growth | Ascension Lifestyle

15 Dec 2023
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Don’t Let Perfection Be the Enemy of Productivity

Productivity isn’t about getting more done. It’s about what you get done. Three aspects of perfectionism can interfere with your ability to prioritize the most important tasks.

You’re reluctant to designate decisions as “unimportant.”

There’s an argument that, for unimportant decisions, you should either decide quickly or outsource the decision.

But perfectionists have a hard time designating decisions as unimportant. They like to be in control of everything. Why? Because imperfections bother them more than they do other people. If something goes wrong, perfectionists might feel explosive frustration or a niggling sense of irritation that’s hard to ignore, and they don’t want to take that risk.

Sometimes, perfectionists are so accustomed to micromanaging that it doesn’t even occur to them that any decision is unimportant. They’re blind to it. They habitually and automatically classify everything as worthy of their full effort.

Solution: In modern life, decision fatigue can be intense. A perfectionist can learn to love giving up control over some choices if they pay attention to how good it feels to be relieved of the decision-making burden. Try using heuristics to quickly decide or delegate with the expectation that you will get much faster and pretty good decisions overall but not perfect ones. For instance, one of my heuristics is: if I’ve thought about doing something three times, I will get on and do it without further deliberating.

You feel morally obligated to over-deliver.

The belief that you need to beat expectations in any situation can manifest in many ways.

Let’s say someone offers to pay you $1,000 for a service. If you’re a perfectionist, providing $1,000 of value might not seem like enough. You might think that you need to give what your competitors would charge $1,500 for because you want to outperform. You think: “If I don’t over-deliver, I’m under-delivering.”

Or if you judge that 24 hours is a respectable timeframe in which to respond to a colleague’s email, you might set your own bar at within six hours. The key point is that you believe what’s generally reasonable doesn’t apply to you, and your own standard needs to be different.

Sometimes this line of thinking comes from wanting an excessive cushion; for instance, you think “if I aim to deliver 1.5X or 2X value for all the services I provide, then I’m never going to under-deliver.” It can also be driven by anxiety, insecurity or imposter syndrome; for instance, you think the only way to prevent anyone from being disappointed or unhappy with you is by always exceeding expectations. Perfectionists also sometimes imagine there will be catastrophic consequences if they fail to overdeliver; for example, they worry a client won’t want to work with them if they take a day to answer an email request, even if it’s a non-urgent query and they’re happy with everything else.

Solution: Have a plan for how you’ll course-correct if you notice these thought patterns. Understand what it’s costing you to always aim for outperformance. What else don’t you have time, energy, attention, and willpower for? Perhaps your own health, your big goals, or your family. If you assess that the costs are significant, try having a rule of thumb for when you’ll over-deliver. For instance, you might decide that in three out of ten situations in which you have the urge to do so, you will, but not in the other seven.

Situation-specific habits can help you, too. For instance, if a reporter sends me more than six questions for an article they’re working on, I’ll generally answer six or so questions in detail, and either minimally answer or skip the others. (I probably give better answers using this strategy because I focus on the areas in which I have the most interesting things to say.)

You get excessively annoyed when you aren’t 100% consistent with good habits.

When perfectionists want to adopt new habits, they tend to fall into one of three categories. They bite off more than they can chew and their plans are too onerous to manage; they avoid starting any habit unless they’re 100% sure they can hit their goal everyday, which leads to procrastination; or they take on only those habits that they can stick to no matter what.

Flexibility is a hallmark of psychological health. You need to have the capacity to take a day off from the gym when you’re sick or just got off a late flight, even if it means breaking a streak. You should also be able to shift away from habits that were once important to your productivity or skills development but that you’ve outgrown. Maybe as a beginning blogger, you vowed to always post three times a week, but now that’s burning you out or, as a new real estate investor, you always attended a monthly meetup, but now you get little out of it.

Sometimes the more-disciplined behavior (deviating from an ingrained habit or pattern of behavior) looks like the less-disciplined one (taking a break). But when conventional self-discipline turns into compulsion, perfectionists may actually be held back by it.

Solution: Have a mechanism in place for checking that you’re not sticking to a habit just because you’re worshiping at the altar of self-discipline. If you’ve never missed a workout in two years (or any other habit), it’s likely there were some days when getting it done wasn’t the best use of your time. Regularly review the opportunity cost of any activities or behaviors you diligently do to make sure they are currently the best use of your physical and mental energy.

Perfectionism is often driven by striving for excellence, but it can be self-sabotaging if it leads to suboptimal behavior like continuing habits beyond their usefulness, over-delivering when you don’t have to, or overthinking every decision you make.

Original article here

12 Dec 2023
Comments: 1

What really happens during a near-death experience

Sci-fi author Brian Herbert once wrote, “The only guarantee in life is death, and the only guarantee in death is its shocking unpredictability.” These words ring true to researchers who investigate what happens in a person’s final moments—and the frustration that comes with these studies. One big problem almost always gets in the way: How do you ask people what dying feels like when they’re no longer here?

Because we haven’t yet figured out how to communicate with the dead, the best-case scenario is talking to people who have had a close brush with death. They often mention seeing bright lights, their life flashing before their eyes, or visions of deceased loved ones. Some have even reported spotting the Grim Reaper by their bedside. It’s a paradoxical situation, says Kevin Nelson, a professor of neurology at the University of Kentucky: A few perceptions are common—a shining light, for instance—but the near-death experience is unique to each individual.

There’s still a lot of mystery when it comes to the cause, but the field is progressing thanks to people who have allowed scientists to study their brains in these situations. People who have survived these close calls say the encounter can be life-changing. One thing is certain: medical experts say near-death experiences are not a figment of the imagination.

And figuring out the mechanisms behind this phenomenon goes beyond general curiosity. One goal is to better understand how cardiac arrests happen. It could also potentially save lives, because doctors would have more knowledge for when to continue resuscitations after a patient’s heart stops.

“The research not only benefits our understanding of consciousness, but also in understanding the importance of the heart, lung, and brain in our everyday physiology,” says Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

Unreal recall

A near-death experience can happen to anyone. In fact, 1 in 10 people have reported sharper senses, slowed time, out-of-body sensations or other features associated with near-death, despite not being in grave danger. Research shows that near-death experiences come in four types: emotional, cognitive, spiritual and religious experiences, and supernatural. Of the four, people often recall supernatural activity, particularly the feeling of detaching from a physical body.

