Journal of Magic & Happiness

[roundcoconut]

One of the other Rules of Earth, seems to be this:

If you indulge in emotions that don’t feel very good, then there winds up being this ripple effect, and then you wind up cleaning up a much bigger mess.

On the other hand, if you can get the ball rolling with emotions that DO feel good, then a (positive) ripple effect ensues, and then you have an emotional abundance which can overflow to others (if that’s your thing!)

I’ll confess here, that I indulged in some fear patterns, and I was choosing emotions of feeling threatened. And then I was sleeping like crap. And here we are! So, it’s going to be very important for me to practice thoughts and beliefs that lead to emotions of confidence, abundance and excitement.

Honestly, people who can at least get themselves some small beliefs of having something lovely to share with others, and some energy of enjoying the world around them (rather than fearing it) — that generally turns out well. People coming from that place can go to the gym and be creative with their workout and can enjoy seeing the other people at the gym — and that makes the workout pattern pretty fun and more likely to travel a good trajectory.

So I’m going to good job of this emotionally! I don’t mean being happy about everything, but coming from a clever and powerful place, in how I approach the world around me. That bit about taking an intelligent approach to people in the victim role, is one decent example of coming from a powerful place. Like, spotting the traps, and realizing you don’t have to fall for them.

Ha! Well, today I am writing some of the most incoherent posts of my entire posting history here. If there were a competition for rambly stream of consciousness rants, I think I’d win! Today at least.


**(This post can be rephrased as: We do best when we take responsibility for our emotions, and take into account the consequences of our emotions. If we don’t create positive emotional spirals for ourselves, who will? If we dig negative emotional holes for ourselves, then we wind up having to “dig out”)

[roundcoconut]

Fitness update! —

The schedule I am following right now, is based on high volume, low intensity. It’s the idea of putting in a lot of easy training sesssions, never really training to the point where the breathing becomes ragged and uneasy.

I’ve noticed that I can and DO break a sweat, without my breathing pattern becoming in any way uncomfortable. This is that middle zone, of WORKING the heart, legs and lungs enough to for them to adapt to the training load (enough for them to even HAVE a training load to adapt to!) — and yet not going overboard into an intensity level that cannot be sustained for 90 minutes. At its most basic level, this approach is about steady-state training.

One thing that many runners and coaches have mentioned, is that recreational athletes tend to run all their runs at the same pace, and at the same intensity level, which is a mistake. They run ten-minute miles for their long runs. They run ten-minute miles for their shorter runs. They just grind out the work, and never get better.

So, I think it’s probably important for me to make sure that I DO train at an easy pace most of the time — keeping the heart rate somewhere between maybe 125 and 135. And yes, it is totally fun to go harder a few times a week, but I want to make sure that I don’t fall into this “grind out the work and never get better” paradigm. I think that the high-140s heart rate isn’t something I should do terribly often! It’s intoxicating, but too high for my preferred approach.

And that’s my dull fitness post for today!

[roundcoconut]

It turns out that fitness is a WONDERFUL thing to obsess about. I’ve spent dozens and dozens of enjoyable hours listening to podcasts about heart rate training, and actually, just watching footage of various runners and races.

For whatever reason, this captures my imagination far more than the plant-based community does. I know that there are people here who LIKE to watch the latest podcast by a plant-based doctor, or (god help me!) the latest movie made about plant-based eating. I could not be more bored by this if I tried!

There is no right or wrong here — just different strokes for different folks!

And there definitely IS some overlap between the two, because the idea of becoming much leaner than I currently am — that also captures my imagination. But oddly, I am kinda over the plant-based eating thing as a hobby. Don’t wanna read another recipe. Don’t wanna listen to Chef AJ. Don’t wanna watch Cowspiracy. I’m way over it, in that way!

And in some ways, I think there is something good to be learned here. Like, why does the latest Dr Gregor video do nothing for me? Why am I so indifferent to the latest cheese sauce recipe?

Well, maybe I don’t need a reason, but I DO know that the minor points of plant-based eating spark no joy for me. I don’t wanna help guide people down their plant-based path. They can guide themselves. It’s not my chosen path in life to specialize in plant-based eating.

And yet, there was a post in the lounge along the lines of “get a life”, and I actually didn’t agree with that either. Like, if somebody here DOES like plant-based cooking as a hobby, then YES, please go ahead and enjoy the process of developing various versions of lentil soup, and trying out fun new variations on veggie burgers. The idea that people should “have a life” with hobbies other than plant-based eating, is kinda rude. Like, what’s better about being obsessed with running? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We can have whatever freaking hobbies and interests we want to have.

So there’s my rant for today. A rant about nothing. I’m so good at ranting, that I’m not positive what the overall thrust of that rant even was! Wow.....

