets permanently tipped on the side of pain.
The balance gets permanently tipped on the side of pain.
Prolonged consumption of high-dopamine substances eventually leads to a dopamine deficit state.
-> nothing feels good anymore.
The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind.
When addicted people reach this point, they stop feeling anything when they take their drug, which makes them feel miserable. And they feel equally miserable if they don’t take it.
Side note: the balance is a metaphor. We can experience both pleasure and pain at the same time (eg: eating spicy food). Furthermore, not everyone starts off with the same balance. For some, it’s inherently tipped to the side of pain.
Symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.
People who relapse into their addiction have their balance tilted to the side of pain. They suffer, so they feel the need to tip the balance the other way.
This is called dysphoria-driven relapse (avoiding pain rather than seeking pleasure).
If you wait long enough, the brain eventually resets and the balance comes back into equilibrium.
People, Places, and Things
The pleasure-pain balance is not only triggered by the drug itself but also by cues that existed in the environment where the drug was consumed
This is Pavlov’s principle: the brain triggers dopamine when it receives the cue. Right after receiving the cue, the brain decreases the level of dopamine which compels us to seek the reward (this is how craving works).
Dopamine in the brain.
If we get the reward, dopamine increases. If we don’t, dopamine plunges even further (it’s the letdown to unmet expectations).
In gambling, players experience as much dopamine when they both lose and win. The more they lose, the stronger the urge to play, the better the reward when they win.
The same principle likely applies to social media, where both negative and positive attention is pleasurable.
The problem with some addictions (like cocaine, alcohol, opioids, or even cannabis) is that it seems you never really get rid of them.
Eg: When rats were injected with cocaine after running, they went from running a nice chilled jog to running faster every day, until sprinting.
After one year of sobriety (a long time for a rat), the scientists gave them cocaine again. They directly went back to sprinting.
The more addicted to a substance you are in general, the less pleasure you will feel in other situations.
Every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it.
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.
Why is that?
Because our reward/pain neural path was adapted to a world of scarcity. It was so well adapted that we have transformed this world into a world of abundance, with the problems that we know today.
The net effect is that we now need more reward to feel pleasure, and less injury to feel pain.
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Grow Up | Becoming the Parent Your Kids Deserve by Gary John Bishop | Book Summary
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Grow Up: Becoming the Parent Your Kids Deserve by Gary Bishop
The New York Times bestselling author of Unfu*k Yourself helps cut through our anxieties about being a “good parent” so we can take charge of our lives and show our kids how to take charge of their own.
Gary John Bishop has helped millions of people break free of self-sabotaging behaviors. Yet we all seem to feel like we’re failing at this thing called parenting. Common wisdom isn’t working—our kids are struggling. Gary argues we don’t need more tips, tricks, and techniques, we need an overhaul of who we are. We’re never going to measure up to the “perfect parent” model we’ve built up in our heads—a Frankenstein version of mom and dad cobbled together from our childhoods, our parents, cultural ideals, social media, and everything in between.
We want to be good parents, but our pasts hold us back. If you’re thinking: “I can’t be a good parent because I had a shitty childhood, bad parents, or a traumatic experience”—stop! Let go of what came before and start taking action in the present to be the person that nurtures their child from a place of love, forgiveness, and integrity. By doing so, you are modeling and equipping your kids to confidently face the world and thrive.
Whether you are a parent, want to be a parent, or simply have parents, this book will cut to the heart of who you are and how you show up in the world—to fully take charge of the direction of your life and show your kids how to follow theirs.
Key Insights
Rethink Your Childhood Narrative
“You are not a direct product of your past. And while it is true you were born (thrown) into an already existing conversation of family and values and morality and so on, you are in fact a predictable, repetitive emotional expression of what you have come to believe as true about all of that past. And no, what you have come to believe about back then is not the same as what actually happened. […]
Therefore, what you now believe about your childhood is your biggest problem. What happened is just what happened. Them’s the facts. What people believe about all of that is where they begin to disconnect.
Your “story” of the past often produces overwhelming fear, confusion, anxiety, frustration, anger and a host of other negative patterns that fool you into thinking you urgently need to solve the symptoms when in fact you never really get to the heart of the matter. The story. Not the past.
And if you are striving to become a fundamentally better parent, you need to realize you are in a tired matrix that really needs to fucking go. But it won’t go without a fight, and be left in no doubt, you’ll fight for that shitrix without even realizing that’s what you’re up to.
That’s when you need to wake up.”
Here’s another take on how our own past sneaks up on us when we become parents. We all leave childhood with a few things we’ll need to unpack and work through. But here’s the catch—if you want to be the best parent you can be, you always have to start by unpacking your own emotional baggage. And that begins with awareness.
“So much of what we have inherited sits just outside of our awareness. That makes it hard sometimes to know whether we are reacting in the here and now to our child’s behaviour or whether our responses are more rooted in our past.”
I’ve always been fascinated by how two siblings can interpret the same childhood events so differently. Here are a couple of real-life examples:
Sibling 1: “Our dad didn’t allow us to climb trees.”
Sibling 2: “Actually, he did. But if we got hurt or dirty, we’d be in trouble. So I just knew we had to be extra careful.”
Sibling 1: “I loved that our parents trusted us to make our own decisions.”
Sibling 2: “I found it frustrating and stressful.”
Same experiences, different interpretations. And the same goes for how we recall major life events like a parent’s divorce, financial struggles, etc.
So here’s a question: what beliefs about your childhood have become foundational for who you are today? Are these beliefs lifting you up, or are they getting in the way of being your best self?
With that, let’s move on to the next insight.
Stop Blaming And Start Living
“Finding someone to blame for the situation you were born into or were even raised in is bankrupt. It just isn’t workable for you to blame this life on that one, and at some level you already know this. Drawing a straight line between the pain of then and the life you have now is over. It has to be or the life you have will always be tainted by the one you believe you had no matter how many mantras you chant.”
That’s a powerful idea. True maturity and living authentically start when we stop blaming our past and take full responsibility for our lives, our choices, and our actions.
Blame is what anchors us to the past. We can blame ourselves, others, or our circumstances, but holding on to blame keeps us stuck. It prevents us from growing, changing, and showing up as the parents our kids need.
Here’s a question Gary poses that cuts right to the heart:
“If you were free from your past, what kind of parent could you be? If you were free from the past, what kind of parent would you have? It’s all tied together by blame. Freedom lies on the other side of all of it.”
This is such a powerful reminder to let go of blame and start living fully.
If you had a painful childhood, try viewing it from your parents’ perspective. Maybe they were young and figuring things out, or perhaps they were carrying their own wounds from a difficult upbringing. Try to rewrite your narrative and make sense of your experiences.
“Without a coherent narrative, we’re likely to repeat the mistakes our parents made, passing down the painful legacy they learned from their own caregivers. But when we make sense of our experiences and work to comprehend our parents’ own woundedness, we can break the cycle and avoid passing down the inheritance of insecure attachment.”
When we let go of blame and make sense of our past, we can break the cycle and start a new legacy for our children.
Three Heirlooms
“I wanted my children to have something, a set of personal life skills, a range of talent for mastering their own humanity, but I absolutely knew none of it would make any difference for them if I did not first deal with how I was going to “give” them anything.
I mean, how do I give them something such as love or patience or any one of a number of the intangible tangibles we live our lives by?
Then it hit me: by living it myself. With no expectation or pressure that they follow suit. They either will or they won’t, but as I am sure you will uncover for yourself, the kind of things I’m talking about here have real impact and not just with your kids but also with everyone else in your life.
Your parents included. […]
For eighty hours a week, thirty-three weeks of the year, week after week, month after month, year upon year committed myself to delving into the darkness with people. Human beings laid bare, vulnerable, and determined to change. And they did.
Why am I telling you all of this?
I don’t say anything here in a vacuum. I’m not anesthetized to what human beings are capable of.
I am in no doubt as to the levels of cynicism, lying, cheating, hating, bullying, violence, intimidation, manipulation, and whatever other horrible and shameful things you may care to throw in the mix that human beings are capable of exacting upon one another.
Maybe you’ve done it, or it has been done to you.
This is a harsh and cruel world at times. People do shit things to other people.
And your children will have to make it through all of it.
And sometimes our efforts to protect end up taking them in a direction we never anticipated. I go the other way. I don’t want my children equipped with emotional survival skills. I want them to be bigger than life, to have a deep well of expression and an unmessable sense of self.
A robustness that’s a match for the world and does not need them to look to anyone or anything to help them through it.
And so, through all of this coaching experience, I noted three things that continually caused people to fall. Three characteristics that, if they had mastered, would have seen them through just about every trial and tribulation of not only their young life but the rest of it too.
I call these three things “heirlooms” because that’s exactly what they are. Three treasures that are at the center of everything we do here. Live by these and you can work through just about anything life cares to throw at you. Keep doing what you are doing and… well, we know how that turns out.”
I love the idea of giving kids “an unmessable sense of self”—what many call resilience. It’s a crucial life skill.
So, how do we teach it to our kids? The best way is by modelling it ourselves.
In the book, Gary shares three core qualities, or “heirlooms,” that we can nurture in ourselves and pass down to our kids to build resilience. Let’s take a look:
- Heirloom No. 1: Being Loving. You can teach your kids to be loving by showing them unconditional love and commitment every day.
- Heirloom No. 2: Being forgiving. “Forgiveness is when you let go of the desire to punish either yourself or another by holding onto an emotional position over something.” Powerful skill.
- Heirloom No. 3: Being someone of integrity. Walk the talk and stick to your values.
So simple and so powerful.
Be An Authentic Parent
“…what does it look like to be authentic as a parent?
Simple.
You tell the truth, and while that’s the case for every area of your life, it’s a critical aspect of being the kind of parent who actually makes a difference.”
Gary emphasizes that one of the secrets to being the best parent is being authentic, which starts with telling the truth (with the important caveat that the truth should be developmentally appropriate for your child). Your words matter—so pay attention to what you say and how you say it.
Here are two rules from Gary to keep in mind:
“1. Speak like your words mean everything.
- Listen without making it mean anything.”
“Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie.” Focus on your personal truth.
Appreciate The Time You Have With Your Kids
“This all happened when my oldest son was about six or seven. We spoke daily, at least twice. He gave me updates on his life, and I shared (responsibly) about mine. One of the first things I did was remove the language about “missing” him. When I looked at that in the cold light of day, I realized we were using our moments together to lament the moments we were not together. It seemed such a waste of our very precious time. Instead, I focused on enjoying whatever time I did have with him, laughing, telling him of my love for him and what I had planned for my return, with plenty of room for him to communicate anything that was on his mind or bothering him.”
Here’s a solid parenting tip for all you working parents (and grandparents out there): focus on the time you actually have with your kids. Stop wasting your energy dwelling on the moments you missed.
Action Steps For You
- Take Responsibility for Your Life: Shift your mindset from blame to accountability. Acknowledge your choices and their impact on your life. Instead of pointing fingers at your past or others, ask yourself what you can do differently moving forward to create the life you want for yourself and your family.
- Cultivate Resilience: Focus on nurturing the “heirlooms” of love, forgiveness, and integrity in both yourself and your children. Model these qualities in your everyday life, and encourage open conversations about emotions and experiences. This will help you all build a strong sense of self and navigate life’s challenges with confidence.
- Focus on Authentic Parenting: Commit to being an authentic parent by aligning your words and actions. Be transparent about your feelings and experiences, and show your children that it’s okay to be vulnerable. This sets a powerful example for them, encouraging them to embrace their true selves and fostering a deeper connection between you.
Quotes From The Book:
- “What upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgements about these things.” © Epictetus
- “What’s the job of being a parent? That your kids come out of this robust and equipped. While they, like all people, will have their scars and bumps (as they’re supposed to), they are grounded in who they authentically are and why they are because they witnessed you handle it too.”
- “Freedom begins with giving up the idea of who is to blame.”
- “Blame is the catalyst for keeping you tied to what has been.”
- “Life is simple when you are authentic. There’s nothing to hide, nothing to pretend. It’s not without difficulty but it will be without complexity. But what to do with your children? Love them. Forgive them. Show them what integrity is.”
- “You don’t get stuck with just events. You get stuck with what you said to yourself about them.”
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The Alcohol Experiment | The 30 day self-help guide to stop drinking | Annie Grace | Book Summary
GET THE 500+ BOOK SUMMARY BOX SET IN PDF & MP3 here
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The Alcohol Experiment: How to Take Control of Your Drinking and Enjoy Being Sober for Good by Annie Grace
It’s YOUR body…
It’s YOUR mind…
It’s YOUR choice…
There are a million reasons why you might drink. It tastes great. You feel more sociable. Sex is better. It helps you relax.
But are you really in control?
Whether you’re reading this because you know you drink too much and want to quit, or whether you just want to cut back for a while, this book is for you.
The Alcohol Experiment is a 30-day programme with a difference. Each day, it will show you a new way of thinking about booze, and ask you to look a little closer at why we drink, what we get out of it, and whether it’s really the alcohol that’s giving us what we want.
In the bestselling This Naked Mind, Annie Grace offered a completely revolutionary solution to dependency, and a path to sobriety. Now, let Annie give you the tools you need to understand alcohol – whether or not it’s a problem. Packed with humour, patience and the latest research, try The Alcohol Experiment today, and take control of your drinking for good.
THE ACT TECHNIQUE
AWARENESS. Name your belief. In the context of alcohol, this is your conscious reason for drinking, simply put it into words: Alcohol relaxes me.
CLARITY. Discover why you believe it and where it originated. You do this by asking questions—both of yourself and of the external evidence—and uncovering truths about your belief.
What have I observed that supports this belief?
