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Breaking Out of Homeostasis by Ludvig Sunstrom

Note: I read this book more than four years ago, but while reviewing my copy-pastes, notes and thoughts from the text I thought I'd publish them here for others to use or share. Enjoy!


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"Life is Practice"

Is this the purpose of my creation, to lie here under the blankets and keep myself warm?

'Ah, but it is a great deal more pleasant!'

Was it for pleasure, then, that you were born, and not for work, not for effort? Look at the plants, the sparrows, ants, spiders, bees, all busy at their own tasks, each doing his part towards a coherent world-order; and will you refuse man's share of the work, instead of being prompt to carry out Nature's bidding?

...

You have no real love for yourself; if you had, you would love your nature, and your nature's will. Craftsmen who love their trade will spend themselves to the utmost in laboring at it, even going unwashed and unfed; but you held your nature in less regard than the engraver does his engraving, the dancer his dancing, the miser his heap of silver, or the vainglorious man his moment of glory. These men, when their heart is in it, are ready to sacrifice food and sleep to the advancement of their chosen pursuit. Is the service of the community of less worth in your eyes, and does it merit less devotion?

--MARCUS AURELIUS 

Structure:

Part 1 explains what homeostasis is, and how it manifests itself by powerfully manipulating your brain and body through various (and creative to the point of devious) ways in order to conserve energy. You will also learn how you can recognize when this happens to you and how you can work on reducing its negative effects. 

Part 2 explains the process of allostasis, and how to go about "Breaking Out Of Homeostasis" by exerting more energy. Allostasis is the sweet spot of optimal physical or mental exertion and the physiological state in which your body adapts most efficiently to stressors. In part 2 you will also learn a ton of practical exercises that you can use to become more physically active as well as numerous ways of activating your brain and becoming more mentally focused.

 

Part 3 explains how a couple of very important parts of your brain work. These are the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the amygdala, and the brain’s reward system. You will learn how you can practice these parts of your brain on a daily basis in order to improve their abilities. You will also learn beneficial ways of improving your learning process and implementing habits.

 

Who Should Read this Book? 

* Understanding why discomfort, pain, and fear are really good things--as long as they aren’t constant.

* Understanding why humans are lazy and opt for the easy way out in life.

 "I wrote it for practice."

 

Homeostasis as a negative thing for the vast majority of (lazy, ego-protecting, discomfort-avoiding) people. "Homeostasis can be a good thing for a person once this person has put in a lot of time to form a large number of intelligent and healthy mindsets, routines, and habits. But this isn’t the case for most people."

 

"If I seem dogmatic, mastering, or pedantic at times it is because I found it to be incredibly boring and stifling to qualify every phrase with “I think…” or “in my opinion…”'

 

Flow, vs Activating the Brain, vs BOOH: 

"The major difference between flow state and BOOH is that to break out of homeostasis you must push through the plateau of discomfort and reach that sudden switch-point when the body starts to naturally exude energy. If you are not consciously trying to break out of homeostasis it is very unlikely to happen, because your body takes drastic measures to sustain its current state through various defense mechanisms in order to preserve energy."

 

The more things from the book that you immediately apply, and the more hard work you put in; the greater the positive effect will be. 

 

There’s a vast difference between grasping something on an intellectual and theoretic level compared to a deeper understanding rooted in first-hand experiences of practical learning. You do not get first-hand experiences by reading, you get it by practicing and putting the theory to work in real situations.

 

I’ll provide you with a ton of useful exercises, but they won’t matter much if you aren’t using them. I want you to muster up some intent and apply this stuff in your life--get mad as hell and start breaking out of homeostasis.

 

My definition for breaking out of homeostasis (BOOH) is: To consciously induce stressors upon yourself and get somewhere in the vicinity of the sweet spot of allostasis; thus making the stress response adaptive and being a positive and healthy thing for the brain and body. After you get somewhere near that sweet spot of exertion you stay there for as long as possible, you keep putting in the mental or physical effort during a sufficient amount of time enough to push through the plateau and get that self-sustaining, internal motivation – momentum. After that point there is usually not as much effort involved in continuing to do whatever it is you’re doing. It becomes a matter of how long you can stay there in the state of having broken out of homeostasis – which in turn comes down to various factors.

 

Create a good and challenging daily routine, rewire the brain’s reward system, form positive habits, eat for performance, get good sleep, relax properly and in an efficient way after going through stress. Put forth slightly more effort than you want to every day and improve gradually. Rinse, wash, and repeat. Repeat more until you break out of homeostasis. Then repeat for five more minutes.

 

Most of us are living in more or less complete reaction to homeostasis, being nothing but slaves to its power of sustaining and continually reinforcing the same patterns and feedback loops on us. 

 

You do not conquer homeostasis more than temporarily and to break out of homeostasis cannot be put on autopilot as most other habits can be. 

 

From the moment you woke up and made the (probably unconscious) decision to snooze, you began the daily habit of procrastination, giving it momentum. By procrastinating once you increase the likelihood of it emerging as your dominant course of action throughout the day; it becomes your automated initial response, often without you being aware of it. 

 

p. 3 Most people do this regularly, they never practice breaking out or quickly changing their behavior... this is going against homeostasis. "They never practice this ability, so their 'muscles' for breaking out of homeostasis remain weak. The brain and body want to remain in the same energy state, mood, and behavior."

 

Part 1: What is Homeostasis?

 

p. 6 Usually [homeostasis] is defined as the state whereby an organism maintains balance in its internal system. Temperature, pH, etc. 

* Economizes energy expenditure, keeps us alive as long as possible. 

* We're not concerned here with the biological aspect of it, but with the practical aspect of it: how it governs our daily life, conduct and behavior as well as thoughts and habits. We are interested in how it keeps us stagnant and hinders progression.

 

Homeostasis hasn't kept up with human society: it's a feature of the caveman era. People eat too much now, they need to do more. "Most people eat for stimulatory reasons."

 

p. 7 "What stands in the way of accomplishing everyday goals, such as changes in diet or habits, is usually not the imagination to come up with something we desire, but rather laziness and fear in a variety of forms. In almost all cases I have found that these stems from being in a state of homeostasis!"

 

p. 7 "Since homeostasis inherently exists in all of us we should neither consider it bad nor good, but rather to accept its existence and use it to our advantage. Homeostasis is a bad thing in terms of productivity and accomplishing change of sorts when you are starting from the bottom and bootstrap yourself up. But it’s a good thing given that you have already established consciously chosen productive habits and ways to conduct your life."

 

Homeostasis cannot be reasoned with, it’s purely focused on sustaining itself. 

 

p. 8 when you have broken out of homeostasis – the last thing on your mind is to slow down and pursue instant gratification or comfort; your only objective is to keep going and deeply channel your outflow of energy into some activity.

 

Symptoms of homeostasis: 

* exert minimal energy: "...you will suffer the same fate as 99% of all other human beings and live in reaction (like a slave) to the brain and body as it sustains homeostasis."

