personal development | Ascension Lifestyle

04 Feb 2023
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Hello, February!

As we entered 2023, I had the feeling that this is going to be THE year where everything turns awesomely towards our dream of life here on planet Earth. Now I know how far out that might sound, how in some ways of looking at the world, one might think that things are getting worse. But I don’t see it that way. Why? Because …

1. a whole new level of connection exists. Notice the brilliance of animals loving other species of animals. Look at the wonders of deep ocean photography. Discover that trees are inter-connected through mycelium networks. Witness the increasing miraculousness of Nature. And feel within yourself that sense of being it all and ever more wondrously in love with the miracle of Life.

2. a next level leap into quantum intelligence is happening. Not just an expansion of intelligence beyond our thinking brains (which we’ve been enhancing for years), but an opening into the Mind behind Creation, the intelligence that sources new possibilities for us all.

3. an interconnective singularity is taking place in which we’re seeing the merging of all consciousnesses and intelligences, opening up brand new pathways of discovery and creation for our collective future.

4. operating in the new high vibe frequencies, we discover that synergy flows through everything. We begin to effortlessly live, breathe, receive and pulse out into the world an abundance of opportunities and quantum possibilities.

5. new levels of collaboration and innovation are available to us now. Not just teams, not just great ideas, but an inter-weaving of collaborative genius fusion that will solve current global challenges in unprecedented new ways.

In recent years we have lived our greater beings, embedded Source within ourselves and the Earth, opened to new kinds of mastery and Life power and become quantum ALLchemists moving this world into the Dreamer’s dream of who and what we can all become. This year, let’s end wars, love animals, exhilarate our soil, forests and oceans and become powerfully alchemically kind and creative in ways we have never known before. Bring it on 2023 … we are loving you already!

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.

01 Feb 2023
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How to Find Your Hidden Creative Genius

There is an interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist and creative genius, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes.

As the story goes, Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman spotted him. She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

“My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.”

Picasso isn’t the only creative genius who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many brilliant creatives.

Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice.

Let’s talk about why that is, and even more important, how you can reveal your own creative genius.

The Age of Most Nobel Prize Winners

A recent study tracked the ages of Nobel Prize winners, great inventors, and scientists. As you can see in the graph below, the researchers found that most groundbreaking work peaked during the late thirties — at least a full decade into any individual career. Even in the fields of science and math, creative breakthroughs often require ten years or more or work.

These findings match the work done by previous researchers as well.

For example, a study conducted at Carnegie Mellon University by cognitive psychology professor John Hayes found that out of 500 famous musical pieces, nearly all of them were created after year 10 of the composer’s career. In later studies, Hayes found similar patterns with poets and painters. He began referring to this period hard work and little recognition as the “ten years of silence.”

Whether you are a composer or a scientist, creativity is not a quality you are born with or without. It is something that is discovered, honed, and improved through real work.

Which brings us to an important question: How can you do your best work and discover your hidden creative genius?

Permission to Create Junk

“People tend to look at successful writers, writers who are getting books published and maybe even doing well financially, and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million dollars, feeling great about who they are and how much talent they have and what a great story they have to tell; that they take a few deep breaths, push back their sleeves, roll their necks a few times to get all the cricks out, and dive in, typing fully formed passages as fast as a court reporter. But this is just fantasy of the uninitiated. I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts… For me and most other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. If fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.”

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

In any creative endeavor, you have to give yourself permission to create junk. There is no way around it. Sometimes you have to write 4 terrible pages just to discover that you wrote one good sentence in the second paragraph of the third page.

Creating something useful and compelling is like being a gold miner. You have to sift through pounds of dirt and rock and silt just to find a speck of gold in the middle of it all. Bits and pieces of genius will find their way to you, if you give yourself permission to let the muse flow.

Create on a Schedule

Amateurs create when they feel inspired. Professionals create on a schedule.

No single act will uncover more creative genius than forcing yourself to create consistently. Practicing your craft over and over is the only way to become decent at it. The person who sits around theorizing about what a best-selling book looks like will never write it. Meanwhile, the writer who shows up every day and puts their butt in the chair and their hands on the keyboard — they are learning how to do the work.

Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.

— Chuck Close

Ira Glass is the host of the popular radio show This American Life, which is broadcast to 1.7 million listeners each week. This is the advice Glass gives to anyone looking to interesting, creative work: “The most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that … the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.”

If you want to do your best creative work, then don’t leave it up to choice. Don’t wake up in the morning and think, “I hope I feel inspired to create something today.” You need to take the decision-making out of it. Set a schedule for your work. Creative genius arrives when you show up enough times to get the average ideas out of the way.

Finish Something

Steven Pressfield’s most famous work, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was a best-selling novel that became a major motion picture starring Matt Damon, Will Smith, and Charlize Theron. But if you ask Pressfield, he will say that his most important book is one that you never heard of: the first book he finished.

Here’s how Pressfield describes finishing his first novel…

“I never did find a buyer for the book. Or the next one, either. It was ten years before I got the first check for something I had written and ten more before a novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was actually published. But that moment when I first hit the keys to spell out THE END was so epochal. I remember rolling the last page out and adding it to the stack that was the finished manuscript. Nobody knew I was done. Nobody cared. But I knew. I felt like a dragon I’d been fighting all my life had just dropped dead at my feet and gasped out its last sulfuric breath.”

Finish something. Anything. Stop researching, planning, and preparing to do the work and just do the work. It doesn’t matter how good or how bad it is. You don’t need to set the world on fire with your first try. You just need to prove to yourself that you have what it takes to produce something.

There are no artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who became great by half-finishing their work. Stop debating what you should make and just make something.

Practice Self-Compassion

Everyone struggles to create great art. Even great artists.

When I write, I feel like an armless legless man with a crayon in my mouth.

— Kurt Vonnegut

Anyone who creates something on a consistent basis will begin to judge their own work. I write new articles every Monday and Thursday. After sticking to that publishing schedule for three months, I began to judge everything I created. I was convinced that I had gone through every decent idea I had available. My most popular article came 8 months later.

It is natural to judge your work. It is natural to feel disappointed that your creation isn’t as wonderful as you hoped it would be, or that you’re not getting any better at your craft. But the key is to not let your discontent prevent you from continuing to do the work.

You have to practice enough self-compassion to not let self-judgment take over. Sure, you care about your work, but don’t get so serious about it that you can’t laugh off your mistakes and continue to produce the thing you love. Don’t let judgment prevent delivery.

