What is happiness? Biology? Emotions? Here's the simplest way to find out.

“The better decision maker has at his/her disposal repertoires of possible actions; checklists of things to think about before he acts; and he has mechanisms in his mind to evoke these, and bring these to his conscious attention when the situations for decision arise.” (Herbert Simon, Nobel Laureate)

How you analyze the purpose of your life and the causes of your happiness and unhappiness matters a lot.  Not because they may not be based in reality, but because it changes the systems you use to analyze your life and changes how you try to engineer it.  Some see life's value in terms of god, or oneness with the universe, or seratonin levels, or family, or career, or impact, or altruism, or selfishness.  

Whatever it is, you are using these terms to create systems in your mind.  Systems are ways of organizing the data of a situation in order to make decision making and analysis faster and smarter.  Instead of analyzing every single situation based on all the unique data in the moment, your brain uses patterns and assumptions.  For example, if your stuck with yogurt and no spoon in the middle of a dessert, you won't need to reinvent a whole new utensil.  You use yogurt systems to analyze and solve faster.  

1.  This is yogurt
2.  System:  yogurt and spoons work nicely together. 
3.  I have yogurt, but no spoon, how can i make a spoon?
4.  Take the lid, bend it a bit so it resembles a spoon as much as possible, 
5.  Eat yogurt.  

Without the system, it would take much longer and require more mental energy to come up with the lid-spoon idea.  This is a very basic example.  But systems thinking is more ubiquitous in your day than you would imagine, it's the basis of a large part of all sorts of learning.  Warren Buffet and Charles Munger have identified 90 specific systems they use to make fast and reliably successful investment decisions.  It's worked fairly well for them.  

While systems thinking is great for a lot of things, it can also backfire in a major way.  The more we use a system, the more automatic and defaulted it becomes in the mind.  Systems were great for helping us to invent our way out of the stone age and tons of other things, but they can also make us close minded, out of touch with reality, and make uninformed bad decisions (the opposite of what they're meant for.)  For example, defaulted systems thinking is why people are racist, or try the same solution to a problem over and over again failing every time.  It's why, perhaps subconsciously without realizing, you may think that "no one really likes me" or that "I'm always going to fail."  Those are ridiculous notions, but bad experiences can cause bad systems, and lots of people are dealing with bad systems and not aware of it.  

You most likely have a system for seeking value in your life.  If your unaware of it, it was engineered unintentionally.  That doesn't necessarily mean its a bad system, but being aware of how you think makes you think better, and if you see room for improvement in your system,  you can make change on purpose and with clear headed intentions.  

For seeking happiness, i've come up with a system. For a long time I struggled with whether to deal with happiness through biology or emotions.  I couldn't figure out if happiness was about seratonin levels, money and cars, or being one with the universe.   As all polar conflicts tend to go, the answer was somewhere in the middle.  

I now use a really basic system to understand why and how i feel good and bad and how to change it.  There are two important and inseparable aspects of long term happiness: a thriving brain-body, and emotional fulfillment. 

1. Biology

You need your biology to feel positive emotions.  Your thoughts and feelings can all be boiled down to neurons firing and chemicals moving around.  Any time you feel anything good or bad, its happening because of your body.  No matter how happy you should be, if you can't muster up enough seratonin (oversimplification) you'll feel like depressed shit on the street. 

Those days or moments when you feel bad for no reason are usually a result of some kind of wackiness in your homeostasis.  And even when you can think of ten reasons to feel depressed (especially if they're broad and existential) they can be completely the result of momentary deficiencies in brain and body health.  And if there is a real external reason for bad feelings, biology can make it a 1,000 times worse.  Imagine the difference between a creditor hounding you for money you don't have after green tea, meditation, and a big healthy breakfast, and a creditor calling you 2/3 of your way into a meth bender (an extreme example to emphasize the point, but the concept is constantly happening on a subtler level.)

BUT, even if your buzzing on a perfect homeostasis, you can still be unhappy, especially in the long run. Thats where emotional fulfillment comes in.

