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Tag Archives: writing tip
The Demon Lemon
Filed under 2022, writing humor, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Monday morning writing joke: “Happy hard”
Happy hard
There once was a writer of greeting cards, /
Who found this season a bit of a canard. /
All she had to say /
She’d said already for pay. /
To do it now for free was very hard.
Writing tip Wednesday: “It’s harder than it looks.”
Filed under 2021, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
Writing tip Wednesday: “Be not afraid”
Filed under 2020, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
This is What Your Overactive Brain Needs to Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Hint: Don’t Netflix and chill.
- Tara Swart
You already know how much better you feel after a good night’s sleep, but sleeping well helps your brain in less apparent ways than just not being groggy the next day. In fact, getting seven to nine hours of sleep each night can help secure your cognitive well-being.
In the short term, it gives your brain time to flush out refuse matter that builds up–like protein plaques and beta amyloid tangles–through a kind of waste chute called the glymphatic system. And over the long term, that can help stave off diseases like Alzheimer’s. So it pays to know a few tricks and habits to help yourself along to the land of nod. For starters, here’s what to avoid:
No More Nightcaps
It’s all too easy to slip into a routine of having a glass or two of wine each evening, and you wouldn’t be alone in thinking this helps you unwind and sleep better. But what you might not realize is how significantly impaired the quality of your sleep is when you drink.
Alcohol is a depressant and neurotoxin, which means it slows down the central nervous system’s processes by reducing electrical conductivity in the brain. This means that neurons, which send and receive the electrical signals that cause the release of neurotransmitters, operate more slowly. In fact, if you spent the evening drinking and then went to sleep wearing a heart-rate variability monitor, it would show significantly increased levels of stress for your body while you slept.
That’s thanks to the body’s physiological response when it’s trying to break down a toxin, the liver works harder when it should be resting, leading to a stressed state from which you’ll wake up feeling exhausted. Throughout the night, as the liver uses a higher proportion of the body’s energy than usual, the brain is starved of its usual resources and struggles to recuperate effectively for the next day.
Don’t Netflix and Chill
Many people like watching TV to relax after a long workday, and while that might help distract you from your daily worries, it doesn’t prepare your brain for a good night’s rest. Melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate sleep, is released into the bloodstream by the pineal gland. But darkness triggers the gland to start working, and it gets confused by the blue light that most screens emit.
Many people have heard of this issue when it comes to their smartphones, but it may not be enough to set aside just that device and not others. Even reading an e-book on a tablet or certain kinds of e-reader, or just watching ordinary television, can be potentially problematic. Try reading paper books and make sure you stop looking at all your devices’ screens for at least an hour before you hit the hay.
(Not sure what to do instead? For what it’s worth, sexual intimacy leads to the release of the bonding hormone oxytocin, which makes you feel comfortable and lowers your guard–helping to ease you into a good night’s sleep.)
Skip the Late-Night Snack
Eating a large, heavy meal is also a bad idea, especially acidic, spicy, or fatty foods, which can actively stimulate the brain. Certain foods like bacon and preserved meats, soy sauce, some cheeses, nuts, tomatoes, and red wine contain a chemical called tyramine, which causes the release of norepinephrine, a brain stimulant that boosts brain activity. Even some milky drinks, which many believe to be sleep-inducing, contain high quantities of sugar that can also keep you up. So make sure you check the label and choose your dinner carefully.
Now that you’ve cut these habits from your evening routine, what should you add to it instead? Here are a few good options for improving both the quality of your sleep and reducing the time it takes your brain to power down for the night.
Smell Some Lavender
Lavender is a powerful neuromodulator, which means that it lowers your blood pressure, heart rate, and skin temperature, making you more relaxed and likelier to fall asleep. Smell has a powerful and immediate impact on emotion and mood because of the proximity of the olfactory nerve (which contains the sensory nerve fibers relating to smell) to the brain.
There’s also an associative quality to regularly smelling lavender before you sleep. If you make this a habit, it will signal to your brain that it’s time to wind down (once you’ve established this association, you can tap into it on the road, too; just throw some lavender in your travel bag). If you don’t like lavender, jasmine is a good alternative and can produce similar effects.
Drink Nut Milk With Turmeric
Rather than buying a powdered milky drink that’s high in sugar, you can make your own relaxing bedtime drink using a nut milk, like almond, which is full of magnesium. Magnesium helps reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol and calms the nervous system.