* resist change: "It usually requires less energy to continue what you are already doing than it does to change the activity. Remember this."

* come up with an infinite number of excuses not to exert energy: your brain/ego uses doublethink: a form of cognitive dissonance so strong that you cannot resolve it, and hence you employ doublethink to keep yourself from thinking any more deeply about it and actually reaching a definitive resolution; because to do so would require a lot of effort and energy, and your brain doesn’t want that unless you convince it that it absolutely has to.

* live to procreate another day: Your mind wants you to stay in the cave and avoid risk and uncertainty... except that "there are no dangerous storms or fierce predators in the cities; life is very dull and repetitive nowadays for most people."

* seek instant gratification, avoid pain: To be normal today is to spend most of your time chasing after various forms of instant gratification and do as few painful things as possible. To have a chilled-out and non-challenging life where everything just breezes along. To succumb fully to homeostasis.

* herd mentality/groupthink: humans hate uncertainty, so we resolve/reduce it. Herd mentality sustains homeostasis; thinking for yourself requires the expenditure of a lot of energy and may break us out of homeostasis. Herd examples: joining a group, following a guru or expert, etc. "Everywhere you look, if you should choose to do so, you will find an unwillingness to exert effort; laziness in various forms, resistance to change being reflected back at you – as if to justify its own existence. It is on constant defense of its position and will readily assure you to act the same way"

* repetitive thinking: "Change requires energy, and someone who is deeply in homeostasis will tend not to change their thought process because it feels uncomfortable." the brain/mind follows the path of least resistance. "...your thoughts inside the neural pathways are like water flowing in a river, and it will continue to run there unless you redirect the flow of the water through irrigation."

 

Characteristics of Homeostasis: 

p. 15 The brain is either in homeostasis or out of it. We dwell in it by default and break out of it rarely and only with conscious effort. The difference between the two is palpable and they are like two different personalities or value systems. 

 

The brain and body dislike switching between states of "in" homeostasis or "out".. it requires enormous energy. "This resistance has to be overcome or at the very least acknowledged to break out of homeostasis."

 

p. 15 "In homeostasis there is often an unhealthy amount of dreaming and future planning going on, but never any real plans or actions taken to implement it. The act of starting is too frightening to the brain because then it has to work, so it is always postponed by the brain as part of the mental behavior of remaining in homeostasis. Years may go by without any real change in the life of a person deeply in the shackles of homeostasis."

 

p. 15 "Of course no one admits to this. There’s always an excuse for not taking action – some better than others, and as long as we buy into and believe in these excuses to justify our behavior then there’s no need for us to work harder."

 

p. 16 "Most people cannot persist through the plateau and quit before breaking out of homeostasis or changing their state. They quit way early, usually the moment discomfort arises."

 

p. 17 "To get past the threshold will be called ‘pushing through the plateau’, because that’s exactly what it feels like. It often feels hard, boring and occasionally impossible – until all of a sudden you realize that you made it through to the other side. When you get past the plateau it feels really, really good; as doubt, discomfort, and resistance all fall away. In short, you feel like a boss."

 

p. 17 "That weak, self-doubting person who was haphazardly messing about in uncertainty a few hours ago is now gone. You think, 'That was not ME! That was someone else... Some loser stole my body and inhabited it. Now, finally, I am BACK in control. What took me so long?'"

 

p. 18 "Action breeds action and the hours fly by. All of a sudden you need to sleep and the cycle starts all over. Usually you wake up as the ‘other’ – less awesome – person again. Keep in mind that whichever mode you’re in – homeostasis, or broken out of it – will automatically try to sustain itself for as long as possible. Therefore it’s relatively easy to stay out of homeostasis once you have gotten out of it. The hard part is pushing through the plateau; persisting through the period of struggling to get up that hill. Know that if you persist through the initial phase of discomfort, it shall pass." 

 

p. 20 Various Factors Influencing the Difficulty of Pushing Through the Plateau (PTTP) 

* Physiology of your brain and body (neurotransmitters, hormones).

* Current skill level or ability in performing an activity.

* Your own belief, or perceived ability, of performing an activity. 

 

p. 20 "The last case may be the most important and interesting one. It means that if you have low expectations of your own ability and you manage to surpass those expectations you tend to get motivated and excited. This in turn greatly improves your chances of pushing through the plateau. But it’s not that easy to magically conjure up low expectations of yourself; the mind builds these expectations through a virtually automated process by which it reviews your earlier reference experiences, and thus constructs your self-esteem brick by brick for everything you do daily. 

 

p. 20 "However, this is definitely something that is best understood from personal experience, and not mere theory; if you have never pushed through the plateau (which I suspect many have not) it is impossible to imagine. The mind cannot conceive of the unknown, only what has already been experienced. The plateau is never more noticeable than when engaging in physical activity. This is one reason why I like reading about incredible athletes, bodybuilders or people who are uncommonly competent at pushing through these limitations. You will get a better understanding of this when we get into stressors, change, and various other aspects, such as allostasis, later on."

 

p. 21 Sustaining momentum is also a function of the lazy brain... it decides it would be easier to maintain this state, but it only lasts for so long. 

 

p. 22 "A lot of times it’s hard to notice whether you’re in homeostasis or not, especially if you haven’t been out of it recently. To be caught in homeostasis is to settle for less – to settle for comfort and ease. To have broken out of homeostasis means you don’t settle at all. You keep going until you run out of energy and find out where the limit is. But in order to reach the razor’s edge one has to try a lot without being discouraged.

 

p. 23 "Longer time invested in a single sitting usually leads to exponential returns in productivity as opposed to several smaller sittings of the same total time spent. It’s a lot like Moore’s law or the concept of increasing returns to scale. Keep this in mind when you read the chapter the positive cumulative effect later on."

 

Archetypes: 

1) Lazy by choice: people who figure out "cheats" for doing things, are intelligent, but ultimately have low discipline and work ethic as a result of never practicing it. "He’s spent his entire life in pursuit of exerting a minimal amount of effort; making him mentally weak in terms of willpower and follow-through."

 

2) Lazy due to constantly living in unconscious reaction to their brain and body. Their mind and body are running the show and they are living in unconscious reaction to most of that communication, kind of like a well-designed robot or a zombie-like creature. 

 

Poor Frames of Reference: 

p. 26 "Because we see almost everyone else being indecisive, lacking in clarity, and being lazy and unproductive in regards to their potential, we often unconsciously assume that it justifies our own similar lack of clarity. But it doesn’t. The only thing it signifies is a failure to take personal responsibility. If the saying that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”, is true – then certainly it has to be a pretty bad idea to be using peers in homeostasis as social references to compare yourself to. If this is the case for you then my only advice to you is to either stop hanging out with these friends of yours and find better suited ones, or to consciously stop comparing yourself to them because they make for poor references."

 

Flaws based on assuming everybody else knows what they're doing: long lines in clubs, following books or videos because of popularity metrics... these are poor guides for governing our conduct and actions. 