2. Emotional fulfillment

You have emotional needs.  Theres tons of theories on how and why they got there (evolution, culture, ideology, god, personality) and how to categorize them (maslow, psychology, love, ego, altruism, selfishness, yada yada) but what matters is that they're there and you need to fulfill them to feel happy. 

The best way i've found to quickly and efficiently analyze how to fulfill those needs is best described by what this one question:  "How do I feel about what i do?" (Or how will i feel or how am i feeling).  Ask that question as often as possible, in reflection on future improvement and during real time decision making and try to answer with as thick and heavy honesty as possible.  The better you feel about what you do the more fulfilled you'll be.  Its a great way to analyze happiness because it doesn't rely on anything external or out of your control. 

It can get complicated when trying to figure out if you should alter what you do or alter how you feel about it.  But giving my brain this type of simple straightforward framing makes it all much less complicated, and makes the solution usually come easier and faster.

Takeaway:  The more you take a balanced approach with decisions that honor both of these two aspects of happiness, optimum biology and emotional fulfillment, the faster you'll find value in your life and the better you'll be at cultivating even more.

Problem People: They suck, but your making them worse.

Interactions with other people and creatures are the petri dish for EVERY thing of value in life as a human.  So paying attention to and optimizing how you interact with others has an incredible life benefit for every ounce of effort you put in.  

The world has a lot of dicks in it and a few are bound to get worked into daily life.  Dealing with them effectively will turn them into a positive influence instead of a constant rainy day you can't control.

A simple preset system and philosophy for dealing with problem people is an extremely powerful tool.  Problem people, especially when they have authority over you, screw up your entire biology.  They can make you think irrationally, rewire your hormonal balance, and can spin you into depression, anger, and self loathing for no good reason and often not even on purpose.   This biological reaction makes it extremely difficult to react productively.  Problem people make you emotionally stupid.  So “proacting,” in advance and while your still smart, is the solution. 

Different systems will work for different people and I’ll make some initial research suggestions further down the page for places to start figuring out what works for you.  But what’s important is the guiding philosophy behind the system.  This will determine how well it works in the short and long run.  Make sure the system boosts understanding, compassion, and respect for the problem person and yourself at the same time.  Don’t make yourself feel good at the expense of the other person, and don’t raise your respect of them at the expense of yourself.  Aversion and hate from the other person and yourself will screw yourself further and multiply the damage the problem person initially caused. 

Just remember the following:

If every baby was given the intelligent powers they have as an adult but without any experience of the world, every single person would chose the same thing when filling out a form of how they’d like their life to go.  They would want as many people as possible to love them, they would want to love lots of people, and they would want to do no harm to others and leave a positive impact on the world.  Every single person ever created, including Hitler and psychopaths and rapists, would fill that out.  But life gets complicated, suffering happens, culture and ideology and points of view are confusing, the brain can be a wonky weird thing that doesn’t work correctly or logically, and problem people are created. 

When they do problem things that make our lives horrible, it’s not because they are demons sent to make us unhappy for their own personal gain, it's not that they are inherently inferior or more selfish, it’s that their confused and hurt and dealing with bad information and bad coping tools.  Being selfish and hurting people for your own gain isn't the road to happiness, any tumblr page on spirituality will tell you this.  So when someone is going down that road, their trying to escape from suffering just like everyone else, but their suffering more and their using the wrong roadmap.  They don’t want to do harm.  They want to leave a positive impact with lots of love for everyone.  Something about them just got messed up along the way and they are suffering because of it.  Acknowledging this doesn't make their actions any less harmful, but it allows for your response to those actions to be more helpful to your own life and the rest of the world.  

Here are some research starting points for developing a system for interactions with problem people:

1.     Your own body language can help you change your attitude. 

Especially if a superior is giving you a hard time, your self-esteem can start to lower (because of hardwired pack mentality circuits in the brain, studied extensively in baboons) despite all you know logically about how awesome you are.  Change your body language so that it reasserts your confidence.  Run to the bathroom or close your door, and when no one is looking, flash an awesome super hero power stance.  Doing it in front of the mirror has been suggested to emphasize the effects.  Hold the position for five seconds or more, and then flash another one.  Have fun with it and be crazy.  Do it in front of your coworkers to inspire them to feel good about themselves as well, they probably feel the same way about the boss as you do.  This helps to reset the chemicals in charge of your self confidence.  Thinking it will only get you half way there, when your body gets involved it becomes much more powerful.    

