What I propose here is a sort of game to face illness. The importance of good mood in any healing process will never be remarked enough. This practice is useful not for very complicated diseases, but for those tiny nuisances that we are bound to when we feel depressed (or in reverse: those tiny nuisances that, without being serious, can take us to depression with thoughts of the “I’m getting old” kind and the like, zzz).

Here is the thing: do not resist your worst premonitions. Make them real. Don’t be narrow minded: that sharp pain in your throat is not the preamble of influenza. Be more ambitious: today is your last day on Earth. The worst possible scenario has come true. You are going to die.

And then, having that in mind, you start to speak to yourself. Aloud, it is important. Tell yourself what do you regret not having done, what will you miss the most, how do you think you’ll be remembered. Use a theatrical, woeful tone. It’s a game, so let’s be serious! And don’t be rude to yourself. You are in a privileged situation now.

By doing this, we are taking advantage of a bad situation, turning weakness into strength. It is very usual to advise that one must remind that one’s time is limited, etc. When we are ill, we have the chance to “grab” that feeling, it is not just an abstract visualization anymore (and once the pain goes away, just the same as with tears, there works a nice mechanism of relief, too).

It is a game, and a very healthy one. In the case of subtle uneasiness, for example (that kind of things that you cannot define enough to tell a doctor about them), it conjures the spirit of disaster: to name is to have. A funny paradox is that, by “mocking” disease, you very often defeat it (it is also a terrific way to make long term plans…). Having a playful stance, you will be able to taste your pain better, and many times, feeling itself considered, it could even disappear. Many times, it is our fears which stand in the way of your healing. Our body, our organic functions, know better than the conscious mind. Well, the don’t know, they just do.

This is not a tool for everyone: it requires a playful stance and being a bit theatrical (having good imagination skills helps, too). But I guess if you’ve reached this far in this post I guess you fit the profile.

Other healthy games, roles, mockeries you like?

Playing death originally appeared on Zerebria on 9 March 2010.

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I’ll admit it: everything I do, I do it for my fiction. I honor writing as the art with the biggest powers, when considering its effects, and the degree of intimacy, elevation and sometimes “possession” it grants (writing, in its finest hour, becomes invisible, the words stop being “black boxes” with a meaning inside and become something similar to music).

But something must be pointed out: I feel myself comfortable with a European tradition that considers a writer as a humanist, with his writing being a tool to explore the contradictions and dark areas of the human nature. Such a conception is nowadays minority: a writer is usually considered a mere entertainer, a manufacturer of stories. But I always found that point of view very limiting and limited, and I am not interested in it: in fact, telling a story is quite a simple discipline, with fixated structures that are easy to learn, and which can even be generated by a computer. It is easy to tell a story, the point is which story to tell in order to be helpful (Examples: Hemingway writes a novel about the Spanish Civil War because he considers it an important moment, in which the fate of the whole human kind is on stake. Henrik Ibsen writes a play about the unbearable situation of women under the macho domination in his age. The poet Rafael Alberti writes a book of poetry intended to be outrageous, to stir up a dull society that is heading for destruction. It is important to remark that, in order to be considered literature, those books never offer answers, only questions via characters and situations).

In all those cases, the technical skill is at the service of something greater, and more urgent. That’s what makes writing worthwhile in my case, and the kind of passion that commercial bestsellers usually lack.

So, I have a certain gift for words and, logically, I want to be helpful doing what I like. But, just like anything without a straightforward, short-term retribution in our troubled days, good fiction must be protected like a delicate flower (a humanist takes very long to grow). As for me, my flower has been paralyzed for a series of years (which were not idle, because the concept of idleness has no meaning for a real writer: those days when I do not write I feel VERY uncomfortable. But sometimes you just have to wait). Overwhelmed by the growing needs of modern life, I lacked a system because I didn’t think I needed one; prolific a writer as I am, in a way I thought that my garden would take care of itself. But there is a lot of work to do with the pruning, the plague control, the collection cycles…