As a secret ingredient, add turmeric, whose powerful anti-inflammatory properties can prevent nighttime stomach problems that might interrupt your sleep (and which have even been implicated in preventing dementia). If you want to sweeten your drink, use Manuka honey rather than sugar to help boost your immunity.
Have a Soak
Circadian rhythms are our bodies’ series of physical, mental, and behavioral changes. They follow a roughly 24-hour cycle and depend primarily on how bright our environment is. Because of these rhythms, our body temperature automatically dips a couple of degrees at night, causing us to feel sleepy.
So when you take a hot bath–ideally 60–90 minutes before bedtime–your body temperature rises, but the rapid, steeper cool-down period immediately afterward relaxes you. And since the best way to increase your magnesium levels is actually through your skin, you can try adding magnesium salts to your bath to decrease cortisol levels. You should also make sure your bedroom isn’t too hot and stuffy once you get out of the bath. A cooler room can help reduce your body heat by the couple of degrees needed to drift off.
While falling asleep might seem like a passive process, there’s a whole cocktail of neurotransmitters involved in it, including histamine, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, glutamate, and acetylcholine. But that means there are many physiological “levers” you can pull on your way to a better night’s sleep. Get your evening routine right, and you’ll be able to enjoy the spoils that come with it–better concentration, memory, and moods, enhanced creativity, and reduced inflammation and stress.
Dr. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, leadership coach, author, and medical doctor. Follow her on Twitter at @TaraSwart.
Filed under 2020, writing tip
Writing tip Wednesday: “Your Ability to Focus Has Probably Peaked: Here’s How to Stay Sharp”
Eliminating distractions is as important as heightening your focus. And no, they’re not the same thing.
- Chelsea Robertson, PhD
Here’s the Gist:
- Researchers say our ability to pay attention is equal parts focusing and ignoring.
- Irrelevant information bogs down our ability to suppress distraction, especially as we age.
- To increase our ability to focus, researchers suggest both boosting our ability to concentrate as well as reducing distraction. Here’s how:
- To reduce distraction…
- Use one screen, one browser window, and one computer program at a time.
- Keep your physical and virtual desktop tidy.
- To increase our ability to concentrate…
- Exercise, meditation, and spending time in nature may help boost cognitive control.
- Some cognitive exercises and immersive action video games also seem to improve our ability to focus.
Having a hard time focusing lately? You’re not alone. Research shows interruptions occur about every twelve minutes in the workplace, and every three minutes in university settings. In an age of constant digital interruptions, it is no wonder you’re having trouble ignoring distractions.
In their book, The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist, and Dr. Larry Rosen, a psychologist, explain how our ability to pay attention works and what we can do to stay focused.
It turns out, attention isn’t as simple as it seems. In fact, paying attention involves two separate functions: “enhancement” (our ability to focus on things that matter) and “suppression” (our ability to ignore the things that don’t). Interestingly, enhancement and suppression are not opposites, they are distinct processes in the brain.
From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“Although it may seem counterintuitive, we now appreciate that focusing and ignoring are not two sides of the same coin […] it is not necessarily true that when you focus more on something, you automatically ignore everything else better. We have shown in our lab that different [brain] networks are engaged when we focus compared to when we ignore the same thing.”
These processes are so separate, in fact, there are different networks of brain structures that carry out their respective functions, each of which is critical for attention.
If either of these brain processes is impaired, we lose focus. For example: we struggle with attention when we are tired, drunk, and, most notably, as we age.
Older adults are biologically more distractible than young adults. Personal anecdotes and scientific evidence demonstrate that our attentional capacity peaks near age twenty and diminishes over time. Gazzaley discovered that age-related declines are caused by a deficit in the suppression (ignoring) process.
From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“Our main finding in this study was that, interestingly, older adults [focus on] relevant information as well as twenty-year-olds. Where older adults suffered a deficit was in suppressing the irrelevant information … We discovered that their main attentional issue was that they are more distractible than younger adults.”
The attentional decline we experience as we age has more to do with our inability to filter out distractions, not our lack of concentration. If you think it’s hard to pay attention now, just wait until you age a few more years.