2.     Create a healthy plan for depression or low self-esteem. 

Many people seek immediate physical comfort after a stressful day at work.  Especially when dealing with problem people that create anger and depression.  This can turn into junk food, drug, alcohol, tobacco, and TV addiction (or some combination thereof).  This of course exacerbates the self-esteem problems instead of solving them.  The short term benefit often only lasts for five or ten minutes.  So come up with a plan in advance for dealing with depression and anger.  Do extra walking, break out of your routine, meditate, throw rocks off a cliff, call a friend, etc.  Just know what it is before hand and make sure it’s strong enough to overpower unhealthy urges.  Don’t underestimate the power of your lizard brain if you’ve had problems with it in the past.

3.     Recognize developmental problems in your childhood but don’t let them determine problems in your present. 

Some people who have an extra hard time with problem bosses may have had a hard time with problem parents in their childhood.  Or maybe if you always got picked last for kickball you may have a harder time as a manager of other employees or in leadership positions.  This is one of the punch lines of life.  Since the brain is so malleable as a child, getting beat up by your dick step dad for three years can determine the shittiness of the next seventy years of your life.  Therapy can help if it’s causing major emotional problems for you.  But also remember “My mommy didn’t hug me enough as a child” is a cliché for a reason.  No one has the perfect childhood, when they do, it usually becomes a problem how perfect it was, making it just as imperfect as everyone else's.  The fact that you're now scared to stand up to your boss because you had an overpowering parent is completely ridiculous in logic, but rooted in biology and neural development.  

Good news is that once you recognize it, decide that you’re not a victim doomed to a life of suffering for no reason, you can start to change it fairly quickly.  Recognize things like negative automatic decisions or negative knee jerk reactions, and set up systems to protect against them and rewire them for the better.  Whatever you do, don’t accept your hard childhood as an excuse to suffer needlessly.  It wasn’t your fault you were abused or neglected or bullied.  But as soon as you recognize as an adult that it’s causing you problems, the negative effects of that childhood are completely your fault if you decide not to fix them.  Don’t worry about goals and benchmarks in this venture, just be sure to always be increasing your awareness of your own mind and always growing for the better.  You're going down the same journey as everyone.  Don't feel disadvantaged or unlucky.  Lots of times, a realization that the mental problems from a hard childhood can be solved, can produce more tools for success and happiness than you would have had without the suffering in your childhood.  

Hack Your Brain to Wake Up Early & Effortlessly Every Day with the 3 Step Pavlov Method

America’s standard wake up method sucks.  Ugly air raid alarms that slap you in the face can ruin every single morning for the rest of your life.  Hitting the snooze for ten minutes only puts you through the mental scarring all over again.

If you can take 45 minutes to plan out a sleep method that pleasantly wakes you up when you want  then spend thirty minutes setting it up, you could make every single morning for the rest of your life incredibly better.  So you should.  Take a Saturday and plan it out. 

A place to start is my method.  I created it based on what we know about the neuroscience of habit formation and the bits of information science has discovered about circadian rhythms and biological clocks.  It’s not the absolute healthiest method of controlling sleep, but it’s the best way I know to sleep effectively and still live in a 9 to 5 work hard and play hard society.  

The Pavlov Waking System

Step 1:  Decide a reasonable time you could wake up every single day, even on weekends. 

Most people immediately shoot for 4:30 am, but make sure you’re willing to go to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep at least 4-5 nights of the week.  I go with 7:30am.   

Step 2:  Pick a no-calorie cold drink you enjoy and leave it on your nightstand every night.  Iced coffee, iced tea, and water all work great. 

Step 3:  Start setting your alarm for the same specific time every single day.  When you get up on time, get up and chug down the beverage you left by your bed.  If you hit the snooze, don't chug the drink.  Since you’ve been sleeping you haven’t had anything to drink, and drinking a big amount of anything when your thirsty will give you a rush of endorphins. 