 

Metacognition: 

"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle

 

Do you know why some thought occurred, or when? 

p. 28 "By practicing metacognition you slowly but gradually increase the period of time between a stimulus and your response to it long enough for you to be able to catch yourself in the act of unconsciously reacting. You will soon notice how this skill is integral to the whole process of breaking out of homeostasis and maintaining that state." 

 

p. 29 "One of the easiest ways of exercising your metacognition is to start observing your thoughts as if they were separate entities or something being shown to you. This implies that you shift your frame of reference from being based wholly in the mind and thoughts to somewhere else where you’re able to objectively watch them as if on a screen."

 

Ways to improve metacognition: 

* Meditation

* Reading biographies and studying the subject's thought process.

* Focusing on times of day or activities that boost metacognition

* Working out/exercise -- use the post workout endorphin rush as a time to practice metacognition

* Keep a journal

* "Holding counsel with your mind" exercise (see below)

 

p 30 "...start to purposely put yourself in this state as often as possible to practice metacognition. These moments are to be savored. Squeeze everything you can out of them – think deeply, write down how you feel or think, or film yourself. Of course, there’s more than one way of doing it; maybe you want to record a song or something, but it’s got to be something you can daily that helps you disidentify from your thoughts and analyze them. Try finding out the root cause of certain thoughts or urges that you consistently experience. It usually takes a while, but it’s well worth it.'

 

p. 30 Holding counsel with your mind: "My final exercise is what I call, ‘holding counsel with your mind’, and the analogy I use for it is that I picture myself as a CEO or leader of sorts holding an important meeting in which I listen objectively to whatever information my closest counselors (my thoughts) are bringing up to my immediate attention. I picture myself sitting by a fine mahogany table, quietly listening to what my counselors believe ought to be my agenda for the day. What kind of matters do I have to attend to in the immediate future? After having listened to what they have to say my job is to deem what is of relevance and what is not, some advice will be pure bullshit. I politely tell them to leave me to my business, I will see them again tomorrow around the same time. I usually do this once or twice a day for about ten minutes."

 

p. 31 General metacognition question: am I doing this consciously or do these actions perhaps stem unconsciously out of homeostasis? Remember, homeostasis wants you to be comfortable and exert the least amount of energy possible.

 

p. 32 Principal/agent theory and metacognition/homeostasis: 

* You are the principal and your mind/brain is the agent... the agent will shirk its duty unless carefully monitored or well-incentivized. 

* Thus you EXPECT the incoming dumb-ass excuses, rationalizations, negative feelings, fear and doubt that arise as the brain tries desperately to conserve energy by shirking. 

* The reason why it’s important that you expect "shirking" and excuse-making behavior is because it then makes you more able to deal with it when it shows up. By expecting this negative behavior from the brain you can ruthlessly dismiss it with certainty and see it for the trick it is. These mind-made excuses and fears are uncalled for and will only limit your potential for growth.

*  This helps you catch low quality thoughts and emotions by stopping them before they get a hold of your mind and begin to fester in there. They work as anti-virus programs for your mind – helping you detect, clean out, and block the mental weeds you don’t want in there in the first place.

 

p. 32 "...implement the habit of writing down and thoroughly describing the sensation whenever you are in a really great emotional or mental state, whenever you feel really powerful and productive." 

p. 33 How does it feel? be precise, what are the tells here?

Can you identify a recurring pattern that leads to this state? Are there certain things you can do to stimulate this state? (talking to a lot of people, engaging in a specific activity, eating something, etc.)

 

p. 33 "If you can accurately convey how it felt and find different recurring patterns as to why you entered that state it will increase the chances of engraving it in your mind and eventually let it become a point of reference for the times you slip out of it; and you definitely will from time to time. It’s a bit like sending messages between two different selves – the one who has BOOH and ‘woken up’ is now coaching the other you who’s ‘asleep’ and locked inside a mental prison by the mind and thus in a state of homeostasis."

 

p. 34-35 Useful daily questions for exercising metacognition:

1) Do my current actions as of right now in this moment stem from trying to preserve energy?

2) Is this activity I’m about to undertake going to help my chances of breaking out of homeostasis or will it serve to push me further into the comfort of homeostasis? 

3) Did this thought or urge I’m having right now spring up as a defense mechanism of homeostasis preventing change and wanting to be comfortable? Remember: homeostasis is self-sustaining.

4) Monitor your thought process throughout the day as you do things or as things happen to you. Observe your response. Try putting yourself in an objective position and see how it makes you feel.

5) Why are you reacting the way you are? If you were to guess, why would expect that you are having this certain sensation or urge right now?

 

p. 35 "The brain absolutely does not want to engage in deep, character-changing thinking because it isn’t used to it and it wants to stay the same through homeostasis." 

 

"There are very few activities requiring more concentration and energy exertion than that of sustaining a certain train of thought; when you’re not used to doing it, your mind (brain) will find any and every way possible to distract itself rather than to face its own belief system."

 

How Homeostasis Sustains Itself

p. 36 "Homeostasis will sustain itself by default unless your metacognition is highly developed enough to catch it, and if your intent is sufficiently strong to allow you to persist or push through the plateau." 

 

p. 36 "Don’t trust your thoughts or intentions without examining them. Unless you put a thought there through conscious effort, which is rare, then the thought and its corresponding action is likely a symptom of homeostasis sustaining itself. Homeostasis perpetuates our unconscious autopilot behavior."

 

p. 36 "The brain ‘uses us’ to sustain its current behavior, addictions, and way of operation indefinitely unless a change is forced upon it by an external situation."

 

p. 36 "True change happens slowly, gradually, and through consistent repetition every day."

 

Excuses/Rationalizations

p. 37 "The brain creates false future images of what reality would be like if we did the specific thing that it so desperately wants us to do, in order for it to stay in homeostasis. It gives us imaginary sensations in order to manipulate us into doing its bidding. The better you become at quickly dropping and disallowing these false images and sensations from lingering in your mind and gather focus cumulatively, the easier it will be to break out of homeostasis."

 

p. 38 "The brain is a lazy little bastard that tries to trick you."

 

p. 38 "This is why you absolutely cannot trust your brain to, by default, work in your best ‘rational’ interest. It is absolutely selfish and wants to keep doing whatever it’s already doing and nothing else. It will stop at nothing to justify an action which is going to fulfill its needs; and these needs are in accordance to how your brain’s reward system is currently wired – the kind of things you are addicted to and associate with pleasure etc."

 

p. 38 "The slow process of rewiring the way the brain operates is bothersome, it’s much easier for it to try to trick you into stopping rather than to actually do the work; this is why we have such a hard time changing our behavior, habits, diet, beliefs etc."

 

Procrastination:

p. 40: One of the brain’s most powerful and devious ways of fooling us into saving energy is by procrastinating. 

 

p. 40 "If it happened unconsciously it means that there was no gap between the stimulus and the response. There was no process of metacognition going on at all, just a pre-programmed response."

 

p. 40 "Another rule of thumb that can be applied to procrastination, as well as any other habit or behavior, is that if you act wrongly today you will be a lot more likely to do so again tomorrow." 

