Category: Wellness when Always-On

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Wellness when Always-On

Some notes from my experience with mindfulness meditation

Mindfulness works for me more than any other method.

My practice of mindfulness is simply observing one’s own breathing. There is no counting, no attempt to breath deeply, no holding one’s breath. The only attempt is to observe this essential function, breathing, at its own pace, for the duration of the meditation session. That is it.

In the beginning this will likely be hard to do beyond a couple of seconds, since the mind wanders. Often for over a minute. Whenever one does realise it has wandered, the idea is to simply revert to observing one’s breathing.

There is no judgement of oneself and an acknowledgment of the inevitability of distraction. This simple nonjudgmental approach helped me build a better relationship with myself.

There will likely be feelings of anxiety too. Sometimes they are because one is not used to this level of passiveness. Sometimes they are because of the thoughts that occur when the mind wanders. Sometimes they are because the self is uncomfortable observing itself, causing tension/stiffer breathing, which also the self observes, which creates a vicious loop. At that point, I open my eyes, continue taking a few breaths, then resume.

What eventually happens is the self learns to take things at their own pace – one second per second – this is when thoughts calm down. The first time I observed a totally silent mind was a wonderful moment. Only to have it instantly broken. Even today, it is near impossible to both notice and persist with a silent mind. But over time, during meditation, mental chatter dies down to a low murmur more quickly than at the beginning of the practice. Moments of silence come and go. And at the end of the session one is both more calm, physiologically, and more equanimous, with what is bothering oneself. That also makes one feel more empowered, which improves equanimity, and it is now a positive feedback loop that extends beyond the session.

One can extend the meditation practice by observing a particular point of physical tension or pain in one’s body, instead of one’s breath. The idea is not mysteriously resolve or heal it, but to see it for what it is, instead of being bothered by it and thinking about how one will tackle it. Sometimes the act of calmly observing tension does relax it.

In any case, observing one’s breathing provides a natural rhythm.

When beginning mindfulness, twenty minutes may seem much too long. The first few days, one could try five or six sessions of one minute each, spaced a few minutes apart. It’ll take twenty minutes end to end but each time one will only observe for one minute at a time. Extend to two, five minutes and further.

Mindfulness is something I strove to maintain through the depths of depression and treatment through most of the 2010s. Even so, during periods of acute distress or physical pain, mindfulness may not be possible. I skip instead of pushing through. The observation of breath may be passive, but the process itself is very much active. Pushing oneself further during periods of stress may not be beneficial.

However passive, mindfulness is a workout. Like maintaining a plank position or standing on a balance board, stillness doesn’t imply relaxation. The point is to train one’s mind to experience just being, at the natural pace of time. ★

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Life Design Wellness when Always-On

Social connections and “a lifelong journey together”

This New York Times article from three years ago describes the degree to which strong social bonds with people who share similar interests improve one’s longevity.

One example is Okinawa, Japan, far south of the country’s main islands:

… a place where the average life expectancy for women is around 90, the oldest in the world, people form a kind of social network called a moai — a group of five friends who offer social, logistic, emotional and even financial support for a lifetime.

In a moai, the group benefits when things go well, such as by sharing a bountiful crop, and the group’s families support one another when a child gets sick or someone dies. They also appear to influence one another’s lifelong health behaviors.

“Traditionally, their parents put them into moais when they are born, and they take a lifelong journey together.”

That’s not the only reason Okinawans live longer than even the average Japanese – diet and genetics seem to play their part too – but social practices seem to be the third pillar of their longevity.

This National Geographic article from last year, which touches briefly on each of these three factors, also mentions moais.

Takashi Inafuku, head of one of Ogimi’s districts, belongs to two moai—one with a group of school friends and another with former co-workers. “They are places where you can exchange information and communicate with others,” he says. “I think that participating in moai, having a common hobby and releasing stress, can help promote longevity.”

And that

“loneliness is as bad for you as smoking.”

Image: National Geographic

While the forced isolation of the last nearly two years has had a devastating effect on people’s mental health, I have observed clearly that those with such strong social connections have fared better during this period. Often, such connections had been built and nurtured electronically even before the pandemic, and so weren’t buffeted as much by it.

(ends)

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Discovery and Curation Life Design The Dark Forest of the Internet The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Life pre-internet

This question on Reddit had a bunch of answers that I think are worth reflecting on.

