I invite you to go over to app4Mind and start making use of all that’s there on how to make any change you may want to make in your life, now or in the future. You’ll see that the site is packed with guidance, insight, and clarity on how to change how you eat, change how you move, and change how you do anything.

The new site is based on the same model this blog is about, just way better, clearer, and beautifully illustrated. I’ve evolved the model into what I now call app4Mind, which distills into 4 principles what actually happens when people make sustainable change, fused with the world’s wealth of research and insight on behavior modification.

The moment you hand power over to people, you get an explosion of curiosity, innovation, and effort. – Joshua Cooper Ramo

app4Mind is a metaphorical app you read and memorize from one, illustrated, printable, memorizable page that comes to you free when you subscribe. Once you store the the app in your mind, it’s ready for you to call up and use when there’s something you want to change about yourself. Think of the new site as the user manual for the app.

Another thing you’ll see are the options to work with me personally, either in developing specific core skills for particular changes, or in learning the new immersive paradigm I’ve created called PaleoMetrics.

As for this blog, I’ll keep it up for another week or so to give everyone a chance to transition over. Just to be clear, your subscription won’t transfer automatically. If you’re subscribed to Good Disruptive Change, you still have to subscribe to app4Mind to continue receiving posts. I hope you will. We’ve grown into a pretty awesome community, and I want us to continue on together.

See you over at app4Mind. There are 3 new posts awaiting on the blog that’s there. I hope you’ll devour them and weigh in in the comments. Can’t wait to get our conversations going again!

My own experience was similar. That’s about how old I was when I moved New York (scary indeed), and that’s about how long it took to become my comfort zone. Twenty plus years later, it still is.

Comfort zone cliches abound: “Step outside your ….”; “Life begins at the end of your ….” Search Twitter and you’ll see how nicely the rhetoric fits into 140 characters.

The power of no light

Something my daughter told me yesterday distilled comfort zones (and the outside of them) to their essence. She’s just back from a class trip to a camp where her grade spent two days doing start-of-the-year team building activities. The facility sounded a bit like the sleep-away camp she’d gone to for the first time this past summer – which we had reservations about (as do other families) because the bunks have no electricity. Imagine that! Kids go to sleep when it gets dark outside (unless they choose to stay awake under the covers, reading with a flashlight). It sounded so 16th century to us when we first heard the idea. Then we threw all care to the wind and chose it anyway.

Long story short. She had a great summer at camp, returning to the city a happier and stronger girl. Fast forward a few weeks later, and she’s on the class trip, to the other camp where the bunks were similar, except that they did have electricity. My daughter told me she didn’t like that. When kids are busy all day and sharing a bunk at night, she said, they should go to sleep when it gets dark. What does anyone need lights for?

Easier is the new harder

See what happened? With a little time and settling in, the thing that had seemed outside her comfort zone (no light) had become her comfort zone. She grew to like it better than cushy wattage. Easier became the new harder.

I’ve thought of the many times in recent years when the same basic thing has happened to me, in other contexts. I’ve grown to like my paleo life better than my old one (seriously – I can’t even remember what I used to eat back then). And I’ve grown to like waking up and riding my bike first thing better than whatever it was I did before I discovered how great that makes me feel. And I’ve grown to like working out in the Crossfit way better than the big box gym way.

Let’s face it. Comfort zones are an illusion. We’re not even comfortable in them. All we are is stuck, because we let ourselves think we’re comfortable, so we indulge ourselves in what’s not even that great. It’s our own doing. We should ditch our fear and get totally psyched about stepping out and staying out. Because life is better and happier that way.

A little more often, let’s turn off the metaphorical lights, shall we? It’s the only way to find out how illuminating the dark is.

OVER TO YOU: Are you hanging out in a comfort zone now? Have you ever done something you thought you wouldn’t like, and you found you like it better than what you were doing before? Has harder ever become the new easier for you? See you in the comments.

Notes & Further Reading
Derek Sivers, Push, push, push. Expanding your comfort zone.
Derek Sivers, Anything You Want.

There are striking parallels between the two endeavors.They both require a careful balance of patience and proaction. Nurturing and perseverance are imperative. Whim and weather can be more determinative than planning and sweat. Mind blowing bounty happens sometimes, but usually, the beautiful simplicity of enough – is enough.

Brian tells me he’s interested in my blog because he’s ready for a change. He likes his work, but much of it is routine-driven. He follows his farm’s natural cycle, and, in a sense, he follows his clients’ cycles as well.

Brian’s got the app

I tell him he has everything it takes to make a major life change, if that’s what he chooses. “Huh?,” he asks. I explain. Whenever people have succeeded in making a life change, it’s because they’ve applied the 4 essential “M” principles – whether they knew it or not: Mindset, Motion, Mastery, and Measurement. These 4 Ms are a distillation of everything you need to know about behavior mod in order to do behavior mod. They comprise the model this blog is based on.