TURNAROUND. This is where you allow your subconscious to let go of the belief, deciding if after exploration it is indeed true for you. There are two steps here.
First, you turn the initial belief around and find as many ways as you can that the opposite of your initial belief is true. For example, if your belief is “alcohol relaxes me” the opposite becomes “alcohol does not relax me” or “alcohol stresses me out.”
ACT: Awareness. Clarity. Turnaround. It’s an effective, scientific way to shine a light into your subconscious and figure out what’s actually causing your behavior.
When we’re tired, stressed out, cranky, or upset, we don’t need alcohol. What we need is to change our emotional state. We need to do something to go from tired to energized, from cranky to happy. And we turn to alcohol.
Here are a few things you can do to help the process along.
- Make a firm decision to commit to this experiment 100 percent.
- Tell someone you trust about what you’re doing and
- Drink plenty of water to flush out all the toxins in your
- Get some exercise.
- Eat healthy foods, especially protein.
- Start a
- Take a photo and weigh yourself.
- Stay social.
- Be positive!
- Join this book’s online social challenge at alcoholexperiment.com.
Day 1: What’s Your Why?
The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to blame. The gift is yours—it is an amazing journey—and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins. —BOB MOAWAD
We’ve talked about how you’ve been unconsciously conditioned to believe alcohol is a vital part of life for relaxing, socializing, and everything in between. And you know there are competing desires inside your mind. Your conscious mind wants to drink less, or even stop drinking completely. And your subconscious mind believes you need to keep drinking for some very good reasons. Before we dive into those beliefs and stories and deciding if they’re true, we need to know what those beliefs actually are.
WHY DO YOU DRINK?
Write down a list of every reason you drink.
WHY THE ALCOHOL EXPERIMENT?
Write down all the reasons you want to take part in this experiment.
Act 1: The Taste of Alcohol
Taste is an innocent reason for drinking. After all, no one thinks twice about eating ice cream or nachos. They taste good! And our favorite alcoholic beverages are the same way.
So ask yourself, what observations and experiences have you had in your past that might have made you believe alcohol tastes good?
Imagine we could remove all the physical and emotional effects of alcohol. If it couldn’t actually make you drunk, would people still drink it? There’s a body of pretty convincing research suggesting they wouldn’t. It tastes bad. It’s poisonous. Drinking for the taste is a convenient, innocent excuse. At the end of the day, is it a possibility that there’s something more going on with your drinking than just the taste? Humans are incredibly adept at lying to themselves and believing their own stories.
TURNAROUND
This may be the most important part of the ACT Technique. Here you want to dig into the turnaround, or the opposite of the belief. You’ll want to take the time to come up with as many ways as you can (at least three) that the turnaround is as true or truer than the original belief. In this case, the opposite of “I drink for the taste” is “I don’t drink for the taste”
Day 2: It’s Not What You Give Up, But What You GAIN
One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain. —RICK GODWIN
As a participant in this experiment, you’re obviously giving something up. You’re giving up alcohol for 30 days. But there are two ways to look at it. You could focus on how hard it’s going to be and all the things you’re going to have to give up and go without. Or you could think about all the amazing insights and experiences you’re going to gain as a result of the experiment.
You don’t have to do this experiment. You get to do it. You have the opportunity to do this. You are excited to do this. You are choosing to participate. Recognize your old, disempowering, words around alcohol and replace them with new, empowering, words. This is important. The brain loves anything that gets you out of pain and into pleasure. It loves that shift both consciously and subconsciously, so choose the words you want to use. When you start consciously choosing your words, you’ll even start to get a little buzz, especially if you reinforce your statements afterward. If you say, “I’m going to enjoy some iced tea tonight,” reinforce it by actually feeling it. “Wow, I did enjoy that iced tea tonight!” The brain will latch on to the experience and repeat it more easily the next time.
Labeling
Another type of language you’ll want to pay attention to is how you’re labeling yourself and others. There’s a ton of research showing how labels can limit your experience. When we put a label on something, we create a corresponding emotion based on our beliefs and experiences. That’s especially true when we label ourselves and say we’re depressed or we’re alcoholics. It’s true that we might be suffering, but by labeling ourselves that we are those things, we ingrain the negative feelings and end up believing them subconsciously.
Day 3: Why We Think We Like to Drink
True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you’re having is immediate gratification pleasure—which is fleeting and doesn’t grow you as a person. —KAREN SALMANSOHN
DOPAMINE AND SEROTONIN
ACT 2: Alcohol and Sleep
Day 4: Dealing With Discomfort
Day 5: What Are Cravings, Really?
Knowledge renders belief obsolete. —NANA JANE
I’ve found there are two kinds of cravings you have to contend with at different times: physical cravings and emotional cravings. Physical symptoms such as anxiety, restlessness, and the inability to sleep show up while the alcohol is still in your system. We know they’re cravings because they go away if you give in and have a drink. It can take up to a week for alcohol to completely leave your system, so that’s about how long you can expect those physical cravings to last. After that point, you’re most likely looking at mental or emotional cravings. (Fortunately, you probably know exactly the last time you had a drink. When people try to get over a sugar addiction, they sometimes consume sugar without even knowing it because it’s hidden in so many food products!)
CRAVINGS AND STRESS
For example, if you used to handle work stress by drinking, like I did, then every time you experience work stress, you’ll likely trigger a psychological craving for alcohol. You’ve already wired your brain to do this. It’s a learned response. Your subconscious believes drinking reduces stress, even though science has proven that alcohol actually increases stress over time. And even though you’ve made the conscious decision not to drink, your subconscious didn’t get the memo. So it sends up a desire—a craving.
Day 6: Why Willpower Doesn’t Work for Long
If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice.—ANONYMOUS
Willpower can also be defined as the ability to resist short-term temptations in order to meet long-term goals. Some people think it’s a skill that can be honed and perfected. Or a muscle that can be built up and maintained. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. New research shows it’s more like an energy reserve, and when the reserve is low, there’s not much you can do until you top it back up.
Every decision you make requires you to expend a certain amount of energy, and that includes energy you might prefer to save up for exercising willpower.
Act 3: Alcohol, Relaxation, and Stress Relief
AWARENESS
If you’re drinking to relax, like I used to do, you are not alone. Relaxation and stress relief are some of the main reasons people drink. After all, who can deny that a few drinks totally relaxes you and relieves everyday pressures, stress, and anxiety? There’s a reason it’s called “happy hour,” right? You can’t use willpower to grit your way through and ignore the idea that alcohol relaxes you. Let’s name this belief: “Alcohol relieves stress and helps me relax.”
True relaxation is the absence of stress and anxiety. It’s not ignoring the stress or numbing it—real relaxation removes it completely.
It’s ironic that we drink to relax, because drinking actually adds stress to our lives. I’m not going to deny that alcohol definitely provides the illusion of relaxation, especially at first. But here’s what’s actually happening. That drink is simply numbing the senses and slowing the mind. For a short time, we truly don’t care about our problems, and we feel relaxed. But we’re not actually eliminating the problem or concern. Instead of solving the issue and removing it, we’re actually postponing it and prolonging the pain.
Remember that alcohol takes about a week to completely leave your body. So if you’re a regular drinker, you are in a constant state of withdrawal. Which means you have consistently elevated levels of cortisol and adrenaline. Which means you’re always stressed on a physiological level. Add on the everyday stressors of work, health, and relationships, and it’s no wonder you want to escape for a little while! One drink and that anesthetic takes over, decreasing your senses and slowing your brain function. The more you drink, the less you feel. And if you drink until you pass out, you get to feel absolutely nothing for a short time.
TURNAROUND
The opposite of “alcohol relieves stress and helps me relax” is “alcohol does not relieve stress and help me relax” or “alcohol adds stress to my life.” Come up with as many ways as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief.
Day 7: Your Experiment and Your Friends
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
—MARK TWAIN
ARE PEOPLE STARTING TO NOTICE?
At this point, some of your friends might be noticing that something about you has changed. Maybe you’ve been out with them and turned down a drink. Or maybe they’ve noticed a change in your behavior or even your physical appearance.
We’re Often Hesitant to Tell Our Friends
You might be a little hesitant to tell even your friends, and I believe there’s a pretty good reason for that. I think the crux of the problem is that we treat alcohol differently than we do any other addictive substance. For example, we don’t have “cigarette-aholics” or “heroinism,” but we do have “alcoholics” and “alcoholism.” When we say “cigarette addiction” or “heroin addiction,” we’re talking about the addiction, not the people themselves. But the word alcoholic defines a person. The word itself blames the person rather than the substance.
As a Society, We Don’t Seem to Realize That Alcohol Is Addictive
We don’t talk about the fact that when we party on a Friday night and end up puking, that physical reaction is our body’s way of saving our life because we literally poisoned ourselves.
We have successfully separated alcohol out from other toxic substances. We even say “alcohol and drugs,” as if alcohol weren’t also a drug, in spite of the fact that alcohol kills more people every year than prescription and illegal drugs combined. In fact, according to two independent studies about what is the most dangerous drug, alcohol won the prize.
Alcoholism has been defined as a lifelong disease for which there is no cure. Alcoholics must completely abstain from drinking forever. They have to label themselves as alcoholics for the rest of their lives, even if they manage to stay sober. Alcoholism is portrayed as a never-ending fight for control. A fight that, if people lose, could cost them their marriage, their job, their children, or even their life. That is so scary! No one wants to think about that when all they’re trying to do is unwind after a long day at work.
Day 8: How Alcohol Affects Your Senses
All our knowledge begins with the senses.—IMMANUEL KANT
Alcohol depresses the central nervous system and slows down your neurotransmitters, which are the chemicals responsible for moving information back and forth between your body and your brain. When your brain can’t process the information as quickly as usual, your senses are affected. They’re sitting there staring at that “buffer bar,” saying, “Come on .. . come on . . . why is this taking so long?” that a body in balance craves what will keep it in balance, whereas a body out of balance will crave what keeps it out of balance.
Day 9: The Power of Self-Talk
I AM. Two of the most powerful words; for what you put after them shapes your reality.
—GARY HENSEL
Becoming aware of how you speak to yourself is the first step. The second step is actually changing how you speak to yourself. Most people think this is difficult, because they’ve been beating themselves up for so long that it’s become a habit. And you can’t “get rid” of a habit easily, because it’s a neurological connection in your brain. It’s an unconscious loop that repeats itself over and over. By definition a habit happens without thinking. It’s unconscious behavior. Once you wake yourself up and become aware of the habit, you have to make a conscious decision to change it. And to do that, you have to rewire the neurological connections in your brain with new behaviors. It does take effort, but it’s completely worth it!
We aren’t always aware of our self-talk, and that is why emotions, even the negative ones, are such a gift. Emotions are the signal that something in our thinking is causing stress. Your job is simply to listen to your thoughts, identify the thoughts causing you stress, and question them.
Act 4: Alcohol, Our Culture, and Society
Humans evolved to fit in with others. Think about it. When a prisoner has the harshest punishment inflicted, it’s solitary confinement. Being separated from the group is the worst thing we can think of to punish a criminal. Let’s name this belief:
“If I don’t drink, I won’t be part of the group.”
So it makes total sense that to fit in with an alcohol-obsessed society, we must be drinkers.
We’ve also experienced that feeling of fitting in when we drink with our friends, right? It’s fun. We feel cool, at least for a little while. Whether we’re pounding beers at a baseball game or sipping champagne at a classical music festival, it doesn’t matter. When our friends are gathered around us, we’re all drinking and having a great time. We fit in. The advertising works so well because it mimics our everyday behavior.
Society’s view of nondrinkers is that they’re boring. They’re buzzkills. They aren’t any fun to be around.
One of the main reasons people say that they can “take it or leave it” is because they’ve never tried to leave it.
Once I was honest about my drinking, suddenly others felt like it was okay to question their drinking, too. They worried about the effects on their health and their families but were too afraid to talk about it. In the years since I wrote that book, I’ve discovered that the people who defend drinking the loudest are often the most worried about how much they drink. They desperately want to have the same amount of fun while drinking less, but they just don’t see how it’s possible. The cultural conditioning is that strong.
I also want us to ask, What kind of culture are we creating by choosing to be a part of it? It’s not popular to talk about, but there is a lot of evidence that an alcohol-saturated culture is actually a culture of violence.
FITTING IN DURING THE EXPERIMENT
Let’s talk about how to get through this experiment while keeping your friendships intact.
Don’t preach.
Be a positive example.
Be creative.
Day 10: Dealing with Sugar Cravings
Be gentle with yourself, you’re doing the best you can! —ANONYMOUS
It might surprise you to learn that you may experience heightened sugar cravings during this challenge. This can happen for a couple of reasons. First, most alcoholic drinks contain more than alcohol; in fact, they contain quite a bit of sugar. So your brain is accustomed to the sugar rush from your drink of choice, which will create an intense craving for sugar. Second, both sugar and alcohol create a similar kind of response in the brain.
Addictive substances cause the brain to flood with dopamine. That is true for alcohol and for sugar, which is also addictive. The dopamine is triggered by the substance, in this case, rather than by something important for survival, but the flood of dopamine tricks the brain into believing that alcohol is vital for survival. Just think—because of the flood of dopamine, your brain is learning that alcohol is important for your very survival. No wonder it’s so addictive!
When I was drinking regularly, I was consuming close to two bottles of wine per day. A bottle of red wine is about 600 to 800 calories, so just by cutting out the drinking, I was saving myself over 1,000 calories. For someone drinking the equivalent amount in beer or mixed drinks, the calorie count is much higher.
Allowing myself the extra sugar worked for me. However, if you don’t want to go that route, here are some ways you can keep the sugar cravings at bay.