This pleasure rush will lay the groundwork for a subconscious habit.  After doing this for a week or two, your body will learn that pleasure is synonymous with waking up at 7:30, not sleeping in.  You won’t have to fight yourself to get up any more, you may even have to fight yourself to sleep in. 

When you get your “I want to accomplish everything” brain and your “I want to do everything that feels good right this second with no attention to consequences” brain going in the same direction, life gets a lot easier, and often a lot more awesome.  

Steroids for the Pavlov Method (make it work faster, better, and stronger)

1.     Train yourself outside of your regular sleep schedule.  This will speed up the process and allow you to engineer the emotions and fine points of your waking habit more intentionally.

I did this initially to reinforce my habit and leave less room for failure.  When you have some spare time during the day and you feel thirsty, you can take ten minutes to reinforce your waking habit.  Recreate the environment in your bedroom as much as possible to when you wake up.  Put on sleep clothes, turn off lights, get in bed, and set your alarm for three minutes.  Close your eyes and rest, when the alarm goes off jump out of bed mimicking the type of mood (keep it realistic) you’d like to have every morning, and chug down your drink.  The more you expose yourself to the sensory triggers of the morning, repeat the muscle movements of waking up, and then produce a chemical reward, the stronger and more subconscious your habit will become.  Waking up with beaming hope and energy for the day will eventually be like backing your car out of the driveway.  Happiness will be on autopilot and your set default.   

To boost the chemical reward, fake a beaming smile right after you chug your drink, genuinely congratulate yourself (out loud if your brave enough), and massage your own shoulders and forearms for ten seconds.    

2.     Make your alarm pleasant and distinct from all other sounds. 

Use your cell phone and get a customizable alarm app.  There are tons that are all basically the same.  I use “Alarm Clock Xtreme Free” for Android.  You want several key functionalities.  The first is to customize the sound of your alarm.  Make it a recording of your mother yelling at you about getting your prostate checked, or the sound of a koala purring, it doesn’t matter as long as you never hear it regularly throughout the day.  Making it the same as your ringtone or a song you enjoy or as an alarm you use for other things throughout the day will screw up the Pavlov Method. 

You may also want to look for the functionality of gradually increasing volume.  I use this feature to wake me up more gently.  Most full featured apps have the ability to slowly increase your volume from nothing to full blast over the course of a set period of time.  I use 1 ½ minutes.  This will wake me up more gently, but also not allow me to stay in bed for more than twenty seconds after I wake up. 

3.     Every single night, set your alarm far enough away from your bed so that your forced to get up to turn it off. 

When you wake up in the morning, especially if you didn’t get enough sleep, your lizard brain is in control.  Set yourself up with safeguards like these so that you can stick to your plans even if your half asleep and don’t understand the meaning of anything except crushing your alarm and going back to bed.  (If I drink too much or stay up too late, I have this problem in a major way.  My girlfriend has watched me get up out of bed, with only one eye half open, walk across the room to turn off my alarm, not understand how buttons work as a half asleep zombie, and just start pounding the phone against the wall until it stops, and then stumbling back into bed and going back to sleep.  Set yourself up the night before like the person your waking up is not you.  They definitely won’t be in the same motivated rationale mindset as you are in the moment. 

4.     Acknowledge that you’re not Superman and you need sleep. 

Waking up at the same time everyday helps you manage your sleep much better if you do it responsibly.  On nights that you only get four hours of sleep, you can still wake up on time, not screw up your work schedule or miss appointments, and then either take a nap or go to bed earlier the next night to make up for it.  Perfect system.  But if you start only getting four hours of sleep every night you’ll crash quickly.  Don’t let your hubris allow you to believe you can still get things done without ample sleep.  It’s as important to your brain in many ways as food and water.  You lose intelligence, decision-making ability, mood control, and impulse control the longer your sleep deprived.  

Your Taking Drugs Every Single Day

Our environments and lifestyles don’t constantly affect our emotions, temperaments, and brainpower.  Our environment and lifestyles constantly define them. 