The 4 “Ms” form a memorable model – or app – that you store in your mind (rather than buy in an app store). I’m calling it app4mind now. (We’ve been calling it something else. More coming on the new name and other new things to come.)

Brian nods and says he thinks it’s cool there’s an app for this. I tell him it’s especially cool – for him – because he’s already applied the 4 Ms in other changes he’s made – without knowing it. He applied them in his many years of learning and honing his farming skills, and he applied them in learning to be a head hunter (something he tried on a whim on the urging of a friend, and was woefully bad at in the beginning).

Let’s go quickly through the 4 Ms, with Brian as an example:

• He believes he can change (Mindset);
• He’s willing to start something and stick with it, through a mix of getting it wrong and getting it right (Motion);
• He can find motivation in the intermittent small wins along the way (Mastery, i.e. the micro-kind); and
• He knows the power of applying metrics to manage his efforts (Measurement).

Change as art

So he’s good to go, in whatever he decides, I tell him. I elaborate a bit. I talk about Picasso and how he embodied the 4 Ms. He spent his entire career having a blast trying new things. He loved the process way more than the result, and, like no one else, he appreciated the power of trial and error as a learning tool. If he didn’t like what he did, he white washed over it and tried again (sometimes entire canvases that he had already exhibited!).

That’s when Brian told me he doesn’t have an artistic bone in his body. And that’s when I told him I think he’s wrong about that.

Later that day he emailed me this photo of his farm:

Which looks a lot like art to me:

My ensuing email with Brian went something like this:

Me: How do you get your rows so straight?

Him: That’s me….I operate the planter! I find a point in the distance and follow it to make my first mark. Then after that the machine makes a line in the soil and I follow it.

Me: See? You’re in flow. Just like an artist. The field is your canvas.

Him: That’s great…I like that! I actually love planting a field and then driving past it to see how straight my rows came out.

This, from a guy who told me he lost his whole crop to Hurricane Irene last year. Does it surprise you that he’s out there this year, trying again?

The takeaway

Perseverance comes from loving the process. Loving the process is what makes you willing to try again and again (even when nature wipes out your whole canvas).

I wonder how many crooked rows Brian planted before he learned to get them straight. And I wonder how many times he’s driven by a day’s work and saw a lot of meandering lines. But here’s what I don’t wonder – whether Brian has what it takes to make a major life change. He does. He’s got the app. He’s had it for a long time, and it’s worked brilliantly.

OVER TO YOU: Think of a major change you’ve made – or might be considering. Do you recognize change as a trial and error process? Or do you think of it as something you have to get right from the start? Might looking at change differently help ease the process? Might it make you more amenable to trying something new? What about the app? Will you use it?

NOTES
Renior, The Onions, 1881
Van Gogh, Landscape At Auvers After The Rain, 1880

He’s his own very skilled self-advocate. It’s something well worth striving to become.

Take what he did at Woodstock, for example. There he was, all of 24 years old, a member of CSNY for one month, when a cameraman stuck a lens in his face a little too closely. Having found himself in the center of the biggest musical spectacle of all time, you might think he’d have been a little wowed, perhaps a little deferential to the process as it unfolded. But he wasn’t. In true Neil fashion, he was there on his own terms. He didn’t like cameras in his face, so he told the guy to f*%# off.

Self-advocacy

Has there ever been a time when you’ve wanted to speak up when someone’s invaded your space or interfered with your efforts? It’s happened to all of us. Have you ever thought it wasn’t your place to speak up, for whatever reason, so you didn’t? How did that work for you, all that silence? How did it play in to trying to do your best work? It’s something worth asking ourselves, every time we wimp out of self advocating.

Our words and our actions drive each other. If we’re willing to say what we think, we’re often also willing to do what what we can to learn, grow, and evolve – even when we’re held back by very real constraints.

That’s precisely what Neil did during the infamous Geffen suit. A little background: Geffen Records was Young’s recording label for much of the 1980s. Trouble loomed when Neil’s music became what producer David Geffen believed wasn’t Neil-enough (too much country and not enough rock). So Geffen did the absurd (and ultimately unsuccessful): sued Young for not delivering Neil Young music.

JFDI

Pending resolution of the suit, Young couldn’t record (because Geffen locked him out of the studio). So instead of focusing on what he couldn’t do, Young did what he could do: perform. He went down to Nashville, assembled The International Harvesters (a band of instrumentalists with names like Rufus, Spooner, and Pig), and took his show on the road. They played any venue that would have them, including state fairs. (Some trajectory, wasn’t it? Woodstock to livestock.)

Some might have viewed it as a low point, but Young didn’t. As he describes it, “we were having a great time, living high off the hog and … flying down the road in buses and just never stopped for about a year.”

Then the Geffen suit settled, and Young moved on, signing with Reprise and resuming his recording career.

I would have a big hit record, and then I would have what some people would say … was a miserable, terrible record, and I’m going, “what a great record that was.”