Share Your Work

Share your work publicly. It will hold you accountable to creating your best work. It will provide feedback for doing better work. And when you see others connect with what you create, it will inspire you and make you care more.

When it comes to ideas, most people overestimate the risk of piracy, and underestimate the price of obscurity.

— Mike Trap

Sometimes sharing your work means you have to deal with haters and critics. But more often than not, the only thing that happens is that you rally the people who believe the same things you believe, are excited about the same things you are excited about, or who support the work that you believe in — who wouldn’t want that?

The world needs people who put creative work out into the world. What seems simple to you is often brilliant to someone else. But you’ll never know that unless you choose to share.

How to Find Your Creative Genius

Finding your creative genius is easy: do the work, finish something, get feedback, find ways to improve, show up again tomorrow. Repeat for ten years. Or twenty. Or thirty.

Inspiration only reveals itself after perspiration.

Original article here

29 Jan 2023
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The Science of How Your Body Ages

Ask people what they think they’ll look like in 25 years, and chances are they’ll mention how their parents looked at that age. And while genetics certainly play a part, research shows there’s more to the story. Only about 30% of what we see as aging is inherited, explains John Rowe, M.D., Julius B. Richmond Professor of Health Policy and Aging at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health.

When you look specifically at things above the neck — like cognitive function, vision, and hearing — that number goes up to about 50%. “People feel there’s some intrinsic clock playing out a program in their body that they don’t have influence over,” says Dr. Rowe. “It’s just not true.”

Yes, good news: We have real control over how our bodies age. Aging is happening on a cellular level at every moment, so for a long and healthy life, it’s vital to stay on top of the changes within your body and your mind. For a better understanding of these shifts through every decade, we talked to the experts.

In Your 20s

In our 20s, we’re generally at the peak of physical health. In several ways, our bodies are still on the upward curve of development — even our menstrual cycles maybe more regular than in our teens! — and our brains and bones are growing to their full potential.

Brain

Your brain is changing well into your 20s, says Shanna Levine, M.D., a New York City–based internist working in private practice for Goals Healthcare. Research has shown that your prefrontal cortex — the part responsible for factors like inhibition, high-level functioning, and attention — continues growing until around age 25.

POWER UP: It’s never too early to prioritize brain health! Keep your noggin sharp through the decades with these brain-boosting tricks:

Plan to volunteer. One study found that giving back, even for less than two hours a week, could slow cognitive decline — likely because doing so promotes social connection and mental engagement, which research has proven can help stave off dementia.
Study a new language. It may be easier to learn one when you’re young, but studying another language at any age can “promote thinking skills, increase mental agility, and delay the aging of the brain,” found one study. Plus, if you take group classes, you get the social benefit.
Learn to play an instrument. Even if you don’t see yourself as musically inclined, give it a shot. In one study, people 60 and over showed improvement in cognitive functions after just four months of piano lessons.

Bones

By the time you’re 18, you already have up to 90% of your peak bone mass, including strength and density. However, you’re still adding more mass than you’re losing (that changes around age 30). While the amount you develop is primarily based on set factors like race and gender, about one-quarter of it is determined by things you can control.

POWER UP: Exercise regularly, get enough calcium in your diet (about 1,000 mg per day), limit alcoholic beverages, and don’t smoke.

In Your 30s

Many people see this as their best decade. During our 30s, we’re likely getting more settled in our careers and families, and according to one study our happiness levels are still actively increasing. This is also when making real lifestyle changes can help stave off long-term issues.

Metabolism

You may notice that it takes extra effort to shed pounds. This is because of a slower metabolic rate — it can start to decline in our 20s and continues to decrease by 2% to 3% every 10 years. The reason you likely won’t realize that until now: This is also when we start losing muscle mass (3% to 8% per decade after age 30). This metabolic shift may translate into an increase in body fat around your middle. While you might be annoyed about how your jeans suddenly fit (or don’t), the deeper belly fat around your organs (called visceral fat) is more of a concern— it can increase your risk of things like type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and high blood pressure.

POWER UP: Eat healthfully and start a regular exercise routine; it’ll help build muscle mass, which gives your metabolism a boost.

Skin

Seeing new fine lines and wrinkles in the mirror? You can blame decreasing collagen and elastin levels. And cell turnover slows after your late 20s, so skin can look dull and tired without extra exfoliation. Our Beauty Lab recommends adding a facial peel to your weekly routine. This is also when damage from past unprotected sun exposure can start to rear its ugly head.

POWER UP: Prevent future sun damage by wearing SPF 30 or higher every day — even if you’re not hitting the beach or the pool.

In Your 40s

Everything seems to come together when you hit your 40s. While your family life and career are likely at a high point, caring for aging parents and planning for the future can make it a stressful time.

Eyes

Struggling to read the restaurant menu? Eyesight begins to weaken at this age because of changes in the eyes’ focusing ability. But you won’t see the more profound consequences for two more decades, says Dr. Levine.

POWER UP: Focus on your diet. “Just one cup of kale has more than a whole day’s worth of the carotenoids zeaxanthin, lutein, and beta-carotene, which help shield ocular tissue from harmful UV damage and may also reduce your risk of developing cataracts,” says GH Nutrition Director Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D.

Height

“Every 10 years after the age of 40, we lose about half an inch of height” because of changes in bones, muscles, and joints, says Dr. Levine. But talk to your doctor about any rapid height loss — it could be a sign of osteoporosis.

POWER UP: Get exercise. There’s no way to fully stop shrinking, but a study found that people who did so regularly could cut the height they lost almost in half. This was true even for those who became moderately active only after 40 (compared with those who never exercised regularly and those who ended their activity as they got older).

In Your 50s

As your children head off to high school and college, now is when you think about how you would like to spend your time. Whether you focus on a new hobby, a volunteer project, or a career change, this decade is all about starting to concentrate on your own wants and needs.

Hormones

The big health story during this decade? Menopause. It hits some women in their 40s, but the average age is 51. Menopause is diagnosed when you haven’t had your period for over a year — and when your ovaries stop producing estrogen, the effects can be challenging both physically and emotionally. The classic symptoms include hot flashes, insomnia, mood swings, and even anxiety or depression — but not all women will experience every one of these.

POWER UP: Keep cool! While there hasn’t been much research on supplements and herbal remedies, some women have found that black cohosh eases hot flashes; one study showed that listening to relaxing music or practicing slow-breathing exercises could reduce their frequency. For many women, the end of periods — and cramps, bloating and PMS-ing — is something to celebrate!