 

Self-Pity

p. 41 "Self-pity is a disgusting mental habit that needs to be worked on diligently in order to be removed." 

 

p. 41 "...it’s you versus your brain: when you respond to the brain’s mental behavior of inducing self-pity by ‘punishing’ it through working extra hard and exerting more effort than you normally do, the brain eventually learns that its ‘clever’ strategy didn’t work and will stop it. If you give into it; it persists. If you punish it; it diminishes."

 

p. 42 "A weird example of how self-pity can manifest itself for me is when I’m working out and I notice how the sensation arises as a response when I begin feeling pain and fatigue set in between the sets or while running. My state of concentration is exchanged for something worse as my focus shifts to the physical pain and is transformed into self-pity with my current situation. I feel tricked and disgusted every time my metacognition catches this mental behavior. As soon as I recognize this behavior I firmly tell my mind that it won’t get out of pain or discomfort by annoying me or pleading with me to stop. To do so is immature and weak behavior that I refuse to condone and therefore won’t focus on."

 

p. 42 "Often we have bad habits or thought patterns – such as self-pity – that were formed when we were younger and less capable of taking responsibility. At some point earlier in our lives we used this way of coping with the situation because it gave order to our consciousness and provided an adequate resolution."

 

p. 42 "If you’re trapped in a sea of shit – start swimming! Time is finite. You will die. Don’t die in a sea of shit."

 

Homeostasis and Food

p. 43 "Eating is directly linked to homeostasis as it puts you in a passive mode when you begin digesting the food and your body begins to store energy. This causes your parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) to go into a state of rest-and-digest, which makes you sluggish. We must all eat, but we ought to carefully examine our reasons for eating to see how it aligns with our other goals in life so that we can integrate it as a part of our process of living in a more deliberate and conscious manner. The food you eat matters greatly in terms of your energy and concentration. Overeating or snacking are easy and common methods for keeping ourselves in homeostasis and getting easy stimulation as we give into the current desires of the brain’s reward system and give it what it has come to depend upon. Most eating is habitual and hormonal – which I’ll get into shortly. If you can’t go a few hours without eating, that means you have work to do in terms of diet, unless you suffer from some sort of condition."

 

p. 43 "We don’t think about eating; whether it is really necessary for us or not. We just do it."

 

p. 44. "The downside to being a serious athlete or bodybuilder is that you sometimes have to make the tradeoff between eating for efficiency and productivity, and eating in order to gain muscle. We can’t focus on too many things at once or our efforts will cancel each other out. Thus the importance of having clarity of what the objective we are trying to accomplish is."

 

p. 45 "Being addicted to sugar is not to be taken lightly as it is one of the hardest addictions to stop. Sugar binds to the same opioid receptors in your brain that cocaine binds to. A single soft drink contains a lot more sugar than what we should optimally consume in the course of an entire day; and even worse is that the sweetness is usually derived from some cheap and potent artificial sweetener, such as high fructose corn syrup. These artificial sweeteners are more addictive to us than, say, fruits are.

 

p. 46 "A key point that I really want to emphasize is that the concept of moderation is not applicable to food, especially not sweet food; because it gives rise to a number of hormones that in turn make you feel hungry, even when you’re really not. Therefore it is harder to ‘eat only a little’ than it is not to eat at all and to let the hormonal sensation of hunger fade away."

 

p. 46 "If we refrain from eating for a few hours our insulin levels will revert to a baseline state and we will gradually start to break down some of the calories stored in the fat reserves – this is called lipolysis. If we keep from eating a while longer, lipolysis soon turns into ketosis – which is when the body’s main energy source comes from ketones. This never happens to a person who is eating constantly; this person is always using glucose as his main source of energy. This is why the approach of calories in vs calories out isn’t completely bulletproof, even though it is a good guideline for dieting."

 

See discussion on page 45-47 on dietary hormones: insulin, leptin and ghrelin

 

Two types of eating:

Hedonic eating vs Eating for performance

 

p. 48 "Eating tasty food is one of the easiest ways of achieving instant gratification, and it’s incredibly addictive and harmful in the long term because the brain quickly learns that it can get its enjoyment without having to do any work, but can skip right to the reward by having some junk food."

 

p. 49 "Eating for performance assumes that you choose food mainly depending on its effect on you in relation to productivity in terms of your goals, long term health, and overall well-being."

 

p. 49 "The immediate trade-off between these two purposes for eating is that you will have to choose whether you value the short and ephemeral sensation of taste more highly than you value a higher sense of well-being and mental clarity. To me that choice is usually simple. Certainly there are occasions for both, but I am of the opinion that eating for performance must be the dominant purpose for eating if we are to lead a remarkable life."

 

Summary Questions 

1) Why do you eat; what is your purpose for eating? 

2) How highly do you value taste? Are you willing to pay the price for eating unhealthy food in the long-term?

 

Part 2: Breaking Out of Homeostasis

 

"I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self." — ARISTOTLE

"It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience." — JULIUS CAESAR

 

Allostasis, term coined by Bruce McEwen as "constancy through change" difficult to understand. 

p. 51 "Another way of explaining allostasis is that it is the process by which the body and brain are able to stay in a working balance by adapting to the things that are currently happening – whether that is waking up in the morning, getting hit by a baseball bat, giving a speech, exercising, getting thirsty, etc."

 

p. 51 "then there’s also the mental imaging of things being experienced as well. For example, when we imagine a future scenario – which we constantly do – it affects the body through allostasis. This constant communication between brain and body is commonly known as the brain-body connection. They both influence each other."

 

p. 51 "Here’s where it is crucial to make the distinction between consciously induced stress, such as when working out, and that of prolonged unconscious stress which happens by thinking or anticipating negative things. ...Even though our thoughts are merely anticipations of a non-physical future scenario, the brain experiences it as if it was happening right now  The brain then responds to the experience by telling the body what to do. 

 

p. 52 "The key takeaway is that whenever you have thoughts that make you feel bad and induce negative emotions or make you feel stressed you are actually physically hurting yourself and slowly etching this thought into your brain little by little." 

 

p. 52 "What you can do about this is first to practice the skill of inducing a relaxation response in your body (calming down) as soon as possible after you have gone through some stressful situation, such as; after a tough workout, a scary situation, a serious accident, etc." 

 

p. 52 "Continual and prolonged periods of responding to stressors, whether physical or mental, will exhaust your body and give rise to what Bruce McEwen calls allostatic load."

 

p 53 "Other negative side effects of stress and allostatic load include a less potent brain. We go into this a bit deeper later in the chapters of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala.

 

Your brain and body's response to a stressor should be:

1) Rapid: relax as quickly as possible after a stressor, a workout, an injury or trauma, etc.

2) Effective: ineffective responses diminish the brain and body's capacity for adaptation

3) Brief: don't subject yourself to extended/prolonged stresses

4) Terminated promptly, your body experiences the stressor, relaxes effectively, then you want the "allostatic load" to go away.