Pretty adaptive, wouldn’t you say? Resilient as can be. It was as if Young had said the same thing to Geffen as he did to the camera man years before. He broke through constraints. He turned can’t into can. It’s something we all can do in work, play and life – if we choose to.

The ironic thing is that much of the music Young performed during the Geffen suit was taped (completely out of Geffen’s reach). Archived and forgotten about for decades, it’s what comprises Young’s most current album, Treasure. There’s one thing we can be sure of: whether we like the music isn’t the point. Neil doesn’t care. It’s the doing that matters to him.

The takeaways

• It’s the process that matters, not the result. It’s a total fluke that an album resulted from Young’s performances during the Geffen suit. An album wasn’t his Why.
• The Why, for Young, was keeping his groove at a time when Geffen had tried his best to take it away. What’s groove? It’s about the same thing as flow. As we’ve seen before, we get into flow from doing precisely the things Young instinctively does: moving, stretching, trying new things, and finding ways to branch out or up our game.
• 

Flow’s biggest foes are precisely the opposite of those things, namely: 1) trying to please; 2) marching to someone else’s beat; or 3) staying comfortable doing what we we already know how to do, in the same way we’ve always done it.
• We can tap into the feeling of flow and let it carry us through what we’re working on, especially things that scare us, make us feel uncomfortable, or reside just beyond our current skill level. And we can do it even when someone is doing all he can to constrain us.
• Our words and our actions drive each other. When we speak, we’re more likely to do. We don’t have say it quite like Young, but let’s keep in mind the skills of self-advocacy and turning can’t into can are key in a world of metaphorical camera men and David Geffens.

OVER TO YOU: Have you ever been truly constrained, by someone or something? Have you ever constrained yourself, through your own thoughts and perceptions? When have you spoken up like Neil? When have you turned can’t in to can? When haven’t you? See you in the comments.

Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly on external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

Outward bound

In other words, Russell moved beyond thinking it was all about him. He shifted his focus from inward to outward, adopting an autotelic approach to life. As we’ve seen before, being autotelic means doing things for the sake of doing them, not for an extrinsic benefit (money, praise, fame). The doing itself is the benefit. What you feel inside (intrinsic reward) is enough for you. That’s what keeps you going.

There are infinite ways to lead an outwardly focused, autotelic life. Russell’s way happened to be geeking out over what mattered to him, primarily philosophy, mathematics, and history. That’s what he chose, because that’s how he found happiness.

Happiness via truth

In the third volume of his autobiography, Russell included a micro-manifesto he called A Liberal Decalogue, which served as his vision for the responsibilities of teachers. Grounded in what he valued -education, uncertainty, and critical thinking – it can serve as a short guide to life. Here it is. As you read, see which items on the list resonate most.

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worthwhile to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking, for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always other contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do, the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted. – Bertrand Russell

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that is happiness.

The takeaway

There are limitless ways to transcend our inner selves and go about serving the world in some way. Russell’s was to seek the truth. Not his own self-serving version of the truth, or some fragment of it standing in for the whole – but the real, complete, dialed-in deal. He found happiness by taking an autotelic approach to life and in what he viewed as his role in the world.

Autotelism, then, plays a huge role in the happiness trajectory. It’s there for all of us, if we’re willing to learn, as Russell did, to be indifferent to ourselves and our deficiencies, to focus our attention outward, being autotelic in what we choose to do.

OVER TO YOU: Where is your focus, most of the time? Inward or outward? Are you autotelic in most things? Or when it comes to certain things, but not others? What do you see as your role in the world? Have you found happiness in it, and if not, what does that have you thinking?

NOTES & FURTHER READING
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness at 17, 187.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Flow at 93.
Brainpickings, A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments Of Teaching.

RELATED POSTS
On Advocacy, Rock & Roll & The Truth
What Is The Truth, Anyway? (And How To Find It)
Checklist For Cheating Chaos & Finding Flow
Gardenbrain Changes Everything
What You Know (vs. What You Think You Know)

Enjoyment vs. pleasure

What few of us realize is that enjoyment is a source of happiness. To understand why, we must know the difference between pleasure and enjoyment. Probably no one is better qualified to explain than renowned psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who spent decades researching how people all over the world experience the entire gamut of things people do in life, from the mundane to the complex and everything in between. He tells us:

Contrary to what most of us believe, happiness does not simply happen to us. It’s something that we make happen, and it results from doing our best. Feeling fulfilled when we live up to our potentialities is what motivates differentiation and leads to evolution. The experience of happiness in action is enjoyment – the exhilarating sensation of being fully alive.

Seeking out pleasure is also a powerful source of motivation, but pleasure does not foster change; it is, rather, a conservative force, one that makes us want to satisfy existing needs, to achieve an equilibrium, comfort, and relaxation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking pleasure, but the person for whom it becomes the main reason for living is not going to grow beyond what genes have programmed him to desire.