About 76 percent of people report an out-of-body experience during a near-death experience. While some people may attribute this to a spiritual experience, this is actually a sensory deception caused by the brain, which scientists have successfully replicated in people who are asleep. Research has shown that direct electrical stimulation of a brain area normally inactive in REM sleep can provoke an out-of-body experience. “Like a flip of a switch, you can literally throw somebody out of their body and back into their body,” Nelson says.

Often, though, people with cardiac arrest will recall near-death experiences. “About a quarter of people who suffer and survived cardiac arrest have memories about some aspect of near-death experience, Borjigin says. This is because people with cardiac arrest have decreasing blood pressure, she says. With the heart unable to pump properly, oxygen is unable to travel to the rest of the body, which is essential for every single cell in your body to survive. When a brain is alerted to a sudden decline in oxygen, your brain undergoes certain changes that contribute to the perceptual distortions that accompany a near-death experience.

Electrical surges in the brain

Ten years ago, Borjigin and her team observed that rats in simulated cardiac arrest still had fully active brains even 30 seconds after their hearts stopped. What’s more, their brains increased in electrical activity. To confirm whether this happens in humans, Borjigin recently tested the brains of four people who were critically ill and removed from life support.

When these comatose patients were taken off their ventilators, they could not breathe on their own. But, using EEGs, Borjigin noticed two people showed a surge in gamma brainwaves as their bodies started shutting down. Gamma brainwaves are usually a sign of consciousness, because they are mostly active when someone is awake and alert.

“We’ve shown the brain has a unique mechanism that deals with a lack of oxygen because oxygen is so essential for survival that even an acute loss massively activates the brain and could lead to a near-death experience,” Borjigin explains.

The boost in gamma waves occurred in a brain area called the temporo-parieto-occipital (TPO) junction. This is responsible for blending information from our senses, including touch, motion, and vision, into our conscious selves. It’s impossible to know if the increased brain activity was related to any visions they may have had, because, sadly, the two patients died. But Borjigin suggests activation of this area suggests people may likely pick up sounds and understand language. “They might hear and perceive the conversation around them and form a visual image in their brain even when their eyes are closed.”

Hidden consciousness

In one of the largest studies of near-death experiences, an international team of doctors has linked the surge in brain activity to what they called a hidden consciousness immediately following death. In the study, people who were brought back to life through CPR after cardiac arrest could recall memories and conversations while they were seemingly unconscious.

Between May 2017 and March 2020, the team tracked 567 people who underwent a cardiac arrest. They used EEGs and cerebral oxygenation monitoring to measure electrical activity and brain oxygen levels during CPR. To study auditory and visual awareness, the team used a tablet showing one of 10 images on the screen, and five minutes after, it would play a recording of fruit names: pear, banana, and apple, for another five minutes.

Only 53 people of the original 567 participants were successfully resuscitated. Initially, they showed no signs of brain activity and were considered dead. But during the CPR, the team noticed bursts of activity. These spikes included gamma waves and others: delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves—all electrical activity that signals consciousness.

Twenty-eight of those 53 patients were cognitively capable of having an interview. Eleven people recalled being lucid during CPR, being aware of what was happening or showing perceptions of consciousness like an out-of-body experience. No one could recall the visual image but when asked to randomly name three fruit, one person correctly named all the fruits in the audio recording—though the authors note this could have been a random lucky guess.

The study authors also included self-reports of 126 other survivors of cardiac arrests not involved in the study and what they remembered from almost dying. Common themes included the pain and pressure of chest compressions, hearing conversations from doctors, out-of-body experiences, and abstract dreams that had nothing to do with the medical event.

The findings debunk the idea that an oxygen-deprived brain stays alive for only five to ten minutes. They also raise the question whether doctors can save people already determined to be dead. “These patients were actually alive within, as seen in the positive waves on the EEG, but externally they were dead,” says Chinwe Ogedegbe, an emergency trauma center section chief and coauthor of the study.

Beyond the brain’s resilience to the lack of oxygen, the authors propose an alternative “braking system” that could explain the distorted perceptions of consciousness. The brain normally filters and inhibits unneeded information when you’re awake. In this unconscious state, however, the braking system is gone, which could allow dormant brain pathways to activate and access a deeper realm of consciousness containing all of your memory, thoughts, and actions. “Instead of being hallucinatory, illusory or delusional, this appears to facilitate lucid understanding of new dimensions of reality,” the authors write in their paper.

Unfortunately, with only a small number of participants surviving their cardiac arrest, it’s unclear whether this altered consciousness is more visual or auditory. Ogedegbe is working to increase the number of participants in the next trial to 1,500. Doing so will give researchers a better idea of the type of brain activity that goes on when someone is at death’s door, and potentially provide comfort that their loved ones can sense them in their final moments.

Original article here

09 Dec 2023
Comments: 1

5 Mistakes We Make When We’re Overwhelmed

When you feel overwhelmed, you may react in ways that not only don’t help the situation, but that even make it worse. Maybe you’re oblivious to these patterns, or you know what they are but struggle to do anything about them.

The following are five common self-sabotaging mistakes overwhelmed people tend to make. There are practical solutions for each that will help you feel like you’re on top of things and do a better job of navigating your most important tasks and solving problems.

You think you don’t have time for actions that would help you.

People often have great ideas about things that would help them feel better and more in control — for example, hiring someone to help around the house, practicing self-care, seeing a therapist, taking a vacation, or organizing a game night with friends. However, they dismiss them because they think they’re too busy or that it’s not the right time, waiting to take those actions until a more ideal moment that typically never arrives.

Instead of thinking about what would be ideal, choose the best option that’s easily available to you now. Perhaps you don’t have time to research the best therapists by interviewing multiple candidates, but you do have time to pick someone who meets a few of your criteria and try a couple of sessions with them.

When you have good ideas but don’t act on them, it can lead to a sense of powerlessness or incompetence. You may also have endless open loops of “shoulds” and waste time and energy thinking the same thoughts over and over again. Plus, when you don’t act, you miss out on the benefits you’d accrue from trying your ideas. By acting to help yourself, you’ll get practice finding doable solutions, feel more self-efficacy, and reap those benefits sooner.