In Your 60s

Welcome to a new concept: freedom! Whether it’s thanks to becoming an empty nester, being newly retired, or just shaking off societal expectations, it’s all about you from now on. Here’s to prioritizing your mental and physical well-being!

Hearing and Vision

Along with declining vision, hearing loss is an issue: One-third of Americans in their late 60s and early 70s have hearing loss. And after 75, half of us will have difficulty hearing.

POWER UP: Ask for help, especially since this can be socially isolating. Today’s hearing aids are often more discreet than previous models, so don’t hesitate to talk with your doc about whether you’re a candidate. Only 30% of adults 70 and older who could use them ever have, reports the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

Bones

Women are at higher risk of developing osteoporosis (about one-quarter of women age 65 and older in the U.S. suffer from it, versus less than 6% of men) because of rapid loss of bone density during and after menopause.

POWER UP: Take a proactive approach and get screened regularly for bone disease. You can help lower your odds of it by starting an exercise plan with weight-bearing movements (like walking, hiking, jogging, climbing stairs, weight training, and even dancing) and making sure you get enough calcium and vitamin D.

The Future of Aging

Somewhere between early adulthood and middle age, a compound in your cells called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) begins a gradual decline. NAD+ helps power hundreds of metabolic processes and keeps a group of proteins called sirtuins active. You want them to stay active, since they can contribute to overall health and longevity.

Leonard Guarente, Ph.D., director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT and chief scientist and cofounder of Elysium Health, discovered their role and importance. He says sirtuins are the “guardians of health maintenance” in cells.

While experts are able to make some generalizations about growing older, it’s a different experience for everyone. “People are very diverse in terms of their aging rates, and the level that one person hits by age 50, another may not hit until 60,” says Morgan Levine, Ph.D., assistant professor of pathology at Yale School of Medicine.

Biological Age

This is why many researchers also talk about biological age, a measurement focusing on biological markers that show how your systems are actually aging. “About 68% of people will have a biological age within five years of their chronological age, but you can also find individuals who are 10 years older or younger,” she explains.

You can’t stop aging, of course, but lifestyle choices make a real difference. And research is focusing on what else can be done. “People want to play an active role in their own health maintenance,” says Dr. Guarente. He and his team at Elysium Health are looking to develop a test that will let people find out and monitor their NAD+ levels.

True Age

The hypothesis is that NAD+ levels are a better measure of aging than chronological age. And in theory, knowing them would help people make profound changes. “Successful aging is not the imitation of youth,” says Dr. Rowe. “Making yourself look better on the outside won’t impact what’s going on inside.” At the end of the day, it’s internal functions that actually matter for our health and life span.

Original article here

26 Jan 2023
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Who Has Time for Hobbies?

One of the bigger lessons I got from reading Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, was the importance of scheduling your leisure time.

Scheduling time for hobbies may sound unnecessary. Aren’t those the things you do for fun?

Yet, I would wager that most of us have activities we’d like to do on the side but never seem to have time for:

Learning a language
Art
Sports and activities
Reading for fun
Creating something

A common way to look at this state of affairs is to argue that we don’t have time for these things because we’re too busy. We want to relax at the end of a hard day, with whatever meager hours are left over.

This idea assumes we mostly use our time wisely, and if there isn’t time for something at the end of the day, it must be because there wasn’t time for it to begin with.

Where Does Your Free Time Really Go?

The view put forth by Newport in his book is that we tend to invest a lot of our time on various, low-value leisure activities that neither give us meaning or much enjoyment. Think television, Netflix, video games, social media and web surfing.

These activities often don’t provide much value, but they have really low barriers to get started. That combined with carefully engineered reward mechanisms keep them occupying our attention for many hours in the day.

In this view, it’s not that we don’t have time for high-quality pastimes because we’re too busy. Rather it’s because the default is to do something less worthwhile. If we could momentarily push ourselves out of these bad habits and onto something else, we’d be happier overall.

The solution is simply to schedule time for activities you care about.

How I’ve Been Applying This Idea

There’s two ways I’ve been working to integrate this idea more in my own life:

The first is to set strict limits on internet and television use, outside of a few high-quality areas. Right now I have LeechBlock configured on my phone to block my biggest time-wasting websites if I use them more than an thirty minutes per day total. I also have ten minute blocks on my iPhone per day for YouTube and other apps that I mostly use to waste time.

Thirty minutes per day is still more than enough time to follow everything I care about.

The second way I’ve been trying to integrate this idea is proactively scheduling time for higher-value hobbies. Making a goal to do some activity every evening, Monday to Thursday, whether it’s learning salsa, painting, attending a Chinese language meetup or going to the gym with friends, makes me less likely to fall back into binge-watching old television shows before going to sleep.

What If You Really Don’t Have Time?

The idea of scheduling hobbies tends to provoke one of two reactions:

The first comes from people who don’t like the idea of putting in effort to have fun. Why should you schedule fun–shouldn’t it be spontaneous?

However, I think the problem is often that there are barriers to starting activities you’d find really meaningful and enjoyable in your life, so the path of least resistance is usually not the most satisfying. Scheduling is just one way to avoid this trap.

The second reaction comes from people who argue they actually don’t have any time for hobbies. They’re truly too busy to do any of those things, since they work eighty hours per week, have seven kids and are studying for a dozen exams.

It’s hard to respond to this second objection because, there really are people in such a situation. You may even be in this situation yourself.

However, I also know that some of the highest-achieving, busiest people I know, nonetheless put in a lot of time in high-quality leisure activities.

Do You Really Lack Time, or Are You Just Stressed and Tired?

This suggests to me that the feeling that you have no time is often a reflexive evaluation about the amount of stress and exhaustion you experience to do the things you have to do in life, rather than an objective assessment about the number of hours per day you have no choice over.

My guess is that for most people in this situation, if you did a timelog, you’d find there’s lots of “wasted” time, and that your self-assessment mostly reflects the fatigue and stress you feel.

However, if it truly is fatigue and stress, rather than genuine lack of time, then that’s all the more reason to invest in high-quality hobbies. It’s the meaningless web surfing and Netflix binging that can make your life feel like a complete grind. Creating, learning, adventuring, socializing and experiencing are ways to reduce that stress and fatigue.