To improve our ability to pay attention, we need to both remove distraction (especially as we age) as well as boost our capability to focus on one task at a time. Here’s how…
How to Eliminate Distraction
Have you ever noticed someone squinting their eyes in an attempt to recall something? Turns out closing your eyes to remember may actually work. Why this quirky technique is effective tells us something important about how the brain filters information. When your eyes are closed, your brain isn’t working as hard to filter out visual information. Instead of struggling to ignore everything in your field of view, your brain can devote more attention towards scanning your memory. Gazzaley conducted an experiment to see what type of visual information is the most distracting. He and his team asked volunteers to remember details while looking at one of three visual scenes: a plain grey screen, a busy picture, or with their eyes closed. From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“The results of this experiment revealed that their ability to remember details [ …] was significantly diminished when their eyes were open and there was a picture in front of them, compared to either their eyes being shut, or their eyes being open while they faced a grey screen”
This experiment, along with others, provides evidence that cluttered and disorganized environments are more distracting than organized ones. Spaces filled with visual distractions force our brains to work harder to filter out superfluous information. When facing a pending deadline that you desperately need to focus on, clearing your desk and workspace to make it like the grey screen can increase your focus. Try clearing your virtual desktop of clutter as well. Limit yourself to one monitor, one browser tab or window and one computer program or app at a time. For more on “How to Clear Your Computer of Focus-Draining Distraction” click here. Removing distraction is important to maintain our focus as we age, but we also need to boost our capability to concentrate on one task at a time. Here’s how..
How to Boost Focus
Gazzaley and Rosen say some activities may boost cognition and attention by stimulating the brain’s ability to strengthen and reorganize existing neural connections, a process called neuroplasticity.
Activities that may boost cognition include physical exercise, meditation and spending time in nature. Recent research also finds that some cognitive exercises may also help. Although there are many brain training programs, some of which have over-promised and under-delivered, some scientists believe a new crop of clinically validated programs may soon come online.
From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“Cognitive exercises are an attempt to improve brain function by harnessing our brain’s inherent plasticity, rather than by explicitly teaching a strategy or a skill. Most training programs attempt to accomplish this goal not just through repetitive task engagement, but also through adaptivity.”
For Gazzaley and Rosen, adaptivity is key. Just as athletes must adjust their exercise routines as they grow stronger; cognitive exercise programs must also adjust to how well, or how poorly, the participant is doing in the task. Personalized adjustments make the training more successful.
New research shows the of cognitive exercise programs in older adults and healthy populations. Gazzaley and Rosen caution that while the research is encouraging, more clinical trials are needed to prove medical benefits. However, many in the industry are hopeful doctors will one day prescribe game-like cognitive exercises as part of a healthy brain training regimen.
In the meantime, certain currently available video game titles may actually be good for brain health and improve cognition.
From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“They are designed with a primary goal of engendering high levels of immersion, engagement, and enjoyment for the players, […] They do not tend to focus on one specific cognitive skill, as exercises usually do, but rather expose players to multiple demands that challenge a broad range of abilities. ”
A 2003 study of video-game play linked better cognition and higher scores on attention and memory tests in gamers vs non-gamers. But not all video games are created equal.
Non-gamers who played the first person shooter game, Medal of Honor, one hour per day for 10 days showed improvements in cognition, while the ones who played Tetris did not.
From The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World:
“[The researchers’] conclusion was that the nature of action video game play was critical in ‘forcing players to simultaneously juggle a number of varied tasks (detect new enemies, track existing enemies and avoid getting hurt, among others)…”
Video games may give you a boost, but not every off-the-shelf game will do the trick. The difference between the games that work and the ones that don’t gives us information into how the brain changes in response to its environment.
Video games good for building focus create environments that are fast-paced, interactive, adaptive and have complex reward and gaming structures. Like a brain playground.
In 2013, Gazzaley verified that a custom-designed cognitive video game, NeuroRacer, improves cognition in older adults. Dr. Gazzaley’s research led to a proprietary technology platform to measure and improve certain executive functions.
In the future, cognitive video games will be like “Neuro Cross Fit Training” as Gazzaley calls it. They will combine elements of physical activity, meditation, and cognitive exercise, rolled into one game.
In the meantime, we can do our part to keep our attentional focus sharp by first reducing distractions to improve our suppression capabilities, and then beefing-up the brain’s enhancement functions through activities like exercise, meditation, outdoor time, and immersive video games. We can boost our ability to concentrate by doing just one thing well at a time.
Filed under 2020, writing tip, Writing Tip Wednesday
This Simple Productivity Tip Nudges the Easily Distracted—Ever so Gently
A quick check-in will get you back on track. In time, you won’t even need one.
Quartz |
- Lila MacLellan
Despite its intense title, Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction (Viking) is not a book written exclusively for hard-charging, elite-level time managers.