You don’t utilize your unconscious mind enough.

Focus isn’t the only way to get things done. Your unconscious mind is great at problem-solving, too.

When I go for a walk, my mind wanders. I don’t aim to walk mindfully; rather, I let my mind drift without directing it too much. When I do this, it invariably meanders to work, but not in an unpleasant way. Solutions to problems magically emerge, and what I should prioritize becomes clearer without effort.

Even knowing this, it’s hard to allow myself to take a walk early in the workday (before temperatures where I live get too hot). What’s fascinating is that when I walk before work, my anxiety about the work I need to start once I get home creeps up. However, this doesn’t get in the way of me having insights into my problems and priorities. Both can occur together.

Your unconscious, wandering mind is as valuable a tool for solving problems and creative thinking as your focused mind. Utilizing your wandering mind will help you get important things done, without so much pressure to be focused and undistracted all the time, which can be an unreasonable expectation.

People who are feeling overwhelmed sometimes try to block out work thoughts during their personal time by listening to music, a podcast, or other entertainment. But that can rob you of some of the productivity potential of your drifting mind. Try identifying the activities during which your mind naturally drifts in helpful ways and solves problems for you. For me, these include running errands (driving), exercising, taking showers, and lounging in the sun.

You interpret feeling overwhelmed as a weakness.

Lots of times, we feel overwhelmed simply because we need to do a task we’re not very familiar with, or because a task is high stakes and we want to do a superb job of it. By itself, this isn’t necessarily a problem. We can often work through the task despite those overwhelmed feelings.

However, sometimes we get self-critical about the very fact that we feel overwhelmed. We think: “I shouldn’t feel overwhelmed by this. It’s not that hard. I should be able to handle it without it stressing out.” When you’re self-critical, you become more likely to procrastinate, because not only does the task trigger feelings of overwhelm, it also triggers shame or anxiety about having those feelings.

Some people react to this shame and anxiety in other ways. They might approach the task with extra perfectionism, or they might become more reluctant to ask for tips and advice from others. It’s important to replace your self-criticism with compassionate self-talk, which I’ve provided specific strategies for previously.

You default to your dominant approaches and defenses.

When we get stressed out, we tend to get a bit more rigid. Because we have less cognitive and emotional bandwidth to consider other options, we become less flexible about adapting to the demands of the situation and default to our dominant ways of handling things.

We all have values, but we don’t always use them to our advantage. For example, thoughtfulness can turn into overthinking, self-reliance can morph into micromanaging or doing everything yourself, having high standards can lead to being picky or perfectionistic, and resourcefulness can steer you toward doing things in unnecessarily complicated or unconventional ways.

When you’re overwhelmed, make sure you’re matching your values to the demands of the situation. Does the particular task or problem need _____? (Insert your dominant value, such as thoughtfulness or self-reliance.) Or would a different approach be better suited to the circumstances?

You withdraw from your supports.

If you feel overwhelmed, you’ve probably got limited emotional energy. This can lead to important changes in your behavior and emotional availability. They can be subtle — maybe you usually give your child a long hug when they come to you, but instead, you now give them a quick perfunctory squeeze while still thinking about other things, then get back to whatever you were doing.

This is self-sabotaging. You’re missing opportunities to fill up your emotional cup when you need it most, and you risk your loved ones noticing the differences and acting out to get your attention (for example, a child drawing on a wall, or a spouse picking an argument about something unimportant).

Identify ways you still enjoy connecting with your supports even when you’ve got limited emotional energy. For example, I like to draw alongside my five-year-old during my breaks, or construct something out of blocks and shapes with her. We also like to cuddle in bed while watching our own individual screens. If you struggle to get around to these activities, create routines for them so they fit into your day or week in specific places — for example, maybe you always bake with your child on Saturday mornings.

By being aware of the five patterns outlined here, you can make getting through busy and challenging times easier on yourself and those around you. They’re understandable patterns to fall into — and not a reason for you to be self-critical. Know what the traps are and make easy, small changes to overcome them.

Original article here

02 Dec 2023
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Been There, Done That! (Are You Sure?)

I bike the same route to my job every morning. Turn right, over a bridge, gentle left, hard left, hard right, check for cars at the 4-way stop, left turn, gentle right, huff and puff up the same long hill… and on I go. I can recite the entire route from memory. Same streets, same houses, same trees, same lake, same parks, all whizzing by as I focus on the road ahead, keeping up my speed to get a good workout and get to work on time.

I vary the return trip a bit at the end of the day because I have more time to explore. But do I get bored with the morning ride? Never! A few days ago, for example, those “same” streets were very much not the same, because it was still dark out, rain was smearing my glasses, and the road was covered in bright yellow, wet autumn leaves. I felt deep gratitude for the “beginner’s mind” that steered carefully and kept my speed under control through those slippery crash hazards. In the moment, I appreciated my bike, my legs, and my bright headlight. It all made me smile, to be awake and aware, and the sun was rising when I pulled into my destination.

Often we think we need something new and different in order to be happy; we think we can only be stimulated by change. Maybe you have walked the path 1,000 times between your home and your car, or the bus stop, or wherever you keep your bicycle. So you think you’ve done it, seen it, nothing is new. You may sigh and say “Been there, done that” and feel unhappy.

But in reality, we’ve never experienced this moment before. Not this one either. Nor this one.

In the eyes of a beginner, our path has many wondrous things to notice, smile at, even celebrate. Because with every moment things are changing. What are you looking at? Are you stopping to look with fresh eyes?

Joanne Friday writes beautifully about this in her story “Freedom from My Own Mind,” in the book Tears Become Rain: Stories of Transformation and Healing Inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh. When a brain injury after a car accident left her with no memory and the inability to manage her stress hormones, she writes, “I was trapped in a constant state of anxiety and fear.” Spontaneously joining a retreat with the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanne learned the joy of looking with fresh eyes at what was right in front of her. “Since I had no memory of the past and was in fear of going forward in my life with no ability to think or function well, I loved the idea of focusing fully on the present moment.”