”People old enough to remember life pre-Internet, what are some less obvious things you miss about that time?”

Work-life balance

“Leaving home and just being gone for the day. No cell phones.”

Mind-wandering

“I miss spacing out. Like, you could legit just sit on a bench or ride a bus and space out completely, letting your mind wander into those creative zones. Now phones/tech makes it much harder to get there.”

“Having an idea, finding a new hobby or skillset or project to work on, going to the library or bookstore to educate yourself about it, start learning and growing and excited about a new passion. Now… you look it up online, realize there’s a bunch of people who are wayyy better at it than you will ever be, and so you immediately give up out of discouragement. :\”

Presence

“If there were cameras, it was really different. You used them to take pictures of things or had people take pictures of you. But there was no social media to preoccupy your mind. It was just doing something. And whoever you were with, was who you were with.“

“My former housemate – who is twenty years younger than me – and I both left our phones at home by accident one day. So we kept on keeping on doing the days activities. Some errands and some wandering around. At one point, she turned to me and said “So this is what the 80s were like?”

“We weren’t getting texts all the time. No constant robocalls and spam e-mails. No expectation of instant reply 24/7. No constant stress or pressure. We were just there enjoying the moment and the simple stuff.”

The news cycle

“News only being on at 6pm. That was it. Now we have 6 hours of local news and 24 hours of cable news. Not being bombarded all day with “news.” And when you saw “Breaking News” on the screen you knew some serious shit went down.”

A curious one for me was one about identity:

“The ability to start over. I moved a lot, every move I could reinvent myself, bookworm, punk, preppie, I got to try out lots of aspects of my personality and my past wasn’t a factor.”

and its reply “I think especially when young it’s genuinely damaging to be locked into an identity by the stuff you have said / done years ago. How are we supposed to grow? Also being judged by the norms of a previous era which are not cool now.”

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Decentralisation and Neutrality Discovery and Curation Wellness when Always-On

“The News consumes us”

Quick quote from a short blog post I read last week:

The News is like alcohol. Both are drugs that give you a quick buzz but both are depressants. Both are habit forming. Some people can do moderation but many struggle with that.

2020 showed us that if you lock people in their homes for months on end, deprive them of the people they love, their basic freedoms and hook them up to The News and Social Media 24 hours a day, they go completely mental.

it has felt like The Public Square is broken. Online discussion is a poor substitute for face to face discussion. It’s only when discussing things face to face that you get the full range of vocal cues, body language and tonal emphasis. 

To me, the most important bit in the post was this:

We can choose to reduce and control our intake. We can get more of our information from primary sources. 

The most reliable information in the right context is from primary sources. It’s suprising how many news articles, tweets and blog posts all eventually quote the same source. And how different interpretations (not always malign) can change the original meaning.

But locating that source takes time. And it follows that because you can only read so many news sources, that you pick them carefully.

Related:

21st Century Media part 1 – The new news
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Life Design Wellness when Always-On

“Feel awesome in the morning”

A question asked on Twitter about what one could to do “to feel awesome in the morning” had interesting and commonsense replies. Here are some of both:

In my experience, waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle ruins a whole day. A major downside of alarms, and why apps like Sleep Cycle are helpful.
Yep. A good eye mask and ear plugs are among the most valuable cheap things I have bought.
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Investing Wellness when Always-On

Stop ascribing morality to the stock market – it’s pointless

Recently, the founder of an Indian stockbroking company wondered whether it was right that the Indian stock indexes were doing well in the midst of abject suffering.

A few days later, there was news about the USA government possibly intervening to override vaccine patent protections to make them more widely available. The stocks of companies involved in vaccine manufacturing fell, prompting this:

I remember in late 2019, before the pandemic, there was a credit squeeze problem in India. The last eighteen months have nearly erased that memory, but loans had gone bad then, a few high-profile companies defaulted on their debts, and it became hard for companies to get loans to expand their business. Even so, the Indian stock market then reached record highs. I remember similar judgements on whether it was moral for the indexes to do so well.

When people refer to the ‘stock market’ they’re usually referring to the flagship index, which is a collection of a few dozen stocks. The ‘market’ rising or falling on any given day is an outcome of how those stocks do. And whether a stock rises or falls is an outcome of what people think and feel about the prospects of that company in the future. For some, the future means the next day. For others, it means the next decade.