Therefore, paradoxically, I think it’s often the very people who claim they cannot possibly schedule their hobbies that need to do it most.

Original post here

18 Jan 2023
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Why Failure Is Fabulous

The idea is not to turn failure into success, per se, but to be open to what our failures have to teach us about who we are and who we aim to be. There may be a “success” inside the failure that you’re not seeing…

Failing big can mean you took a big risk.

Failing at something may mean that you extended yourself beyond your comfort zone. You did something you weren’t familiar with doing; or you tried to do something you had never done before. Congratulate yourself on making the effort. What do you know now that you didn’t know before? Is it something you want to try again? Do you need to reexamine your assumptions? Get help? Take more time? Take a different approach?

Failing can indicate that you’re doing something against your will.

Sometimes we do something because others encourage us to do it, or it’s something we feel we should do; but it’s not what we really want to do. Failing is the feedback that wakes us up and asks: what are you doing? Why are you doing this? What was my reason for doing this in the first place? Was the reason for your failure that you didn’t put your heart into the effort? Maybe it’s simply the wrong thing for you to do.

That’s good information.

Failure can indicate you’re ahead of your time.

One of the hardest kinds of failure is when you’re enthusiastic and excited about an idea – that no one seems to share. I, for instance, wrote a speech called “The ‘F’ Word – The Positive Aspects of Failure” more than ten years ago. I saw then that society’s hyper focus on success was blinding us from benefiting by learning what didn’t work. When other people don’t understand what you’re doing, or tell you that your idea is dumb, or wrong, it just may be that they haven’t caught up with you yet. Don’t let other people’s indictments steer you away from what you know is true.

Failure can lead you in a new direction.

The tried and true may lead you to success. But failure, if you’re open to looking at it, will most certainly lead you in a new direction. History is rife with stories of people who were trying to solve a particular problem and ended up discovering something completely unexpected. The same could be true for you. You may flop at “American Idol” but find that you make a great singing coach. Or when you throw your ceramics at the wall, you may find they make a lovely mosaic. Failure breaks things apart – leaving you the opportunity to put the pieces back together in a whole new way.

Failure reminds us that certain things are beyond our control.

This is the biggest and hardest lesson for us to learn. There are times in our lives when we do try our hardest, give it our best, apply all of our interest and talent and still fail at the attempt. And sometimes, the more we try, the worse it gets. In this case, it’s important to realize that some things are beyond our control. We cannot always make things turn our right for ourselves and certainly not for others. Knowing in our hearts that we tried our best and gave it our all is all we can do. Acknowledging that is what allows us to go and try again. Failure in this case teaches us that we must focus on the process and the moment as much as the ultimate reward and outcome. Being present to the moment is the reward.

There are all sorts of ways to look at failure, but maybe it all really comes down to this: without knowing what didn’t work, how can you identify what did?

Remember: Thomas Edison, one of the greatest inventors of all time, said of his attempts to invent an electric light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

About the Author:

Susan E. Schwartz is a writer and consultant living in San Mateo, California.

14 Jan 2023
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The Mind Gym: Five Ways to Make Exercise a Pleasure

For most of my adult life, exercise was an ordeal. Even mild workouts felt grueling and I left the gym in a fouler mood than when I’d arrived. The very idea of the runner’s high seemed like a cruel joke.

As a science writer investigating the mind-body connection, however, I was surprised to discover many psychological tricks that can turn the pain into pleasure. Putting these simple tips to the test, I now happily burn between 6,000 and 7,000 calories a week with high-intensity interval training, 5km runs and yoga. What was once a torment is now the highlight of my day.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s the science behind the five strategies that I found most transformative.

1. Let music be your pacemaker

Choosing the right music for a workout can be as important as picking the right playlist for a party, with ramifications for your enjoyment and your performance.

The benefits are not only found in motivational lyrics – though there’s no doubt that upbeat tracks can infuse you with positive feelings that can help to drown out the sensations of fatigue; when you are lost in the music, you simply forget how hard you are working out.

There are also some physical benefits. Loud, high-octane music also increases our “physiological arousal”, resulting in a faster heart rate that will deliver more oxygen to our muscles. And research by Costas Karageorghis, a professor of sport and exercise physiology at Brunel University London, shows that we naturally synchronise our body’s motion to the underlying rhythm. This reduces any energy-wasting irregularities in our movements and results in more efficient use of our muscles.

If you want to make the most of the pacemaker effect, the tempo of the music must match the type of exercise you are trying to perform. If you are taking a step for every beat, around 170-180bpm (such as Roar by Katy Perry) would be right for a high-intensity run. For energetic cycling, you might want something slower, such as Dangerous by David Guetta ft Sam Martin, at 92bpm.

2. Ignore #fitspo posts

Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, you’ll come across countless “fitspiration” accounts offering pictures of perfect pecs and tight torsos – a portrait of what might be possible if you only follow the right regime. Such images might seem like a sensible source of motivation, a way of focusing your mind on what you want to achieve. But a study led by Ivanka Prichard at Flinders University, Australia suggests these accounts can lead to a less rewarding workout.

The participants first scrolled through a set of 18 images. Some saw supposedly motivational photos related to fitness, such as before-and-after shots depicting a body transformation. Others saw travel photos of attractive locations. They then took to the treadmill for a 10-minute workout. Far from encouraging the exercisers, the #fitspo images had a negative effect on their mood and increased their rating of “perceived exertion”, so that they found the activity more tiring than the people who had seen the travel snaps. This seemed to be tied to lower body satisfaction – the sight of the fitness gurus had left them feeling less attractive and more concerned about their weight and shape, which put a downer on the whole experience.

3. Reframe the pain

If you are just getting started on a new fitness regime or simply having a bad day, it’s very easy to interpret feelings of fatigue as a sign of failure. The heart thumping hard in your chest, the burning of your lungs, the aches of your limbs – your body seems to be yelling at you to stop exercising. The sensations may even trigger cycles of catastrophic thinking, in which you start to exaggerate your discomfort – “this is awful”, “I can’t take it”, “I’m never going to get fit”.

Psychological science suggests that these thoughts will only amplify your distress – which may, of course, discourage you from continuing your workouts in the future. To avoid this fate, you can practise “cognitive appraisal”. This could involve taking a deliberately dispassionate view that avoids negative interpretation; you might try to passively observe the feelings without judging them. You might even try to see discomfort as a sign of progress – that you are successfully pushing your body to the max.