Elevate your heart rate.
Eat fruit when you feel the need for sugar.
Drink lots of water.
Keep your blood sugar stable.
Consume naturally fermented food and drinks.
BABY STEPS
Focus on this one goal of eliminating alcohol for 30 days, and then you can revisit your other goals next month.
Day 11: The Alcohol Culture Is Shifting
Don’t be afraid of being different. Be afraid of being the same as everyone else.—ANONYMOUS
I first noticed the shift in some of the super-athletes and people who are deeply involved in the fitness and health world. They realized that while they were eating all-organic food, exercising, and doing yoga, they were also drinking a known toxin in excessive amounts. People are waking up, and they’re starting to question that behavior.
YOUNG PEOPLE ARE DRINKING LESS
CUTTING BACK IS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
Children are the happiest people and they don’t drink.
Act 5: Alcohol and Happiness
For so many of us, alcohol has been central to so many meaningful and fun events in our lives that we blend the two together without thinking. Holidays, birthdays, weddings—celebrations of all kinds practically require alcohol in some form or another. So it’s no wonder we feel like alcohol makes us happy. It seems like it’s always there when we’re having fun. Let’s name this belief: “Alcohol makes me happy.”
Did you always need alcohol to be happy? When you were a kid, did you need a six-pack before every Little League game? Or did you and your girlfriends play hopscotch with real scotch? The average four-year-old laughs hundreds of times a day, no alcohol required. Think back and recall the years before you started drinking. Remember those friendships and activities that brought you joy.
Happiness is at the very heart of advertising, especially alcohol advertising. But there’s no balance in advertising. Alcohol actually causes far more unhappiness than happiness. It slows our minds and chemically depresses us. The ads never show the unhappiness that alcohol causes.
Children of alcoholics are up to four times more likely to develop alcohol addiction later in life.1 It’s a terrible cycle all based on the false belief that drinking makes us happy.
Maybe it’s the occasion and not the alcohol providing the happiness. It’s hard to separate the occasion from the drink, though, because drinking is completely intertwined with every social event we attend.
After alcohol has completely left your system can you fully realize that, yes, you can feel joy and happiness and incredible energy levels on a consistent basis.
Research has shown that only 10 percent of our overall happiness depends on external things, whether that’s a new car, a relationship, or alcohol. Things don’t make us happy. Ninety percent depends on our internal environment. How relaxed are we? How confident? How peaceful?
Day 12: Your Incredible Body and Brain
Take care of your incredible body. It is the most amazing thing you own, and it is the only place you truly have to live. —ANONYMOUS
Most of us don’t take the time to think about how amazing our bodies and our brains are. Think about all the incredible physical and mental feats we can perform. Our brains are more powerful than supercomputers; in fact, we created supercomputers.
Your brain and body’s function is to ensure you survive and thrive. Consider that for a moment. This amazing living computer is not meant to ingest large amounts of alcohol every single day.
Comedic actor Jim Carrey once said, “I’m very serious about no alcohol, no drugs. Life is too beautiful.”
Act 6: Is Alcohol Healthy in Moderation?
Our brains are excellent at rationalizing. And the alcohol industry counts on that when they promote this kind of pseudoscientific reporting.
The fact is, there are a handful of studies claiming that alcohol is good for you. Some of them were even funded by the alcohol industry itself. And there are thousands of studies that prove the exact opposite. The difference is that the positive studies get far more attention than the negative ones. Why do you suppose that is?
According to the World Health Organization, “alcohol can damage nearly every organ and system in the body. Its use contributes to more than 60 diseases and conditions.”The WHO also reports that alcohol has surpassed AIDS as the leading risk factor for death among males between the ages of 15 and 59.
Global study came out in 2018 stating that there is in fact no safe level of drinking; even a single drink, even on occasion, is detrimental to your health.
In a study of the harmful effects of 20 different drugs, alcohol came in as the most dangerous drug.9 It’s more harmful than heroin or crack cocaine when you look at the “ratio between toxicological threshold [or how much it will take to kill you] and estimated human intake.”
The International Agency for Research on Cancer declared alcohol a carcinogen in 1988. Not only is alcohol pure ethanol, which is extremely toxic, but it can contain at least 15 other carcinogenic compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, and lead.
We’ve also known alcohol causes cancer for 30 years, and yet it’s news to most drinkers. No matter how little or what type of alcohol you’re drinking, you’re increasing your risk of cancer of the breast, mouth, throat, rectum, liver, esophagus, and other organs. Cancer Research UK says, “There is no safe limit for alcohol when it comes to cancer.” Why don’t we know this? People just don’t talk about such things.
The term “drink responsibly” came from the alcohol industry itself.
Day 13: Let’s Talk About Sex
Sober Sex Is Truly Better Sex
Day 14: Staying Mindful in the Midst of Chaos
In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you. —DEEPAK CHOPRA
DISRUPT THE CYCLE
Neurologically, you’re physically disrupting the craving cycle in your brain. It is possible to separate yourself from your addiction. And the more often you do it, the easier it becomes and the less tightly the addiction will grip you. And it works even if you give in!
TODAY, think of your craving as a wave. It builds and builds, applying more and more pressure, until it peaks. Then it gradually subsides until it disappears for a while.
Act 7: Alcohol and Parenting (a.k.a. Mommy Juice)
Let’s name this belief:
“I need a drink to handle my kids.”
But whether you’re a parent or not, this section is incredibly powerful because what we’re actually talking about is stress. Drinking to relieve intense stress. Parenting happens to be one form of stress that millions of people share, and the alcohol industry has latched on to that and targets parents, especially moms, as a market segment.
Like all drinkers, you think you’re totally in control and can leave at any time. But the slope gets steeper and steeper, and the darkness closes in around you. You try to stop drinking and fly away, but it’s too late. The pitcher plant has you completely in its grasp. Eventually you stop drinking long enough to look down and make out a pool of dead bodies floating in the liquid. You’re not drinking nectar—you’re drinking the juice of other dead creatures. You are the drink.
Alcohol is addictive, not only to some people—to all people. And we need to understand that something as innocent as having a glass of wine to get through making dinner for the kids can end up becoming a huge problem. The only way to get out of the trap is to avoid it altogether. And the only way to do that is to understand that alcohol is, indeed, a trap. Oftentimes addiction takes hold when we use a substance to relieve stress. And in our society today, there aren’t many things more stressful than parenting, especially when the kids are young.
Wine was more than just a fun way to relax; it became my friend and ally. It wasn’t something I wanted. It was something I thought I needed.
Day 15: Social Life and Dating
Day 16: The Power of Belief
Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives. —TONY ROBBINS
You’ve heard this before, and you’ll hear it again: Your mind is incredibly powerful. It can be a staunch ally or your worst enemy, depending on how you use it. The good news is that once you learn how the mind works, you can take control and use its power to change anything in your life. If you believe that you’re going to be miserable without a drink in your hand at a social occasion, sporting event, concert, or even home alone, you will be. If you believe you’re going to be lonely, you will be. If you believe you’re going to be bored, you will be. If you believe this experiment is miserable, it will be.
CONDITIONING
Let’s talk about conditioning for a moment. Neuropsychologists agree that we spend our lifetimes being conditioned. We’re teaching our brains what to expect in any circumstance. Whether what we expect actually happens doesn’t matter, because we will manufacture circumstances that deliver exactly what we expect. This phenomenon has been studied over and over again.
One mistake people make is to think about and visualize what we don’t want. But the mind doesn’t necessarily understand the word don’t—you get whatever you think about. Which, in this case, is the opposite of what you do want. So if you imagine, I don’t want to just sit there being miserable, but you’re thinking of yourself sitting there miserable, that’s what your brain works from. It tries to make that scenario a reality. But if you think of yourself going out and having a great time, your brain tries to make that scenario a reality.
Act 8: Alcohol Is My Friend
Drinking often starts out as a social activity, but then it becomes something that we do alone and sometimes even in secret, driving us further and further away from true human connection.
TURNAROUND
The opposite of “alcohol is my friend” is “alcohol is not my friend” or “alcohol is my enemy.” Come up with as many ways as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer in your life than the original belief.
Day 17: Relieving Boredom Without Drinking
Boredom leads to creativity. Imagination is more important than knowledge. —ALBERT EINSTEIN
Boredom is an incredibly uncomfortable state for many people. Scientists studied this by putting people in a room for 15 minutes to be alone with their thoughts.
So we have this feeling that we don’t know what to do about, and our parents, teachers, and other authority figures tell us we shouldn’t be feeling it. That sets us up for classic cognitive dissonance. We feel bad or embarrassed that we’re bored, so we seek out ways to change our state of mind. Some people eat. Some people mindlessly scan social media. And many of us reach for a drink. For a short time, alcohol numbs the boredom and the guilt we feel about being bored in the first place.
People who are easily bored are more prone to addiction. Teenagers who report being easily bored are 50 percent more likely to try drinking, illegal drugs, or smoking.
While it’s true that alcohol does temporarily relieve boredom by slowing down your brain, it also numbs your ability to experience and appreciate the things that bring you joy.
TODAY, remember that boredom has a purpose. Turning it off robs you and the world of something beautiful and important that only you can offer. Try, just for now, to sit with your boredom. Let it wash over you. Allow the discomfort. And see what happens.
Day 18: Why Tolerance Is Literally a Buzzkill
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.—THOMAS MERTON
THE SCIENCE BEHIND TOLERANCE
It’s a neurological fact that the more alcohol you consume, the lower your pleasure dips until you are much worse off than you were when you started. Does that sound like fun to you?
Dynorphin affects the pleasure you get from everything. That means when you build a tolerance for alcohol, you’re also building a tolerance for sex, and laughter, and ice cream! Anything you used to find pleasing doesn’t do it for you anymore. You have to return to using alcohol (or whatever your drug of choice is) in higher and higher quantities until you become more and more focused on your next drink. Eventually, everyday pleasures don’t even register anymore. That IS a big deal.
Day 19: Dealing with Depression
Stars can’t shine without darkness.—ANONYMOUS
Often it feels like depression and alcohol are linked in this chicken-and-egg scenario. Which comes first? Alcohol itself is labeled as a depressant, meaning it suppresses your arousal levels and reduces excitability. It’s capable of causing both sadness and depression, as well as making a sad situation worse.
When you use alcohol to numb your sadness, you’re also numbing anything that makes you feel happy. And that only worsens your depression.
When we’re depressed, we obsess. We blow the thoughts up and make them true inside our heads until the thoughts become a compulsion.
Depression is incredibly complex. And every person experiences it differently. One thing that I know to be true, though, is that alcohol doesn’t help. It only masks the problem and makes it worse.
Day 20: Our Headline Culture and the Science of Sharing
The science of sharing says that people share content that gives them social currency. That means we share things that we think will make us look good in other people’s eyes. As we’ve discussed, anything that confirms our own personal biases or makes us look smart or hip or funny—that’s what gets shared. Anything that makes us feel bad or uncomfortable gets ignored. Consequently, positive articles about alcohol are shared far more often than ones about its negative effects on our lives.
Day 21: Hey, Good Lookin’!
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you. —RALPH WALDO EMERSON
ALCOHOL MAKES YOU FAT
You might be surprised to learn that alcohol is more quickly stored as fat than excess calories from sugar, carbohydrates, or protein—or even from fat itself. Alcohol has 7 calories per gram (fat, for example, has 9 calories per gram), but alcohol does not require as much time or effort for digestion; it is quickly absorbed. Not only does alcohol provide a dense source of calories —which is quickly stored as fat—but because alcohol is poison to the liver, the liver prioritizes processing alcohol over digesting other foods (and all other tasks) and stores it as fat.
Day 22: Drinking Due to Unmet Needs
Human happiness and human satisfaction must ultimately come from within oneself. —DALAI LAMA
In 1943, Abraham Maslow published his now famous “hierarchy of needs” (illustrated on the next page). He was interested in human motivation and what made people behave the way they do. He proposed that people must meet their lower needs first before they will be motivated to move up to fulfill their needs at the next level.
Act 9:Alcohol and Sadness
Does drinking make you happy or sad? Alcohol does give us a little reprieve from our feelings, but not for long. If you’ve ever had a drink to help you escape from sadness, you know it never lasts.
Tragically, there’s a strong link between alcohol and suicide. In fact, drinking is the most common factor with all suicides. More than one-third of victims were drinking prior to death. And statistics show that people who are dependent on alcohol are 120 times more likely to commit suicide—120 times! That’s because alcohol causes depression and makes us act impulsively.
Depression lies to us, and alcohol makes those lies believable. So when life drags you backward with hardship and sadness, it simply means that you’re getting ready to launch forward into something great! Out of the pain and sadness, you can find the courage and strength to truly heal yourself instead of masking the symptoms with alcohol’s temporary lift.
Something great is waiting for you. I know it!
TURNAROUND
The opposite of “alcohol relieves my sadness” is “alcohol doesn’t relieve my sadness” or “alcohol makes me sad.” Come up with as many ways as you can that the opposite is as true as or truer than the original belief.
Day 23: Alcohol’s Effect on Your Health
YOUR BRAIN
Alcohol slows the pace of communication between neurotransmitters, the chemical messengers that transmit messages between different parts of your brain and body. It interrupts your brain’s pathways, literally reducing the speed of delivery of information between parts of your brain and body by slowing down your brain’s neural highways. It slows communications from your senses, deadening them and decreasing your responsiveness.
YOUR HEART
Your heart beats over 100,000 times per day to carry 2,000 gallons of blood through your body. That’s a big job. Alcohol weakens the heart muscle so that it sags and stretches, making it impossible to continue contracting effectively. When your heart can no longer contract efficiently, you are unable to transport enough oxygen to your organs and tissues, so your body is no longer nourished appropriately.