All this is to say that a stock, and the ‘stock market’ isn’t an entity of its own. It’s made up of investors like you and me and larger trading institutions, domestic and foreign.

Ascribing morality to the stock market is pointless.

Let’s think this through further. Here are the companies that together make up the thirty stocks in the ‘Sensex’ and the fifty stocks in the ‘Nifty’:

When the Zerodha founder, an obviously immensely successful businessman and investor, wonders why the market hasn’t fallen, is he saying that he in fact expects these companies to do worse in the coming months, and that people who hold these stocks don’t understand this?

Or is he making the moral case, that markets ‘should’ drop in solidarity with the mood of the country? Because then he’s saying that people should sell their stocks out of such solidarity, regardless of what they feel about the prospects of the company.

And let us not forget that when someone sells, someone else needs to buy. When people sell their Tata Steel shares en masse because the stock, and the market, must suffer, they’re selling those shares to other people. If Tata Steel is fundamentally a good company, it will do well, there’ll be demand for its shares during and after the pandemic, and its price will rise again. Who benefits? The other people who bought the shares. Who misses out? People who sold them.

So who should suffer and whose expense, and for what? Who decides this?

Or take the other person whose tweet I pasted. They seem to imply that it is immoral for people who hold pharma company stocks to sell them when they hear news of patent protections being suspended. In other words, he thinks the following: Maggie, who in 2020 read about Moderna’s research into a vaccine and bought the stock anticipating that the company would make money off the vaccine, and who now hears that Moderna stands to make less money than it seemed last year, should nevertheless hold on to her stock because it is the moral thing to do.

According to this person, what should Maggie do when Moderna does inveitably announce that it’s made less money in 2021 than it projected in 2020? Should she only sell the stock at that time, despite knowing about lower earnings months earlier? Or does morality dictate that she hold on to it?

Who is Maggie being moral to? Other investors? But they are beholden to the same morality as she is. Who enforces this morality and, more importantly, who benefits from it?

Implicit in all this is the notion of ‘investors’ being greedy, unprincipled people. That they are not you and me; they are out to fleece you and me. And so no wonder ‘they’ do well even as the ‘rest of us’ are going through a hard time.

The reality is simply that people who hold stocks of fundamentally good companies benefit from these companies doing well – making good products, selling them in India and overseas, growing their sales year after year while also being prudent with their expenses. Why do these people benefit? Because the share price of such companies rises as they do well [1].

So instead of punishing both the companies and their stock-holders to suffer along with the rest of the country for abstract reasons of ‘right-ness’ and morality and solidarity, why not have as many Indians as possible benefit from India’s best companies? Ergo, why not make as many people stock-holders as possible?

In India, there are less than fifty million ‘demat’ accounts, or accounts via which stocks are bought and sold [2]. Since many investors have more than one demat account, let’s assume there are forty million actual people with such accounts. Let’s assume that all of them hold a meaningful amount of stocks in them (a wildly optimistic assumption). That is still less than three percent of India’s population, or less than five percent of adults. In contrast, “48.8 per cent of US families were direct or indirect owners of publicly traded stock in 2013” (SEBI source)

That means the rise and fall of the stock markets means nothing to over ninety-five percent of Indian adults. News items like ‘Bloodbath on Dalal Street‘ are utterly irrelevant to the vast, vast majority of people [3]. But correspondingly, when the market reaches an ‘all time high‘, like it did earlier this year, only a tiny, tiny fraction of people benefited from it – the purportedly immoral investors.

This needs to change. Both perception and reality.

So where are we at? I hope by this point we agree that it’s futile to treat ‘the market’ as an entity that has motives and morals.

That forcing share prices up or down in solidarity with the suffering or redemption of a country’s citizens doesn’t benefit those citizens, investors or companies. If anything, it harms them.

Finally, that in fact a powerful way to create wealth for citizens is, as far as possible, to have them participate directly in the growth of their country’s best companies, companies that contribute the most to the growth of the country’s economy. Today less than one in twenty Indians does.

[1] Why does it rise? To simplify greatly, say Infosys’ share price today is INR 100. If Infosys reports good numbers during the last few months, more people will want to hold Infosys shares. These people will be willing to buy shares at INR 101, because the expectation now is that the Infosys of tomorrow is even better than the Infosys of today. If enough people who already hold stock are OK selling their shares at INR 101, that now becomes the new price of Infosys. If not enough people are willing to sell, maybe others will offer INR 102. Or more. At some point, these two groups will reach an agreement.