The food you eat, the clothes you wear, the people you interact with, the things you do, the position you sleep in, all contribute to building your biology.  Whether or not you’re inclined to believe in a transcendent personality or soul, temperaments, emotions, reactions, energy, and brainpower all happen in this world as biological phenomenon.  You can’t feel happiness without serotonin, you have no motivation without dopamine, you have no energy without food, and you have no thoughts without neurons.  There’s no escaping this.    

Science has been and continues to discover things like how, posture affects productivity, diet affects nervousness, light affects happiness, and social contact effects concentration.  But what our broader culture has not shifted to yet is the idea that we don’t just have a static temperament that is then effected individually by specific stimuli, but that our temperament itself is defined by the constant input of environmental stimuli.  They are who we are and they are what we feel. 

When you come to this conceptual knowledge, and pair it with the individual scientific studies surrounding it, it’s incredibly empowering.  Since we can control our environments and lifestyles much more than our supposed unchangeable static personalities, we can become smarter, faster, better people with the use of logic and reason, instead of trying to trudge through the murky, unstable, and subjective waters of theoretical psychological principle.  I.e. “Between the ages of three and seven, my mother showed me affection by giving me food, now when I have an existential longing for love, it becomes expressed as a craving for salami, which I then internalize into sexual distance from my spouse, which contributes to a reemergence of the anxiety I formed between the ages of 13-16,” etcetera.  This all may be true, and introspective emotional analysis can be one of the most powerfully transformative experiences in life, but if your trying to stop eating salami sandwiches, or increase your sex drive, or feel less anxiety, starting your effort with looking at your environmental input is the biggest bang for your buck, it’s the most measureable, and has the most visible and obvious results.

Drugs are the easiest metaphor to use to grasp the concept.  Your environmental stimulus is like a constant drip of drugs that you have no choice but to take.  You can however, control what kinds and amounts of drugs are in the IV bag.  If you have an anxiety problem, before (or at least at the same time) you talk to your shrink about your problems with father figures and authority, try taking out anything in the methamphetamine category from your regular drug regimen.  Gluten, over 65% of diet as carbohydrates early in the day, sleep schedule, processed sugar, flashing lights late at night, mild allergens, breathing habits, types of cardio exercise, too little exercise, eye movement habits, color in living spaces, different types of media, cluttered visual space, etc. all can cause anxiety in the same way that an anxiety pill would cause you anxiety.  And your doing these things every single day of your life, multiple times a day.  Yes, you may really be nervous because of credit card debt, but bill collectors calling all the time is going to be way more scary on meth, and your not going to react as productively.

So go to Pub Med, Google responsibly, and then change a variable in your drug intake and try to measure the results and analyze objectively.  You may get intended and unintended consequences both positive and negative.  You also may start to see changes in what you thought was your static identity or your permanent personality.  The knee jerk reaction can be a sense of loss of identity and a knowledge of who you are, but a closer look will show you that you’re learning more about yourself, not less.   Keep measuring and improving and learning, because if you stop, you’re just leaving the type of person you are to blind chance, and in today’s modern world where our body isn’t designed to do any of the things we do everyday, it’s probably not going to turn out as optimally as you’d like.      

Your Bad Habits Are Like The Gimp From Pulp Fiction

Average Read Time: 6 Minutes

What You'll Get:

- Find out what part of your brain has been ruining your life
- Learn how to conquer it with three mental steps
- The pleasure of not understanding half the article, if you haven't seen Pulp Fiction (just watch this clip if you haven't)

Let’s look at two scenarios:

1. You come home from work and your boss has been on your ass all day, the sun was in your eyes for the whole trafficky commute home, and you forgot lunch so you’re hungry and irritable, someone left their dog shit on your lawn, and the flower pot from your dead grandmother fell over in the wind and shattered.  

You know exactly what you should do to take control, remedy the situation, and completely rejuvenate your day, your health, and your life:

Take a slow deep breath, for just a moment remember how thankful you are for all the great people and things in your life, then quickly make a healthy dinner (not TOO healthy, still tasty) and leave the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.  Go for a quick jog and do some push-ups, grab a green tea with a good friend for a half hour, give a dollar to a hobo on the way home, do your dishes, and go to bed a bit early to shake off those last stress wrinkles from the work day, and get up in the morning brimming with excitement.    