It was only very short ago that I knew the GTD system. Like I said in many many posts, it was a revolution for me, and, naturally, I tried to apply David Allen’s principles to the creative field. I must say that I have not still succeeded to the fullest extent, maybe because my writing habits are very sporadic, with long periods without action followed by others where everything else must be postponed (yeah, right, I believe in inspiration). I have found very little information on the issue (or at least very little of what I was searching, which I, besides, don’t know exactly what is). One of my main problems is that it is very difficult for me to decide when a text is finished, how many “stages” set in its maturing (here is a comment on a book that is also useful as a checklist for the correction inferno).

Perhaps GTD cannot be applied to artistic activities but to a certain extent. The artistic process, by definition, is free, and random factors have an important role in it. By now, the biggest benefits my writing has obtained from GTD are:

• Saving my life. Exhausted by the “tyranny of urgent”, my writing (as a non-immediate, non-short-term activity) was always a victim of delays; too many fires to extinguish. GTD cleared the mind frame, reduced the complexity of things, and gave me more free space to do what I like (watching TV… hahaha, just kidding).
• Structuring notes. Before having a system (L), my fiction ideas used to pile up in notebooks that I would very rarely re-read. After some GTD gymnastics, it comes natural, as with any scrap of paper, to ask yourself the savior questions: what is this? Does it require an action? Does such action takes less than two minutes?
• Reaffirming my goals. The “democracy” of GTD processing, element-by-element, makes sure I’ll keep an eye on my writing even in the busiest days.
• Fighting procrastination. Writing is a source of energy for a passionate writer, but the hardest thing is always to start. I very usually, when I find a note with an idea for a short story, apply the two minutes rule and write a treatment of the idea, or even a short passage to experiment with the tone, as a “sample” of it. Then you proceed into a phone bill or a reminder that you must renew your driving license in a different mood: the seed has been planted.

Gee, on second thought, GTD has in fact done a lot for my writing already. Who knows, maybe it cannot be taken any further without killing creativity, without putting our inner child into a uniform. What do you think, creative people out there? What’s your system to move ahead? How can you tell when a piece is “done”?

GTD for writers originally appeared on Zerebria on 5 March 2010.

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I had never realized before to what extend a place like that divides our attention. Everything conspires against a united mind, everything is flash, buzz, dispersion. Observing my fellow humans there (which to me -and I know I’m weird here- were more interesting than the furious consumerism), I noticed in their attention, the following simultaneous divisions (I would normally have been only pissed off, but, like I said, I was in a scientific mood):

• Consciously being watched: malls, there is no doubt about it, are the modern interaction spaces. Some people even call them the new temples. Many people go there just to feel that they are a part of something. Watching and being watched has an essential role in the mall’s life cycle. You don’t simply acquire things: you watch and get ideas, set examples and precedents, favor serendipity… Inside the temple, it is acceptable to watch and being watched. We all become brothers in consumption.
• Disperse attention: different as they might be, a mall is always some kind of dome where you are bombed with an intense load of stimulus. Perceptive attention is on stake, and a lot of contrary forces struggle for our attention at the same time, using any resource at hand: color flashes, muzak, a guy in a suit, a car on top of a column… and above all this: etcetera.
• Walking: the basic unit of movement, from point A to B, using both legs alternative, gets obstructed, detoured or stimulated by the mall’s permanent and ephemeral architectures. The consumer shows all kind of undetermined pauses, of unpredictable effects for fellow walkers.
• Lateral stimulus: it is easy to collide in a crowded mall. The chances are you usually walk ahead, but you would die before missing the action happening in all those lateral shop windows. As a result, the step goes in one direction and the eye in another.
• One’s own train of thought. And yet, could you believe it?, some people still find the time to have a thought of their own, in addition to all the rest. Or a slice of thought at least. You can read it in their faces. It usually lasts very little, but it introduces a new uncertainty factor in the equation.