[roundcoconut]

For whatever reason, I am very keen on clarifying things that annoy me a bit about the culture that surrounds me! So if that strikes anyone as (inappropriately or unenjoyably) negative, then definitely click away before I get going!

My thought for today is that Will to Bear Discomfort, is an important key to long term success in ANYTHING, but is generally misunderstood and generally not used properly.

We have to be willing to bear mild discomforts. Mild discomforts are things like denying yourself second helpings when your calorie needs have already been met. Mild discomforts are finishing your prescribed workout even if you ran out of audiobook.

Larger discomforts are not good to push through! Wearing clothes you don’t feel good in, after putting on a bit of weight is twisted. Bearing mild discomforts in the service of something greater, is beautiful, but putting yourself through ugly situations for no good reason, is unintelligent. There’s a difference!

Personally, I think that bringing an “enemy of your goal” into the house, is unintelligent. If someone or something is not good for you, there aren’t too many reasons to invite it in. Abstaining from something that sits appealingly on the kitchen counter is not really minor discomfort — for most of us it’s a larger booby trap than we can comfortably withstand (somewhat comfortably).

I would like to see people willing to do dozens of small and attainable things. Most people should walk for twenty minutes each day. Demanding forty minutes is probably too much unless or until that’s something that appeals to you.

On that note, I am encouraging myself to adopt the correct intensity level on my long workouts especially. That means keeping my heart rate below 145. There’s this mild discomfort of being unimpressive in front of my fellow gym members.

For me, I would be wise to endure the mild discomfort of going to bed before midnight. Over and over again.

There’s no pressure to stay in bed if an hour of insomnia goes by. But make the effort to put myself to bed each night.

One favorite thing, is the idea of extending my long days, just by ten or fifteen minutes. Not extending the length of any other day. Just the long day.

There’s my second stream of consciousness post in just one day! Yeehaw!!

[f00die]

perhaps obsession itself is unhealthy?
lack of perspective engendered by over-signification?
tunnel-vision is bad even if we are looking at a diamond?
no?

[roundcoconut]

Actually, I think it’s perfectly OK for us to have hobbies, whether we are intense about them or not. I’m hard pressed to see any right or wrong about it!

Like, if you like Civil War history, and you read Civil War books in your free time, who am I to say you should be more of a history generalist? Maybe it’s quirky to have only one big hobby, but it’s certainly not a crime!

Well, anyways, I sometimes laugh at how often people are measured against a standard that does not serve us. I DO know that we seem to have too few hours in a day to become really good at a lot of different things. Trade offs, y’know?

[roundcoconut]

A couple thoughts on learning skills and practicing behaviors:

I’m super-fascinated at how, if you want to people to be good at a skill, you would never really set them loose and watch them flail and falter.

If you wanted to train an excellent pilot, you’d have them work on the landings and takeoffs, REPEATEDLY, on a simulator, or later with a co-pilot, and only far later would you want them to fly solo.

And I think if you wanted to train an excellent surgeon, you’d have them perform similar procedures, whether on simulators, or on (yikes) dead or living lab animals. And you’d have them work with a highly qualified surgeon for many, many procedures, before they are alone in the operating room and facing things using only their own skill and knowledge.

And then, when you look at these other areas that require FAR less technical expertise, we have far worse systems for people to mentally rehearse discrete behaviors and execute those behaviors.

Like, this is a funny thought, but I honestly would love to see myself identify some clear-cut behaviors, and do this very process of cognitively rehearsing the behavior, correctly conceptualizing the desired behavior and executing the desired behavior, repeatedly unto competence and then automaticity.

Good coaches are able to do this for their athletes. But I think we ourselves, can become good coaches for our own behaviors.

Well, I just feel that if rats can be trained to press a lever when the researcher plays Beethoven, then certainly we can identify triggers that we would like to associate with positive behaviors. Right???

I’m fascinated by this!

[f00die]

Actually, I think it’s perfectly OK for us to have hobbies, whether we are intense about them or not. I’m hard pressed to see any right or wrong about it!

Like, if you like Civil War history, and you read Civil War books in your free time, who am I to say you should be more of a history generalist? Maybe it’s quirky to have only one big hobby, but it’s certainly not a crime!
...

i think our lives have higher quality
if we do many things vs. a few things
YOLO
a mix of activities is richer than an insect-like specialization?
despite the mental satisfaction (comfort-zone) that comes from mastery of some niche?
a civil war history specialist is less useful/interesting than a history generalist
unless we are just doing things for ourselves
and not for the sake of others...

[roundcoconut]

I was playing with this idea of identifying a behavior I want to be good at, and identifying a trigger, and doing a series of repetitions.