This new way of seeing the world also applied to how Joanne viewed her own injured body. Daily walks prescribed by her doctor were torment, as she focused on the pain from her ruptured discs and her mind filled with fear and speculation that she couldn’t return to the healthy self she once knew. But then Joanne tried walking meditation, taking slow steps outdoors and focusing on the miracle of being a part of everything. “The trees exhaled what we inhaled, and we exhaled what the trees inhaled. When we focus on what a miracle this precious lifetime is, we are walking in the kingdom of heaven,” she writes. “I realized that where I chose to place my mind determined my experience. I had a choice!”

I was asked recently how we can find happiness in this world that contains so much conflict and suffering. I find happiness because I look for it, right where I am, just like Joanne did. There are tiny flowers on the ground and funny bumper stickers on people’s cars. The person who walks past me has a face, and it might smile if I smile at them. When I look as a beginner looks — as if I haven’t already seen a million flowers, read all the bumper stickers, passed so many faces in my lifetime — I experience these little joys.

My wife still makes me laugh, after 22 years. Yes, we’ve struggled, and we still have our struggles, but because of that we also notice and cherish our happy moments. We’ve never been here before, with all that brought us to this point, with all the challenges swirling in our brains, with whatever is going on in our work lives, our community, and the world. We truly have never been here before. And in this moment at the dinner table, I see her make a silly face, hear her bad pun or her intentionally obtuse question that makes our kids and me stop and wonder if she’s all there.

I could think with exasperation, “Oh there she goes again being silly.” Or look at her and roll my eyes, as our teenage kids sometimes do. But instead I get to laugh at her lightness, as if this is the first time, because it is! What a wonderful feeling when we pause and look in each other’s eyes, and catch the eyes of our kids, and know we are enjoying this moment together.

And that lightness then spreads. Laughter is like yoga, making happy chemicals move around in our brains. Our teenagers may even admit that smiling feels way better than eye rolling. They see my glee at their other mom’s silliness, and it’s contagious. Finding joy isn’t a crime, even when others around us are suffering. I see it as the opposite: Our happiness waters our seeds of compassion because we know that others want happiness too. Instead of getting lost in our own dissatisfaction at the “same old same old,” we can look and see those around us who need our smiling face, open to the possibility of this new moment.

Original article here

28 Nov 2023
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Modern Medicine Has Its Scientific Roots In The Middle Ages − How The Logic Of Vulture Brain Remedies And Bloodletting Lives On Today

Nothing calls to mind nonsensical treatments and bizarre religious healing rituals as easily as the notion of Dark Age medicine. The “Saturday Night Live” sketch Medieval Barber Theodoric of York says it all with its portrayal of a quack doctor who insists on extracting pints of his patients’ blood in a dirty little shop.

Though the skit relies on dubious stereotypes, it’s true that many cures from the Middle Ages sound utterly ridiculous – consider a list written around 800 C.E. of remedies derived from a decapitated vulture. Mixing its brain with oil and inserting that into the nose was thought to cure head pain, and wrapping its heart in wolf skin served as an amulet against demonic possession.

“Dark Age medicine” is a useful narrative when it comes to ingrained beliefs about medical progress. It is a period that stands as the abyss from which more enlightened thinkers freed themselves. But recent research pushes back against the depiction of the early Middle Ages as ignorant and superstitious, arguing that there is a consistency and rationality to healing practices at that time.

As a historian of the early Middle Ages, roughly 400 to 1000 C.E., I make sense of how the societies that produced vulture medicine envisioned it as one component of a much broader array of legitimate therapies. In order to recognize “progress” in Dark Age medicine, it is essential to see the broader patterns that led a medieval scribe to copy out a set of recipes using vulture organs.

The major innovation of the age was the articulation of a medical philosophy that validated manipulating the physical world because it was a religious duty to rationally guard the body’s health.

Reason And Religion

The names of classical medical innovators like Hippocrates and Galen were well known in the early Middle Ages, but few of their texts were in circulation prior to the 13th century. Most intellectual activities in northern Europe were taking place within monasteries, where the majority of surviving medical writings from that time were written, read, discussed and likely put into practice. Scholars have assumed that religious superstition overwhelmed scientific impulse and the church dictated what constituted legitimate healing – namely, prayer, anointing with holy oil, miracles of the saints and penance for sin.

However, “human medicine” – a term affirming human agency in discovering remedies from nature – emerged in the Dark Ages. It appears again and again in a text monks at the monastery of Lorsch, Germany, wrote around the year 800 to defend ancient Greek medical learning. It insists that Hippocratic medicine was mandated by God and that doctors act as divine agents in promoting health. I argue in my recent book, “Embodying the Soul: Medicine and Religion in Carolingian Europe,” that a major innovation of that time was the creative synthesis of Christian orthodoxy with a growing belief in the importance of preventing disease.

Establishing an intellectual framework for medical study was an accomplishment of early medieval scholars. Doctors faced the risk of being lumped together with those who dealt in sorcery and pagan folklore, a real possibility given that the men who composed the Greek medical canon were pagans themselves. The early medieval scribes responsible for producing the medical books of their age crafted powerful arguments about the respectability and piety of the doctor. Their arguments manifest in illustrations that sanctified the human doctor by setting him parallel to Christ.

This sanctification was a crucial step in including medicine as its own advanced degree program at the first universities that were established around 1200 in Europe. Thus began the licensing of healers: the elite “phisici” – the root of the English word “physician” – trained at the university, along with empirical practitioners like surgeons, herbalists and female healers who claimed a unique authority to treat gynecological illnesses.

Today, religious dogmatism is often equated with vaccine hesitancy and resistance to basic scientific truths like evolution. But deeply religious thinkers of the past often saw rational medicine as an expression of faith, not something endangering it. Herbal remedies were scribbled into the margins of early medieval works on theology, history, church sacraments and more. This suggests that book owners valued such knowledge, and people of all classes were actively exchanging recipes and cures by word of mouth before writing the most useful ones down.

The Body In Nature

Though the Dark Ages is a period from which no case histories survive, we can still form a picture of an average healing encounter. Texts from that period emphasize the need for the doctor to be highly learned, including being well read in philosophy, logic, arithmetic and astronomy. Such knowledge enabled healers to situate their observations of sick bodies within the rules that governed the constant transformations of nature.