(Note the acronym"REBT" here!)

 

p. 56 "The bigger the change is to your brain and body, the more allostatic points it will require in order for you to adapt." 

 

p. 56 "It’s very much like lifting weights; you need to go at it hard, but then you need to rest before coming back so that you can lift again with at least the same amount of intensity next time. And vice versa, by the opposite logic it’s a stupid idea to go to the gym and lift heavily every day of the week." 

 

p. 56-7 "That’s what this entire book is about – to encourage you to find this out through self-experimentation and trial and error. However, the sweet spot will gradually shift and you will either have to take on more difficult challenges and exert more effort – or switch to novel challenges in order to keep the brain engaged and activated."

 

Moderation

*** p. 58 "It becomes painfully obvious that we want to reach this evident sweet spot of effort, and yet we don’t want to induce an allostatic load. But to theorize about this sweet spot too much will just end up hindering you from doing the work and actually putting in the time to getting the practical experience which constitute the very foundation of BOOH. Do you see the paradox? The brain tricks us back into the habit of being lazy and not exerting more effort than what is necessary by justifying this behavior as being productive; it makes us think that we’re doing a good thing by trying to find out how to theoretically do it rather than to actually be doing it.

 

p. 58 "Therefore, don’t concern yourself too much about being “perfect” and avoiding allostatic load. You can take it. As a matter of fact I believe fewer than one percent of the people reading this book have the mental fortitude, combined with the stupidity, to put themselves in a state of self-induced allostatic load through exerting themselves too hard day after day. Be more worried about never getting there in the first place. Be more worried about never pushing through the plateau. Or in the optimal case, don’t worry at all. Just do – continual action."

 

p. 59 "Remember; the definition for BOOH was to consciously induce stressors upon yourself and get somewhere in the vicinity of the sweet spot of allostasis; thus making the stress response adaptive and being a positive and healthy thing for the brain and body."

 

Like the movie "Limitless"

p. 59 "Our personalities and value systems are drastically different when we’re in a state of unconscious homeostasis versus when we have BOOH. When we have BOOH there’s a natural inclination for the brain and body to be used and exercised as much as possible. What we procrastinated or feared doing in homeostasis often becomes viewed as challenging and interesting when we have BOOH."

 

p. 60 "[I experience] the inherent urge to exert energy, try new things, and take on challenges; as opposed to the urge of wanting to exert the minimal amount of energy possible while being comfortable and continually stimulated through instant gratification."

 

Other aspects of the BOOH experience: 

* Increased curiosity

* Desiring novelty

* Wanting to do it now

* Less anxiety, less distraction from things outside of what you're doing (bills, etc)

* More fun, grass is greener here

  

Habits and exercises to help you exert more energy/get into BOOH:

p. 62 "If it was easy everyone would do it. But it’s not easy, and you will find out why when you read the chapter about the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The art of expending more energy than needed (yes, it’s an art form) is largely based on achieving a certain degree of mastery over your physiology and using your metacognition to become increasingly aware of how different ways of using your body influence your emotional state."

 

* Act incongruently with your emotional state whenever it is unproductive or negative 

* Forcing your physiology: if you feel like shit, go for a run; if you are feeling tired during the day, start tensing your muscles, shouting, or whatever for no reason (activates the parasympathetic nervous system)

* Keep going for five more minutes (the last three or four reps, "I don't start counting until I'm in pain", "I get energy by looking into the future and seeing what defeat will mean.") 

 

p. 64 "It’s very easy to logically get a hint of what these badass guys [Ali, Arnold] are saying. It’s a completely different matter to deeply understand it, become truly changed by it, and be implementing it in your life every day."

 

Build a "KEEP GOING FOR FIVE MORE MINUTES" habit: 

p. 64 "Whether you enjoy the task or not: the second you feel like quitting you must make the decision to keep going for at least five more minutes when you first feel like stopping. ...You want to get used to exerting just a bit more effort than the brain wants you to. It doesn’t have to be much more so long as you do it consistently."

 

p. 64 "Never let the brain and homeostasis get the last word. Never let homeostasis get away with doing the minimal amount of work and thus to be sustained – go beyond that!"

 

p. 64 "form the mental habit of not letting the brain dictate reality to you, especially in negative, uncomfortable, painful, or boring situations."

 

p. 65 "[Form the "five more minutes" habit] so that the notion to keep going for five more minutes automatically pops up in your mind as an instantly generated response whenever you’re about to quit or succumb to the pressure of fear, boredom, exhaustion, pain, or laziness. Five more minutes always!"

 

Deliberate Self-Sabotage/Messing With Your Habits

p. 66 "only the most innately curious, or the most discontented readers, are going to be willing to seriously do this"

 

p. 66 "a prerequisite for using it is that you’re aware of several habits that you have, or that you are willing to identify a number of habits that you’re not aware of. ...Once you have done that you may begin the mission of purposely messing up the habits that you have identified.... In short, it is very annoying and demanding to the brain if you mess up its usual mode of operation. By doing this you force the brain to spend a lot more energy than it wants to, and it may feel very uncomfortable."

 

Examples:

* write with your other hand

* take huge detours on your way to work

* force yourself to walk or go by bike instead of drive/take the bus

* take the stairs, etc.

 

p. 67 "You know yourself better than anyone else and you also know what you’d least of all want to change, and which habits you treasure the most. Those are the ones that are going to be the most helpful to mess with."

 

p. 67 "I am not recommending you to do these things to the point of ruining your life, but merely to force yourself to become used to the idea of spending more energy than the brain wants you to. By doing this you’ll take the path least traveled – the path of most resistance."

 

The Reserve Tank

 

p. 68 "You’ve got latent deposits of energy available to you if you demand strongly enough that they be used. But you’ll never access this energy by begging for it, you’ve got to take it by force and through action."

 

p. 68 "The habit of going for five more minutes is crucial in regards to unlocking the reserve tank. It all starts and ends with that. You focus on five more minutes and persisting just a little longer. If you invest your willpower into the habit of keeping it up for five more minutes during every day for at least a month it should be an automated response afterwards.  

 

p. 70 "If you’ve ever watched The Biggest Loser you’ll find that perhaps 90% of the contestants will give up very easily – almost as soon as they are faced with the slightest discomfort... The brain has way too much power over them. They have many, many thousands of reference experience in which they vividly remember losing this mental battle, ...On the other hand, among the very few contestants who actually make it to the finals, you’ll notice that they all have the ability to go into a rage-mode, turning them into miniature Hulks (not the Lou Ferrigno version), and literally scream in fury. That, old sport, is to truly fight the brain and push through the plateau."

 

p. 71 "don’t concern yourself with working too hard, but do concern yourself with mental anxiety and thinking too many destructive thoughts."

 

Julie Moss, Ironman 1982: "She got to the limit of the mental reserve tank and that is a very rare thing."

 

Activating Your Brain

p. 72 "you need to be in a state of continual action and movement, combined with activating your brain."