For a lot of people, it is probably true that it’s not immediately obvious how to immunize yourself to overeating. What I kinda decided upon was this:

Every Behavior Needs a Trigger.
For me, i decided that any time I was in a position of sitting around at home, I could have this behavior-triggering moment. I could initiate the process by (this sounds weird!) writing down some kind of simple recognition of the situation I’m in, and then setting the kitchen timer.

I decided to write down something like, “It’s 9:21, and you had a nice meal several hours ago, and now’s a good time to let your body digest, or just give your body some time to relax. You had enough to eat for dinner, and you also have some calories in storage for your body to use to power your heart and lungs for the next hour.”

I set the kitchen timer for 60 minutes after writing down a little statement like this, and then I kinda divert myself to some journaling, loosely ABOUT the importance and wisdom of giving your body a little bit of space to clean house (use up old calorie stores!) and all kinds of other beliefs and conceptualizations that can help me along in the process.

And when the 60 minutes is up, and the kitchen timer rings, I kinda mark it down as one iteration, and make note of the date and the time that I did a repetition of a behavior I am keen on acquiring.

So, I probably did six or seven iterations over the last two days. I called it “One Hour Diversion Therapy”, and I kinda think it’s brilliant. For me. Probably not for anybody else though!

The fascinating things about eating behaviors, is that you kinda gotta decide on a behavior that’s doable (not too freaking hard) and has a defined behavior and a defined endpoint. Sixty minutes to me, seems workable. Just sixty minutes to do something productive and non-caloric. And then kinda rewarding myself by marking down one successful completion of the behavior.

I tend to think that a 24-hour time period is too long (which is what most dieters do), and that the desired behavior is usually too broad and ill-defined (like “stay on plan”) and that the completion of the behavior does not create competence (because a strategy or process didn’t get defined clearly or carefully enough)

Well, that’s my brilliant and genius idea, but I can honestly see that anyone who practices a behavior is going to learn to do the behavior with much greater ease. Perhaps an outsider would see my technique as foolish, since it is not fancy or high-tech, but HA they would be so wrong!

I am always enamored of the adage, that Americans decided to make pens that could write in space. But Russians just sent their men up into space with a pencil.

Meaning, nobody needs anything more than a plan, and possible a little notebook to count your practice sessions in. People can learn to initiate and execute any behavior, as long as they are willing to break it down into steps, and just repeat, repeat, repeat.

So I am happy with what I’ve been doing, and having tons of fun! People like me really enjoying engineering repetitive tasks that accelerate learning.

[roundcoconut]

i think our lives have higher quality
if we do many things vs. a few things
YOLO
a mix of activities is richer than an insect-like specialization?

I can actually think of a lot of reasons why a person might be able to live happily, without have a “well-rounded” set of hobbies.

For one, I have remarked that very few people are able to achieve great proficiency at a foreign language, especially if they cannot decide on the one language to focus on. If you ever meet somebody who has lived four months in Argentina, and five months in Russia, and three months in China, you mostly find out that they cannot understand Spanish, or Russian or Chinese, as spoken to them by a common cab-driver (which is not a super-high standard!).

Also, I was friends with a woman once, who dabbled in everything, and discarded each hobby in turn. Because an activity is not fun at first, until you can produce a good product. Someone who takes up pottery probably can’t make a good pot until several dozen hours have been invested, and they probably cannot make a reasonable coffee mug until year 2. (I don’t know anything about pottery — just guessing!).

I just think — what a miserable way to live, to skim the surface of everything, and never achieve an expert level at anything. Some people just like getting to expert level, and y’kinda can’t do that if you’re frittering away your resources on multiple endeavors!

[roundcoconut]

I wonder if it’s true that people never achieve mastery around food, because their attempts are generally disorganized, overly complex and lacking in repetition?

Someone who wakes up every day and “tries to be a good parent” probably doesn’t make any steady gains, in any recognizable say.

But someone who practices a small thing, like “Tell me something nice your child did today” can become solid and proficient at this behavior. (Which probably isn’t tied to being a good parent, but hey, cut me some slack!)

I think it is probably true that people can train themselves to perform a sequence of behaviors, if we perform each component many times before expanding the list.

A person could probably learn a sequence of “Get home, make a cup of tea” and then branch out from there until they had an evening routine that they felt good about.

But “don’t binge on cookies in front of the TV” is a weak proposal. It’s just so geared for failure on so many levels.

I’m going to sound crazy, but I think that proper grocery shopping can be trained into total success. You just kinda have to know — in black and white — what to get. A behavior has to be pretty straightforward. If you set yourself up with the task of “Buy these four vegetables, buy these two pieces of fruit, and buy the biggest potato you can find” — well, that’s achievable.

But “get healthy stuff” leaves things too fuzzy. Hard to execute. Hard to assess success or failure.