YOUR LIVER
Two million Americans suffer from alcohol-related liver disease, making it a leading cause of illness and death. Your liver stores nutrients and energy and produces enzymes that stave off disease and rid your body of dangerous substances, including alcohol. When your liver metabolizes alcohol, it creates toxins, which are actually more dangerous than the alcohol itself. Alcohol damages liver cells by causing inflammation, and it weakens your body’s natural defenses. Liver inflammation disrupts your metabolism, which impacts the function of other organs.
Further, inflammation can cause liver scar
Drinking also causes steatosis, or “fatty liver.” Fat buildup on your liver makes it harder for the liver to operate. Eventually fibrosis (some scar tissue) becomes cirrhosis (much more scar tissue). Cirrhosis prevents the liver from performing critical functions, including managing infections, absorbing nutrients, and removing toxins from the blood. This can result in liver cancer and type 2 diabetes. Twenty-five percent of heavy drinkers will develop cirrhosis.
ALCOHOL AND CANCER
Occasional drinking couldn’t possibly cause cancer, could it? Yes, apparently it does. In a meta-analysis of 222 studies across 92,000 light drinkers and 60,000 nondrinkers with cancer, light drinking was associated with higher risks for many types of cancers, including breast cancer. A seven-year study of 1.2 million middle-age women highlights the direct and terrifying link between drinking and cancer. According to this study, alcohol increased the chance of developing cancers of the breast, mouth, throat, rectum, liver, and esophagus.
“There’s no ‘safe’ limit for alcohol when it comes to cancer.” It also doesn’t matter what type of alcohol you drink. It’s the alcohol itself that leads to the damage, regardless of whether you imbibe beer, wine, or hard liquor.
Although many of us are not aware of the relationship between alcohol and cancer, it should not come as a surprise. Again, alcohol was officially declared a carcinogen in 1988. Alcohol itself, ethanol, is a known carcinogen, and alcoholic beverages can contain at least fifteen other carcinogenic compounds, including arsenic, formaldehyde, and lead.
ALCOHOL AND DEATH
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, alcoholism reduces life expectancy by 10 to 12 years.
Act 10: Alcohol and Anger
There’s a well-documented link between aggression and alcohol consumption. Drinking is involved in about 75 percent of all child abuse deaths and half of all violent crimes. On college campuses, 95 percent of all violent crimes and 90 percent of sexual assaults involve alcohol. Why? What is it about alcohol that fuels all this anger and aggression? The biggest reason is that alcohol gives you tunnel vision.
Day 24: Are Addictive Personalities Real?
THE WAY IN IS THE WAY OUT
Take my case: I’m decisive. I have a strong will. I take commitments seriously. All those traits likely caused me to become addicted to alcohol. I was strongly committed to my decision to drink. However, once I decided to stop drinking, I was equally strong-willed and committed. The way in was also the way out.
Day 25: Setbacks and the Way Forward
You never fail until you stop trying. —ALBERT EINSTEIN
Day 26: Liberation vs. Fixation
Liberation is when I can take the substance or leave it. I’m in control, and I will have a great time whether I choose to drink. Fixation is when the cravings and addiction have taken hold and I am losing my power over my own choices.
One of the most painful things for us as humans is to feel powerless. Ironically, we give away our power to alcohol without even realizing it is happening. Today’s ideas will help you recognize where you are inadvertently giving up your power to booze so that you can consciously decide to take it back.
Liberation is being offered a beer and truly feeling like you could take it or leave it. Fixation is waiting to be offered a beer. It’s walking into a party and wondering when someone will offer you a beer.
Liberation involves no internal dialogue. There’s no “other voice” in your head arguing with you. Fixation is talking with yourself about whether you should have a drink, if you will feel bad in the morning
Liberation means you can have one drink and not give it another thought. You’re perfectly content. Fixation means you’re thinking about your next drink, often before the one in your hand is even finished.
Liberation does not come with a jonesing for the substance after it leaves your system. Fixation often means withdrawal symptoms and cravings begin as soon as the substance begins to fade away. Someone who can handle themselves around chocolate can have just a bite. But someone addicted to chocolate has to finish the whole bar that’s in front of them, and then strategizes how to get more.
Liberation puts the focus on the people and the environment. There’s little or no focus on the substance. Fixation puts the focus on the drink, not the party, even if that focus is how not to drink.
Liberation lets you be around the substance without a problem. Fixation means you can’t have it in the house without temptation.
Liberation is rational. You can decide not to drink because you have to get up early in the morning. Fixation is irrational. Even though you have that early meeting, you still want to drink.
Day 27: Is Alcohol Really Poisonous and Addictive?
How you think about a problem is more important than the problem itself. —NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
Before we discuss alcohol as an additive substance, let’s talk about what addiction actually is. It’s nothing more than an up-and-down cycle. You consume something (sugar, drugs, alcohol—doesn’t matter) and you feel better temporarily. Then the feeling goes away. You want that feeling back, so you consume the same substance again. But this time it doesn’t feel quite as good as your subconscious mind remembers, so you need a little bit more. Then the effects wear off, and you consume it again. It’s literally a high-and- low cycle that keeps you coming back to whatever substance you subconsciously believe makes you feel better.
There are four types of alcohol: methyl, propyl, butyl, and ethanol. If you consume even tiny amounts of the first three types, you’ll either go blind or die. They are extremely toxic. Ethanol is the only type of alcohol humans can consume without dying. However, it’s still so toxic that if you take even just a sip or two of pure ethanol, you will instantly vomit the poison out of your body. Ethanol is a general anesthetic. If you inject two or three milliliters of ethanol per kilogram of body weight, you will anesthetize the human body. That means you’ll go completely unconscious. Ethanol was used as a general anesthetic in Mexico, London, and Germany in the 1929–31 era, but was abandoned because of its toxicity.
When we drink, we’re consuming pure ethanol in tiny amounts. A strong beer is about 6 percent alcohol by volume. Wine is generally 12 to 16 percent alcohol by volume. Even hard liquor is only 40 percent alcohol, and people usually add mixers, which dilute the percentage even more. We’re masking the poisonous ethanol with a lot of other stuff that makes the drinking taste better. But the anesthetic effects remain.
Anesthetic and Depressant
In addition to being an anesthetic, alcohol is a depressant. It depresses your feelings and your nervous system. Depending on how much pure alcohol you consume, you might pass out completely or just feel nicely numb for a while. But our brains react to stimuli, and they are designed to maintain balance, or homeostasis.
Let’s say you had a hard day at work and you just want a drink. Happy hour it is! You head to your favorite watering hole and have a drink. Within a short time, everything slows down. The alcohol’s natural depressants dull your senses, and you subconsciously interpret that as relaxation. You feel better, for about 20 to 30 minutes. Then it’s time for your brain to kick into action and regain balance. There are depressants in your system, so your brain releases more stimulants to bring you back up. The problem is those stimulants make you even more uneasy and anxious than you were to start with. Well, one drink was good, so two must be better, right?
You have another drink in an effort to counteract the chemicals your brain released in an effort to counteract the alcohol. Confused? So is your body! It releases more stimulating stress hormones to battle that second drink. Back and forth. Depressants. Stimulants. Depressants. Stimulants. This cycle might continue on and on until you pass out from the sheer amount of poisonous ethanol in your system. And thank goodness, because blacking out gives your body a chance to metabolize the poison and detoxify your blood as best as it can.
Alcohol is addictive because you wind up worse off after each drink. And you mistakenly believe that another drink will bring you back up.
It’s the problem and the solution at the same time. It’s the chicken and the egg.
Detoxing from Alcohol Is Even More Toxic
Here’s the kicker. In order for your body to process and get rid of the alcohol, it has to create the chemical acetaldehyde. The amount of acetaldehyde that is released into your body from just one unit of alcohol would never be allowed in any food because it would be deemed too toxic. Acetaldehyde is actually more toxic than the alcohol itself! So, we drink. We build tolerance. To get the same feeling of relief from everyday stress, we need to drink more. We produce higher and higher levels of acetaldehyde to process the alcohol. And we don’t even realize how much poison is circulating in our bodies at any given time.
Once we consciously realize what we’re actually putting into our bodies— ethanol and acetaldehyde—we can’t go back to blissful ignorance. Now that you know what happens and why alcohol is addictive, you can’t unknow it.
Day 28: The Truth About Moderation
Don’t bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself. —WILLIAM FAULKNER
We’re coming to the end of this experiment, and you’re going to have to decide what to do next. Will you stay alcohol-free for another 30 days? Or 60 days? Or indefinitely? Or will you decide to carry on as before but become more mindful of your behavior?
moderation is possible. Either alcohol just isn’t important to a person because they have not developed an emotional or physical addiction and can truly take it or leave it. Or they are willing to put in the effort to pay attention and moderate how they drink. This means constant vigilance and regular assessment.
THE POWER OF DECISION
But there is incredible power in making a decision. Once you’ve truly made a decision about something in your whole body and mind, there is no plan B. There’s no turning back. And that’s a good thing because it lets you escape the “maybe” trap.
When you make a decision that you’re not a drinker anymore, that’s it. You’re free from the hamster wheel. Alcohol no longer has a hold over you because you are of one mind. Your conscious and subconscious want the same thing.
The ins and outs of moderation are complex both physically and psychologically. So before you make a decision to moderate, consider these ideas.
- Moderation means you’re always making
- Moderation doesn’t make sense from a physiological
- Alcohol impairs your ability to stick with your
- Alcohol makes you
- Alcohol numbs your response to normal stimuli.
- Alcohol increases cravings but not
“I’ve tried moderation so many times and besides being exhausting, I hated being a slave to alcohol.
Day 29: Tough Love
The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment. It is not in luck, or chance, or the help of others. It is in yourself alone. —ORISON SWETT MARDEN
We spend so much time thinking, I would drink less if my life weren’t so stressful. Or If my husband hadn’t left me, I wouldn’t be drinking so much. Or If my kids were nicer to me . . . Or Maybe when the kids are out of the house . . . There’s always a reason or an excuse for drinking too much. The truth is, this train runs only one way—forward.
If you go back to mindless drinking, you could be headed somewhere you don’t want to go. Self-medicating with alcohol is not a long-term answer to anything. In fact, it’s the opposite. It only increases stress, depression, and anxiety. If you’ve got real-world problems, drinking is only going to mask them in the short term and make things worse in the long term.
The longer you’re on the train, the harder it is to get off. So ask yourself, Where are you headed? What does your future look like if you don’t make a change? What’s life going to be like for you a year after this experiment? How about in 5 years? Or 10? Whatever alcohol is costing you now, it’s going to cost more in the future.
Day 30: What’s Next?
Destiny is not a matter of chance; it is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for; it is a thing to be achieved. —WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
Completing this 30-day experiment is a big accomplishment, and you should be proud. No matter where you go from here, you will never lose this time of learning, self-reflection, and empowerment. And while you may not realize the enormity of your accomplishment, I promise you that powerful shifts have happened. You have embarked on a path of awareness, and you will naturally and effortlessly be more mindful of your drinking in the future.
Another non-negotiable for me was drinking as self-medication. If I simply “had to have a drink” because I was stressed out for some reason, that was not okay. I was totally committed to finding other healthy ways to deal with stress and uncomfortable emotions. I couldn’t keep going back to the bottle every time I had a bad day or things were tough, because I knew where that train was headed, and I did not want to be on it when it crashed. Before I started drinking, I used to run or read a book to handle negative emotions. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that alcohol was making things worse.
Understand That Maybe Means Yes
One Final Word
Your brain is amazing, and you can program it to do what you want by repeatedly succeeding. If you make the target too hard to hit, you’ll consistently fail. When that happens, your brain gets the message that you’re a failure. And you start to believe it! When you believe you’re a failure when it comes to alcohol, that belief makes your life SO difficult. Train your brain to believe you’re successful instead, and you can do anything you decide to do.
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The Making of a Manager by Julie Zhuo | Book Summary
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The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You by Julie Zhuo
Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller!
Congratulations, you’re a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don’t really know what you’re doing.
That’s exactly how Julie Zhuo felt when she became a rookie manager at the age of 25. She stared at a long list of logistics–from hiring to firing, from meeting to messaging, from planning to pitching–and faced a thousand questions and uncertainties. How was she supposed to spin teamwork into value? How could she be a good steward of her reports’ careers? What was the secret to leading with confidence in new and unexpected situations?
Now, having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie knows the most important lesson of all: great managers are made, not born. If you care enough to be reading this, then you care enough to be a great manager.
The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed everyday examples and transformative insights, including:
* How to tell a great manager from an average manager (illustrations included)
* When you should look past an awkward interview and hire someone anyway
* How to build trust with your reports through not being a boss
* Where to look when you lose faith and lack the answers
Whether you’re new to the job, a veteran leader, or looking to be promoted, this is the handbook you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.
Chapter 1. What is management?
What do managers do? You can think that they promote and fire people, share feedback, and have meetings with reports. This is true yet quite superficial. The real essence of management lies in building a team and achieving results by collaborative efforts. As a manager, you don’t do all work by yourself; rather, you delegate responsibilities and create conditions for a smooth work process.
Can anybody be a manager? No. Considering a proposal to become a boss, ask yourself several questions: do you prefer leading or being an individual contributor? Do you like talking to people (70 percent of a manager’s time is spent in meetings)? Can you handle emotionally challenging situations, providing care for people sharing problems like health issues or family concerns that negatively impact the quality of their work? If the answers are “no”, just don’t do it.