 

Nothing is Inherently Boring

p. 73 "There is no such thing as something that’s inherently boring. It’s purely a matter of whether your brain is activated or not. That’s why meditation becomes quite ‘fun’ when you get over the initial hurdle, and why Buddhist monks and other weird dudes sit around doing nothing all day and still feel stimulated and happy. If you can find ways of keeping your brain engaged you’ll find almost any activity interesting." 

 

p. 73 "The three most efficient ways I’ve found to activate the brain can be distilled into the categories of intense focus, triggering adrenaline, and responsibly using helpful drugs."

 

When you consistently take action and push past the plateau beyond the point where the brain finds the situation uncomfortable it almost always results in intense focus and an activated brain. 

 

Three Ways of Activating the Brain

1) Intense Focus:

Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning) on approaching three topics at the same time, or one deeply at a time and then transferring insights to the next, then the next. With the latter approach you can make thematic connections across domains. "One of the many problems with multi-tasking is that the frenetic skipping leaves little room for relaxation, and thus our reservoir for energetic presence is constantly depleted."

 

* Reducing all unnecessary multitasking is a good start as it greatly diminishes your capacity to focus for longer periods of time.

* Live simply and concern yourself with fewer things and your focus is likely to increase over time.

 

2) Triggering Adrenaline:

p. 76 "Too much comfort and safety dulls the brain."

The fastest way to get your brain fully engaged is to put yourself in situations that you fear... the effect of that is that your brain stays activated longer!

Doing something we fear or that we think is uncomfortable: the brain's perception of the situation is disconnected from reality, but it can't tell the difference. 

Your amygdala is older and has precedence over your neocortex. 

 

p. 77 "The end result is that after we do a thing like this, the silly brain believes it’s in danger and has to work harder to survive. Suddenly, its ability to absorb and retain information is greatly improved – because it literally thinks its life depends on it! A more scientific explanation of the phenomenon is that the sudden surge of adrenaline triggers the release of glucose into the body, which gives rise to increased energy and a heightened concentration. This makes us feel very interested, alert, and usually euphoric." [Also, the experience is salient.]

 

* Speak up

* Don't hesitate (your brain gets you to hesitate as yet another form of homeostasis)

 

3) Using Drugs:

p. 78 We are all addicts: "the only smart move is to consciously choose what stimuli we become addicted to. Because homeostasis will preserve whatever habits, behaviors, feelings, and addictions we have.... few choose to align their addictions with their chosen goals." 

 

Alcohol, nicotine, caffeine

 

p. 78 "...when you find yourself in the situation of needing to drink more than two cups of coffee to get a buzz, or if you absolutely need coffee to wake up in the morning, then you have ventured far beyond the point of increasing scales of return in terms of personal productivity and health."

 

p. 79 On sugar keeping people doped up and docile, preventing focus: "[Sugar] also hinders them from building up a sufficiently strong discontent with their current state of affairs needed to break out of homeostasis. 

 

p. 80 "To avoid messing up my sleep I limit my daily intake of coffee to a maximum of two cups and don’t drink past 2 PM."

 

Part 3: The Brain

"Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them." Steve Jobs

 

The Prefrontal Cortex

Suboptimal sleep impairing the PFC's function

Phineas Gage, post PFC damage: couldn't prioritize tasks, lacked impulse control, etc. 

p. 83 "...these people became very primitive and sheep-like as they had lost or impaired their ability of focusing and making decisions. They could no longer adapt to change.

 

"To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction." Thomas Edison

 

p. 83 "The more we use our PFC the ‘stronger’ and more capable it becomes through the process of Hebbian learning, which states that neurons that fire together wire together." 

 

The PFC & The Reticular Activating System (RAS)

p. 83-85 Using the PFC and RAS to imagine/visualize future realities... easily parodied by many as "Law of Attraction" but still valid in how it helps articulate and make real your plans and goals. 

 

p. 85 "Unfortunately few people know about the existence of the PFC and the RAS, and even fewer make a habit of consciously exercising it daily to an extent above what feels comfortable. It’s a little bit like people who go to the gym without ever lifting to the point of failure."

 

The importance of the RAS in the learning process by integrating it into matrices of your already-in-place learning, experiences, context, etc. 

You're better able to store it as firsthand experience, positive reference points that support a new theory. 

 

p. 86 "When you read something that you think is cool or smart you might start to notice this thing in your life soon. That is the RAS at work; but that is still a very unrefined and inefficient way of making use of the RAS, because you are leaving much of it to chance – you are squandering its potential."

 

p. 86 "You need to repeat whatever seems important many times in writing, by saying it, or by thinking it – preferably, all three. Most importantly; you need to keep your focus (PFC) on the things that you want to learn (RAS)." 

 

p. 86 "The dilemma is that you cannot focus the RAS on too many things at once or it will become sloppy. The more you exercise these parts of your brain the easier it becomes and the more things you can focus on for a longer period of time. This is the true meaning of ‘meditating’ or ‘reflecting’ on something. You keep meditating on the object of your choice until you’ve got it down properly, which can more or less time depending on whatever you are learning. It will take the time it takes. Don’t fall victim to the brain’s lazy temptation of wanting to move on to the next thing without first grasping what you were focusing on."

 

PFC development

p. 87 "Some researchers in the field of neuroscience believe that the PFC is fully matured by the time we become somewhere around 25-35 years old. After that point we don’t retain the same degree of neuroplasticity in the PFC and therefore can’t rewire it as fast as when it was still maturing. This means we might not have the same advantage in quickly adapting to our environment or improving our faculties of exercising willpower, focusing, and making decisions at the same rate as we did when we were younger." 

 

p. 87 "When he was around 70 years old, Jean Paul Sartre said that he didn’t like spending time with people his age, nor had he for many years. He felt he couldn’t even hang out with people who were ten or fifteen years younger because they were too dull and stuck in their ways; too fixed in their behavior and thoughts to take on anything new or be interesting. Their cups were filled already. They had certain opinions and beliefs that they felt were accurate and if the world and all the things in it would not conform to their opinions they felt that something was profoundly wrong."

 

Investing in your PFC during the pre-35 neuroplasticity period of your life... continuing to do uncomfortable and scary things, the more you will gain from it, the better you'll be at acting on and following through on your plans.

 

p. 88 "A person who rarely exercises self-discipline and willpower is likely to have a ‘weak’, lowly developed, and inactive prefrontal cortex.

 

p. 89 "A person with a ‘weak’ PFC is a lot more likely to be part of groupthink and relegate the responsibility of thinking and decisionmaking to outside authority or to the peer group in which the person considers himself to be part of."

 

"Pain makes me grow. Growing is what I want. Therefore, for me pain is pleasure." Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

p. 89 "This mindset reflects that of a person who is passionate about the process of developing his PFC, activating the brain, and BOOH. It is the mindset of a person who has the ability to delay gratification and to recognize how doing something that might temporarily be uncomfortable is going to be very beneficial in the long-term. In short, Arnold rewired his brain and thus also his reward system from an early age to accept and to even cherish discomfort because he knew it served the purpose of his goals." 