So there it is. The difference between pleasure and enjoyment. Beautifully clear. Pleasure is conservative. We seek it to satisfy existing needs, to achieve equilibrium, comfort, and relaxation (think homeostasis). It does not foster change. But enjoyment does, because it’s evolutionary. It’s integral to growing, becoming our best selves, and getting to happiness in the truest sense.

The questions, then, are:

• What is enjoyment?
• How do we make it happen in our lives? and
• How does enjoyment lead to happiness?

Let’s get right into the answers. As you read on, think about how you’ve perceived and experienced enjoyment and happiness up until now, as well as changes you might make to add more of them to your life as you go forward.

What is enjoyment?

• Here it is, in a nutshell. Distilling Csikszentmihalyi’s volumes of writing into a few simple words, enjoyment is flow. They’re one and the same, and he uses the terms interchangeably. People with enjoyment-filled lives are those who are in flow in much of what they do.
• There are 3 primary mental states, according to Csiksezentmihalyi: boredom, anxiety, and flow. What he calls the “flow channel” runs right through boredom and anxiety. When what we’re doing puts us in the flow channel, we’re insulated from boredom and anxiety.



• Flow is the name Csikszentmihalyi gave to the feeling people consistently describe when they’re enjoying what they’re doing – whether it’s gardening, writing, doing business, performing surgery, running a race, raising their children, or whatever else. Have you ever felt what the word flow describes? It’s that feeling of being carried by what you’re doing. Moving within in the current of an activity. Losing awareness of time, your surroundings, and your basic needs. Doing something just to do it, not for some possible extrinsic reward.

How do we get to enjoyment?

• A key thing to know is this: enjoyment doesn’t have to be pleasant. It often comes from stretching ourselves, learning new skills, or improving existing ones. In other words, enjoyment often comes from doing something difficult.



• Enjoyment can even happen in extreme conditions. A person could be freezing cold, exhausted, and in danger, and still be in a state of enjoyment. Take mountain climbing, for instance. Cold, exhaustion, and danger often come with it. Yet suspended on a rope in freezing temperatures, mountain climbers can still be in a state of enjoyment. They may be unaware aware of their enjoyment at the time, but they still experience it, and it’s exhilarating. To them, it’s part of what makes life worth living. That’s why they’d rather be mountain climbing than sipping daiquiaris at poolside. (Think of it this way: daiquiaris are pleasure; mountain climbing is enjoyment; pleasure doesn’t lead to flow or happiness, but enjoyment does).
• Sometimes enjoyment (flow) just happens, without us even trying to get into it. It comes more naturally for some than others, but we can all learn how to get into flow and enjoyment, in all facets of life – in physical and intellectual activities, in connecting with others, in our work, in solitude, and even in times of adversity.
• Flow activities are autotelic (from the Greek, auto = self + telos = goal, purpose). These are things we do for the sake of doing them, not for an extrinsic benefit (money, praise, fame). In an autotelic activity, the doing itself is the benefit. We do it for what we feel inside (intrinsic reward).
• There are two main kinds of autotelic (flow) activities:
  
  1) Microflow activities. These are activities from which simple flow can emerge from low complexity, unstructured tasks (listening to music, reading a book, daydreaming, talking to people without an express purpose, and every day tasks, like cooking and grocery shopping). The level of enjoyment is relatively low, but the experience is indispensible for normal functioning. Microflow can also support macroflow (see below), as simple doodling might help us get through a complicated lecture.
  
  2) Macroflow activities. These are complex, structured activities that yield full-fledged flow experiences (playing an instrument, composing music, writing a book, strategizing, public speaking, and other endeavors requiring focus and skill). The level of enjoyment can be high and lead to what Csikszentmihalyi calls optimal experience.



• We can transform virtually any activity into an autotelic one that produces flow. The task could be one we’re used to doing at work (memo writing, dealing with coworkers), something we already know how to do (riding a bike, preparing food), something that’s completely new to us (scuba diving, serving on a board), or something taxing, problematic, or even tragic (working through an inconvenience, a conflict, a defeat, or a loss).
• These are the steps for turning an activity into an autotelic (flow) activity:
  
  1) Ditch your ego. Remember, it’s not about you or the outcome; it’s about doing and learning.
  
  2) Decide what want you want to do and why. Set goals and subgoals based on those things. Then get started.
  
  3) Start small. Build skill. Gradually increase the challenge over time so you keep improving. Pay attention to feedback. Keep refining your efforts. Find what works; reject what doesn’t work. Keep raising the bar.
  
  4) Measure your progress. Creative metrics work as well as standard ones (and sometimes better). Choose some that reflect your goals and have meaning to you.

Note that these 4 steps align precisely with the model this blog is based on, the 4 principles of which are mindset, motion, mastery, and measurement.

How does enjoyment lead to happiness?