This strategy keeps each day fulfilling and enjoyable and at the same time gives you the strength and structure to work towards achieving life’s changing goals.  It makes you feel that dealing with your boss' stupidity is comical in how ridiculous it is, and a bit of a fun challenge trying to deal with it while you still get your work done.

2.  You know you should do option 1.  You know it would be rejuvenating and productive and make you happy.  

But instead you sag your shoulders, throw your stuff on the ground, make some lukewarm microwaved bullshit, pour yourself a stiff drink, and sit in front of the TV until 2 in the morning carbo loading, trying to zonk yourself out of the stressed memories of the day.  

You wake up the next morning exhausted, depressed, and with the knowledge hanging over your head that your life is slowly depreciating in value with every passing day.  You want to just hang on and endure the pain until something good happens.  You wish there was a fast forward button, or at least a pause button, to take a break from all the endless gauntlet of stress and let downs pummeling you day after day as time, deadlines, and appointments inevitably roll over you.  

That Sucks!

Why would anyone ever do the second scenario, and after that why would they do it more than once?  It’s not difficult to see that it leads to more of the stress and depression that caused the behavior in the first place.  Yet most people will do something they don’t actually want to do and regret later at least once a week if not every day.  

The knowledge of what to do to live the perfect life is not anywhere near enough firepower to do it successfully.  You need to know HOW to do it.  The major missing link in the "how" is understanding the mechanisms of success in the brain and body and acting on the information creatively.  That’s what this blog will teach you how to do.     

As an introductory example, we'll dive into the bare bones basics of the type of bad habit behavior described in the second scenario.  

One major factor driving habitual behaviors is the basal ganglia.  

The basal ganglia does some amazing things.  It’s in charge of the subconscious habits that allow you to walk, chew your food, fold laundry, and play basketball while thinking about how you’re going to introduce your new nine-years-younger-than-you Wiccan girlfriend to your mother.  It designs the series of subconscious habit programs that keep you on the road when you’re driving to work in the morning half asleep.

But there's also a dark side of the basal ganglia.  What I like to call the basal gimplia, because it’s like the gimp from pulp fiction.  It has no outside contact with the rest of the world, it can’t really see or hear through the leather mask, it doesn't follow instructions very well, and it really only responds to triggers and rewards.  The basal gimplia is cut off from the part of your brain that knows what’s good for you in the long term and in modern society.  The basal gimplia is just a really complex rat hitting a button.  If you do something a couple times (especially if it’s in response to a certain trigger), and each time afterward the basal gimplia gets a chemical reward like a bump of blood sugar or a dose of dopamine, it’s going to make you want to do it over and over AND OVER again.

The genius of the basal ganglia becomes a misinformed overcorrection.  The positive reinforcing chemicals that the basal ganglia is trained to sense as success and vitality are often, in the modern land of plenty, actually poisoning our health and restricting our freedom to pursue happiness beyond the couch.    
  
When people get stressed out, and just go into an Everybody Loves Raymond cave with a tub of ice cream, mac and cheese, and a handful of Marlboro ultra lights, they're basically just taking their basal gimplia out of its box and flogging it mercilessly to make themselves feel better.  The worst part about it is that it’s the only way the basal gimplia feels love (it had a weird childhood...).  Thus your basal gimplia tricks you into self destructive behavior that the “smarter you” doesn’t actually want to do, but your basal gimplia thinks is important to your survival to continue repeatedly.
Solution:  there's a way to rewire your basal gimplia to work for you instead of against you.  

Every habit program the basal gimplia creates has three simple parts.     

Part 1: Trigger, the chemical, emotional, or sensory feeling that causes the action Example: home from work, low blood sugar, stress hormones, overwhelmed, tired

Part 2: The action
Example:  Eat junk food and watch TV (or if your Zed, flog a strange man in the basement)

Part 3: The expected chemical reward
Example:  Blood sugar spike, bodily rest, subdued beta brainwaves, serotonin bump, etc.