Besides, to be a manager, you will need to be a leader who knows how to influence others. This is tightly connected to trust: you cannot inspire people, if you don’t have credibility. So work hard on developing it:
Leadership is not something that can be bestowed. It must be earned. People must want to follow you. You can be someone’s manager, but if that person does not trust or respect you, you will have limited ability to influence him.
Chapter 2. Your first three months
According to Zhuo, getting a position of a boss, you will probably take one of the four paths – apprentice, pioneer, new boss, or successor. If you know how to act in your particular case, it will be easier for you to live through the first steps, usually the hardest:
The Apprentice
You start to manage a part of a growing team. A huge advantage is that you know the team from the inside, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. However, you may get stuck, if you keep doing things in a certain way because it “has always been like that.” To avoid this, make a list of what works great and what doesn’t. This way, you will get a perspective on how to move forward from a current point.
One of the challenges apprentices face is the need to combine their individual contributor responsibilities with management – it is like managing a group of people making and selling lemonade, standing at the counter and selling it at the same time. Another one is that you will have to establish new relationships with former peers. You can notice they share less information with you and generally treat you differently now when you are a boss.
The Pioneer
You manage a new group you founded from scratch. A privilege you get in this case is the opportunity to pick the people you want to work with. However, you can feel “alone in a new, unfamiliar terrain”: the burden of responsibility can be very heavy.
Good news is that you can always ask for support – either from other managers in your company, or from subject matter experts outside your organization. For example, Zhuo often had coffee with people from Google, Airbnb, and Amazon where they discussed problems in design industries, sharing experience.
The New Boss
You start to manage an already existing team. It gives you a great chance to “form new ties and reset your identity,” getting rid of your old reputation. On the other hand, it is pretty challenging to get adapted to a totally new group and its rules.
The best thing you can do as a new boss, says Zhuo, is “to address the elephant in the room” – publicly admit that you are new, and you know very well your employees don’t trust you yet. Tell them about your failures. Don’t be scared to seem vulnerable – it will only make you look more human.
The Successor
You are taking the place of a person who decided to leave. Like when you are an apprentice, it is easy because you know the work context, and hard because you have to develop new relationships with your former peers. Besides, people expect you to be like their boss, and that puts a lot of pressure on you. But you are a different person: give yourself permission to be so.
Taking any of these paths is stressful. But this stress is only temporary:
Your first three months as a new manager are a time of incredible transition. By the end of it, the day-to-day starts to feel familiar— you’re adapting to new routines, you’re investing in new relationships, and you may begin to have a sense of how you can best support your team.
Chapter 3. Leading a small team
Trust is a fundamental ingredient of building a healthy team. And if this team is small enough, trust becomes even more important. What can a manager do to earn it?
There are several ways, believes the author. To begin with, a boss must always stay human – which is, care and respect your team workers. Sometimes care means you have to give a bitter pill, and tell them something they don’t like.
It also means investing time to help your reports, discussing priorities or even the person’s state of mind; setting clear expectations; and admitting your own mistakes.
Staying honest is also critical. But to make honesty less harsh, says Zhuo, you will have to develop trust:
Imagine you go shopping with your best friend and she comes out in an unflattering green-and-yellow sweater. “How do I look?” she asks you. “Like a caterpillar,” you say. You’re not worried about insulting her because she’s your best friend and she’ll know you said it out of affection rather than spite.
Help people use their strengths. Do not tolerate any bullies, even if they are the best workers. Remember that people are the most valuable resource, especially in a small group where “you don’t get many cross wires when your team can still fit around the table”. So focus on them.
Chapter 4. The art of feedback
When something isn’t broken, we accept that it’s good enough, so why say more?” – this is probably one of the worst approaches a manager can take. Giving feedback is a central aspect of management, and not giving it means not caring about your team members.
Feedback shouldn’t be vague, but it shouldn’t be emotionally charged either. The best feedback inspires you to improve, says Zhuo, suggesting four characteristics of it:
- Setting clear expectations – for a specific project or time period.
- Giving task-specific feedback – as frequently as possible, and preferably right after that task was completed so a person remembers the details well.
- Sharing behavioral feedback – making it more personalized, taking into account the way a person acts, not just works.
- Collecting 360-degree feedback – helping people see themselves from multiple perspectives.
Zhuo also emphasizes that sometimes people perceive your feedback not the same way you initially planned it to be:
If you’ve ever played a game of telephone as a kid, you know this to be true: What you intend to say and what the listener hears are not always the same. You might think you’re being clear when in fact you’re saying too much, or too little, or sending a different message through your body language.
To avoid this situation, she recommends making a verbal confirmation directly asking a report how he understood the remark, or asking him to summarize it in an email. But remember – it is very important to be on the same page.
Chapter 5. Managing yourself
Managing large groups of people is impossible if a person cannot manage his own behavior. Having to do things they have never done before (for example, you cannot practice firing people before you actually do it) on a permanent basis, many managers face a problem called “imposter syndrome”: they always doubt themselves and feel like “they are not supposed to be here”.
How to overcome this state? Accepting yourself, in the first place. The top world leaders do not share some special type of personality: you can come across extroverts, like Churchill, introverts, like Lincoln, people avoiding attention, like Gates. Realize that you are unique.
It also helps to understand yourself at your best and your worst, continues the author. Think of rituals that make you feel more effective: for example, you can notice that you function best after 8 hours of sleep. At the same time, think of triggers that decrease your effectiveness – like arrogance or injustice you observe at a workplace. This information is very valuable.
Zhuo also underlines that even if you find yourself “in the pit” – lonely and frustrated – you should always try to get your confidence back. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Understand that the worst-case scenarios in your head are not necessarily true. Celebrate little wins:
Learning how to be a great leader means learning about your superpowers and flaws, learning how to navigate the obstacles in your head, and learning how to learn. With these tools comes the confidence that you’re meant to be here just as you are—no masks or pretenses needed.
Chapter 6. Amazing meetings
Gathering team members in a big room on Fridays and asking them to share what they have done this week sounds like a very logical thing to do. You can analyze what already happened, and you can make plans for the future. But it is not enough to just have a meeting: it has to be a productive meeting.
Leo Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the statement “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Meetings are much the same.
This is ironic but true. The absence of clarity and a lot of confusion, repetitive remarks, a couple individuals dominating the room – this is what a bad meeting looks like. A good meeting, on the contrary, is straightforward and simple: you get a clear understanding of what is expected from you; you learn something new; your time is not wasted.
So what are the techniques that help organize a productive meeting? Zhuo comes up with several ones:
Focus on decision making: present all options and make a fair decision, even if you didn’t find the consensus.
Share information. Emails and group chats have made it possible to quickly exchange information, but they will not replace a real-life meeting where you can express your opinion not only verbally but also through body language and eye contact.
Generate ideas. Despite the popular belief that brainstorming is super effective, our brain produces the most creative ideas when we are by ourselves. The best way is to hear the ideas of everyone in a room, and let them evolve within a detailed discussion.
Set the norms. If you want everyone to say something, insist on it.
Meetings take a lot of time and energy, which are precious and finite. This is why, says Zhuo, you should guard them “like a dragon guards its treasure stash. If you trust that the right outcomes will happen without you, then you don’t need to be there.”
Chapter 7. Hiring well
Hiring isn’t about filling holes, says Zhuo; it is about finding talents who would inspire the team. However, as she ironically points out, “As they say in fairy tales, you’ll have to meet a lot of frogs in order to find a good match.”
The techniques that are typically used for hiring are interview, resume, and the reference check. Interviews are not reliable methods because they do not recreate the real work environment; besides, interviewers can be personally biased against a particular candidate.
Resume is helpful since it lets you see if a candidate has specific skills or experiences you are looking for. It may happen that a candidate is very eager to work, and it impresses you – but it does not mean he is the right person.
Reference check is usually underrated but it is actually the best way for evaluation, says the author. Talking to multiple people who know the candidate, you may get the most trustworthy picture of who really this person is.
Another important thing to remember while hiring is diversity. According to a 2014 report, companies with greatest ethnic and racial diversity were 35 percent more likely to have financial returns.
Hiring is not something you can avoid as a manager. It is not just a process – it is a skill you need to acquire:
When your team is growing swiftly, hiring becomes easily the top one or two most important skills. If you need to build out a large team and you don’t have a strong bench of managers, the problem quickly becomes intractable. You can’t create great outcomes without consistently attracting talented people.
Chapter 8. Making things happen
The more arbitrary and heavy work processes are, the harder it is to achieve goals. So it makes sense to optimize every process involved. How can managers do it?
To begin with, through planning. “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything,” said Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of history’s top generals. Even though it is impossible to control everything and plans do not always work, planning can help understand at what stage of your work you are.
It is very useful to focus on a few things and do them well. The Pareto principle, also known as 80/20 principle, means that 80 percent of results come from 20 percent of causes. Instead of giving too much effort where it is not needed, it’s better to identify things that matter the most.
Creating a concrete vision is priceless too. Mark Zuckerberg would often repeat that one day they would connect the world – even when Facebook was a small company, and my Space almost ten times bigger. The vision he had was very clear, and everybody knew what it was. Eventually, Facebook became a part of everyday life for billions of people.
Zhuo emphasizes that no matter how scared you are, you should try new ways and keep making mistakes – this is how you make things happen:
The most brilliant plans in the world won’t help you succeed if you can’t bring them to life. Executing well means that you pick a reasonable direction, move quickly to learn what works and what doesn’t, and make adjustments to get to your desired outcome.
Chapter 9. Leading a growing team
The contrasts between managing large and small teams are striking. If you have a small team, you can individually approach each person; if it’s bigger, you cannot – at least, not directly, but through other leaders at lower levels.
In both cases you as a manager are responsible for the outcome. With a big group, it can be very challenging since you cannot get deep in all the details. All you can do is to learn to trust your people and find the balance between controlling the situation and giving freedom:
“Dive in too much, and you’re the micromanager… if you step back too much, you’re the absentee manager.”
In a position of authority, you will be in charge of numerous things; however, you are only a human, and your resources are limited – so you must prioritize. The author suggests keeping a calendar and preparing for each meeting, taking notes, and making time pockets for reflection.
One more thing to mention here is that when a team is growing, a manager will inevitably have to replace himself. It can be hard because people get attached to what they are doing. However, it also means personal growth everyone involved, because it presents many opportunities:
The act of constantly trying to replace yourself means that you create openings to stretch both your leaders and yourself. Right ahead is another mountain that’s bigger and scarier than the one before. Everyone keeps climbing, and everyone achieves more together.
Chapter 10. Nurturing culture
Culture is the norms and values that determine how work is done. Since a manager has a lot of influence, he plays a very important role in shaping it.
What kind of culture do you want to have in your company? Zhuo recommends thinking of 5 adjectives you would want an external observer to describe your company with. Then, analyze the current state of things. Is the work environment hostile? Is there too much drama? If the answer is yes, this needs to change.
Try to see the difference between your aspirations and the situation you’ve got at the moment. Talk more frequently and more patiently about your values, persuading others to adopt them as well. Zhuo says it has never been annoying to her colleagues – on the contrary, they responded positively and asked what steps they needed to take. Finally, don’t forget to reward those who behave according to your values.
Sharing values is a priceless instrument of developing a team and achieving results – it unites people and leads them to the same destination:
A group of people working in unison is a wonderful thing to behold. Done well, it ceases to be about you or me, one individual or another. Instead, you feel the energy of dozens or hundreds or even thousands of hearts and minds directed toward a shared purpose, guided by shared values.
The path to becoming a great manager is not straight, and the journey will be long. You will fall and rise, try new ideas and fail. But make sure you always keep your mind open. Learn from your mistakes and from the experience of others. You will see many opportunities just around the corner.
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The Power of Awareness by Neville Goddard | Book Summary
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The Power of Awareness by Neville Goddard
Consciousness is one, manifesting in many forms or levels of consciousness.
I AM is the self-definition of the absolute and the foundation for everything.
A person’s concept of themselves determines their experience and the world they live in.
The individual state of consciousness explains the phenomena of life.
Changing one’s concept of themselves can lead to higher and higher concepts and experiences.
The fundamental nature of consciousness is unchangeable and eternal.
The purpose of life is to discover one’s true identity as the eternal I AM.
The journey to discovering one’s true identity involves letting go of negative concepts and embracing positive ones.
The attainment of a high level of consciousness brings about the experience of oneness with God.
Changes in life are the result of a change in one’s concept of oneself, not external causes.
The ideal a person seeks will not manifest until they imagine they are already that ideal.
A radical psychological transformation, including feeling as if one’s wish is already fulfilled, is necessary for the realization of goals.
One’s attitude towards oneself determines what can be realized.
Suggestion and complete abandonment of an ideal is necessary for transformation.
Imagining oneself as already experiencing the desired outcome and feeling as if the wish is fulfilled can lead to its manifestation.
To reach a higher level of being, a higher concept of oneself must be assumed.
Life is determined by assumptions, and one must become the master of their assumptions to attain freedom and happiness.
Controlled imagination and sustained attention focused on an object can lead to its manifestation.
Thinking from an ideal instead of thinking of an ideal leads to its manifestation.
Attention is important for achieving success and changing your future.
To develop and control your attention, practice focusing on the events of your day in reverse order before sleep.
With repeated practice, you can develop a “center of power” and become aware of your true self.
When you have control of the internal direction of your attention, you can walk in the assumption of your wish fulfilled.
To change your concept of yourself and your future, focus your attention on the feeling of your wish being fulfilled.
The power of attention is increased by the narrowness of its focus and by the exclusion of other ideas.
The ideas that dominate your consciousness and have your attention are the ones that lead to action.
Imagination is able to do anything, but only according to the internal direction of your attention.
The attentive attitude involves selection and is directed towards a specific goal.