There was no way to perceive the internal state of the body via technology – instead, healers had to be excellent listeners and observers. They sought to match the patient’s description of suffering with signs that manifested externally on the body. The inside of the flesh could not be seen, but the fluids the body excreted – sweat, urine, menstrual blood, mucus, vomit and feces – carried messages about that invisible realm to the outside. The doctor’s diagnosis and prognosis relied on reading these “excreta” in addition to sensing subtle changes in the pulse.

Medieval people were detailed investigators of the natural world and believed the same forces that shaped the landscape and the stars operated inside bodies formed from the same four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Thus, as the moon’s waxing and waning moved the ocean tides, so did it cause humors inside the body to grow and decrease.

The way the seasons withered crops or provoked tree sap to flow might manifest in the body as yellow bile surging in the summer, and cold, wet phlegm dripping in the winter. Just as fruit and meats left untouched began to rot and putrefy, so did dregs and undigested material inside the body turn poisonous if not expelled. Standing water in ponds or lakes generated slime and smell, and so were liquids sitting stagnant in the body’s vessels seen as breeding grounds for corrupt vapors.

In this sense, the menstrual cycle was representative of all bodies, undergoing internal transformations according to seasonal cycles and periodically purged in order to release pent-up fluids.

According to this logic, health depended above all on maintaining the body’s relationship to the physical environment and ensuring that substances were passing through their proper transformations, whether it was food turning into humors, blood disseminating throughout the body, or excess fluids and wastes leaving the body. Bloodletting was a rational therapy because it could help rebalance the fluids and remove toxins. It was visible and tangible to the patient, and, to the extent that we now better understand the placebo effect, it may well have offered some kind of relief.

Fasting, purging, tonics and, above all, monthly dietary regimens were also prominent tools healers used to prevent and relieve sickness. Several medical books, for instance, specified that consuming drinks with cinnamon in November and pennyroyal in August could recalibrate the body’s temperature in winter and summer because one drink was warming while the other was cooling.

Some medieval remedies – such as one produced from wine, cow bile, garlic and onion to heal eye infections – were later proven to be likely effective in treating sickness. But whether these remedies worked isn’t the point. For medieval doctors, vulture brains and cow bile operated according to the same logic that continues to inform research today: Nature operates in mysterious ways, but rational deduction can unlock the hidden mechanisms of disease. The M.D. has direct roots in the Dark Age elevation of “human medicine.”

Before mocking medieval doctors, consider how popular juice cleanses and detox regimens are in the 21st century. Are we really so far from humoral medicine today?

24 Nov 2023
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Best time ever to be alive on planet Earth!

I believe we are living in the most extraordinary time ever with breakthroughs happening on many levels:

Our intelligence is expanding and in many cases fusing with what I call infinite intelligence. This results in spontaneous knowing of things beyond our learning and training.
We are now able to embody our greater beings, with a capacity to create who we want to become as opposed to being trapped within the confines of our genetics and our past.
Vibrational frequency is rising across the whole planet, resulting in an upleveling of consciousness, which in turn generates deeper appreciation for and connection with all life.
Some of us are now experiencing freedom from reactive emotional response, finding joy in emotive moments that power breakthroughs.
We’re discovering and enhancing our bodies’ miraculous ability, all while embodying a new vitality fuelled by universal life source power.
We’re recognising that death is not the end, but instead the beginning of the next grand adventure where joyful freedom reigns.
We’re making friends with the universe. On the one hand through technology like the James Webb Telescope. On the other hand through our own deepening connection with the inherent intelligence behind Creation.
And how about the increasing beauty and power of Nature and the animal kingdoms! Cross species love. Breath-taking GREEN. An understanding that Water is intelligent … see Veda Austin’s work with water. Even an increasing ability to work with what I call ‘the weather gods’ to help fulfill the greater purpose of Nature’s movements with as little harm to life as possible. Some might call this shamanic. I call it a deepening alchemical partnership with the miraculousness of Life.
An unleashing of genius all around the world, leading to exciting new innovations that bring solutions we could hardly have dreamed were possible.
Source fills the air we breathe and the cells we dwell within. We are interwoven to one another and to all life now through what I call the internal Source ‘mycelium’ network.

We are quantum leaping by the day into new horizons of possibility. Elevating ourselves into next levels of being. Enhancing our abilities to create life as never before. Best time ever to be alive on planet Earth!

About the Author:

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

20 Nov 2023
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100 Ways to Slightly Improve Your Life Without Really Trying

1 Exercise on a Monday night (nothing fun happens on a Monday night).

2 On the fence about a purchase? Wait 72 hours before you buy it.

3 Tip: the quickest supermarket queue is always behind the fullest trolley (greeting, paying and packing take longer than you think).

4 Bring fruit to work. Bring fruit to bed!

5 Consider going down to four days a week. It’s likely a disproportionate amount of your fifth day’s work is taxed anyway, so you’ll lose way less than a fifth of your take-home pay.

6 Everyone has an emotional blind spot when they fight. Work out what yours is, and remember it.

7 Plant spring bulbs, even if they’re just in a pot.

8 Send a voice note instead of a text; they sound like personal mini podcasts.

9 Keep a bird feeder by a window, ideally the kitchen. It’ll pass the time when you’re washing up.

10 Always bring ice to house parties (there’s never enough).

11 Get the lighting right: turn off the overhead one, turn on lots of lamps (but turn off when you leave the room).

12 Sharpen your knives.

13 Feeling sluggish at work? Try the Pomodoro technique: 25 minutes on, five-minute break, and repeat.

14 Buy a cheap blender and use it to finely chop onions (it saves on time and tears).

15 Keep your children’s drawings and paintings. Put the best ones in frames.

16 Set aside 10 minutes a day to do something you really enjoy – be it reading a book or playing Halo.

17 Don’t be weird about how to stack the dishwasher.

18 Reuse all plastic bags – even bread bags. Much of the packaging you can’t reuse can be taken to larger branches of supermarkets for recycling.

19 Take a photo of the tag you are given when leaving your coat in a cloakroom.

20 Can’t sleep? Try a relaxing soak with lavender bath oil before bed.

21 Add the milk at least one minute after the tea has brewed.

22 Laugh shamelessly at your own jokes.

23 It might sound obvious, but a pint of water before bed after a big night avoids a clanger of a hanger.

24 Start a Saturday morning with some classical music – it sets the tone for a calm weekend.

25 Look closely.

26 Set time limits for your apps. Just go to the settings on your smartphone and add a limit – for example, if you have an iPhone turn on Screen Time.