Chris Bailey, its author, calls for kindness when you catch your attention slouching on the job. Why be hard on yourself? We’re all swimming in a sea of distractions and it’s not our fault if we get carried off by a current several times in a day.
“Your mind will always wander, so consider how that might present an opportunity to assess how you’re feeling and then to set a path for what to do next,” he writes in the just-published book.
One way he has trained his mind to keep its finite amount of attention on whatever task he has designated for it is through an “awareness chime.” Using any number of apps, you can set up your computer or laptop to chime hourly. That gentle, pleasing sound will nudge you to take a second and ask yourself, “Am I doing the thing I’m supposed to be doing right now?”
Bailey actually suggests posing many other questions, including one about the quality of your attentional flow, distractions you might be able to remove from your environment, and whether you’re ignoring something that is more important than what you’re doing, even if you’re technically on schedule.
“If you’re anything like me, your hourly awareness chime may at first reveal that you’re usually not working on something important or consequential. That’s okay—and even to be expected,” he writes. In time, however, like Bailey, you probably won’t need the chimes to stay on track.
The hourly chime hack is not new. But usually it’s recommended as a mindfulness tool that can help you remember to breathe or sit quietly for a few minutes, or as a reminder to stand and walk around the office, or just stretch.
Several years ago, Daniel Pink, who writes on the science of motivation and time management, featured a chimes tip on his blog as a productivity hack. He quoted Peter Bregman, an advisor to CEOs and the author of 18 Minutes, who described how beeps can help a person snap to attention every hour. At first it seemed counterintuitive, Bregman wrote: “Aren’t interruptions precisely what we’re trying to avoid?”
But the beeps are productive if they take you off of autopilot, Bregman said. “This isn’t all about staying on plan. Sometimes the beep will ring and I’ll realize that, while I’ve strayed from my calendar, whatever it is I’m working on is what I most need to be doing.”
Then he shuffles priorities on his calendar, if necessary, and makes decisions about what is going to be left undone.
As the chime-marked hours pass, you’ll naturally recognize patterns in what you’re caught doing when the bells sound. (And we definitely prefer bells to startling beeps.) It’s one of the benefits to any time-awareness exercise: the heightened attention it brings to what’s stealing your time.
Filed under 2020, writing tip
The ‘Untranslatable’ Emotions You Never Knew You Had
From gigil to wabi-sabi and tarab, there are many foreign emotion words with no English equivalent. Learning to identify and cultivate these experiences could give you a richer and more successful life.
By David Robson / BBC Future
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-untranslatable-emotions-you-never-knew-you-had
Have you ever felt a little mbuki-mvuki – the irresistible urge to “shuck off your clothes as you dance”? Perhaps a little kilig – the jittery fluttering feeling as you talk to someone you fancy? How about uitwaaien – which encapsulates the revitalising effects of taking a walk in the wind?
These words – taken from Bantu, Tagalog, and Dutch – have no direct English equivalent, but they represent very precise emotional experiences that are neglected in our language. And if Tim Lomas at the University of East London has his way, they might soon become much more familiar.
Lomas’s Positive Lexicography Project aims to capture the many flavours of good feelings (some of which are distinctly bittersweet) found across the world, in the hope that we might start to incorporate them all into our daily lives. We have already borrowed many emotion words from other languages, after all – think “frisson”, from French, or “schadenfreude”, from German – but there are many more that have not yet wormed their way into our vocabulary. Lomas has found hundreds of these “untranslatable” experiences so far – and he’s only just begun.
Learning these words, he hopes, will offer us all a richer and more nuanced understanding of ourselves. “They offer a very different way of seeing the world.”
Lomas says he was first inspired after hearing a talk on the Finnish concept of sisu, which is a sort of “extraordinary determination in the face of adversity”. According to Finnish speakers, the English ideas of “grit”, “perseverance” or “resilience” do not come close to describing the inner strength encapsulated in their native term. It was “untranslatable” in the sense that there was no direct or easy equivalent encoded within the English vocabulary that could capture that deep resonance.
Intrigued, he began to hunt for further examples, scouring the academic literature and asking every foreign acquaintance for their own suggestions. The first results of this project were published in the Journal of Positive Psychology last year.