To increase the power of your attention, focus on one object or state and exclude other ideas.
Renunciation involves taking your attention away from evil and focusing on what you want instead.
Practice renouncing negative thoughts and feelings by focusing your attention on your desired ideals.
You can claim and appropriate what you desire by imagining that you already possess it.
Your thoughts and beliefs about yourself shape your reality.
Obedience to the law of assumption, or the power of imagination and belief, determines your experiences in life.
By renouncing negative thoughts and focusing on your desired goals, you can change your concept of yourself and thereby change your future.
The process of renunciation involves relinquishing attachments to material possessions and ego.
The ultimate goal of renunciation is to discover and unite with the higher self.
The concept you have of yourself determines your life.
To change your life, you must change your concept of yourself.
This can be achieved through the use of imagination and attention.
Attention can be attracted from the outside or directed from within.
To control your future, you must learn to direct your attention subjectively.
This can be achieved through the task of deliberately withdrawing attention from the objective world and focusing it subjectively.
Once you have control over the movements of your attention in the subjective world, you are in control of your fate.
You should not accept the dominance of outside conditions or circumstances, but rather change them through the use of imagination and attention.
This process requires renunciation of negative thoughts and feelings and the assumption of positive ones.
The key to success is persistence in the use of imagination and attention.
The principle of “Least Action” states that to move from one state to another, a minimum of energy and time must be used.
The psychological equivalent of “Least Action” is an assumption, which works by means of attention, minus the effort.
Assumptions have the power of objective realization and every event in the visible world is the result of an assumption or idea in the unseen world.
The future becomes the present in your mind when you imagine that you already are what you will be when your assumption is fulfilled.
The Immaculate Conception is the birth of an idea in your own consciousness, unaided by another.
The Assumption is the highest use of consciousness when you assume the feeling of the wish is fulfilled and it becomes actual fact.
The natural and only way to lift yourself up to the level of your assumption is by feeling it, not by striving or struggling.
To change your future, you must change your assumption, which will then guide all your conscious and subconscious movements toward its suggested end.
The principle of “Least Action” (using the minimum of energy and time) governs the journey from one state of consciousness to another.
The psychological equivalent of “Least Action” is an assumption, which works through attention and without effort.
Your desired state already exists but is excluded from view. An assumption brings it into sight by changing your perspective.
Assumptions have the power of objective realization and events in the visible world are the result of assumptions in the unseen world.
Control and concentration of attention are necessary to modify or alter your life.
Attention can be attracted from without or directed from within.
The present moment is the only time when assumptions can be controlled.
To assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled is to mentally lift oneself to a higher level.
To achieve a desired state, one must persist in the assumption and be a “doer of the work”.
Essential points for the successful use of the law of assumption include intense desire, the mainspring of action, and the intention to succeed.
To achieve a desired state, one must identify with it and transform oneself into it.
Righteousness is the consciousness of already being what you want to be.
Sin means not attaining your desire or not being the person you want to be.
Righteousness is the only way to be saved from sin.
It is a mistake to focus on things rather than on the consciousness of already having them.
The kingdom of God is within you and righteousness is the awareness that you already possess it all.
There is no free will to do anything except assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
Everything happens automatically based on your assumptions, whether conscious or unconscious.
The law of assumption operates automatically, without any effort on your part.
Righteousness is not attained through religion, good deeds, or moral behavior.
The only thing necessary to make the law of assumption work is to feel the wish fulfilled with all your heart.
The principle of persistence, or continuing in the assumption of the wish fulfilled, is essential for the successful use of the law of assumption.
Persistence is demonstrated in the parables of Jacob seeking a blessing, the Shunammite seeking help from Elisha, and the widow seeking help from a judge.
To pray means to give thanks for already having what you desire.
Persistence in the assumption of the wish fulfilled causes subtle changes in the mind that result in the desired change in life.
Other people in the world will respond in harmony with persistent assumptions, rather than being reluctant or resistant.
A maintained attitude of the wish fulfilled, rather than a single isolated act, is necessary for the effective use of the law of assumption.
Frequent assumption of the feeling of the wish fulfilled, rather than the length of time, helps to make it a natural and maintained attitude.
The law of assumption can be compared to a mathematical equation, where persistence in the assumption of the wish fulfilled is the constant factor.
The law of assumption can also be compared to a seed, which needs the constant factors of warmth, moisture, and air to grow and bear fruit.
Persistence in the assumption of the wish fulfilled leads to the realization of the desire, and the end of yearning.
Failure in the use of the law of assumption can be attributed to a lack of feeling of naturalness about the desired outcome.
This feeling of naturalness can be achieved through persistent imagination, envisioning oneself already being or having what is desired.
Success or failure in attaining a desired outcome is solely determined by one’s own state of consciousness.
If an assumption is not fulfilled, it is due to an error or weakness in consciousness that can be overcome.
The time it takes for an assumption to become reality is proportional to the naturalness of being it.
Man’s outer world is a reflection of his inner world and thoughts.
The law of assumption is a universal law that can be applied to any desire.
The use of the law of assumption requires persistence, faith, and a feeling of naturalness.
Destiny is the inevitable experience one must face and is influenced by one’s own consciousness.
It is possible to consciously create one’s own destiny by understanding the causes of one’s experiences and the power of consciousness.
The study of the law of assumption is key to achieving the highest level of destiny.
One’s true self is the consciousness that knows one’s identity, and it is the foundation of the law of assumption and the basis for feelings of reverence and worship.
The deepest feelings, including those of reverence and worship, are often the most difficult to express.
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Super Human by Dave Asprey | Book Summary
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Superhuman: The Bulletproof Plan to Age Backward and Maybe Even Live Forever by Dave Asprey
From the creator of Bulletproof coffee and the bestselling author of Head Strong and The Bulletproof Diet comes a plan to bypass plateaus and ‘up’ your game at every age.
Dave Asprey suffered countless symptoms of ageing as a young man, which sparked a lifelong burning desire to grow younger with each birthday. For more than twenty years, he has been on a quest to find innovative, science-backed methods to upgrade human biology and redefine the limits of the mind, body, and spirit. The results speak for themselves. Now in his forties, Dave is smarter, happier, and more fit and successful than ever before.
In Super Human, he shows how this is level of health and performance possible for all of us. While we assume we will peak in middle age and then decline, Asprey’s research reveals there is another way. It is possible to make changes on the sub-cellular level to dramatically extend life span. And the tools to live longer also give you more energy and brainpower right now.
The answers lie in Dave’s Seven Pillars of Ageing that contribute to degeneration and disease while diminishing your performance in the moment. Using simple interventions – like diet, sleep, light, exercise, and little-known but powerful hacks from ozone therapy to proper jaw alignment, you can decelerate cellular ageing and supercharge your body’s ability to heal and rejuvenate.
A self-proclaimed human guinea pig, Asprey arms readers with practical advice to maximize their lives at every age with his signature mix of science-geek wonder, candour, and enthusiasm. Getting older no longer has to mean decline. Now it’s an opportunity to become Super Human.
BOOK SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION
What is the first thing you would do if you ever gained control of our own biology? Not die, probably.
The author wants to take things further, aiming to age backward and, finally, heal like a deity, so he can keep getting better with age instead of suffering an inevitable decline.
He wants to go from a mere mortal to a 180-year-old Super Human:
“Someone with the wisdom of age but who heals and regenerates like a teenager.”
Let’s see how he plans to achieve that.
PART 1. DON’T DIE
The Four Killers
“Aging is death by a thousand cuts”, the author says.
These are the four diseases most likely to leave the deepest cuts as you age:
Heart disease (23% risk dying from it),
Diabetes (25% risk dying from it),
Alzheimer’s (10% risk developing it), and
Cancer (40% risk getting it and 20% risk dying from it).
As you age, your mitochondria (responsible for producing lots of energy from the food you eat) become damaged and begin producing an excess of free radicals, which leak into the surrounding cells and lay the groundwork for the Four Killers.
To stop damaging your own body with thousands of (big or small) cuts, focus on the basics:
Good nutrition,
Quality sleep, and
A healthy environment free of toxins that cause more cuts.
Take action now to stop this damage before it stacks up. It’s a lot easier to avoid damage to your mitochondria than it is to reverse it later.
What if you made better choices throughout your life, so you took fewer hits over the course of decades? This is the premise of this book.
THE SEVEN PILLARS OF AGING
PILLAR 1 – Shrinking tissues
Loose skin… no muscle tone… shaky hands… foggy memory… that’s what you think when you picture an old person, right? This is what happens as we age when cells die and are not replaced. Brainwise, this causes cognitive decline and dementia. To avoid a lot of unnecessary cell loss, keep your mitochondria healthy.
PILLAR 2 – Mitochondrial mutations
Your mitochondrial DNA is a lot more susceptible to mutations than your human DNA because mitochondrial DNA has a limited ability to repair itself when it is damaged. Again, you’re going to want to take fewer hits to your mitochondria.
PILLAR 3 – Zombie cells
Some cells eventually no longer divide or function properly, yet they persist and secrete inflammatory proteins, causing all the problems that stem from chronic inflammation. Over time, the accumulation of the damage they create is a major cause of aging and disease.
PILLAR 4 – Cellular strait jackets
The extracellular matrix holds your cells together and gives your tissues their elasticity. When these tissues lose their elasticity, they become stiff and your body has to work harder to push blood throughout your circulatory system.
This can lead to aging, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
PILLAR 5 – Extracellular junk
As you age, waste products build up both inside and outside your cells, they stick together and form plaques that cause aging and disease by getting in the way of healthy cellular interaction.
PILLAR 6 – Junk buildup inside cells
Each cell’s own built-in waste disposal system incinerates unwanted materials of all kinds, keeping your cells free of junk and able to function optimally. When the system malfunctions, the waste products end up just sitting there, clogging up the cell until it can no longer function.
PILLAR 7 – Telomere shortening
Just like your shoelaces, there are endcaps for your DNA to protect your chromosomes from fraying with wear and tear (aka age). These caps naturally deteriorate over time, until they can no longer protect the cell.
The simple interventions to avoid the Four Killers – good food (no fried, grilled, or charred meat!!!), the right environment, moderate exercise, stress control (do you meditate?), and quality sleep – are also the best and most effective ways of slowing down or reversing many of the Seven Pillars of Aging.
FOOD IS AN ANTI-AGING DRUG
When it comes to aging, grains are bad, sugar is bad, charred or fried stuff is bad, and too much or too little protein is bad.
Instead, opt for tons of organic vegetables, limited organic fruit, and meat only from pastured animals.
When you eat enough of the right fats without excess carbs or protein, your body learns to efficiently burn fat for fuel. If you eat excess carbs or protein, your body burns those first.
Ideally, get your protein from gently-cooked grass-fed animals, wild fish, or plants like hemp. Limiting how much protein you eat or intermittent fasting are two of the most painless high-impact ways to live longer.
SLEEP OR DIE
A lack of good sleep directly increases your risk of dying from one of the Four Killers, while good quality sleep promotes skin health and youthful appearance, and healthy cell division.
To improve your sleep, get a sleep tracker. Did it take you a long time to fall asleep? Are you wasting your night with light sleep? Did you snore (sign of inflammation)?
The more time you spend in either REM or deep sleep, the more restorative your sleep will be.
You can increase your sleep quality by meditating, taking a hot bath before sleep, eating better, consuming fewer toxins (including alcohol), reducing blue light exposure at night, or taking the right supplements for your biology.
USING LIGHT TO GAIN SUPERPOWERS
To harness the power of light, first reduce junk light at home by installing dimmers and wearing glasses that filter out blue light.
To look better and have more energy, make sure you are exposed to some red or infrared light every day, or aim for fifteen to twenty minutes of natural sun exposure a day.
For the brave ones, consider trying an infrared sauna to aid in detoxification and boost your mitochondrial function.
For help with wound healing, muscle fatigue, or tissue repair, look into red and infrared light therapy. And if your concerns are primarily skin-deep, yellow light therapy may be an easy fix.
PART II. AGE BACKWARD
Turn Your Brain Back On
It’s pretty hard to concentrate or improve your decision-making skills if your brain is constantly and easily panicked – even if the source of panic is a simple text message.
An hour of neurofeedback can help you learn to self-regulate so your fight-or-flight response isn’t activated quite so easily.
Also shining the invisible LED light down your brain for two minutes a day can dramatically improve your brain function, focus, and mood.
When it comes to food, start a diet that consistently keeps your blood sugar low, avoids spikes, and keeps ketones present in your blood.
There are also plenty of pharmaceuticals and supplements that can help you enhance cognitive function as you age, such as:
Piracetam: Reduces cognitive decline with age
CoQ10: Helps your mitochondria produce energy
PQQ: A powerful antioxidant for anti-aging
Curcumin: Improves memory and attention while acting as an antioxidant
METAL BASHING
Arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury are the most toxic and present metals in our environment. Although the EPA has classified each of them as carcinogens, today we are consuming them in considerable quantities.
Toxic metals, such as lead, thallium, and mercury, have a direct impact on mitochondrial cellular function, leading to premature aging and decline.
It is essential to periodically see a functional medicine doctor, get your urine levels tested for heavy metals, and then purge them from our system. Get an IV of glutathione,
Talk to your doctor about activated charcoal treatment,
Eat chlorella tablets along with fish (a common source of mercury),
Consistently use digestive fiber (15 grams every other day for a year),
Sweat it out in an infrared sauna or by exercising.
POLLUTING YOUR BODY WITH OZONE
Ozone therapy can strengthen your immune system and your mitochondrial function.
Weak cells that are vulnerable to invasion from bacteria or viruses are more susceptible to oxidation. Ozone therapy kills off these weak and damaged cells, while it destroys harmful bacteria, yeast, viruses, fungi, and protozoa.