27 If possible, take the stairs.

28 Always be willing to miss the next train.

29 Eat meat once a week, max. Ideally less.

30 Be polite to rude strangers – it’s oddly thrilling.

31 Ask questions, and listen to the answers.

32 Connect with nature: stand outside barefoot for a few minutes – even when it’s cold.

33 Join your local library – and use it.

34 Go for a walk without your phone.

35 Eat salted butter (life’s too short for unsalted).

36 Stretch in the morning. And maybe in the evening.

37 If you’re going less than a mile, walk or cycle. About half of car journeys are under two miles, yet these create more pollution than longer journeys as the engine isn’t warmed up yet.

38 Sleep with your phone in a different room (and buy an alarm clock).

39 Send postcards from your holidays. Send them even if you’re not on holiday.

40 Instead of buying new shoes, get old ones resoled and buy new laces.

41 Buy a plant. Think you’ll kill it? Buy a fake one.

42 Don’t have Twitter on your phone.

43 If you find an item of clothing you love and are certain you will wear for ever, buy three.

44 Try taking a cold shower (30 seconds to two minutes) before your hot one. It’s good for your health – both physical and mental.

45 Text to say thank you.

46 Read a poem every day. Keep a compendium, such as A Poem for Every Day of the Year, by your bed.

47 Take out your headphones when walking – listen to the world.

48 Buy secondhand.

49 Buy in person!

50 Learn how to floss properly.

51 If something in the world is making you angry, write (politely) to your MP – they will read it.

52 Say hello to your neighbours.

53 Learn the basics of repairing your clothes.

54 Always bring something – wine, flowers – to a dinner/birthday party, even if they say not to.

55 Learn the names of 10 trees.

56 Call an old friend out of the blue.

57 Every so often, search your email for the word “unsubscribe” and then use it on as many as you can.

58 Buy a newspaper. (Ideally this one.)

59 Always have dessert.

60 Drop your shoulders.

61 Make something from scratch. Works best if it’s something you’d normally buy, such as a dress or a bag.

62 Go to bed earlier – but don’t take your phone with you.

63 Volunteer. Go to gov.uk/government/get-involved for ideas.

64 Dry your cutlery with a cloth (it keeps it shiny).

65 Instead of buying a morning coffee, set up a daily transfer of £2 from a current into a savings account and forget about it. Use it to treat yourself to something different later.

66 Don’t save things for “best”. Wear them – enjoy them.

67 Sing!

68 Think about your posture: don’t slouch, and don’t cross your legs.

69 Hang your clothes up. Ideally on non-wire hangers (it’s better for them).

70 Skinny-dip with friends.

71 Switch your phone off on holiday (or at least delete your work email app).

72 Always use freshly ground pepper.

73 Thank a teacher who changed your life.

74 Respect your youngers.

75 Keep your keys in the same place.

76 Ditch the plastic cartons and buy milk in glass bottles.

77 Rent rather than buy a suit/dress for that forthcoming wedding (even if it’s your own).

78 Always book an extra day off after a holiday.

79 Ignore the algorithm – listen to music outside your usual taste.

80 Mute or leave a WhatsApp group chat.

81 Learn a TikTok dance (but don’t post it on TikTok).

82 Cook something you’ve never attempted before.

83 Join a local litter-picking group.

84 Handwash that thing you’ve never cleaned.

85 Don’t get a pet/do get a pet.

86 Nap.

87 Learn how to breathe deeply: in through the nose, out through the mouth, making the exhale longer than the inhale.

88 Buy a bike and use it. Learn how to fix it, too.

89 Politely decline invitations if you don’t want to go.

90 If you do go, have an exit strategy (can we recommend a French exit, where you slip out unseen).

91 If in doubt, add cheese.

92 Don’t look at your phone at dinner.

93 Do that one thing you’ve been putting off.

94 Give compliments widely and freely.

95 Set up an affordable standing order to a charity.

96 Keep a book in your bag to avoid the temptation to doomscroll.

97 Listen to the albums you loved as a teenager.

98 Make a friend from a different generation.

99 Staying over at a friend’s place? Strip the bed in the morning.

100 For instant cheer, wear yellow.

Original article here

16 Nov 2023
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Signs You’re Moving Into a High-Vibe Version of Reality

You feel calm inside … and that calmness offers an ease of genius flow and vitality.
You have emotive bursts popping up from inside.
Sometimes they’re purposeful and other times you might cry over nothing at all. I believe this is your power offering itself to you to elevate the world.
You fall in love with nature, animals, people, the Earth.
You see wonders everywhere you look. And you want to put more of that wonderfulness into the world around you for others to thrive upon.
It becomes effortless to energetically zing others up. The more you do this, the greater you feel.
You see the potential in people and situations and aim straight for the new possibilities on offer in every circumstance.
You feel younger than your years and look in the mirror to find that’s showing up in you physically too.
You love easily with zero concern for a broken heart because this kind of love comes from a greater place with greater purpose and offers itself readily to all.
You understand things at greater levels, eliminating the reactive responses that come along with a lack of comprehension of greater purpose at play.
You feel more like the greater being you really are, finding ways to live this here on Earth.
You discover you can talk to animals, trees, oceans, the universe, etc. and they energetically talk back to you with brilliant insights into how life is unfolding right now. We are increasingly interconnected as Source beings in a symbiotic version of reality.
You become an alchemical elevancer of Life naturally and instinctively.

May grace, genius and greatness flow through us all now with wonder and joy.

About the Author:

31 Oct 2023
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Becoming Super Conscious

Many many people (and animals and forests and oceans too) have become super conscious in these past few years. Is that you too? Here are what I see as the 12 sign of being super conscious now….