And the basal gimplia is extremely stubborn.  Willpower and motivation only work temporarily, especially because the basal gimplia has incredible memory retention (the reason why you never forget how to ride a bike).  However, redirecting and modifying the already programmed structures of your bad habits is very doable, and has the highest rate of long term success.  

Here's how you do this:

Define the three parts of your bad habit.  

The trigger, the action, and the reward.

I'll make an example:

Trigger: Coming home after a long day of stressful police work
Action:  Flogging the gimp in the basement
Reward:  The emotional release and calming feeling received from being a fucked up guy named Zed.  

If Zed wants to break this habit, just deciding not to do it any more will have a high failure rate.  The habit is ingrained in his brain forever, but he can have a much higher chance at success if he morphs the current wiring into a more productive habit.  

He can't change the stress associated with his job, which is the trigger for the habit.  And he can't remove the reward, which is the most important part of the habit programming.  When you take away the chemical reward of the habit, the brain freaks out, and often, in a nervous kerfuffle, finds a way to relapse.  

What Zed has to do is change the action:

He needs to find an action that he enjoys doing, but is more productive than abusing his gimp and still provides the same chemical reward to his basal gimplia of emotional release and a calming sensation (read by the basal gimplia as serotonin spike and lowered cortisol levels).  He decides to do pushups, listen to country music, and have a big gulp of iced tea out of the anus of his friend with the beard and the gun store.  

So next time he comes home stressed out, he quickly flips on some Kenny Chesney, hammers out fifty push-ups, and savors some delicious southern style iced tea.  He makes sure to really appreciate the endorphin rush, let the music take his mind to a calm place, and fully enjoy his iced tea.  This allows the basal gimplia to begin to rewire itself.  The trigger and the chemical reward remains the same, but the action becomes more productive for Zed's long term goals of not being a rapist and a sadistic pervert.

With Devon's recommendations of willpower and social accountability, by the second week of this rewiring practice, Zed is noticing that not only is he having an easier time not flogging the gimp, but he's actually beginning to crave the pushups and iced tea more than his old bad habit.  Now when Zed is especially stressed, preoccupied, depressed, anxious, or otherwise weak and out of willpower, he won't fall back into his old habits, because his new habit still serves the cathartic effect flogging once had for his basal gimplia.  

Take Back Control of Your Brain by Tricking Yourself

Article Preview
Read Time: 2 1/2 minutes
What you'll get out of it:
- The real reason why you can't stick to your diet or focus at work
- A way to trick your brain into making evolutionary barriers work for you, not against you
- What to eat and when to eat it to ramp up your testosterone levels


Your intellect is smart but your brain is not.

This is why everyone does things they don't actually want to do.

People keep doing drugs instead of getting clean, keep watching TV instead of going outside, and keep eating McDonalds instead of food that tastes better and makes you feel better.

Your intellect know's what to do and when to do it to create the happiest life possible.  It's been to school, it's formulated wisdom from experiences, and it's learning from this blog post right now.  But most intellects don't realize that they aren't actually in charge.  The intellect is an employee of the the rest of the brain; not the boss.  It only serves as a tool for obtaining what the rest of the brain, in charge of EVERYTHING, needs to survive.  Things like breathing, eating, pooping, muscle moving, loving, procreating, protecting, staying safe, feeling secure, etc.

So when the rest of the brain decides it's hungry, it tells the intellect to take care of it.  The intellect then makes a sandwich that it knows will please the hunger and the taste buds.  However, the intellect knows that it shouldn't use mayonaise, it's too high in calories and it's bad for the arteries.  But the rest of the brain isn't smart.  It never went to school, it never listened to it's mother, it has no wisdom, no concept of time, no understanding of language.  Even more so, it was wired together before the time of Doritos, match.com, and health insurance.

So when the intellect decides to put the mayonaise back in the fridge, the rest of the brain sends out a request for as much food as possible.  As an employee of the rest of the brain, the intellect abides.  "I'll just have it this time, and next time I'll go no-mayo."  It takes the need and intellectualizes it so that it stays in conjunction with the rest of it's knowledge.  Thus you do things that you would never do had your intellect been in charge of what it was doing.  But you do it anyway, because your intellect is a slave to the illiterate, busy, and unaware rest of the brain.