The mixture of those elements produces a typical walking style, and is also a prove of the versatility of human mind, which can run single, serial, laser-like processes (100% of attention focused on one direction), and also simultaneous, parallel, infinitely atomized ones (like here). Maybe you are a mall animal and this post feels to you like trying to teach piano to Beethoven; but don’t forget that the things that we are more used to are precisely the easiest to forget…

How do you feel about those “temples”? Do you (really) like them? Do you enter them with a preset plan (and stick to it)? Or do you just let yourself go? Any alternative of massive social space?

The mall zoo: reflections on the divided mind originally appeared on Zerebria on 2 March 2010.

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Jung defines the unconscious as a natural mechanism of regulation. It is there to send us messages (and not only while we are sleeping) about how we manage. To warn us about excesses or defects in our behaviour. It is an additional safeguard, a guarantee, a “guard angel” provided by mum nature. Jung states that we can never gain access to it (“the unconscious is really un-conscious”, as he puts it), we can only design approximative models. As examples of unconscious mechanisms in nature, he mentions the fixated way in which birds have built their nests for centuries: birds do not have a conscious memory, they cannot keep information, compare the past and the present, or learn from each other: such ability is thus in-built, so to say. Or an even better example: bees. How the hell does an animal without a central nervous system manages to work in team and build complex constructions like hives?

A force does not need to be conscious to exist and act (otherwise we wouldn’t have heartbeats unless we would think about them), and, you will agree, a human being is quite more complex than a bee.

What I like most about Jung is that there is nothing esoteric about his theories. His method was rigorously scientific: he compared thousands of dreams and myths from different persons, cultures and ages, and found common factors, universal to all the human species. Maybe an Eskimo tale from the XVIIIth century told about a giant walrus who kidnapped a kid, and in a Southern African myth it was a giant Lion and a damsel, and in a Hungarian traditional tale it was a big bird and a shoemaker, and in a biblical story a giant whale and a bearded patriarch, but the fact is that the structure in all the narrations, and the role played by each character, showed fixed patterns in peoples who had not had the least contact, nor even existed during the same period. Conclusion: those features were common to the whole human kind, fixated in the same way as the construction of bird nests is.

It is important to remark, too, the important differences between Jung and Freud, legitimate inventor of psychoanalysis. Freud lived all his life in Vienna, and his patients were all members of Vienna’s middle-class in an age of conventionalism and sexual repression; that’s certainly why his theory considers sexual impulse as the sole “engine” of unconscious activity. On the other hand, Jung, while agreeing with Freud on the importance of the sex drive in our behavior, considers it only one of many others factors: food, power… Like I said above, Jung’s opinion is better grounded because he traveled around the world for years, studied different ages and mythologies, compared, weighted… Freud was the one who “discovered” the unconscious, but his exploration was limited to the Vienna of his time.

Jung warns that the unconscious cannot be directly known… but it must be noticed. Otherwise, it becomes inflamed. It is a part of us, alive and changing just like we are, and it asks for its share of attention. Its warnings are set there for our survival, just like many other resources developed by evolution along thousands of years.

Dreams are the privileged vehicle for those warnings, but not the only one: repressing those messages can also cause psychosomatic illness, making us say inconvenient things… The unconscious exists 24 hours a day, just like we do. It is a very jealous lover, but there is no reason to fear: it is set there for our protection, and it usually knows better than we do: in contrast to our tiny 1-100 years of individual experience, it offers more than 15 million years of collective experience accumulated by the species.

Western culture has been traditionally more “extroverted”, more interested in the outer world than in our complex (and beautiful) inner landscapes. I’d like to think that things are slowly changing, that we’ll improve in the management of a power that belongs to us and which, uncontrolled, violently released, has lead to irrational violence and disgrace many times through history. This blog, among other things, intends to be my modest contribution to such a change.