The sum and substance of Csikszentmihalyi’s work is that enjoyment makes us feel good about ourselves, our actions, and our place in the world. And that is what leads to happiness. These quotes explain how and why:

As humans, we cannot survive without hope. When we lack reason for living apart from the urges that biology has built into our nervous system, we soon revert to an animal level of existence, where only food, comfort, and sex matter.

At the moment it is experienced, enjoyment can be both physically painful and mentally taxing, but because it involves a triumph over the forces of entropy and decay, it nourishes the spirit.

[A] good life consists of more than simply the totality of enjoyable experiences. It must also have a meaningful pattern, a trajectory of growth that results in the development of increasing emotional, cognitive, and social complexity.

Contrary to what we usually believe … the best moments are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times … The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.

Happiness … does not depend on outside events, but rather on how we interpret them …. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives.

Getting control of life is never easy …. But in the long run optimal experiences add up to … a sense of participation in determining the content of life – that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.

The takeaway

Pleasure and enjoyment are very different, both in terms of how we experience them and their outcome. Pleasure is about feeling; enjoyment is about doing. Pleasure conserves us; enjoyment evolves us. We experience enjoyment by getting into flow, which comes from autotelic activities – those we do for the sake of doing them, not for external reward. They lead to optimal experience. Patterning our lives this way is proactive. It’s how we go about participating in the contents of our lives, thus determining our own happiness.

OVER TO YOU: What’s your take on pleasure, enjoyment, and happiness? How do you experience them? What gets you into a flow state. Can you get yourself into flow? How does it feel? See you in the comments.

NOTES & FURTHER READING
Books by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi:
Flow at 3-4, 40, 49, 93, 97.
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety at 13-23.
Good Business at 6, 18, 37-56.

RELATED POSTS
Pleasure vs. Enjoyment: What’s The Difference? Part I
How To Get Good (Really Good) At Making Change In Your Life
Checklist For Cheating Chaos & Creating Flow
The Thing We’ve All Missed
How To Turn Disruption Into Order (aka Why I Want To Be Like E)

When you’re eating a piece of delicious cake, are you feeling pleasure, or are you enjoying it? It matters, because word choice matters. There’s a distinct upside knowing what we’re thinking and talking about. It leads to being clear about what we’re doing. Our actions become effective, fueled by truth, and unencumbered by self deception. Which means we’re on our way to accomplishing what’s important to us (rather than just thinking we are).

So let’s get started with precision, shall we? Pleasure vs. enjoyment. What’s the difference? We’ll focus on pleasure here, and enjoyment in the next post.

Pleasure: it’s a brain circuitry thing

“Because I enjoy it” is the reason people often give for the things they do. Especially when it comes to things that aren’t particularly good for them, like having that afternoon cookie or those nightly glass(es) of wine, or starting their meal off with a piece of that yummy bread that just arrived on the table.

The list goes on. We all have our lists of things we think we “enjoy.” There’s a problem, though. Enjoy is the wrong word. Things that please are the stuff of pleasure, and thus neuroscience. In other words, when we’re talking about pleasure, we’re talking about what’s going on in the brain, which is hard-wired to seek reward.

We can get a “liking” sensation from a wide range of stimuli, whether they’re good for us or not, including:

• Things we need, like nourishment, water, and sex;
• Things we don’t need, like highly palatable food, soda, alcohol, and drugs;
• Things we perceive as good, like being included socially, reaching a goal, or engaging in prosocial behavior like sharing, comforting, rescuing, and helping; and
• Thoughts and ideas about the foregoing (yes, even thinking about this stuff can give us pleasure).

The essence of pleasure

Here’s a quick distillation of pleasure and how it works:

• Deep inside our brains, we have what’s called a pleasure circuit. When certain stimuli activate it, we feel (you guessed it) pleasure.
• To understand the pleasure circuit, think of a baseball game. The batter is like the part of the brain known as the ventral tagmented area. When it gets a hit, a feel-good neurotransmitter called dopamine (the ball) goes out into center field, to a cadre of the eagerly awaiting fielders who throw it around to each other in well-rehearsed play. Each one has a job to do in the brain’s functioning: the amygddala and the anterior cingulate cortex (emotion); the dorsal striatum (habit formation); the nucleus accumbens (reward); the hippocampus (memory); and the prefrontal cortex (judgment and planning).

But I like it, like it, yes I do.
- The Rolling Stones

• Different stimuli leads to different activation levels in the pleasure circuit. Stimuli that cause a little activation make us feel good. Stimuli that cause lot of activation make us feel really good.
• Pleasure can be a great motivator for doing good things, like taking care of ourselves and others, adapting to our environment, and working toward goals. It also has a dark side. When the circuit is stimulated too frequently or too strongly (think sugar, salt, fat, cocaine, and heroin), the liking feeling becomes a wanting feeling. That’s when our behavior can change. We start seeking out the stimuli, missing it when we don’t have it, feeling fearful of running out, and taking steps to insure an ample supply. In other words, pleasure starts taking up real estate in our lives, eroding our resources, and eclipsing things that matter more.
  