We don’t get triggered by things in the way we used to. There’s a kind of calm understanding of what’s behind things and where they might lead if someone recognises its potential and greater purpose.
We walk in awe of the natural world, going ‘look at that sky, the green of everything, the bursting wonder of flowers and the sheer joy of connecting with animals’.
We KNOW things. Yup just simply know stuff we never learned or heard of before. I call this quantum intelligence and it seems to be catching on.
We know who we are and at the same time it’s kind of irrelevant as we are now the source creators of ourselves. Identity has ceased to matter and fulfillment of greater purpose has taken its joyful place.
We appear to be timeless in some way. Yes there are signs of aging, but at the same time there’s a radiant inner glow that supersedes any belief in getting older.
We are radiant suns lighting up reality, not just in our close proximity, but in the greater field of us all.
There is a strong sense of Source both within and without. We see source in everything and everyone. It seems we are now inner connected via what I like to call the Source mycelium network that connects all life now.
We can commune with animals, trees, the stars, the universe. It’s more than telepathic, it’s communion at its most wonderful level.
We are possibilitarians, apocaloptimists, transformers and transcenders of all that has come before. The past is maleable, we live in the presence of the present, co-creating a future too fabulous to even yet imagine.
We talk with those who’ve gone on to the other side with great ease and grace, reveling in their next becoming. We are even watching a wave of loved ones being reborn right now as the next wave of super conscious beings on the planet.
We are a collective force of wonder, of creation, of super connection, each with our own unique masteries and genius surging to the fore to innovate everything.
We source new consciousness and quantum leap new possibilities into reality. We are future innovators, loving life, spreading Kindness with a capital K and living in a version of reality that is magical, synergistic, beautiful and naturally abundant.

About the Author:

Original post here

26 Oct 2023
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Why Career Transition Is So Hard

Today people at all stages of their careers are asking themselves profound questions about the kind of work they do, how much of it they want to do, and the place it occupies in their lives. We’re asking ourselves these questions in part because fewer and fewer of us conceive of life as having the three “traditional” stages: a short early stage devoted to learning, a long middle stage dedicated to work, and a later stage devoted to enjoying one’s golden years. Instead, with growing frequency, we’re alternating between changing jobs and careers, pursuing opportunities for education, and making time for periods of rest and restoration.

This isn’t a midlife-crisis type of questioning that flares up at a certain age and gets resolved once and for all. The accelerated pace of technological change and, most recently, the advent of AI are reshaping jobs and organizations in ways that call for constant career reinvention. So we all need to learn how to get better at making the most of the frequent transitions that will constitute a long working life.

There’s a lot that’s beneficial and necessary about this shift, but no matter how often you change careers, you’re likely to experience the transition as an emotionally fraught process—one that involves confusion, loss, insecurity, and struggle. Big changes can be exhilarating, but they’re also terrifying.

For more than two decades—ever since I began conducting research on the topic for my book Working Identity—I’ve been studying career reinvention: what prompts people to do it, how they go about it, and how it affects them. In this article, drawing on work I’ve done since the book’s publication in 2004, I’ll explain why such transitions are so hard for so many of us, despite their growing frequency and prevalence, and I’ll offer some ideas for managing them more intentionally and successfully.

Why Change Is Hard

Some of what makes changing careers difficult will be unique to you and your particular circumstances. But you’ll almost surely have to confront two challenges while in transition: a lack of institutional support and an unsettling loss of professional identity.

Lack of institutional support. Until recently, many of the important moves in our working lives were institutionalized, meaning they were well scripted by the communities and professions that oversaw them. If you wanted to become a doctor, make partner at a law firm, or move up the management ranks, you had to follow a clear sequence of steps. From schooling through retirement, you knew more or less how long each step would take. Peers went through them with you, and elders showed you the way. Throughout the process, gatekeepers marked your progress with degrees, credentials, promotions, and, eventually, gold watches.

Today, with the rise of nonlinear career paths, many of the transitions we make are “under-institutionalized.” There is no immutable series of steps for the change you need to make, and no telling how long it will take or how to measure your progress. Complicating matters, the direction of travel is often from large organizations, which have well-structured recruiting and hiring processes, to smaller players, private firms, and entrepreneurial opportunities in unstructured job markets. Increasingly, too, people are shifting from full-time jobs to fluid, individualized portfolios of gigs and part-time roles. All this can offer you an endless sense of possibility, but it also makes it harder to figure out what you want to do, and where to start.

Loss of professional identity. Decades’ worth of research in social psychology shows that our sense of identity is anchored in the well-defined groups and organizations with which we are associated and by which we are recognized. Without the cover and support of a traditional employer and a stable work identity, we can quickly start to feel lost, anxious, irrelevant, and insecure. Those feelings can be strongly amplified if instead of choosing to leave your job, you’ve been let go or fired.

Emotional ups and down are a standard feature of any transition. Unfortunately, you’re likely to have to cope with them for longer than you might expect, for several reasons. If you’re an experienced executive, you probably have some very specific skills and knowledge, and that can make finding a new fit challenging, especially because many senior positions are not advertised publicly. Vetting and interviewing processes have also gotten longer—the result of a confluence of factors, including the use of multiple screening methods such as personality tests and skills assessments. More broadly, the current economic uncertainty can make it slower and harder to secure a job or financing for an entrepreneurial venture.

Search Different

When it comes to making big life decisions, we’re typically told that the first step is to figure out what it is that we really want. Once the hard work of self-reflection is done, the thinking goes, the rest is simply a matter of implementation.

The problem is, that approach doesn’t work. Year in and year out, I’ve seen the same dynamic: People know what they don’t want to do anymore, or what is no longer viable, but they don’t know what to do instead. So they delay getting started, feeling that they first need greater clarity or waiting until they’ve lost a job and are forced to make a change.

It’s easy to blame this inertia on human psychology: We fear change, lack maturity, don’t understand ourselves, have failed to reflect on our true nature. But my research has led me to a different conclusion. Usually we fail to change simply because we don’t know how to go about it. The problem lies in our methods, not our minds.

Career change is iterative. You can’t line everything up in advance. You have to figure things out over time and make adjustments as you go.

The story of Thomas (a pseudonym) is instructive. Thomas had a conventional career in finance with a Fortune 500 company until he reached the age of 48. Each year he got bigger bonuses, greater performance evaluations, and bigger responsibilities, and he was eventually promoted to finance director in his company’s health care business. But when that business was dismantled, he lost his job, and finding a new one proved difficult. He couldn’t make a lateral move, because roles at his level were few and far between; he didn’t yet have the experience to become a CEO; and he was told he was overqualified and “too well paid” for more-junior roles. Eventually he got an offer from a midsize firm that needed his expertise temporarily. It wasn’t an ideal match, but he took the position to avoid having a big gap on his CV.