Master Jung would probably be agitated in his grave if he could read such a condensed summary (wise as he was, he always remarked that his theories were mere approaches to a vaster reality, because the unconscious is really un-conscious. The best introduction to his work is “Man and his symbols”, a compilation arranged by him and his collaborators short before he died). I hope that he will forgive me because of the love I have towards his ideas, and the need for their spreading that I feel in nowadays’ world. He had the misfortune of becoming fashionable in the 60’s, so now he has become sort of “outdated”. Such a shame that the world of ideas is also submitted to the tyranny of novelty. Naturally, more posts on the issue will follow…

So let’s go hunting. Any story of a very “rational” person who one day says or does something really childish, even suicidal? Any “coincidence” or disaster that obscurely, in a way, seemed makes sense? Any “congratulations” slipped by mistake in the middle of a funeral?

Honor your unconscious originally appeared on Zerebria on 26 February 2010.

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Writing the successes of the day was one of those great ideas. Simple, non-coded, very little time-consuming, it pays off in a way that is almost scary.

The tip is not new and has been around for some time. My personal encounter happened in a blog for musicians (I’d like to put the link here to show my recognition, but the post is lost in the information flow, due to the slow maturation process described above).

I started writing 5 successes at the end of the day, and some days it took me quite long to find them. In those initial days I also faced a series of very revealing repressions and mental obstacles. The greatest hits:

• “Hey, Nacho, but you’re cheating, this is only a minor detail”. (Answer: no it is not, it is neither minor nor major, it is positive, that’s what it is, so please stop being so judgmental.)
• “Gee, but you’re hiding a part of the facts in order to make the experience look better” (Answer: no, I’m not. I’m focusing on the positive aspects of the thing, that’s the whole point of the exercise.)

I started writing those successes as a section of my journal (the interactions and contrasts between the “plain” narration of the day and the reported successes were also very revealing). Now I have separated both: I have a tiny notebook on my bedside table, so writing the successes of the day is usually the last activity before turning off the light. It is not a bad way to close the day, any day, because it generates a certain recency effect that then spreads that optimism all over your next day and your activities.

There comes a wonderful moment when you start to do it spontaneously along the day: you generate “batches” of positive facts at will and very easily, the same way as you can decide to take a deep breath. There exists, without any doubt, a neural training factor. You can train your set of “optimistic circuits”, in the same way as you can train a certain group of muscles.

Nowadays, 5 is only my minimum rate, which I very easily surpass, and there are many moments, along the day, when I am tempted to stop what I’m doing to write down what a success it is turning to be. So I strongly recommend it. In a very short time, you’ll wake up and, after having a shower, you might be saying to yourself (to your surprise): “I already had my shower! What a success!”

P.S. It wouldn’t feel fair if I didn’t mention here Oprah’s “gratitude journal”, which I knew short after sketching this post. Blessed be any suggestion to reinforce good habits; as for myself, I prefer the successes approach because it is more proactive and, by connecting person and actions, it reinforces self-esteem. But your case might very well be different. As I explained in a different post, I have a natural gift for admiration, so I don’t need to be reminded how lucky I am, or how many cool things happen around me (maybe it is like being talented for music: it just happens). But perhaps for other people, with a bullet-proof self-esteem, or those who are excessively action-oriented, it works better to have a reminder of the need to stop from time to time and smell the flowers of existence.

What do you like better? Do you know other systems? Have you already adopted a positive mindset? What’s your advice?

How to become optimistic with very little effort originally appeared on Zerebria on 23 February 2010.

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I’m absolutely great, no doubt about it, so I cannot tolerate so many misunderstanding spread around. O.K., maybe it is true that in certain occasions I am a bit greedy with perception, to the extent of mistaking myself for the WHOLE reality… but I cannot accept rough terms like obsessive or megalomaniac. In any case, it is important to remark that most of my excesses, if there are any, are not my fault, but caused by a BAD EDUCATION, imposed on me by other left brains while I was a very tender and young brain.