However, please don’t try ozone gas before consulting a doctor! Accidentally inhaling it can cause permanent lung damage or even kill you.
FERTILITY = LONGEVITIY
Before getting any hormone replacement, get a lab test to learn your current hormone levels. The author has supplemented many of his hormones, i.e.:
Testosterone – necessary for muscles and sexual function
DHEA – a pre-hormone
Oxytocin – best known for its role in making you feel good and bond with others
There are many simple ways to hack your hormones besides hormone replacement therapy:
Get good quality sleep consistently,
Eat the right foods (stop eating sugar, soy, excess omega-6 fats, and refined carbs, and replace these foods with additional healthy saturated fat from grass-fed meat, pastured eggs, and energy fats.),
Go through your toiletries and personal care products and get rid of everything containing phthalates and parabens, which mimic hormones in the body and disrupt your natural hormone function,
Exercise regularly, and
Avoid junk light and other environmental toxins.
YOUR TEETH ARE A WINDOW TO THE NERVOUS SYSTEM
When your bite is misaligned, your jaw is always on guard, trying to keep you from banging your teeth into one another.
This causes the trigeminal nerve to send a threat message to your autonomic nervous system, triggering a fight-or-flight response and releasing cortisol, the stress hormone which is highly inflammatory and has its own profound aging effects.
A corrected bite through something as simple as a plastic bite guard can allow your lower jaw to relax, making a big difference in your nervous system.
In other words, proper jaw alignment can help your entire body feel better and become younger.
HUMANS ARE WALKING PETRI DISHES
There are approximately 39 trillion bacterial cells in the human body. If our balance of microorganisms is off (especially in our gut), we age rapidly, develop disease, and die.
The trick is to focus on eating the foods that help good bacteria grow and reproduce: prebiotic fiber and resistant starch.
You can get prebiotics from vegetables that are rich in soluble fiber like sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and asparagus. There is a little prebiotic fiber in coffee and chocolate, too.
The best way for anyone to starve the bad bacteria and feed the good ones is by cleaning up your diet:
Don’t eat grains, legumes, or nightshade vegetables, all of which lay the groundwork for leaky gut syndrome.
Quit eating sugar – bad bacteria love sugar and feed off it.
Never eat industrially-raised animals again, because the antibiotics they receive and the glyphosate in their food will end up in your gut and harm your gut bacteria.
Part III. Heal Like A Deity
Finally, although many of the techniques the author mentions in the last part of the book are unregulated and often untested by him, here’s a few ways to practically and realistically heal like a deity:
Spend more time in nature to boost your own natural killer cells and enhance your immune system. Bonus points for frequently visiting a forest with lots of evergreen trees.
Get your hormone levels checked and look at any prescription meds that may be causing a problem. To improve sexual function, simply practice Kegel exercises on a daily basis.
For your skin to look younger than ever:a. Supplement with grass-fed or pastured collagen protein – at least 10 grams per day. You can also make bone broth if you don’t like collagen protein. b. Eat more foods containing polyphenols and antioxidants: vegetables, coffee, tea, and chocolate.
For your hair to look shinier than ever:a. Stop using chemical-laden personal care products and switch to all-natural versions. Throw out anything containing phthalates, parabens, and benzophenones. For women, consider alternatives to hormonal birth control. b. Deal with your stress, already! c. To stimulate blood flow to the scalp, get a head massage or purchase an at-home massager.
Conclusion
Key takeaways
As a general rule, always aim for good nutrition, quality sleep, and a healthy environment free of toxins.
Quit eating grains & sugar, and never eat industrially-raised animals again.
The health and diversity of your gut bacteria is the most important part of your system.
Before trying any advanced biohacking technique or drug, always consult with a doctor.
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In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré | Book Summary
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In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honoré
We live in the age of speed. We strain to be more efficient, to cram more into each minute, each hour, each day. Since the Industrial Revolution shifted the world into high gear, the cult of speed has pushed us to a breaking point. Consider these facts: Americans on average spend seventy-two minutes of every day behind the wheel of a car, a typical business executive now loses sixty-eight hours a year to being put on hold, and American adults currently devote on average a mere half hour per week to making love.
Living on the edge of exhaustion, we are constantly reminded by our bodies and minds that the pace of life is spinning out of control. In Praise of Slowness traces the history of our increasingly breathless relationship with time and tackles the consequences of living in this accelerated culture of our own creation. Why are we always in such a rush? What is the cure for time sickness? Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Realizing the price we pay for unrelenting speed, people all over the world are reclaiming their time and slowing down the pace — and living happier, healthier, and more productive lives as a result. A Slow revolution is taking place.
Here you will find no Luddite calls to overthrow technology and seek a preindustrial utopia. This is a modern revolution, championed by cell-phone using, e-mailing lovers of sanity. The Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word — balance. People are discovering energy and efficiency where they may have been least expected — in slowing down.
In this engaging and entertaining exploration, award-winning journalist and rehabilitated speedaholic Carl Honoré details our perennial love affair with efficiency and speed in a perfect blend of anecdotal reportage, history, and intellectual inquiry. In Praise of Slowness is the first comprehensive look at the worldwide Slow movements making their way into the mainstream — in offices, factories, neighborhoods, kitchens, hospitals, concert halls, bedrooms, gyms, and schools. Defining a movement that is here to stay, this spirited manifesto will make you completely rethink your relationship with time.
Top Slow Quotes from Others
“There is more to life than increasing its speed.” — Gandhi
“For fast-acting relief from stress, try slowing down.” — Lily Tomlin
“Take the time to live more deeply.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
“Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.” — Søren Kierkegaard
“To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization.” — Bertrand Russell
“The whole struggle of life is to some extent a struggle about how slowly or how quickly to do each thing.” — Sten Nadolny, author of The Discovery of Slowness
“When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.” — Milan Kundera, author of the novella Slowness
“It is a Western disease to make time finite, and then to impose speed on all aspects of life.” — Satish Kumar
“Despite what people think, the discussion about speed is never really about the current state of technology. It goes much deeper than that, it goes back to the human desire for transcendence … It’s hard to think about the fact that we’re going to die; it’s unpleasant, so we constantly seek ways to distract ourselves from the awareness of our own mortality. Speed, with the sensory rush it gives, is one strategy for distraction.” — Mark Kingwell, professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto
“Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life. You decide how fast you have to go in any given context. If today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos.” — Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food
“We want to strike a balance between the modern and the traditional that promotes good living.” — Bruna Sibille
“Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing-down that destroys the mass’s dynamic efficiency.” — Paul Virilio, French philosopher
The Busy Life & Time Sickness
“The world is still straining to do everything faster—and paying a heavy price for it. The toll taken by the hurry-up culture is well documented. We are driving the planet and ourselves towards burnout. We are so time-poor and time-sick that we neglect our friends, families and partners. We barely know how to enjoy things any more because we are always looking ahead to the next thing. Much of the food we eat is bland and unhealthy. With our children caught up in the same hailstorm of hurry, the future looks bleak.”
“All the things that bind us together and make life worth living—community, family, friendship—thrive on the one thing we never have enough of: time.”
“In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term ‘time-sickness’ to describe the obsessive belief that ‘time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.’ These days, the whole world is time-sick. We all belong to the same cult of speed.”
“Time-sickness can also be a symptom of a deeper, existential malaise. In the final stages before burnout, people often speed up to avoid confronting their unhappiness.”
“Inevitably, a life of hurry can become superficial. When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people.”
“We have forgotten how to look forward to things, and how to enjoy the moment when they arrive.”
“In this media-drenched, data-rich, channel-surfing, computer-gaming age, we have lost the art of doing nothing, of shutting out the background noise and distractions, of slowing down and simply being alone with our thoughts.”
“Instead of thinking deeply, or letting an idea simmer in the back of the mind, our instinct now is to reach for the nearest sound bite.“
“This is where our obsession with going fast and saving time leads. To road rage, air rage, shopping rage, relationship rage, office rage, vacation rage, gym rage. Thanks to speed, we live in the age of rage.“
“And not only do we enjoy going fast, we get used to it, we become ‘velocitized.’ When we first drive onto a motorway, 70 miles per hour seems fast. Then, after a few minutes, it feels routine. Pull onto a slip road, brake to 30 mph and the lower speed seems slow. Velocitization fuels a constant need for more speed.“
“As we go on accelerating, our relationship with time grows ever more fraught and dysfunctional.”
Evolution of our Relationship with Time
“If we are ever going to slow down, we must understand why we accelerated in the first place, why the world got so revved up, so tightly scheduled. And to do that, we need to start at the very beginning, by looking at our relationship with time itself.”
“Survival was one incentive for measuring time. Ancient civilizations used calendars to work out when to plant and harvest crops. Right from the start, though, timekeeping proved to be a double-edged sword. On the upside, scheduling can make anyone, from peasant farmer to software engineer, more efficient. Yet as soon as we start to parcel up time, the tables turn, and time takes over. We become slaves to the schedule. Schedules give us deadlines, and deadlines, by their very nature, give us a reason to rush. As an Italian proverb puts it: Man measures time, and time measures man.“
“Lewis Mumford, the eminent social critic, identified the clock as ‘the key machine’ of the Industrial Revolution. But it was not until the late nineteenth century that the creation of standard time unlocked its full potential.”
“Benjamin Franklin was among the first to envision a world devoted to rest and relaxation. Inspired by the technological breakthroughs of the latter 1700s, he predicted that man would soon work no more than four hours a week.”
“In the United States, meanwhile, a group of intellectuals known as the Transcendentalists exalted the gentle simplicity of a life rooted in nature. One of their number, Henry David Thoreau, retired to a one-room cabin beside Walden Pond near Boston in 1845, from which he decried modern life as a treadmill of ‘infinite bustle…nothing but work, work, work.‘”
“In 1884, Charles Dudley Warner, an American editor and essayist, gave vent to the popular unease, echoing Plautus in the process: ‘The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of individual freedom and makes no allowances for differences in temperament and feeling.’“
“To teach workers the new time discipline demanded by modern capitalism, the ruling classes set about promoting punctuality as a civic duty and a moral virtue, while denigrating slowness and tardiness as cardinal sins. In its 1891 catalogue, the Electric Signal Clock Company warned against the evils of failing to keep pace: ‘If there is one virtue that should be cultivated more than any other by him who would succeed in life, it is punctuality: if there is one error to be avoided, it is being behind time.’ One of the firm’s clocks, the aptly named Autocrat, promised to ‘revolutionize stragglers and behind-time people.’”
“As the clock tightened its grip and technology made it possible to do everything more quickly, hurry and haste seeped into every corner of life. People were expected to think faster, work faster, talk faster, read faster, write faster, eat faster, move faster.”
“Tempted and titillated at every turn, we seek to cram in as much consumption and as many experiences as possible. As well as glittering careers, we want to take art courses, work out at the gym, read the newspaper and every book on the bestseller list, eat out with friends, go clubbing, play sports, watch hours of television, listen to music, spend time with the family, buy all the newest fashions and gadgets, go to the cinema, enjoy intimacy and great sex with our partners, holiday in far-flung locations and maybe even do some meaningful volunteer work. The result is a gnawing disconnect between what we want from life and what we can realistically have, which feeds the sense that there is never enough time.“
“Part of the answer may lie in the way we think about time itself. In some philosophical traditions—Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist, to name three—time is cyclical. On Canada’s Baffin Island, the Inuit use the same word—uvatiarru—to mean both ‘in the distant past’ and ‘in the distant future.’ Time, in such cultures, is always coming as well as going. It is constantly around us, renewing itself, like the air we breathe. In the Western tradition, time is linear, an arrow flying remorselessly from A to B. It is a finite, and therefore precious, resource. Christianity piles on pressure to put every moment to good use. The Benedictine monks kept a tight schedule because they believed the devil would find work for idle hands to do. In the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin summed up the Western obsession with making the most of every minute with a stern call to action: ‘A man who wastes one hour of time has not discovered the meaning of life.’”
“Perhaps the greatest challenge of the Slow movement will be to fix our neurotic relationship with time itself.”
Slow Myth Busting
Slow is not just a rate of change; it’s a philosophy of life
“In this book, Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. As we shall see, performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results. It is also possible to do things quickly while maintaining a Slow frame of mind.”
Slow is not Anti-Speed
“Let’s make one thing clear: this book is not a declaration of war against speed. Speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel? The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not working? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave. And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.“
Slow is not Slow Motion or Anti-Technology
“Despite what some critics say, the Slow movement is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. Nor is it a Luddite attempt to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia. On the contrary, the movement is made up of people like you and me, people who want to live better in a fast-paced, modern world … Being Slow does not mean being torpid, backward or technophobic.“
Slow is not Anti-Capitalism
“Inevitably, the Slow movement overlaps with the anti-globalization crusade. Proponents of both believe that turbo-capitalism offers a one-way ticket to burnout, for the planet and the people living on it. They claim we can live better if we consume, manufacture and work at a more reasonable pace. In common with moderate anti-globalizers, however, Slow activists are not out to destroy the capitalist system. Rather, they seek to give it a human face.
Slow is not One-Size-Fits-All
“There is no one-size-fits-all formula for slowing down, no universal guide to the right speed. Each person, act, moment has its own eigenzeit. Some people are content to live at a speed that would send the rest of us to an early grave. We all must have the right to choose the pace that makes us happy. ‘The world is a richer place when we make room for different speeds.’”