Many of the terms referred to highly specific positive feelings, which often depend on very particular circumstances:
- Desbundar (Portuguese) – to shed one’s inhibitions in having fun
- Tarab (Arabic) – a musically induced state of ecstasy or enchantment
- Shinrin-yoku (Japanese) – the relaxation gained from bathing in the forest, figuratively or literally
- Gigil (Tagalog) – the irresistible urge to pinch or squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished
- Yuan bei (Chinese) – a sense of complete and perfect accomplishment
- Iktsuarpok (Inuit) – the anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, whereby one keeps going outside to check if they have arrived
But others represented more complex and bittersweet experiences, which could be crucial to our growth and overall flourishing.
- Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer
- Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty
- Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist
- Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable
In addition to these emotions, Lomas’s lexicography also charted the personal characteristics and behaviours that might determine our long-term well-being and the ways we interact with other people.
- Dadirri (Australian aboriginal) term – a deep, spiritual act of reflective and respectful listening
- Pihentagyú (Hungarian) – literally meaning “with a relaxed brain”, it describes quick-witted people who can come up with sophisticated jokes or solutions
- Desenrascanço (Portuguese) – to artfully disentangle oneself from a troublesome situation
- Sukha (Sanskrit) – genuine lasting happiness independent of circumstances
- Orenda (Huron) – the power of the human will to change the world in the face of powerful forces such as fate
You can view many more examples on his website, where there is also the opportunity to submit your own. Lomas readily admits that many of the descriptions he has offered so far are only an approximation of the term’s true meaning. “The whole project is a work in progress, and I’m continually aiming to refine the definitions of the words in the list,” he says. “I definitely welcome people’s feedback and suggestions in that regard.”
In the future, Lomas hopes that other psychologists may begin to explore the causes and consequences of these experiences – to extend our understanding of emotion beyond the English concepts that have dominated research so far.
But studying these terms will not just be of scientific interest; Lomas suspects that familiarising ourselves with the words might actually change the way we feel ourselves, by drawing our attention to fleeting sensations we had long ignored.
“In our stream of consciousness – that wash of different sensations feelings and emotions – there’s so much to process that a lot passes us by,” Lomas says. “The feelings we have learned to recognise and label are the ones we notice – but there’s a lot more that we may not be aware of. And so I think if we are given these new words, they can help us articulate whole areas of experience we’ve only dimly noticed.”
As evidence, Lomas points to the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University, who has shown that our abilities to identify and label our emotions can have far-reaching effects.
Her research was inspired by the observation that certain people use different emotion words interchangeably, while others are highly precise in their descriptions. “Some people use words like anxious, afraid, angry, disgusted to refer to a general affective state of feeling bad,” she explains. “For them, they are synonyms, whereas for other people they are distinctive feelings with distinctive actions associated with them.”
This is called “emotion granularity” and she usually measures this by asking the participants to rate their feelings on each day over the period of a few weeks, before she calculates the variation and nuances within their reports: whether the same old terms always coincide, for instance.
Importantly, she has found that this then determines how well we cope with life. If you are better able to pin down whether you are feeling despair or anxiety, for instance, you might be better able to decide how to remedy those feelings: whether to talk to a friend, or watch a funny film. Or being able to identify your hope in the face of disappointment might help you to look for new solutions to your problem.
In this way, emotion vocabulary is a bit like a directory, allowing you to call up a greater number of strategies to cope with life. Sure enough, people who score highly on emotion granularity are better able to recover more quickly from stress and are less likely to drink alcohol as a way of recovering from bad news. It can even improve your academic success. Marc Brackett at Yale University has found that teaching 10 and 11-year-old children a richer emotional vocabulary improved their end-of-year grades, and promoted better behaviour in the classroom. “The more granular our experience of emotion is, the more capable we are to make sense of our inner lives,” he says.
Both Brackett and Barrett agree that Lomas’s “positive lexicography” could be a good prompt to start identifying the subtler contours of our emotional landscape. “I think it is useful – you can think of the words and the concepts they are associated with as tools for living,” says Barrett. They might even inspire us to try new experiences, or appreciate old ones in a new light.
It’s a direction of research that Lomas would like to explore in the future. In the meantime, Lomas is still continuing to build his lexicography – which has grown to nearly a thousand terms. Of all the words he has found so far, Lomas says that he most often finds himself pondering Japanese concepts such as wabi-sabi (that “dark, desolate sublimity” involving transience and imperfection). “It speaks to this idea of finding beauty in phenomena that are aged and imperfect,” he says. “If we saw the world through those eyes, it could be a different way of engaging in life.”
David Robson is BBC Future’s feature writer. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
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