  It’s all right letting yourself go, as long as you can get yourself back. – Mick Jagger

• There’s a problem with amped up stimuli (Ben & Jerry’s, Coke, cocaine, etc.). They can physically alter the pleasure circuit. We get numbed to pleasure, so we need more and more of the stimuli to feel good.
• After a while, what started out as a seemingly O.K. thing can start showing the markers of addiction: 1) the behavior continues despite negative life consequences; 2) the stimulus becomes necessary to feel normal; 3) we say we’ll stop but we don’t; and 4) we regret the behavior after we’ve done it (once we’ve gotten past rationalizing that it’s something we “enjoy”).

The takeaway

Pleasure is good, until it’s not. We’re hard-wired to seek it out. We like feeling it. But when like becomes want, we can cross over into a danger zone. Which is why it’s important to recognize pleasure for what it really is: a neuroanatomical event that can either help us or hurt us. See what I mean by precision in word choice? It can make all the difference in what we do and how we live our lives.

Part II of this post explores enjoyment. Here’s a hint on how it’s different from pleasure. We need more than a hit of stimuli to experience enjoyment. It involves our active participation (using and building of skill, challenging ourselves, or otherwise showing up and putting forth effort).

Over to you: What’s your take on pleasure? Now that you know how it works in the brain, do you perceive it differently? What’s something you get pleasure from? Have you ever felt yourself crossing over into the danger zone of too much stimuli and too much pleasure?

NOTES & FURTHER READING
David J. Linden, The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good at 15-20, 81-82, 92-93, 142-43, 147-48.
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play, 6, 54.

RELATED POSTS
Pleasure vs. Enjoyment: What’s The Difference? Part II
How To Stop Doing Something
On Ice Cream, Behavior Mod & The KKK
How To Be Your Own Truthteller
On Getting The Hang Of It (AKA Why I Want To Be Like Heidi’s Mom)

When we try new things, we can’t possibly predict how it will go. Sometimes we get to where we like or even love what we’ve tried, and sometimes we don’t. But here’s the thing. When we do, it’s great, and when we don’t, it’s still great. Because in either case, we’ve strengthened our try-new-things muscle.

Stated a bit differently, the more we try new things, the better we get at trying new things. As time goes on, we can keep upping our game, trying harder and more intriguing things. And that’s when life can get really interesting.

So what’s with people who are open to trying new things? Are they just more daring and adventurous than everyone else? No. It’s not that. It comes down to the way they think about themselves and what’s new and different to them. Can we get to where we think that way? Yes. This post shows you how.

Change geek that I am, I’ve compiled a short list of guidelines for upgrading how we think when we think about change and newness in our lives. Read it over and see how it fits with your way of thinking.

I love fool’s experiments. I am always making them. – Charles Darwin

For now, let’s focus on things we don’t have to try – you know, the optional, reasonably low risk stuff – like trying new food or a different way to exercise, or going somewhere you’ve never been, or hanging out with different people, or changing how you get through the day (like checking your email at designated times instead of constantly), or not doing something you usually do (like eating sweets), or trying something just to see if you can do it.

Ready? Here goes …

The short list

• THE WHY. As I’ve written before, start with why. Ask yourself: Why try new things in the first place? To discover? To learn? To experiment? To expand your repertoire? Because life is more fun and interesting that way? Yes to all, as I see it. That’s my general cache of reasons, sometimes joined with this one: Because being wrong is very possible. What we’re doing now just might not work as well as we think it does, so maybe it needs a tweak, or a serious rework.
• THE PARAMETERS. Set some. To get started, here are some helpful questions: Is this a possible one time thing (like intro to yoga, more if you like it)? Is this something that’s contingent on something else happening first (like reacting differently when people annoy you)? Is this something that might take a while? If so, for how long are you going to try this new thing? Would it help to create a zone of practice, like every Thursday afternoon for 3 weeks, or might you encompass your try as a 30 day challenge? Or if that seems too long, then how about 7 or 21 days?

I went from desk dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work, for fun! – Matt Cutts

• THE INEVITABLE. We humans are naturally good at adapting. It’s how we evolved as far as we did. We can get used to things, without even trying that hard. Once we start, things tend to get easier. Adaptation works even in extreme instances, and we’re not even talking about extreme here. Just a little newness and possible short-term inconvenience or discomfort. So what’s the big deal? Just make the leap. Once you do, some nice things will start to kick in, like learning, mastery, and flow, and the process will start to feel good.
• THE POINT. Trying something new isn’t about being good at it from the start. It’s about learning, not judging. So forget what others might be thinking, and forget what you’re thinking if it’s remotely self-judgmental. Strike the words “I suck at this” from your mind and focus on finding what works. We almost never nail it on the first try. So don’t expect to. Don’t expect anything, good or bad. Just begin and let each small win fuel the next one.