…I love calculations, structures, right angles, putting some order in this strange, heterogeneous mashed potatoes structure we call reality. But of course I know that I am only a part of it. The problem is that I don’t know it all the time. I sometimes find it hard to stop, I must admit, and I rarely act as a whole with my twin brother the right brain, because, when I finally pass him the ball, I am usually too exhausted to contribute. So we live kind of divided.

What do you have to say about that, right brain? Oh yes, I forgot that you don’t talk. You’re too busy being this or that. It would be so easy if I could have a conversation with you, from time to time… I sometimes envy you for your nice existence, no memory, no anticipation, just your pure, nice present. But then I figure out a new way to classify butterflies, napkins or human beings, and it feels nice being myself again.

You’re so easy to victimize, right brain… I have to set myself the limits, and it is hard: you never contradict me, you don’t blame for my “me first” stance. I would like us to work as a unit again; I’m sure that we could learn a lot from each other. But first I have to learn to stop grabbing. I’ll try, I promise. I’ll try not to try so hard. Until that day, I want to apologize for blurring every experience with words. I remember that old novel by Aldous Huxley where a guy runs over a dog and simply processes it as “data”, giving a “lecture” on biology and alive beings to his horrified wife.

But, oh, you see? Here I was, throwing all my files again into you. I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t mean it. Come on, take a deep breath. Draw a picture, sing something, do some of those peculiar things you’re so good at. I am a good boy, damn it…”

Any left brain reading there? Won’t you show some solidarity?

Exclusive: left brain (kind of) explains itself originally appeared on Zerebria on 19 February 2010.

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Just like any other experiment, the simple fact of consciously observing has an effect on your behavior. There is not neutral observer. During the first days, my interruptions naturally dropped without effort. Another thing that I noticed was a very subtle, parasitic notion that work must be toiling. Many of my doubts consisted in “micro-choosing” option A, but then telling myself in a very subtle way “no, that’s too easy”, and then having a hard time to choose option B.

I think this is the kind of skill that David Allen (who considers himself a lazy person) refers to when he defends following one’s own nose. The ability to acquire here is to follow your guts right away, having the required reflexes to grab that first guess, not the second or third one. In my case, even with the most intensive focus, this kind of “harder, please” indecision continues coming back now and them. Funny how bad habits take their time to disappear, and even resurrect sometimes. Die at once, you filthy zombie!

In addition to measuring flow interruptions, I have tried other techniques to make transitions between tasks softer (the good thing about GTD, they say, is that the system is not the end, but the beginning, so you start to become creative):

• The SMART scanner: in those days with a general feeling of stagnation, I take my to-do lists and apply, one-by-one, the SMART inquire: this task here, Is it Small, is it Measurable, is it Attainable, is it Relevant, is it Time related? This simple process makes you look at your tasks in a different way; some of them get chopped into more measurable pieces (that you then yearn to attack), others need a more concrete enunciation, others required a numeric goal.
• The acid bath: another way to chop a task into simpler, manageable parts. When weekly review time comes, I take each of the tasks still “standing” in the to-do list, or those that start to “stink” a little but are not suitable for the someday/maybe list, and disintegrate them into several, simpler parts. For example, “filling Internet form” can become “estimate time to fill form”+”Fill Internet form”. If those tasks still survive next week, they can be “atomized” again (never happened to me).
• The guided visit: crazy, but funny too, It consists in applying Merlin Mann’s “dashes” (7 minutes doses of a task to overcome procrastination), to ALL available tasks in all lists. It is like a “living to-do list”, like making a detailed map of your responsibilities in the moment. Not suitable for hurried moments or people without sense of humor.

Ahead

Will we ever defeat indecision? When pauses are not used for reflection, but to sink into hesitation, they drag productivity. The secret, probably, is acting fast, taking responsibility for your decision and considering that, more often than not, a wrong action is better than a sure doubt. To say it with the classics:

In our flowing affairs a decision must be made, -the best if you can; but any is better than none.