Studies show that these small changes in mindset can soften the sense of physical distress and the perceived exertion of exercise. Through the mind-body connection, they could even activate a beneficial “expectation effect” – akin to the placebo effect – that alters the physiological response to the exercise. One experiment by Prof Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Turin found that reframing muscle aches as a positive signal can ramp up the production of the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids and opioids, natural analgesics that could mask the strain.

4. Engage your imagination

Many athletes swear by the power of visualisation. American swimmer Michael Phelps, for example, imagined each event in exquisite detail. “I can see the start, the strokes, the walls, the turns, the finish, the strategy, all of it,” he wrote in his autobiography, No Limits. “Visualising like this is like programming a race in my head, and that programming sometimes seems to make it happen just as I imagined it.”

Sports science seems to back this up: the use of mental imagery can improve the accuracy of our movements, and even our overall strength. Studies show that people who spend a few minutes each day visualising the lifting of heavy weights see bigger strength gains than those who did not practise an imaginary workout. The mental rehearsal is thought to boost the nerve signals sent from the brain to the muscles, increasing the force you can exert when you finally visit the gym. This technique can be especially useful in minimising the loss of strength while recovering from injury.

5. Use temptation-bundling

For many of us, the biggest battle is getting to the gym in the first place when there are so many other activities vying for our time and attention. It’s much harder to summon the willpower to put on your trainers when you might be curled up on the sofa with a trashy novel.

If this is an issue, you can try temptation-bundling, which involves packaging the things you don’t want to do with one of your guilty pleasures. The technique was developed by Prof Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, who gave people iPods loaded with four addictive audiobooks to enjoy while they worked out. The simple strategy increased their gym attendance by 29% over the following seven weeks.

So dust off your trainers. With each of these strategies nudging you towards your fitness goals, you may find soon find yourself making substantial gains with very little pain.

Original article here

10 Jan 2023
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My Afternoon As A Canophilic*, Judgmental A****** (And What I Learned)

After months in pandemic solitary without connecting to any other living thing, I felt that my body would explode.

With no one around, I felt stymied. But then, I thought of a clever ruse.

I’d call my brother and tell him that my dog-niece, Sophia, asked to see me.

My brother replied that he didn’t know Sophia used the phone, but in any case, she was busy.

Desperate to get my hands on something, I devised another clever plan.

I’d go to the park and hug a tree.

Canophilia in action

I didn’t acknowledge it at the time, but deep down, I must have realized that, at the park, chances were good I’d find a doggie or two to use for my personal petting purposes.

Walking toward the park, I notice a doggie right away. He and his person are playing on the (fenced-off) ballfield. I could open the gate and say hello, but that would be odd. Suspicious. Awkward.

I nix that idea and continue walking toward the tree. Slowly.

As luck would have it, the puppy and his person are exiting the ballfield just as I am (very slowly) walking by the gate.

“Can I say hello to your dog?” I ask, trying to remain calm and not start jumping up and down.

“Sure!” the guy says. (By this time I’m already deeply involved in puppy nuzzling.)

“He’s so cute!” I yelp. “A puppy puppy!”

“Yep. Just 16 weeks old.”

The puppy, Rufus, and I were both squealing and wriggling with delight. Rufus got so excited he peed. I managed to hold that part of myself intact.

“OK, that’s enough,” says his dad.

We both strike big puppy-eye looks in Dad’s direction asking for more time – but it doesn’t work.

We go our opposite ways, casting longing looks behind us.

Tree-mendous insight

I take a deep breath, shake it off, and continue down the path to go talk to the tree. Tree gives me a warm hello as soon as I come under its branches. I stroke its rough bark and feel calm immediately.

“Good to see you!” Tree greets me. “You used to come here with your dog, Bailey. It’s been a long time. I was wondering when you’d be back!”

“You remember me?” I exclaim, moving in closer so Tree and I can be heart-to-heart. “How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you stand everything that’s going on?”

“You just ‘be’,” says Tree. “You listen. You watch. You grow. Things go by. Things change. You’re still here.”

You’re right. I am here, I realize.

I stand, eyes closed, front-to-front with Tree, then back-to-back. Tree’s presence is strong, centered, serene.

I take a deep breath…then open my eyes…and see….the picnic table.

No picnic

The picnic table, covered with crap! Litter! Garbage! On the table and all over the ground!

“I don’t understand!” I yell. (I don’t think I yelled out loud, but I can’t be sure.) “Who are these people? How can they come to a public place and leave all this crap behind?”

I storm away from Tree and go to get a closer look at the crap.

Food wrappers. Labels. Paper. Cigarette butts.

I stare at it. I fume. And then I think – I have to fix this! So I start picking up the crap. And with every piece, I yell and grouse and complain and judge and fume a little more.

It probably takes me at least four minutes to pick it up. Maybe less. Two minutes. (So I guess there wasn’t as much crap as I thought.)

But it does look a lot better when I finish picking it up and throwing it all away. And I feel better. For at least a minute. Maybe 30 seconds…before I notice something else. How had I missed it? What is that? On the ground? Coming out of the grass?!

Wild, unwanted plants

A weed! Not just a weed, but a sprawling weed. With flowers! Encroaching on the lawn!

“You don’t belong here!” I yell at the weed. Then I get down on my knees and pull it out. (It wasn’t easy.) And then…I see another weed just like it. And I pull that one out, too.

And then another. And another. And another. Soon, I have a whole big pile of weed-parts.

“The gardeners are going to wonder who was digging up the grass,” I think. But I left the shredded weeds in a big pile anyway.

Then, I kept pulling up some more.

“Why shouldn’t we be here?” one of the weeds asks me.

“This is a lawn!” I shout. This is supposed to be grass. You can’t just take over! You don’t belong here!”

For every weed I take out, there is another one. And then I notice that these weeds are entrenched all over the grass. There is no way I could pull them all out. And what difference would it make if I did? They would just come back. Or another one would.

I realize I can’t stop the weeds. But I wanted to. I really, really wanted to.

“Maybe I’m not as tolerant as I think,” I thought.

“Maybe you’re not,” I agreed.

By this time, my hands are filthy and dirt is packed into my nails. In the distance, across the park, puppies are playing. But it doesn’t feel right to go after them. I don’t think it would be very nice to rub dirt into some poor puppy’s fur.

Feeling slightly disgusted with myself, I head back to my car, brushing off my hands and picking the dirt out of my nails as I walk. I know it’s time to go home, but I’m not quite ready to leave.