After that gig ended, Thomas was back to square one. But during the search process he’d reconnected with a couple of old friends and colleagues in similar straits who had pooled office space and launched freelance advisory businesses that allowed them to generate some income while searching for the next thing. Thomas collaborated with them on two start-up ideas, but neither really took off, so he and his family made some adjustments: His wife ramped up her career, and they moved to a less costly city and invested in profit-generating rental properties.

During those difficult years, Thomas began thinking about a market gap he had noticed while working for his previous employer: the dearth of assisted-living facilities for the aging population in a region he knew well. Gradually he made connections with the players in that space, looked at models in other countries, and began helping companies orchestrate deals in the sector. Over time he became a go-to person for this kind of work. Now, with interest rates rising and the deal flow slowing, he’s seeking an operational role again, keen to use the skills he’s acquired.

What can we learn from Thomas’s story? After he was forced into a career change, he didn’t begin by trying to figure out who he “really” was and map out a plan before moving forward. Instead he hustled, following his nose and activating his networks, trying lots of different things, often simultaneously, without fully settling on one. He learned and adapted, which is what we all have to do in a world that rewards optionality and the exploration of many possible selves.

A Liminal State

Embracing optionality and multiplicity in the search for a new career, as Thomas did, makes a lot of sense intellectually, but emotionally it’s a roller-coaster ride. That’s because it puts you in what anthropologists call a liminal state, where you must navigate between a past that’s clearly over and a future that’s still uncertain.

Liminality can be unpleasant, especially for those of us used to single-mindedly pursuing clear goals on a well-trodden path. But when you’re changing careers, liminality gives you the necessary time and space to question the old givens. Think of it as an identity time-out, when you can let go of your commitment to who you used to be and focus more creatively on who you might become. It takes time to discover what you want to change, identify the habits and assumptions that might be holding you back, and build sufficient skills experience and connections in a new arena. So instead of trying to land your next role as quickly as possible, you must embrace liminality. You have to be willing to get and stay lost for a while.

My research has shown that there are three important ways to make the process easier.

Diverge and delay. Finding your next role almost always takes longer than you expect. Make the most of that time. A traditional plan-and-implement program is likely only to get you more of the same. If you want your liminal period to lead to real discovery, you need to experiment with divergent possibilities while delaying commitment to any one of them. In doing so, you’ll have to think more creatively and will obtain more information about yourself and your options.

Consider the case of a lawyer I’ll call Sophie. Coming out of a two-decade corporate career, Sophie wasn’t sure what she wanted to do next, but she was keen to explore a range of possibilities, among them documentary filmmaking, nonexecutive board roles, and sustainability consulting. Over a three-year period she got herself a board-director accreditation, took filmmaking and journalism courses, worked on a start-up idea, did freelance consulting on compliance, joined a nonprofit board, did an internship in a newsroom, completed a corporate film project in her old area of ethics and integrity, and produced (and won prizes for) two short films. With deeper insight about the economic realities of the media and entertainment industries, she now feels well placed to decide between putting most of her energy into documentary filmmaking and building a more diverse portfolio of work.

Exploit and explore. Human beings are very good at either-or thinking: Either I’m leveraging my old skill set or I’m pivoting to something new. But most people making a career transition have to do both simultaneously, at least at first—ideally staying in their old jobs and careers while exploiting and exploring on the side until something new becomes viable.

One investment banker did just that when he began to tire of his career. While still working at his blue-chip firm, he started a blog lampooning the industry under the pen name Litquidity, shortened to Lit. Next, after switching to private equity, he launched the Litquidity Instagram account. As his following grew, he thought about turning his side gig into a full-time one but didn’t feel he could take the risk. Reluctantly he returned to banking. But just a few years later the Litquidity business had grown enough for him to make that transition. Today Lit is a social media sensation, with several Instagram accounts, a popular newsletter, a podcast, a deal with a recruiting firm, and roles as an angel investor and venture capital scout for Bain Capital Ventures.

Bridge and bond. We grow professionally in and through our relationships with others. But when it comes to career change, the connections we already have aren’t usually all that helpful. You need to build your relationships in two ways: by bridging, which involves creating or reactivating relationships beyond your current social circle, and bonding, which involves deepening ties and finding community within a close circle of kindred spirits.

Bridging often gets more attention because the golden rule of job-search networking has always been to mobilize your weak ties—the relationships you have with people you don’t know well or don’t see very often—to maximize your chances of learning about new opportunities. A recent study of more than 20 million LinkedIn users showed that this is indeed true: Weak ties help you get a job because they connect you to farther-flung social circles. The hitch is that most people dread the prospect of reaching out to their extended network in this way because it’s hard work that can leave you feeling exposed and vulnerable.

That’s why bonding relationships—critical for anyone trying to stay healthy, happy, and sane—are so important for people in transition. They provide the support, sustenance, and space people need to process the unsettling emotions of the transition period.

There’s no one way to forge bonding relationships. Sometimes the important ones are with people you already know (especially spouses), but sometimes they are with kindred spirits, people also in transition, or those already working in the field to which you aspire. Thomas bonded with the buddies he shared office space with. Sophie bonded with the newsroom team (who invited her to stay on a freelance basis after her internship), a community of female documentary filmmakers, and some of the other mature students in her courses. There’s convincing evidence that when independent consultants find their tribe, they are not only more productive but also better able to tolerate the anxiety of being on their own. One way or another, we all need a secure base from which to explore the unknown and turn painful feelings into sources of creativity and growth.

The Learning Plot

Being in transition is like losing the plot of your professional life. You need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help. This process, which I call “self-reflecting out loud,” will propel you forward, in no small measure because others will respond, sympathize, commiserate, ask questions, call your bluffs, and share their own experiences in ways that will help clarify your thinking.

Your story will most likely depart from the timeless myth in which a hero (you!) struggles to pivot to the next career and, by dint of hard work and determination, ultimately finds a happy ending. That kind of simple, linear plotline doesn’t reflect the realities of today’s working world, in which jobs and careers are precarious, liminality can be long, and resolution—if there is any—tends to be short-lived. So we all need to get comfortable with a new kind of narrative that revolves around what I call “the learning plot”—a story of ongoing struggle and adaptation. That’s what Thomas, Sophie, and Lit all did.

As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career.

Original article here