• THE FOUNDATION. Trying new things is itself a skill that we can get substantially better at over time. If you’re not used to it, start small. Like changing how you grocery shop. If you usually walk clockwise around the store, give counterclockwise a try. You might feel a little disoriented, and you might even forget a few things. But you’ll see that you can do something new and come away unscathed. Build from there. Walk home a different way. Get lunch at a new place. Soon you’ll have proof from your own actions that you can try new things. Next thing you know, you’ll be trying …. well, who knows? That’s the exciting thing.

The takeaway

Trying new things can be fun, and it can enrich our lives. The more we do it, the better we get at it. Some of us might be more inclined than others to embrace newness and change, but we can all become more open to it. It takes changing how we think when we think about trying something new. Next time you catch yourself thinking you can’t, or you don’t want to, call up the short list and think about the why, the parameters, the inevitable, the point, and the foundation. Then get started.

OVER TO YOU: What do you think about when you think about trying new things? Does it align with the short list? How is it different? See you in the comments.

NOTES & FURTHER INTRIGUE
If you’ve read this far, you deserve treat. Check out this best-ever video of the Stones doing Jumpin’ Jack Flash live in Rio.

Being wrong is something we humans excel at. We’re just not very good at predicting things, including what will happen if we try something new. As self-proclaimed “wrongologist” Kathryn Schultz puts it in her Ted talk, time and time again throughout our lives, “we think one thing is going to happen, and something else happens instead.”

Why it matters

This phenomenon matters a lot when it comes to changing our behavior, whether it’s how we work, interact with others, nourish and exercise our bodies, or do just about anything. We think we like what we do now, and we often don’t think we’ll like doing it differently. And we very often don’t think we’ll like trying something completely new. So the status quo lives on, and that’s how we miss out on things that could enrich our lives.

Noise of the mind

When we tell ourselves we won’t like something, before we even try it, that’s noise of the mind, standing in for what’s real. A good way to quiet the mind and transition into reality is to do whatever it is we think we won’t like. You know, try it out.

It means getting comfortable with the attitude that Niels Bohr once described as an inevitable part of a quantum view, that tickling “are you kidding me?” feeling as you try something a bit nuts only to discover that it works wonderfully. – Joshua Cooper Ramo

That was the lesson learned by major league baseball player Shawn Green when his career hit an all-time low. Trade rumors were floating around about him, and he was sitting on the bench all the time. Team managers had told him he needed to change his swing, but they wouldn’t let him play, and they wouldn’t even let him practice in “the cage” with the coaching staff. For whatever reason, management had decided to let him die on the vine.

With no other choice, Green did something he was sure he wouldn’t like. He started practicing at a batting tee near the dugout. At first, it felt like punishment. He swung with brute force to release anger and “let everyone know how pissed off” he was.

Then something else happened, and he found he’d been wrong about the tee:

[F]our or five days into it something changed. I began to enjoy it. After the first fifteen or so swings, my mind would quiet and the swings would start to feel more fluid. I began to enjoy the twenty or thirty minutes I’d spend at the tee every day ….

Back in the game

After many weeks, some team changes meant Green was back in the line up. In his first at bat, with one of the best pitchers on the mound, he hit a home run (and another later in the game). In the month that followed, he raised his batting average 60 points.

And then something else happened. Green’s time at the tee became his daily meditation. He recalls:

I began to thirst for those twenty-minute sessions each day at the tee, not just as a means to achieving more at the plate, but as a way to peace and stillness …. the tool had become the crux of my two worlds: baseball and spirituality.

As stillness entered my life, my relationship with the ever-challenging external world would also begin to change …. I noticed that the outer world wasn’t affecting my inner world to the degree it once had …. Finding stillness strengthened my ability to recognize and disarm menacing thoughts …. [T]he daily practice of stillness altered my relationship with those thoughts, aiding me to control them rather than the other way around.

The takeaway

So often in life, we don’t try new things because we think we won’t like them. Sometimes we try them anyway, because we have to, or just to experiment, and we find out we were wrong – we actually like what we’ve tried. We might even find, as in Green’s case, that what we’ve tried is actually our salvation. It’s funny, isn’t it, how good we are at being wrong?

OVER TO YOU: Have you ever thought you wouldn’t like something, but you tried it anyway and got to where you did like it? What was it? Is there something you haven’t tried, because you think you won’t like it? Like a new way of eating, something not in your reperatoire, or a way of working out that sounds painful or boring, like barefoot running, or riding your bike indoors? Do you think you could be wrong, and with time, you could get to where you do like it? See you in the comments.

NOTES & FURTHER READING
Shawn Green, The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph at 4-10, 13-14, 16.
Kathryn Schultz’s TED talk. See also her book, Being Wrong.  