Emerson - “Conduct of life”

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, one of the pioneers in introducing Buddhism in the Western world, tells a delicious story about indecision. The roof of a Zen temple was leaking, so the master commanded three monks to find something to cope with the water as soon as possible. The three monks ran through the temple in a rush, and shortly after, one of them came back bringing a basket. It is said the master was very pleased, because the monk had acted without hesitation; he had failed because he had tried. For me, who always find 3.500 reasons not to do anything, it is a very valuable lesson. Indecision, very often, is nothing but a reflex caused by fear. Productivity, sometimes, is a matter of courage.

How do you deal with indecision? Is your mind like water or like porridge? Any tech to share? Heuristics?

Flowing with the workflow originally appeared on Zerebria on 17 February 2010.

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I guess such a piece of evidence has not made it to the top of popular science because it would be extremely uncomfortable for many manufacturers of “happiness in 5 minutes” recipes. There is no easy way out, pain and pleasure are mingled as two parts of a same thing, to the extent that the better you learn to manage pain, the more pleasant your pleasant moments will be.

(In fact, pain is alright, you bet we can take some. The real problem, the thing that won’t let us sleep at night, is fear of pain. Maybe a good issue for a different post).

So no one should disregard one’s own unhappy moments. They should be honored the same as the others, firstly because they are a part of one’s life too, and secondly because there is really no escape from them.

What makes human suffering original is tears. Nobody would feel comfortable weeping all the time ( just like nobody would feel comfortable laughing all the time ), but tears are necessary for mood balance and physiological purposes. Tears are nice, and natural, and one distinctive feature of humans, not shared by other species -excepting crocodiles ;)-

Do you remember the last time that a film made you cry? Remember that cleaning flood refreshing your breathing system? The exciting shivers in your skin, the relaxation that followed? Films are maybe one of the nicest and “cleanest” ways to reach tears. The same as with a roller-coaster, they imply a psychological mechanism of transference: there is an intended, “faked” emotion that makes us recall the real one very vividly but suppressing its risks; in a ritual, very corporal way, we summon danger so as to remember what was it like, and then tell it to go away: the result is enlarged consciousness, and relief. Crying with a film is a really delicate pleasure.

But maybe crying with films is not enough. I have a feeling that tears in public are badly looked upon (I remember “Alphaville”, a sci-fi film where people got arrested for showing their emotions in public… we haven’t got that far, and I don’t think it can be done). I dream of an ancient time where people were not afraid to cry in front of other humans, just the same as one is not afraid of breathing because it is a simple, natural function, common to all of us. An ancient time of closeness and community, without all those “tele”s and “inter”s that, paradoxically, separate people. Crying, like many other social practices, has now become a solitary, secret event (you would not attend to a ceremony to cry together and pity someone’s bad luck, oh, that’s so primitive… but you do get exactly that collective feeling from a talk-show in the privacy of your hall: you cry by seeing others cry (because we humans are imitative beings), but nobody must know it. Well, pardon me but I don’t get it.

Why are tears so hard to find in our society? Maybe the general environment of everyday horror (3/4 of the world starving to death, a planet heading for a climate collapse, you don’t need the whole list, do you?) makes us a little numb. There is a principle in psychology of attention called the law of fatigue. It’s pretty straightforward: the constant repetition of any stimulus causes a reduction in the response. In other words, our senses get bored with any repetition, including the repetition of atrocity. Sadness and indignation every day, all the time, could kill any normal being. So we change the standards, and decide to pass a lot as “background noise”. We create a defensive crust, the problem is that we lay beneath that crust. Under such condition, tears are sometimes a blessing, and they make you wonder when they come: how long since the last time? And when will this happen again?

So far my sociological interpretation of our problems with tears, with the lack of them to be more precise. There are many other likely theories, so I hope that you, invisible reader who passes by, contribute your two cents here. Yes, I mean you! Come on, don’t be shy, I know you’re there…

Tears? You won the lottery!!! originally appeared on Zerebria on 12 February 2010.