As I get close to the ballfield, I see two fuzzy bodies playing chase. I notice they’re making their way toward the side field gate. I start brushing my hands off a bit more vigorously.“If I time it right I can meet them on the walkway just as they come out”, I surmise.

Canophilia, Part 2

Sure enough, as I come down the path, two adorable goldendoodles are heading right toward me. BINGO!

“Can I say hello to your puppies?” I ask, crouching down to doggie-reception level. Before either their mom or dad can say yes, I’m ready to receive sloppy kisses.

The dogs, Starbucks and Cappuccino (who does that?) feel just as soft as they look. I indulge in every second of nuzzling I can grab.

Their parents stand by patiently, but I don’t want to push it.

“Thanks for letting me say hello to your puppies,” I say, trying to sound casual.

“Sure!’ they reply and walk off.

“Ahhhh…” The tension that had been building in my body finally releases. I got what I so desperately needed.

As I walk back to my car with a skip in my step I’m suddenly brought up short with a thought that strikes me like a nasty thwack on the nose: “I am a puppy predator! I came to the park with the specific intention of getting my puppy needs met.”

“What if I hadn’t found any doggies?” I ask myself. “How would I have felt then?”

“You would have been one hell of a cranky banana,” I answer back.

I imagine how painful it must be to have serious urges that are not as easily and acceptably met. I think of what a few months of social isolation did to me. What about people who have a lifetime of isolation and rejection?

“Imagine what that leads to,” I think.

I don’t want to think about it. But I do feel a surge of compassion for the pain that drives people to do unreasonable things, just to make the hurting stop.

Then, another thwack!

I realize that I’m not just a puppy predator, I’m also a judgmental specist (one who is prejudiced against particular species). Who am I to decide what plants do or do not belong in a particular place – especially public grounds? Those poor plants were minding their own business until I came along and ripped them out of the ground!

“That must be how some people feel when they see people they feel don’t belong,” I think. “They want to rip them out. I guess I have those kinds of feelings, too. Different situation – same feelings.”

So I have to acknowledge that as angry and frustrated as I get at all the people I think of as dangerous, intolerant, judgmental assholes, I have more in common with them than I’d like to believe or admit.

Except I now believe and admit it.

So, maybe I’m not as bad as I think.

And maybe they’re not as bad as I think, either.

And maybe there’s more than a little hope for us all.

* dog-loving

About the Author:

Susan E. Schwartz is a writer and consultant living in San Mateo, California.

05 Jan 2023
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Six Ways To Create Inner Peace And Confidence In The New Year

We all want to feel inner peace. We look for it throughout our entire lives, as being at peace allows us to dream and to actually follow those dreams. When we are at peace with ourselves, we are more understanding and loving towards others, we are able to embody the concept of being One, and therefore we create deeper and more meaningful connections with family, friends and people in general.

Confidence is very important, too. When we have confidence in our inner self, we are more prepared to take risks to advance, and we feel focused and motivated to face challenges. Confidence is believing in our own abilities and skills to do what we want and need to do in order to achieve a good quality of life, not only in the physical world, but also in the spiritual realms of existence.

I want to share a few ways of creating inner peace and confidence in this new year. Just by committing to one of these suggestions, you will see transformation happening in your soul and body.

Change habits

We are all attached to habits that in the long run do not allow us to advance in our inner self journey. In this sense, observing one self in order to identify a few of those habits is advisable. A good way to do this is to sit down in silence and review your daily habits one by one, being very honest with yourself.

Once you have identified those habits you want to change or completely delete from your life, start with the process of substitution. Go little by little and be realistic, which means doing what you are prepare to do, without overwhelming yourself, because implementing new habits should be easy. If you are going to get stressed trying to make a lasting change, not doing it at all is better. Your emotional and mental health come first.

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” ~ Ghandi

Start a daily meditation practice

Meditation has been found to have numerous scientific benefits. For example, it reduces stress, improves concentration, boosts creativity, and increases happiness. Meditation affects our mental health in a positive manner, decreasing anxiety and depression, improving sleep, and enhancing self-awareness

The benefits of meditation touch our physical being as well. Research shows that it helps lower blood pressure, thereby improving cardiovascular health and strengthening our immune system.

There are numerous types of meditation. However, when starting it is better to follow guided meditations, as this kind of meditation allows us to understand what we are really doing and to enter into the practice with ease. And don’t overwhelm yourself! Set an achievable time, like 5 to 10 minutes per day, to start. Once you have learned to meditate for this length of time comfortably, you can increase it.

“The energy of the mind is the essence of life.” ~ Aristotle

Cultivate a positive attitude

A positive attitude has been linked with increased happiness, health and success in all areas, including the spiritual realm. Make an effort to be more positive this year. This does not mean you should avoid negative thoughts and feelings. Instead, acknowledge them and aim to elevate yourself by seeing them in another light. Find solutions from there.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

Practice living in the now

Making a conscious effort to focus on the present involves attention. We have to control our attention, observe where we are placing it and bring it to the now. It is normal to think about the past or the future, but remember that the past is gone and the future never really arrives, we always live it in the present. Sense, live and enjoy every moment of your day. Try this approach and see what happens.

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Practice gratitude

Gratitude is a powerful feeling, because, for me, it is love in action. Make it a habit to focus on the things you are grateful for, big and small. You could start a gratitude journal, which I am doing this year. I have created my own journal and my aim is to write in it every day. You can also take a few moments each day to reflect on the things you are grateful for.

Science has proven that feeling and expressing gratitude impacts our emotional and mental health in a positive way. In fact, the HeartMath Institute has discovered that, “Gratitude releases a powerful, self-rewarding feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain.” Furthermore, they have measured the heart rhythms of people when they feel gratitude and appreciation, and the results show a coherent rhythm: in other words a coherent heart.

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

Get organized

While this advice might not seem to be “spiritual”, nourishing our inner self requires discipline, will and order. Organisation in certain areas of our lives brings us joy and a sense of freedom.

This same idea should be applied to our spiritual practices, meaning that it is important to create a routine and ways of tackling such practices. For example, every morning I start my day with a short meditation and connection to the Source exercise, then I say a few decrees and I end with a short positive visualisation of the activities of the day.

Our external life needs organisation, too. One of the things I do the first month of the year is reorganise my closet, and any place at home in need of order. By doing so, I am creating space not only in my physical surroundings, but in my mind and in my heart. I encourage you to get rid of anything that bothers you and is only collecting dust. Organisation is liberation!