[2] And of those fifty million accounts, over ten million were added in just the last year – young investors looking to participate in the market’s rise after the fall of February and March 2020. Until then, just about two and a half percent of India’s population had demat accounts. See below:

[3] When the same article says that the fall made ‘investors poorer by Rs 3.7 lakh crore in a single day’ it simply means that whoever bought the shares sold on that day will become richer by that same amount when the market recovers.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Chris Liverani/Unsplash)

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Wellness when Always-On

Granted

One reason children are capable of joy is because they take almost nothing for granted. To them, the world is wonderfully new and surprising. Not only that, but they aren’t yet sure how the world works: Perhaps the things they have today will mysteriously vanish tomorrow. It is hard for them to take something for granted when they can’t even count on its continued existence. But as children grow older, they grow jaded. By the time they are teenagers, they are likely to take almost everything and everyone around them for granted.

– A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

These are particularly apt times to reflect on this, as and when mental bandwidth allows.

At the end of all this, we’ll have lost people, norms, rituals, relationships, some of which we’ll have taken for granted. We’ll also have made new relationships with people, ideas, places, organisations. We’d do well to acknowledge their impermanence, for good or for bad.

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Wellness when Always-On

Even casual online abuse diminishes everyone’s experience

The writer, performer and actor Stephen Fry in 2016, on leaving Twitter:

But I would contend that just one turd in a reservoir is enough to persuade one not to drink from it. 99.9% of the water may be excrement free, but that doesn’t help. With Twitter, for me at least, the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much.

– Too many people have peed in the pool

I think the average experience on Twitter is worse than Fry describes. If you’re speaking with your neighbours on the street outside your apartment and someone cycling by yells an obscenity at the group, it diminishes everyone’s experience. That’s the real world example of a single abusive or divisive tweet in an online interaction.

Even if all you do is browse Twitter, scrolling through arguments and trolls is the online analog of walking past an ugly altercation or scuffle – it mars the outing at best and makes you feel unsafe at worse.

As we live out more of our realities online, even casual online abuse should be unacceptable. Instead, both we and social media companies have normalised it.

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Wellness when Always-On

“My experience is what I agree to attend to”

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.

– William James, 19th century psychologist, via Maria Popova

More than a few times, friends have asked me why the espresso or aeropress coffee I brew for them tastes different from what the black coffee they have (rarely) had at a Starbucks in the form of an americano or pourover. By different, they mean it is not bitter, and has notes that they can perceive if not identify.

I realised that the machine that Starbucks uses to extract an espresso – an americano is after all espresso plus water – is adjusted such that the grounds are exposed to water that is too hot, and for too long – over-extraction. Of course this may not be be true for Starbucks in other countries.

That realisation led me to understand that Starbucks probably needs its espresso to be, well, harsh because its customers need to be able to taste the coffee among everything else that is in its drinks: milk, sugar, cream, flavourings, additions like caramel or chocolate or praline.

I would like to think I am not a purist, and this is not a criticism of Starbucks. I use this example simply to point out that when you increase the number of things that have to vie for your attention, each of them needs to be dialled up to eleven. In many cases, that means you’re no longer experiencing any of these things at their best.

Put differently, if as the psychologist James says, My experience is what I agree to attend to, the fewer the things you attend to at any moment in time, the better you will be able to experience them.

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Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

Tools are passive. Toys are not.

Our phones remain as powerful as ever, but every utilitarian function they have is compromised by the presence of these weirdly magnetic recreational functions. I can appreciate a slick, portable multi-tool, but I no longer want to carry in my pocket the most compelling toy ever created.

– Smartphones Are Toys First, Tools Second, David Cain/Raptitude

Apps on your phone with which you work and create are rarely designed to be addictive. Your camera, text editor, photo and video editors, sketch apps have gotten astoundingly capable. Ultimately, though, they are passive tools at your service.

The recreational apps that David speaks of – well they are a different kettle of fish. They’ve been deliberately designed to pull you in and then keep you there. For most of us, they dominate our smartphone and tablet usage. They actively change our very behaviour.

The only way to keep this from happening is to be aware and deliberate, day by day, about how we use our phones and tablets. iOS and Android now have built-in tracking of how long we use what apps. The key is to consciously review that data and act on what you see without criticising yourself.