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In spite of that, he wasn’t precisely a person of the enthusiastic type, and I remember the occasion in which I expressed to him my astonishment and amazement for the recent discovery of such art, more or less with these terms:

-Gee, ain’t that incredible? So much creativity, so much intelligence, so many resources, such a variety of stories and thrills, and all of that for only the price of a ticket… Now isn’t that admirable?

I clearly remember the cold silence that followed. My friend simply didn’t get it. It was too naive for him. That day I discovered for the first time that we regarded human productions in very different ways. To him, everything that reached his senses was something abstract, fallen out of the blue into the screen, the page or the stereo, for his immediate consumption and oblivion. End of the story. For me (naiver, it’s true), while mostly agreeing with him, there was always an additional, underlying evidence: it is another human being, similar to me in many ways, who did this thing. My wonder has no limits. And I call it gratitude.

I have already described in a previous post this “passive” mentality towards objects. It seems to be -sadly, I think- the most usual stance nowadays. Common people do not seem to notice the hand that is behind almost everything one has around; the human kind is self-dependent to the extent that, every morning, in your 5 minutes after waking up, you have taken profit a thousand times of something another fellow human has done. Think about that: the bed you sleep in, the alarm clock manufactured somewhere, with its energy supply, the slippers you purchased from someone, manufactured by someone, now go to the door, that door which etc…

Seeing objects as just “dead” entities leads to a dull, immature and solitary stance. I prefer admiration because it is funnier. And more active: I am not talking of admiration at the foot of the pedestal. As a creative person, I see admiration as part of an active process of discovery: breaking the toy to see how it works, then trying to make a better one. Human beings are imitative by nature, so the more times you remember that this or that was done by a human, the more times you’ll try to mimic it.

I am a deep diver and have had the occasion to admire a lot of things, one at a time, each of them quite intensively: besides movies there is psychology, the Marvel comics mythology, computers, books, writing, guitar, piano, meditation… Very different disciplines, but in all of them, the sequence is always the same:
a) Oh god, how did he do that?
b) What do I need to do it?

Such a variety of interests (when boosted by admiration, not as a 9 to 5 obligation) is also healthier, because of the way in which the brain works. It is more profitable, too, because, by interconnecting several areas of thought, you reinforce all of them, and your ideas will become more original.

In fact, I’ve come to think that admiration is a human need. And thus, when it is not properly respected, it finds other lateral, sick, infamous ways to be satisfied. Admiration is the fuel of human creativity, too: all honest masters should aim to and be comfortable with the idea of training pupils capable to exceed them, capable to make them go wow. In that sense, admiration is a bit “ruthless”: it is like a hunger that can only be calmed down when one explains the mystery, reaches the next level.

And last but not least, admiration is beautiful. Confessing one’s admirations is one of the easiest acts of generosity and makes you feel really good. Tell me who you admire and I’ll tell you who you are. The wisest men I’ve known have always been great admirers, very generous and always willing to see the good aspects in other people’s achievements. The Chinese wise man Confucius, for example, liked to use admiration as a way of teaching; instead of saying “X must be done”, he often talked about this or that guy who had done X, which was admirable. Wise as he was, he understood that a human being is never an isle.

Do you share the “admiration religion”? Who do you admire? How do you do it? What do you get from it?

Admiration is healthy (and powerful, too…) originally appeared on Zerebria on 9 February 2010.

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Within that inner “fist”, the animal section, there is an important area called the limbic system, which is in charge of primal reactions, with a remarkable “ignition button”, of the size of a peanut, called the “amygdala”.

The external, superficial area is called neocortex (from the latin terms neo=new and cortex=bark, i.e. surface), and is, presumably, in charge of all the “modern stuff”, like language, reasoning, etc.