Is it hopeless?  Not really.  Your intellect is learning this concept right now and the rest of your brain isn't paying attention.  Once your intellect learns that it's a slave, and can't do anything without it's master, it can decide to manipulate the master to get what it wants.

How?  It can get complicated.  A high protein, high cholesterol dinner can be a start.  The nutrients from the food will ramp up testosterone production over night.  In the morning, the rest of your brain will have more aggressive needs, if you can figure out how to point them towards something worthwhile like work or hobbies, you can get your intellect finally working for a good cause.  This is just an example.  

Learn more and let your intellect create schemes and conspiracies to control the rest of your brain.  The biggest bang for your buck will be in diet, exercise, and environment changes.

You don't have to worry about the rest of your brain catching your intellect, getting caught, the rest of thwill never be listening.

Any.Do Moment Outsources Your Life

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Read Time: 3 1/2 Minutes
What You Get Out of It:
- Info about a free mobile app for scheduling that makes you better at everything you do
- A blurb about the principles of data offloading
- A possibly ironic story about a fat guy breaking my cell phone

Human society is a bit weird.  Even those amongst us with non-gifted below average brains have incredible intelligence and creative power.  But most of the time its used on stupid stuff like remembering where we left our keys and figuring out exactly why we are better than the person who parked kind of crooked and made it harder to back out of our spot.  

Studies have shown (here's a dense summary of the major ones) that in between sleeping and eating there is a finite amount of biological brain power, will power, and focus.  So we're not only wasting our time by thinking about stupid stuff, we're wasting our massive intelligences.     

This is most pronounced when looking at productivity in school and the workplace.  Most of our precious brain power is used scheduling, remembering tasks, organizing, and staying focused.  The few key decisions and times of creative that make the most difference in success are usually given the same or less priority than all the fluff surrounding them.  So the answer is data offloading.  Move as much information out of your head to external resources so that you don't have to juggle it when it's time to shine.  You can write things down, make lists, organize better, hire a secretary, etc.  Thats all complicated and you'll figure out as long as your not worried about what to have for lunch and which auto mechanic you pissed off last time so you don't bring your car there again for an awkward oil change / stare down session.  But before all of that, you can just download an app, and it can get you started.   

Any.Do
I have been using Any.Do as my to do list android app for about a year.  It's simple, has a calming blue interface, and saves your lists to the cloud, so it survives after I drop my phone in the toilet or a fat guy at Fat Burger (is that ironic?) steps on it after I try and ask him to move so I can pick it up.  Plus if you add a due date to a task, it syncs it up with your Google Calendar account.  (It has a whole lot of other really intuitive add ons with Gmail and text messages that I never use.)

But it just got a whole lot better.  It's created an add-on called Any.Do Moment.  At the beginning of the day, the app will commandeer your phone and prompt you to plan out your day.  Any tasks that haven't been completed pop up and you can decide to schedule them into your day, postpone them till tomorrow or sometime later, or delete them forever.  This isn't much, but the beauty is that via animation, minimal choices, and efficient minimalist design, it pushes you through the process in about 12 seconds with incredible precision to the time of day, the details of the task, etc.  There's never any scrolling, typing, fiddling, or thinking.  Large legible buttons quickly throw you through the process and get you back to your day.  It doesn't take longer than the casual phone check you intended to do.  And since it's so simple and fast, it doesn't become annoying or obtrusive like other apps that start without your permission.

Here's a Video They Made That Doesn't Quite Do It Justice

Now, you don't have to purposefully avoid the to-do list or let it get so long that it becomes meaningless.  It outsources your scheduling and turns you into a manager of your tasks instead of making you your own secretary.  It saves time and keeps you accountable.  And it's free.

The claim of the product is that it helps you create a habit of planning out your day.  Which it doesn't.  Fortunately, it does one better.

Purposefully creating a habit requires will power, repetition, neuro-chemical rewards, conscious engineering of the plan, and more.  This new feature of the app outsources all of that.  Your brain handles nothing besides scheduling decisions.  This leaves your brain more blood sugar and cellular energy to focus on approaching each task with more intelligence and better, faster decision making.