“Organization is what makes the impossible possible, the easy easy, and the difficult manageable.” ~ Zig Ziglar

About the Author:

Veronica Sanchez De Darivas is Chilean-Australian, now living in the UK and a proud mother of teenage twins. A spiritual awakening teacher, bestselling author, pineal gland (third eye) activator and Certified Instructor for the Cyclopea Method, Veronica is currently the only instructor in the world teaching the Cyclopea Method in English.

26 Dec 2022
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In Praise of Doing Nothing

In the 1950s, scholars worried that, thanks to technological innovations, Americans wouldn’t know what to do with all of their leisure time.

Yet today, as sociologist Juliet Schor notes, Americans are overworked, putting in more hours than at any time since the Depression and more than in any other in Western society.

It’s probably not unrelated to the fact that instant and constant access has become de rigueur, and our devices constantly expose us to a barrage of colliding and clamoring messages: “Urgent,” “Breaking News,” “For immediate release,” “Answer needed ASAP.”

It disturbs our leisure time, our family time – even our consciousness.

Over the past decade, I’ve tried to understand the social and psychological effects of our growing interactions with new information and communication technologies, a topic I examine in my book “The Terminal Self: Everyday Life in Hypermodern Times.”

In this 24/7, “always on” age, the prospect of doing nothing might sound unrealistic and unreasonable.

But it’s never been more important.

Acceleration for the Sake of Acceleration

In an age of incredible advancements that can enhance our human potential and planetary health, why does daily life seem so overwhelming and anxiety-inducing?

Why aren’t things easier?

It’s a complex question, but one way to explain this irrational state of affairs is something called the force of acceleration.

According to German critical theorist Hartmut Rosa, accelerated technological developments have driven the acceleration in the pace of change in social institutions.

We see this on factory floors, where “just-in-time” manufacturing demands maximum efficiency and the ability to nimbly respond to market forces, and in university classrooms, where computer software instructs teachers how to “move students quickly” through the material. Whether it’s in the grocery store or in the airport, procedures are implemented, for better or for worse, with one goal in mind: speed.

Noticeable acceleration began more than two centuries ago, during the Industrial Revolution. But this acceleration has itself … accelerated. Guided by neither logical objectives nor agreed-upon rationale, propelled by its own momentum, and encountering little resistance, acceleration seems to have begotten more acceleration, for the sake of acceleration.

To Rosa, this acceleration eerily mimics the criteria of a totalitarian power: 1) it exerts pressure on the wills and actions of subjects; 2) it is inescapable; 3) it is all-pervasive; and 4) it is hard or almost impossible to criticize and fight.

The Oppression of Speed

Unchecked acceleration has consequences.

At the environmental level, it extracts resources from nature faster than they can replenish themselves and produces waste faster than it can be processed.

At the personal level, it distorts how we experience time and space. It deteriorates how we approach our everyday activities, deforms how we relate to each other and erodes a stable sense of self. It leads to burnout at one end of the continuum and to depression at the other. Cognitively, it inhibits sustained focus and critical evaluation. Physiologically, it can stress our bodies and disrupt vital functions.

For example, research finds two to three times more self-reported health problems, from anxiety to sleeping issues, among workers who frequently work in high-speed environments compared with those who do not.

When our environment accelerates, we must pedal faster in order to keep up with the pace. Workers receive more emails than ever before – a number that’s only expected to grow. The more emails you receive, the more time you need to process them. It requires that you either accomplish this or another task in less time, that you perform several tasks at once, or that you take less time in between reading and responding to emails.

American workers’ productivity has increased dramatically since 1973. What has also increased sharply during that same period is the pay gap between productivity and pay. While productivity between 1973 and 2016 has increased by 73.7 percent, hourly pay has increased by only 12.5 percent. In other words, productivity has increased at about six times the rate of hourly pay.

Clearly, acceleration demands more work – and to what end? There are only so many hours in a day, and this additional expenditure of energy reduces individuals’ ability to engage in life’s essential activities: family, leisure, community, citizenship, spiritual yearnings and self-development.

It’s a vicious loop: Acceleration imposes more stress on individuals and curtails their ability to manage its effects, thereby worsening it.

Doing Nothing and ‘Being’

In a hypermodern society propelled by the twin engines of acceleration and excess, doing nothing is equated with waste, laziness, lack of ambition, boredom or “down” time.

But this betrays a rather instrumental grasp of human existence.

Much research – and many spiritual and philosophical systems – suggest that detaching from daily concerns and spending time in simple reflection and contemplation are essential to health, sanity and personal growth.

Similarly, to equate “doing nothing” with non-productivity betrays a shortsighted understanding of productivity. In fact, psychological research suggests that doing nothing is essential for creativity and innovation, and a person’s seeming inactivity might actually cultivate new insights, inventions or melodies.

As legends go, Isaac Newton grasped the law of gravity sitting under an apple tree. Archimedes discovered the law of buoyancy relaxing in his bathtub, while Albert Einstein was well known for staring for hours into space in his office.

The academic sabbatical is centered on the understanding that the mind needs to rest and be allowed to explore in order to germinate new ideas.

Doing nothing – or just being – is as important to human well-being as doing something.

The key is to balance the two.

Taking Your Foot Off the Pedal

Since it will probably be difficult to go cold turkey from an accelerated pace of existence to doing nothing, one first step consists in decelerating. One relatively easy way to do so is to simply turn off all the technological devices that connect us to the internet – at least for a while – and assess what happens to us when we do.

Danish researchers found that students who disconnected from Facebook for just one week reported notable increases in life satisfaction and positive emotions. In another experiment, neuroscientists who went on a nature trip reported enhanced cognitive performance.

Different social movements are addressing the problem of acceleration. The Slow Food movement, for example, is a grassroots campaign that advocates a form of deceleration by rejecting fast food and factory farming.

As we race along, it seems as though we’re not taking the time to seriously examine the rationale behind our frenetic lives – and mistakenly assume that those who are very busy must be involved in important projects.

Touted by the mass media and corporate culture, this credo of busyness contradicts both how most people in our society define “the good life” and the tenets of many Eastern philosophies that extol the virtue and power of stillness.

French philosopher Albert Camus perhaps put it best when he wrote, “Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.”