Slow Philosophy & Core Tenets
“Though speed, busyness and an obsession with saving time remain the hallmarks of modern life, a powerful backlash is brewing. The Slow movement is on the march. Instead of doing everything faster, many people are decelerating, and finding that Slowness helps them to live, work, think and play better. But is the Slow movement really a movement? It certainly has all the ingredients that academics look for—popular sympathy, a blueprint for a new way of life, grassroots action. True, the Slow movement has no formal structure, and still suffers from low brand recognition. Many people slow down—working fewer hours, say, or finding time to cook—without feeling part of a global crusade. Yet every act of deceleration is grist to the mill.”
Balance & The Middle Path
“That is why the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed … Like most people, I want to find a way to live better by striking a balance between fast and slow.”
“What the world needs, and what the Slow movement offers, is a middle path, a recipe for marrying la dolce vita with the dynamism of the information age. The secret is balance: instead of doing everything faster, do everything at the right speed. Sometimes fast. Sometimes slow. Sometimes somewhere in between. Being Slow means never rushing, never striving to save time just for the sake of it. It means remaining calm and unflustered even when circumstances force us to speed up.”
Less But Better
“Many recommend doing fewer things in order to do them better, a core tenet of the Slow philosophy … The twenty-four-hour society is not intrinsically evil. If we approach it in a Slow spirit—doing fewer things, with less hurry—it can give us the flexibility we need to decelerate … Slower, it turns out, often means better—better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex.”
“The central tenet of the Slow philosophy is taking the time to do things properly, and thereby enjoy them more. Whatever its effect on the economic balance sheet, the Slow philosophy delivers the things that really make us happy: good health, a thriving environment, strong communities and relationships, freedom from perpetual hurry.”
Lifestyle Revolution
“A genuinely Slow world implies nothing less than a lifestyle revolution.”
Origin & Evolution of the Slow Movement
“The Slow movement is still taking shape. It has no central headquarters or website, no single leader, no political party to carry its message. Many people decide to slow down without ever feeling part of a cultural trend, let alone a global crusade. What matters, though, is that a growing minority is choosing slowness over speed. Every act of deceleration gives another push to the Slow movement.“
“Through the twentieth century, resistance to the cult of speed grew, and began to coalesce into broad social movements. The counterculture earthquake of the 1960s inspired millions to slow down and live more simply. A similar philosophy gave birth to the Voluntary Simplicity movement. In the late 1980s, the New York–based Trends Research Institute identified a phenomenon known as downshifting, which means swapping a high-pressure, high-earning, high-tempo lifestyle for a more relaxed, less consumerist existence. Unlike decelerators from the hippie generation, downshifters are driven less by political or environmental scruples than by the desire to lead more rewarding lives. They are willing to forgo money in return for time and slowness.“
“It (The Slow Movement) all started in 1986, when McDonald’s opened a branch beside the famous Spanish Steps in Rome. To many locals, this was one restaurant too far: the barbarians were inside the gates and something had to be done. To roll back the fast-food tsunami sweeping across the planet, Carlo Petrini, a charismatic culinary writer, launched Slow Food. As the name suggests, the movement stands for everything that McDonald’s does not: fresh, local, seasonal produce; recipes handed down through the generations; sustainable farming; artisanal production; leisurely dining with family and friends. Slow Food also preaches ‘eco-gastronomy’—the notion that eating well can, and should, go hand in hand with protecting the environment.“
“Petrini thinks this is a good starting point for tackling our obsession with speed in all walks of life. The group’s manifesto states: ‘A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life…. Our defence should begin at the table with Slow Food.’“
“The (Slow Food) group’s manifesto is a call to arms against the cult of speed in all its forms: ‘Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food.’“
“Slow Food has captured the public imagination and spread across the planet because it touches on a basic human desire. We all like to eat well, and are healthier and happier when we do.”
“The Slow movement has its own momentum. Saying no to speed takes courage, and people are more likely to take the plunge knowing they are not alone, that others share the same vision and are taking the same risks. The Slow movement provides strength in numbers. Every time a group like Slow Food or the Society for the Deceleration of Time makes headlines, it becomes a little easier for the rest of us to question speed. What’s more, once people reap the rewards of slowing down in one sphere of life they often go on to apply the same lesson in others.“
“Collectively, we know our lives are too frantic, and we want to slow down. Individually, more of us are applying the brakes and finding that our quality of life improves. The big question now is when the individual will become the collective. When will the many personal acts of deceleration occurring across the world reach critical mass? When will the Slow movement turn into a Slow revolution?“
Spirituality
“Many find that slowing down has a spiritual dimension. But many others do not. The Slow movement is broad enough to accommodate both. In any case, the gap between the two may not be as wide as it seems. The great benefit of slowing down is reclaiming the time and tranquility to make meaningful connections—with people, with culture, with work, with nature, with our own bodies and minds. Some call that living better. Others would describe it as spiritual.“
“These days, many people are seeking refuge from speed in the safe harbour of spirituality. While mainstream Christian churches face dwindling congregations, their evangelical rivals are thriving. Buddhism is booming across the West, as are bookstores, chat rooms and healing centres dedicated to the eclectic, metaphysical doctrines of New Ageism. All of this makes sense at a time when people crave slowness. The spirit, by its very nature, is Slow. No matter how hard you try, you cannot accelerate enlightenment. Every religion teaches the need to slow down in order to connect with the self, with others and with a higher force. In Psalm 46, the Bible says: ‘Be still then, and know that I am God.’”
Mind
“In the war against the cult of speed, the front line is inside our heads. Acceleration will remain our default setting until attitudes change. But changing what we think is just the beginning. If the Slow movement is really to take root, we have to go deeper. We have to change the way we think.”
“Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively. It can bring us what Milan Kundera calls ‘the wisdom of slowness.’“
“Research has shown that people think more creatively when they are calm, unhurried and free from stress, and that time pressure leads to tunnel vision.”
“My eureka moments seldom come in a fast-paced office or a high-stress meeting. More often they occur when I am in a relaxed state—soaking in the bath, cooking a meal or even jogging in the park. The greatest thinkers in history certainly knew the value of shifting the mind into low gear. Charles Darwin described himself as a ‘slow thinker.’ Albert Einstein was famous for spending ages staring into space in his office at Princeton University.“
“Einstein appreciated the need to marry the two modes of thought: ‘Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination.’ That is why the smartest, most creative people know when to let the mind wander and when to knuckle down to hard work. In other words, when to be Slow and when to be Fast.”
“As one Zen master put it, ‘Instead of saying ‘Don’t just sit there; do something’ we should say the opposite, ‘Don’t just do something; sit there.’“
Meditation & Movement
“One way to cultivate inner Slowness is to make time for activities that defy acceleration—meditation, knitting, gardening, yoga, painting, reading, walking, Chi Kung.”
“Meditation is one way to train the mind to relax. It lowers blood pressure and generates more of the slower alpha and theta waves in the brain. And research shows that the effects last long after the meditating ends.”
“Take yoga, an ancient Hindu regimen of physical, spiritual and mental exercises that seeks to bring body, mind and spirit into harmony. The word ‘yoga’ means ‘unite’ in Sanskrit. In the West, though, we tend to focus on the physical side of the discipline—the breathing control, the slow, fluid movements, the postures, or asanas. Yoga can do wonders for the body, firming and toning muscles, fortifying the immune system, boosting blood circulation and increasing flexibility.”
“Yoga can help achieve that core of stillness. It seeks to sustain a person’s chi—the life force, or energy—which can be hampered by stress, anxiety, illness and overwork. Even those who dismiss the idea of chi as mystical claptrap often find that yoga helps them develop a Slow frame of mind. Through the unhurried, controlled movements, they acquire more self-awareness, concentration and patience.”
“Chi Kung is another Eastern exercise regime whose Slow approach to the mind and body is winning converts. Sometimes described as ‘yoga with meditation and movement,’ Chi Kung is a generic term for a range of ancient Chinese exercises that promote health by circulating chi round the body. In a standing position, and using the pelvic area as a fulcrum, practitioners move slowly through a series of postures that elongate the limbs. Slow, deep breathing is also important. Chi Kung is not about pumping up the heart rate and sweating profusely; it is about control and awareness. It can improve balance, strength, posture and rhythm of movement. Even more than yoga, it helps to achieve a relaxed mind while in an active state. Chi Kung has many branches, ranging from martial arts such as Kung Fu to the much gentler Tai Chi.”
“Against that backdrop, walking, the oldest form of exercise, is making a comeback. In the pre-industrial era, people mostly travelled on foot—and that kept them fit. Then came engine power, and people got lazy. Walking became the transport of last resort, a ‘forgotten art’ in the words of the World Health Organization.”
“Travelling on foot can also be meditative, fostering a Slow frame of mind. When we walk, we are aware of the details around us—birds, trees, the sky, shops and houses, other people. We make connections.“
“The same goes for gardening. In almost every culture, the garden is a sanctuary, a place to rest and ruminate. Niwa, the Japanese word for garden, means ‘an enclosure purified for the worship of the gods.’ The act of gardening itself—planting, pruning, weeding, watering, waiting for things to grow—can help us slow down. Gardening does not lend itself to acceleration any more than knitting does. Even with a greenhouse, you cannot make plants bloom on demand or bend the seasons to suit your schedule. Nature has its own timetable. In a hurry-up world, where everything is scheduled for maximum efficiency, surrendering to the rhythms of nature can be therapeutic.“
Education
“‘The notion of the slow school destroys the idea that schooling is about cramming, testing, and standardizing experience,’ Holt writes. ‘The slow approach to food allows for discovery, for the development of connoisseurship. Slow food festivals feature new dishes and new ingredients. In the same way, slow schools give scope for invention and response to cultural change, while fast schools just turn out the same old burgers.’”
“The children still work hard, but without the drudgery of rote learning. Like every other wing of the Slow movement, ‘Slow Schooling’ is about balance.“
“Whenever people talk of the need for children to slow down, play is always high on the agenda. Many studies show that unstructured time for play helps younger children develop their social and language skills, their creative powers and their ability to learn. Unstructured play is the opposite of ‘quality time,’ which implies industry, planning, scheduling and purpose.”
“In the summer of 2001, the dean wrote an open letter to every first-year undergraduate at Harvard. It was an impassioned plea for a new approach to life on campus and beyond. It was also a neat précis of the ideas that lie at the heart of the Slow philosophy. The letter, which now goes out to Harvard freshmen every year, is entitled: Slow Down. Over seven pages, Lewis makes the case for getting more out of university—and life—by doing less. He urges students to think twice before racing through their degrees.“
“When it comes to academic life, Lewis favours the same less-is-more approach. Get plenty of rest and relaxation, he says, and be sure to cultivate the art of doing nothing. ‘Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled,’ writes the dean. ‘It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 x 4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around.’ In other words, doing nothing, being Slow, is an essential part of good thinking.“
Work
“For the Slow movement, the workplace is a key battlefront. When the job gobbles up so many hours, the time left over for everything else gets squeezed. Even the simple things—taking the kids to school, eating supper, chatting to friends—become a race against the clock. A surefire way to slow down is to work less.“
“‘Burnout used to be something you mainly found in people over forty,’ says one London-based life coach. ‘Now I’m seeing men and women in their thirties, and even their twenties, who are completely burned out.’“
“For a chilling vision of where this behaviour leads, look no further than Japan, where the locals have a word—karoshi—that means ‘death by overwork.’“
“These days, we exist to serve the economy, rather than the other way round. Long hours on the job are making us unproductive, error-prone, unhappy and ill.”
“Work devours the bulk of our waking hours. Everything else in life—family and friends, sex and sleep, hobbies and holidays—is forced to bend around the almighty work schedule.“
“At the top of the corporate food chain, more and more high achievers are choosing to work freelance or as independent contractors. This allows them to work hard when they choose and still have time to recharge their batteries, enjoy hobbies and hang out with the family.”
“As it turns out, people who cut their work hours often take a smaller hit financially than they expect. That is because spending less time on the job means spending less money on the things that allow us to work: transport, parking, eating out, coffee, convenience food, childcare, laundry, retail therapy. A smaller income also translates into a smaller tax bill.”
“Yet working less is just part of the Slow blueprint. People also want to decide when they work.”
“Things are so much better now. I still work the same number of hours, sometimes even more, but my relationship with time is healthier. Now that I control my own schedule, I move through the working day feeling less hurried and resentful.”
“Of course, speed has a role in the workplace. A deadline can focus the mind and spur us on to perform remarkable feats. The trouble is that many of us are permanently stuck in deadline mode, leaving little time to ease off and recharge. The things that need slowness—strategic planning, creative thought, building relationships—get lost in the mad dash to keep up, or even just to look busy.“
“Though sleeping on the job is the ultimate taboo, research has shown that a short ‘power nap‘—around twenty minutes is ideal—can boost energy and productivity.”
“Many of the most vigorous and successful figures in history were inveterate nappers: John F. Kennedy, Thomas Edison, Napoleon Bonaparte, John D. Rockefeller, Johannes Brahms. Winston Churchill delivered the most eloquent defence of the afternoon snooze: ‘Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion helped by people who have no imagination. You will be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one—well, at least one and a half.’“
Leisure
“Whatever happened to the Age of Leisure? Why are so many of us still working so hard? One reason is money. Everyone needs to earn a living, but the endless hunger for consumer goods means that we need more and more cash. So instead of taking productivity gains in the form of extra time off, we take them in higher incomes.”
“How to make the best use of free time is not a new concern. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle declared that one of the central challenges facing man was how to fill his leisure.“
“Plato believed that the highest form of leisure was to be still and receptive to the world, a view echoed by modern intellectuals.”
“Franz Kafka put it this way: ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, simply wait. Don’t even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.’“
“In his 1935 essay, In Praise of Idleness, Russell wrote that a four-hour workday would make us ‘more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.’ With so much leisure, life would be sweet, slow and civilized.”
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