So I have every intention of training my grocery shopping a little better. Sometimes I have bought too much. Sometimes I have bought things in the wrong portions. Because if you don’t have a list (or a clear cut intention), you can’t follow it.

[f00die]

...
For one, I have remarked that very few people are able to achieve great proficiency at a foreign language, especially if they cannot decide on the one language to focus on. If you ever meet somebody who has lived four months in Argentina, and five months in Russia, and three months in China, you mostly find out that they cannot understand Spanish, or Russian or Chinese, as spoken to them by a common cab-driver (which is not a super-high standard!).

Also, I was friends with a woman once, who dabbled in everything, and discarded each hobby in turn. Because an activity is not fun at first, until you can produce a good product. Someone who takes up pottery probably can’t make a good pot until several dozen hours have been invested, and they probably cannot make a reasonable coffee mug until year 2. (I don’t know anything about pottery — just guessing!).

I just think — what a miserable way to live, to skim the surface of everything, and never achieve an expert level at anything. Some people just like getting to expert level, and y’kinda can’t do that if you’re frittering away your resources on multiple endeavors!

gaining expertise for fun is not fun
playing/dabbling is fun
for example, who are you gonna speak to in the foreign language? unless you live in a foreign community
and then its not a foreign language...
past the point of "good enough", more proficiency is very expensive
but dabbling in pottery, then fishing, gardening, swimming, painting, music, is fun
little bit of this, little bit of that
the variety itself is stimulating

[WeeSpeck]

Hi Tracie,

I have to say I have been enjoying your thought processes as of late, especially as you apply it to your exercise and in one of your recent posts that you spoke of “One Hour Diversion Therapy”. It really made sense to me and I liked where you were going with that.

I do think we sometimes get lost in the big picture and it becomes so overwhelming that we give up because it seems impossible. While I think long term goals are necessary, incremental tasks are required to achieve them. Some days, we just have to look at the next spot we are going to place our foot and cheer for that victory when we don’t fall down. What does Lao Tzu say? “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

I know that is probably not where you were going with that post, but it is sort of where your thoughts took me. When I start one of my exercise sessions and I have a goal to run 30 minutes, it seems so overwhelming… every single time. But, I tell myself that I can get through the 5-minute warm up and put in another 5 minutes at my running speed. As I near the half-way mark, I think about how my body feels. My legs are warmed up. My breathing is even. I can go one more minute. Then I can quit.

After one minute passes, I assess again. I can go one more minute, then if I truly have to, I can quit. Soon, I am wrapping up my 30 minutes, one minute at a time. Maybe that is my One Minute Diversion Therapy.

I really like your idea of applying that same idea to push off eating. I just ate. I can go one more hour. Set the timer. Renegotiate after the time goes off. That is brilliant. I apologize if I completely misinterpreted your concept. But, it is a method I can wrap my head around.

Thanks for your insights!

[roundcoconut]

Hi Tracie, ...in one of your recent posts that you spoke of “One Hour Diversion Therapy”. It really made sense to me and I liked where you were going with that.

Holy crap! I like that you get this!!

While I think long quote="WeeSpeck"] goals are necessary, incremental tasks are required to achieve them.

Yes, that’s exactly how I see things too! Manageable groups of skills. Learn a few skills; add on when you get bored. Be sure we are practicing at the correct intensity level, otherwise mastery doesn’t happen.

OMG, I just thought about how brilliant it might be to do scenario walkthroughs several dozen times, when the actual difficulty level of the task cannot be reduced below a certain point. Totally an idea that has potential!

I really like your idea of applying that same idea to push off eating. I just ate. I can go one more hour. Set the timer. Renegotiate after the time goes off. That is brilliant. I apologize if I completely misinterpreted your concept. But, it is a method I can wrap my head around!

The thing that is so interesting, was that i started doing these iterations when no big urges to eat we’re present. Because I want to have the skill strengthened before I ever need to use it in a tougher situation. Strengthen the skill before you need it to come through for you.

I’m so glad you got something out of that concept! It was kind of a shot in the dark really.

[roundcoconut]

Another reason why using a scale might actually be a GOOD idea:

I’ve been starting the process of calibrating my daily intake, something like the systems that were often promoted in the 80s and 90s — five servings of x, three servings of y, 2 servings of z, and you check off your servings as you go.

Well, I’ve been playing around with four servings raw veg, three servings cooked veg, two fruits and one giant portion of starch. And trying to see whether I need to adjust up or down from there.

It seems that those levels might be the right ones right now! The foods besides the starch are surprisingly caloric, and I am honestly not a big calorie-burner.

So, I step on the scale each morning and the weight has been more or less steady for three days. So right now, I am not eating far too much or far too little. That is a relief.

The scale reads 111, and I do feel pretty again, even though my preferred range kept me at or below 108. But I feel pretty and it doesn’t get too much better than that!