 

Indicators of a weak PFC:

* craving safety, comfort and routine

* experiencing massive discomfort when straying from routine

* feeling uninspired, feeling lethargic

* lack of discipline

* inability to follow through on goals

* inability to remain focused for longer periods of time

* failure to learn from past mistakes

 

p 91 "Your ability to snap out of autopilot and thus defy the self-sustaining feedback loop of homeostasis is largely dependent on activating the PFC. You might picture the PFC as the enforcer of your will, whereas the rest of the brain consists of shirking employees. Or you could picture it as an overseer armed with a whip forcing the slaves to work."

 

p. 91 "The best thing you can do for your PFC is to use it as much as possible. Focus, even when it feels uncomfortable. Any activity can be used to strengthen the PFC."

 

Things to think about: 

* Learning new things continually: when we learn new things or are thrust into new situations the PFC is very active.

* With routine, non PFC challenging work, we can push ourselves beyond where it's comfortable to do it (pushing through the plateau). 

* Ask yourself, "Who is in control right now?" Make use of your PFC rather than living in reaction.

* Continually ask yourself "How does this relate to my goal?" throughout the day.

* Avoid multitasking/switching between many activities.

 

Other ways to improve or boost PFC function:

* Any activity that requires prolonged concentration

* Novelty, anything that breaks the routine

* Physical exercise/sports

* Good sleep (for recovery)

* Meditation

* Making lots of decisions, then following through on them

* Resisting instant gratification and temptations

 

Lasting decisions

Note the PFC positive feedback loop: 

PFC-->making decisions-->sticking to decisions-->'lasting decisions'-->integrity-->self-esteem-->more PFC use...

 

"Lasting decisions" as everyday PFC strengthening tools

No plan B or quitting (e.g.: finish a book before going to bed, writing a set amount of words before stopping, abstaining from food for a period of time, etc.).

 

p. 93 "...you will face massive negative feedback from your body and brain telling you to quit and give into its urges. The (hormonal) urges feel so real that you begin to doubt your abilities to make it through. Logically you know that if you choose to eat something it is going to hurt your integrity and you will suffer in the long-term. This is the decisive moment in which your mettle is tested." 

 

Will you overcome your urges for gratification, or will you persevere through it and build integrity?

 

When you commit to making a lasting decision you will initially feel empowered – because you’re activating the PFC. As soon as that happens you should harness it by memorizing how the sensation feels, and keep focusing on it as long as possible. With practice you will be able to sustain your focus and maintain that sensation longer before feeling the tug of homeostasis. Remember – you chose this. It happened through your own volition. All the pain that comes with it is good. It will promote growth. You made that decision in advance knowing this – so don’t quit! It’s all about maintaining the focus and holding a specific intention.

 

Other meta-examples: 

* "Today I will remain positive all day and let nothing affect me or my emotional state negatively."

* "Today I will keep going for give more minutes despite whatever happens." 

 

These examples run on two levels: You strengthen your PFC, you hold your focus, you blot everything else out, and you increase your odds of implementing these great mindsets as habits. 

 

The Amygdala

* Causes us to react instantaneously in urgent situations

* Essential to our survival, but a major pain in the ass to modern man because it gives rise to a lot of unnecessary fear and tension: p. 96 "The amygdala is overly active unless we train it not to be."

* Exercising the PFC means the less power the amygdala has over us. 

 

Your Brain's Reward System: p. 97

p. 97 "Are the thoughts and urges you are having something that will lead you toward bliss or is it merely your body and brain repeating the same chemical pattern that it has gotten addicted to? Knowing the difference can be tricky and will require metacognition. It will require that you’re able to elevate yourself above homeostasis." 

 

p. 97 "When you practice metacognition more consistently in your daily life you will become better at distinguishing between what truly is your ‘intuition’ and what is merely the brain wanting to sustain its current form in terms of behavior and thoughts, through homeostasis." 

 

p. 98 "Much of your unconscious behavior stems from the brain’s reward system. The following chapters examine this system of yours to see if it serves your purposes or not... The dilemma is of course when we have a reward system that goes against our goals, which is the case for most people... On one hand we have the existing reward system that wants to be sustained and thinks the best way of getting stimulation is through what we are already doing," 

 

Akrasia: lacking command over oneself. The state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will.

 

Two opposing theories: 

Theory 1: Ice cream is good for me, it makes me happy. 

Theory 2: ice cream is bad, it makes me fat and sugar is deadly. 

 

p. 99 "When this cognitive dissonance arises, the brain will by default take the path of least resistance – this means the neural pathway most traveled.

 

p. 99 "The solution for beating akrasia is to stop compromising."

 

p. 99 "It can often be a good idea to listen to and trust in your mind, body, and emotions once you have established the correct behavior and habits – but not before." 

 

p. 100 "The point is this, don’t trust stupid and unproductive automated responses. Trust only the beneficial ones you put there yourself through persistent practice, like five more minutes, for example. If you’re like most people and in need of thoroughly reprogramming yourself – then nine times out of ten don’t trust the voice in your head when in doubt and experiencing akrasia. If you are at the bottom, stuck in the feedback loops of homeostasis, you have to be absolutely ruthless to yourself to get out of it." 

 

Good or Bad Reward System

p. 102 "an unproductive and inefficient reward system is one of the key aspects that separate successful and happy people from those who are not."

 

Unproductive/Inefficient Reward System:

Seeking instant gratification

Rewards used excessively

Unplanned use of stimuli and rewards

 

Productive/Efficient Reward System:

Delayed gratification/no gratification

Rewards used sparingly

Deliberate/mindful use of stimuli and rewards

 

p. 103 "I have taught my brain’s reward system to associate positive emotions with various activities I initially did not like." 

 

p. 103 "Most people are addicted to all sorts of instant gratification and stimulate themselves excessively. ...They have unknowingly taught their brains to engage in this behavior whenever they feel bored, making the sensation of boredom a powerful cue for starting to watch TV or sit by the computer so that they can get back to feeling stimulated."

 

p. 103 "We cannot change the fact that our brain by nature gets addicted to things, that’s just how we work. We cannot remove the reward system because it is the framework from which we fundamentally operate from. But we can change it. We can change our addictions and inputs for stimuli and information.  The rate of change will be determined by how much we can make ourselves practice and repeat a thing, by the degree of intent we can put into it, and the longer we are able to focus on what we want and keep our focus there." 

 

p. 103-4 "Now we are coming full circle; by understanding the process of BOOH we can now see how everything is connected and that we need to start gaining momentum and get into these positive feedback loops. By applying the process of BOOH we can much more easily and efficiently do whatever it is that we want to do – to keep going with the repetitions past a point we normally would not come close to or be comfortable with."

 

Work Ethic

p. 104. "Hard work is made a lot simpler by positive habits. If our reward system is crappy, we will have a very hard time achieving an impressive work ethic because we’ll associate pleasure with the wrong things. A person with a crappy reward system is not likely to be very productive. Without a consciously chosen reward system we will find it difficult to work at anything of significance in the long-term, because that usually implies having to do at least some hard and boring work."