RELATED POSTS
How To Be Your Own Truthteller
Mastery: Why You Don’t Need Motivation To Get Started
Change & The Ultimate Google Search
An Insider’s Guide To Zen On Your Bike
30 Day Challenges: The Ultimate Zone For Exploration, Habit Change & Getting Unstuck

Choose your fuel

Stated simply, if we want to burn fat (and most of us do), we have to eat in a way that promotes fat burning. Paleo is that way. Fat burning is high on the list of reasons why people go paleo. This post is a primer on how fat burning works. It’s distilled from my first-hand experience and Mark Sisson’s brilliant blog and book. Ready? Here we go:

• Remember from the first post that there are 3 macronutrients: protein, carbs, and fat. Every food out there is a source of at least one macronutrient.
• There are 2 primary sources our bodies can use for energy: fat and sugar. Fat comes from the fat we eat and the fat that’s stored in our bodies. Sugar comes from the carbs we eat, which the body converts to glucose (sugar) and uses right away and/or stores in small amounts for later use.
• When we eat high carb, we train our bodies to use sugar for fuel. In other words, we become sugar burners. That means the body craves carbs and uses sugar as its preferred source of fuel. It stops using dietary fat for fuel, and it doesn’t tap into its fat stores, so fat gets stored in the body and stays there.
• When we eat low carb, we train our bodies to use fat for fuel. In other words, we become fat burners, aka fat adapted. That means there’s little to convert to sugar to use for fuel, so the body gets its fuel from the fat we eat and the fat stored in our bodies. Yessssss! That’s just what we want our bodies to do. Life gets different and better. All kinds of lovely things start happening …
  

• When we’re efficiently running on fat, we don’t feel the need to eat frequently. (Because we have ample fat stores, but limited sugar stores. Sugar needs constant replenishing. Fat doesn’t.) Thus, we’re not our food-focused, snack-seeking selves anymore. We can go long periods of time without eating if we need to or choose to, and even skip meals – all comfortably (which comes in handy, especially when we’re busy or traveling). Gone are our craves and that I’m starving feeling. We experience hunger differently. Instead of it feeling pressing or urgent, it’s a simple awareness that our our bodies are ready to be nourished. So we’re drawn to foods that are actually nourishing, as opposed to the crack-like fare that once had a hold on us. In other words, it gets easy to say no to crack because we don’t even want crack (ice cream, bread, pasta, cupcakes, etc.).



• How do grain and refined sugar fit into the picture? They don’t. It’s impossible to eat low carb when we include them in our diet in any material amount. Why? Because they’re very carb dense. The way to be low carb is to get carbs from vegetables and some fruit, most of which are carb sparse. (To illustrate: 1 cup of Ben & Jerry’s vanilla has 46 grams of carbs; 1 cup of pasta has 40 grams; 1 cup of berries has 20 grams, and 1 cup of cooked spinach has 6 grams.)
• The foregoing explains why fat phobia is unfounded. If you eat low carb and the right amount of fat for your body, fat won’t make you fat because it gets used for fuel. It also makes you feel sated, so it’s a sustainable approach you can go long term with. Compare that with low carb/low fat, which keeps you hungry (so it only works short term, if at all, because it’s not sustainable).
• Major point: It’s high carb/high fat, that makes you fat. In other words, in order for the fat you’re eating to make you fat, you have to be eating high carb with it. And when you’re eating high carb, you keep craving and eating carbs, so you keep getting fatter. Think hamster wheel.



• Protein, the third macronutrient, must be in the mix. When we’re eating the right amount of carbs and the right amount of protein for our bodies, we can round out our caloric needs with good fat – and not get fat from fat – because we’re fat burners.

The takeaway

Fat burning is reason enough for many people to go paleo. If you know the history and science behind it, it’s even more compelling. That’s what we’ll look at in the next post. For now, if you want to start turning yourself into a fat burner, do a paleo self-experiment. Ditch the grain and refined sugar and eat this (and only this) for 21 days: protein and fat primarily from animal sources (meat, poultry, seafood, and eggs – the cleanest possible); carbs from plant sources (vegetables and fruit); and additional fat from plant sources (avocados, nuts, seeds and oils).

It may seem strange and complicated to you, but try looking at it this way. Paleo is high quality food in its basic form. You can get all fancy with recipes, but you don’t have to. The best way to start is to learn to enjoy the essence of clean food in the form that’s as close as possible to how it’s found in nature.

OVER TO YOU: Are you a sugar burner or a fat burner? Whichever one you are, how does it feel? If you’re a sugar burner, what do you think of making the changes necessary to beome a fat burner? See you in the comments.

NOTES & FURTHER READING
Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint at 67, 69, 95-98, 101.

RELATED POSTS
Paleo Primer: What It Is & Who’s Doing It
How To Get Good (Really Good) At Making Change In Your Life
Mastery: Why You Don’t Need Motivation To Get Started
Motion: You Say You Want Some Evolution? Here’s The Plan
Mindset: Why The Biggest Change Is Also The Easiest