Original article here

19 Dec 2022
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How “Good Will Hunting” Changed Men’s Mental Health for the Better

Brian was just a kid when he first saw the movie Good Will Hunting and wasn’t thinking about therapy or his mental health. The 29-year-old engineer was mostly just fascinated by stories about repressed geniuses and Matt Damon’s background story of being a Harvard dropout. He also thought it was pretty rad that the original script was intended to be a spy-thriller.

All of that combined appealed to his sixth-grader sensibilities when he saw the film broadcasted on cable seven years after it was released — so much so that the story of a guy who went to therapy to avoid jail time is still one of his favorite movies.

It wasn’t until he began struggling with anxiety and symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in his early twenties that Brian even thought about going to therapy. He was checking his locks and the stove 10 times before leaving the house, and then one night when he was coincidentally watching another Matt Damon spy movie, The Bourne Identity, his buddy gave him an edible that was too strong and he had a complete breakdown.

“I went for a walk and started having all these intrusive thoughts,” Brian tells me. “I found a therapist the next week.” After his first few sessions, Brian started to realize how much his favorite movie shaped his expectations. “Therapists kind of guide you to the answers rather than try to solve things for you,” he recalls. “The therapist is more or less trying to help him find his own way.”

Counselor and life coach Sam Nabil recalls seeing Good Will Hunting in 1997 when it first hit theaters. He didn’t realize at that moment that he wanted to work in the mental health field, but in retrospect, it steered him in that direction. And like Brian, the movie gave him a sense of what the therapeutic process was really like.

“It didn’t reinforce the idea that going to therapy magically cures all their dysfunctions,” Nabil explains. Rather, Good Will Hunting showed how complex, uncomfortable and intense real introspection can be, even with the help of a mental health professional and a genius-level IQ. The movie may not have convinced men to go to therapy directly, but it gave a lot of guys a reference point for how the process might go once they got there on their own.

Of course, not every guy is expecting to get choked by their therapist for disrespecting their dead wife, like Damon’s character Will does at his first appointment with Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams. But even in scenes that are obviously exaggerated by Hollywood, it shows “how therapy can easily become a pissing contest, especially when unprocessed trauma calls the shots and makes intimacy feel like the silliest and scariest thing in the world,” clinical psychologist Michael Alcee says. In other words, it gives guys an idea of how therapy might feel at its worst — like you’re up against a wall and can’t breathe.

Alcee, who also saw the movie in 1997 at the age of 20, remembers being intrigued by the therapy scenes years before he decided to become a psychologist. “This model of men sharing in strength and vulnerability together in the process of therapy was very revolutionary,” he notes.

Not every guy who is a fan the movie is convinced that Good Will Hunting represents therapy accurately. To Noam, who saw the movie on cable when he was 10 and has been in therapy for depression on and off since his teenage years, Will and Sean’s exchanges were not like any of his therapy sessions. “Therapy, in my experience, is boring. It’s work. It’s not usually thrilling or exciting or hilarious,” Noam, a 31-year-old academic studying philosophy, says. “Few therapists are as charismatic as Robin Williams.”

Casey, a professor of psychology at a local community college, echoes similar critical sentiments. As much as the movie “rocked my world on many frequencies,” it also made him feel more let down by the therapeutic process in real life. “The movie may provide some very unrealistic expectations for the rate of growth Will experiences. It doesn’t happen that quickly,” Casey notes, with some hope. “I’m always looking for my Robin Williams of therapy.”

At the same time, Casey connects with the movie to this day and credits it with getting him interested in the field of psychology. Hoping to become a therapist himself one day, Casey recently got a tattoo on his ribs of the math equation Will was completing at MIT because of how much the movie affected him. “It spoke to me in a way that made me feel, just, kind of seen,” he says.

Noam agrees: “It’s a mixed bag, but I love it.” For instance, by today’s standards, the movie may present a limited, hyper-masculine view of therapy, where men only get help when it’s court-ordered.

But for 1997, Noam suspects the movie did a lot for men’s mental health that they needed. “It’s not hard to make the case that the movie expresses a kind of toxic masculinity in addition to sensitive masculinity,” he says, but it was crucial to show men talking about their feelings in this way, even if it was not entirely realistic. “The ways it depicted men as emotional and able to connect with one another, not in contrast to their masculinity but as an expression of their masculinity, has had a real, positive impact.”

Jay didn’t think the therapy scenes were that important to the movie when he first saw the movie when he was 17. “For like a decade after release, I saw this as a movie about Will’s relationship with his friends and Skylar more than anything else,” the 41-year-old who works in tech sales tells me. But after starting therapy to work on his own relationships over the past three years, he recently re-watched the movie after a trip to the bench Damon and Williams sat on. That was when something finally clicked. Your move, Chief.

As much as the movie meant to him initially, like many people, “I didn’t think therapy was the answer, I thought it was a small part,” Jay says. Now that he’s talking to a therapist, “I see why I was so drawn to the movie. I needed to unburden, I needed someone to tell me that it’s not my fault, instead of hanging onto so much for so long.”

Even after the tragic manner in which Williams lost his life to suicide in 2014, the movie remains an essential touchpoint in many men’s internal work on themselves. On top of that, the loss of musician Mac Miller, who died of an accidental overdose in 2018 and sampled dialogue from the movie on with song “Soulmate” have made men “realize that mental health struggles are, indeed, real and in need of addressing,” Nabil says.

These tragedies have “emphasized that having insight into how you should handle and manage your mental health is far different from actually feeling it and experiencing all that it comes with,” Nabil adds. “To men and their mental health, the loss of an icon known to make people laugh and entertain reinforced their tendency to keep it all in and be quick-fixers.”

As men continue to die by suicide and experience substance abuse at disproportionately high rates, it’s apparent that they need more than platitudes like “It’s not your fault.” But as Jay felt that day visiting the bench, sometimes that phrase is a good place to start, no matter how cheesy the movie may make it seem over 20 years later. To this day, it’s Brian’s favorite movie to quote with his therapist, who he still sees regularly. “I say it to my friends all the time,” Brian says.

It might be difficult to imagine a psychologist saying that to a client in earnest, but to Alcee, it’s even harder to avoid it. “It can actually be a quite important and useful sentiment to convey to clients, especially those who have been abused and had to internalize abuse as their own fault,” he explains. “But the phrase probably can sound trite because it was used in the film and took on a life of its own like any famous line.”

And while he tries to rephrase the same sentiment in sessions when it’s necessary, sometimes the quote slips out. But ultimately, he knows it’s not his fault.

Original article here