 

p. 104 "Every time we face the choice of working hard now and reaping a large reward much later, or to slack off and be somewhat comfortable for a while, homeostasis will overpower us and cause us to neglect the first option in precedence of taking the easy way out. Every single time we are faced with choices like this our brain will do its best to self-sabotage for us by opting for the easy way out. 

 

p. 105 "The process for strengthening your PFC and building reference experiences has to start at some point sooner rather than later or the cycle will continually sustain itself as per homeostasis." 

 

Habits

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit." --Aristotle

 

Very few things are worth the risk of compromising a good habit. 

Habits can be based either in action (behavior) or in thought (mindsets).

 

p. 107 "Important habits can be divided into smaller “subhabits” that together improve the quality of the important habit. You could say that to break out of homeostasis (BOOH) is a big habit and that it consists of a many smaller sub-habits, 

 

Practice – Repetition and Myelin p. 109

Hebbian learning, neurons that fire together wire together

via a mechanism of myelinization

Myelin as "conductor" for neural pathways

Drop a habit for 30 days and the myelin decays, you'll lose the pathways you built. 

"The amount of myelin in our brains keeps increasing (so long as we learn things and practice) until we are around fifty years old."

 

Tips for practice: 

"small-chunking"

Slowing down, filming yourself 

Distinguish between "flexible circuit skills" (large number of varied neural connections in a skill, like writing or public speaking) and "consistent circuit skills" (foundational basic movements underlying the skill, like playing an instrument)

 

Ladder of competence:

unconscious incompetence-->conscious of incompetence-->conscious competence-->unconscious competence

 

Zen and the "gateless gate", you're stuck at something, a barrier, that isn't even there... once you assimilate the activity, you no longer think about the problem or experience it. 

 

Journaling

p. 112 "People who write down interesting things daily, such as their goals, daily evaluations of themselves, and so on, are much more likely to be successful in all areas of life. ...When we read old entries of our journal it is often painfully obvious to note in which step of the competence ladder we were at in terms of some activity at that specific point in time."

 

How to Implement Habits

1) Decide in Advance 

* Provides mental clarity because it spares you unnecessary thoughts as your objective is already fixed. 

* you need to do quite a bit of thinking in advance and thoroughly identify situations in which you will want this new habit to become your automatic initial response. 

 

2) If-Then

Examples:

* If I get tired and unmotivated while writing this book then I will resort to reading it and checking for errors, and if that also is too strenuous for me then I will move around or rest for five minutes and go back to it.

* If I feel that something is scary and rewarding then I will do it just to prove to my brain that it cannot keep me paralyzed in homeostasis through fear. I often do weird or uncomfortable things just to wage war on my brain whenever I catch it making excuses and trying to manipulate me. 

* If I feel like quitting amidst an important activity then I will remember to keep going for five more minutes.

* If I am stressed or if I feel that I am passively in reaction to homeostasis, then I will stand completely still for as long as it takes no matter where I am and take a couple of deep breaths. I will not move until I feel a change in my state.

 

3) Length of Time

p. 116 "...the brain wants to quit just before reaching the finish line. The brain puts up resistance manifested in boredom and disinterest toward the end and I often get the urge to avoid looking at my whiteboard after a while. When this happens, and my metacognition spots the behavior, I know I am nearing the end of the process and that I don’t have much longer to go until I can change the text and start a new experiment."

 

4) Linking Habits

* Associations: drinking coffee and reading, or tying drinking coffee/eating chocolate to a reward for doing something hard, etc. 

* It is important that we stop for a while and ponder what habits we link to each other. 

 

Using Homeostasis and the Law of Diminishing Intent to your Advantage 

p 118 "By now I bet you’re thinking that homeostasis is a bad thing, am I right? Well, it’s like I said in the clarification in the beginning of the book; homeostasis is ‘bad’ for most people, but somewhat good for those of us who have made it far in terms of having a disciplined and productive routine. It’s pointless to think of homeostasis as inherently bad, because it just is and we can’t permanently remove it. It’s always going to be there."

 

The law of diminishing intent

* At work when we procrastinate. 

* One way to explain the law of diminishing intent is that when we do not take immediate action on our desires we signal to our brain that we do not care for its input. This in turn causes the brain’s reward system to gradually stop giving us these desires.

* We never gave it a chance to start a feedback loop to get us addicted to it. 

* Bad habits and urges increase as we obey them

* What you should do instead is to use the law of diminishing intent and wait it out. Get up and procrastinate going back to bed for as long as possible, and soon you will see that you no longer feel like going back to bed, because your hormonal levels are normalizing and you are starting to feel alert. 

* Next time you feel the intense urge to give into instant gratification or any other activity that you have sworn to discontinue, simply sit there passively. Do NOT move away from what you are currently doing. You may or may not think about how nice it would be to give into the desire, but the important thing to keep in mind is that the longer you wait the less you will feel like doing the thing: for example, going to the store to purchase ice cream, sleep in, masturbate, do drugs, surf the internet, or whatever.

 

Key takeaway: Procrastinate the bad things (let the law of diminishing intent take place), take immediate action on the good things (drive the positive reference experience).

 

p. 121 "Do not expect an abundance of positive social feedback. Most people are way deep in homeostasis and may dismiss the effort you put in as pointless. Whatever, leave them to their beer, chips and TV watching."

 

 

READING LIST: 

Nikola Tesla: The Strange Life of Nikola Tesla

Michel de Montaigne: Essays

Mark Hyman: The Ultramind Solution

Robert Sapolsky: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers

Muhammad Ali: The Greatest: My Life Story

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story

Seth Godin: Linchpin

Seth Godin: The Dip

Joe Dispenza: Evolve Your Brain

Napoleon Hill: The Law of Success in Sixteen Lessons

Nathaniel Branden: Honoring the Self

Nathaniel Branden: The Psychology of Self-Esteem

Dan Coyle: The Talent Code

Maxwell Maltz: Psycho-Cybernetics

Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit

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Of the three essays of The Genealogy of Morals  I recommend the first two. Skim the third. Collectively, they are extremely useful reading for citizens of the West to see clearly the oligarchic power dynamics under which we live. Show me a modern Western nation-state where there isn't an increasing concentration of power among the elites--and a reduction in freedom for everyone else. You can't find one. Today we live in an increasingly neo-feudal system, where elites control more and more of the wealth, the actions, even the  thoughts  of the masses. Perhaps we should see the rare flowerings of genuine democratic freedom (6th century BC Athens, Republic-era Rome, and possibly pre-1913 USA ) for what they really are: extreme outliers, quickly replaced with tyranny. The first essay inverts the entire debate about morality, as Nietzsche nukes centuries of philosophical ethics by simply saying the powerful simply do what they do , and thus those things are good by definition. La

The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 by Peter Brown

Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a  lot  that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it. And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century. But that recovery was an all-too-brief min