The problem is that the limbic system comes always first: when the amygdala gets activated by any threatening perception, its messages, which can be a matter of life or death, get top priority, and will inhibit the rest of the brain signals for a while (the estimated average time is 90 seconds). Those are the cases in which we can see someone who acts like “possessed”, or even some of those murderers who in the aftermath of the killing claim “not remembering anything”, “acting as in a dream”, etc. This phenomenon of inhibition has been called “emotional hijack”.

Being “hijacked” by one’s own brain. Quite spooky, isn’t it? And to make things even worse, the amygdala, perhaps due to its primitive origins, its deep roots, has a very “easy trigger”, and once it gets impressed by a certain impulse, the impression will NEVER be completely erased. (Btw, if you don’t have enough, find out about yet another biological coercion here).

So far the bad news. Here come the good ones.

Joseph LeDoux, the researcher who discovered the role of the amygdala in emotional processes, also found out that the modern brain can be educated to inhibit the mechanism and range of the amygdala effects. So to say, you cannot avoid the fire, but you can improve your management as a fireman.

The emotional bursts start in the amygdala. See them as an explosion expanding from the inner brain towards the outer layer (and forcing corporal changes, too). Once the explosion reaches the “hand covering the fist”, the neocortex, this one gets to say something about the situation. In fact, many authors consider that the ability to manage that stage, our “neocortex reflexes” so to say, could be a very precise indicator of mental maturity. Such ability is, literally, what emotional intelligence is about.

After receiving the primitive signal, the neocortex processes it and then sends some signals back to the amygdala; signals that can be soothing or can surrender to the rage and fear sensations (didn’t you ever have the sensation that some people were inventing reasons for their anger, but anger was first?)

As an example of soothing messages, I really liked the proposal by Jill Bolte Taylor in her very peculiar book “My stroke of insight”. I say “peculiar” because it is a treatise on brain stroke both theoretical (Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist), and practical (she was victim of a brain stroke herself). In addition, there is no tiresome jargon in the book. I read it during my father’s illness (as explained here), and, though hard at some chapters (the minute-by-minute description of her stroke, while my father was still at the intensive care unit), it really helped me a lot. Don’t wait to have a stroke in your family to read it!

Dr. Bolte Taylor, during the acutest stages of her stroke, experienced a feeling of disintegration of the self into its elements, an egoless sensation that she describes as nice to the extent that she felt tempted to embrace it, to let herself go. After an experience like that, I guess it is easier for a person to question monolithic notions like “ego”, and to make abstraction of certain parts of oneself as desired. That’s the “trick” that she uses to deal with her limbic system, to face emotional outbursts:

When my brain runs loops that feel harshly judgmental, counter-productive, or out of control, I wait 90 seconds for the emotional/physiological response to dissipate and then I speak to my brain as though it is a group of children. I say with sincerity, “I appreciate your ability to think thoughts and feel emotions, but I am really not interested in thinking these thoughts or feelings these emotions anymore. Please stop bringing this stuff up.”

Fascinating, isn’t it? A common mistake with undesired emotional responses is trying to repress them: “this is childish, I should not feel like this, I must be stronger”, etc. The usual result is like throwing water into a burning pan. Those feelings and emotions are part of oneself, too, and have the right to exist too. Just make sure they realize who’s the boss here… but be tender, because they are a part of you, too.

One more thing about physiological changes: it is important to remark that they remain “invisible” during the emotional hijack: you might notice that “you are becoming anxious”, but you do not notice that your heart has started to beat faster, your pupils have contracted, your breathing is accelerated. Those changes, on their side, will induce more negative perceptions and thoughts of rage, fear and anxiety. So the classic advice of stepping aside and taking a deep breath is more than pure poetry: mind and body are absolutely interconnected!

What’s your favorite trick or sentence to stand the dreaded 90 seconds? Any brain-fu lesson to share?

A hijack can be an opportunity, too

What to do with yourself when you’re mad originally appeared on Zerebria on 5 February 2010.

Related posts:

1. How to become optimistic with very little effort
2. Playing death
3. The magic of journaling