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

Article Preview
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.

Fight Cravings Like a Nun!

Article Preview:
Read time: 10 minutes.
What you’ll get out of it:
-       A simple mental repositioning that will likely double or triple your ability to beat cravings of all kinds  

-       A few chuckles about orphans amongst friends


Cravings suck.  

Without cravings, we could quickly become be 5% body fat, get rich working from home, and take ten years of wrinkles off our face with one weird trick discovered by a mom (even if dermatologists hate her for it!).  All we would have to do is make a decision, read the right eHow articles, follow the steps, and we’d be taking shirtless Facebook pics in the Caribbean in ninety days or less.    

But if you clicked on this article, you’ve probably tried that a few times and it hasn’t worked out.  You get cravings for cake and the first twenty times you resist and declare yourself a winner.  Then your girlfriend breaks up with you, your dad tells you he wished you could’ve been a doctor like your brother, and there’s a sale on generic brand mint Oreos.  All of a sudden you’re standing in front of the pantry at midnight, frantically scooping frosting into your mouth with all four fingers like a raccoon.  (except a grainy cell phone video of this would not go viral and get someone to adopt you…. sorry large orphan readership…)

And cravings are a larger problem than just controlling your food intake, they are major players in drug addiction and drinking problems, they keep people smoking, they contribute to little dick moves in the office as well as embezzlement and corrupt government (the craving for power and money works very similarly in the brain to cravings for things like sugar and nicotine.)

And giving into cravings makes you feel like shit because you experience a loss of power and self-control.  Over time, giving in again and again majorly depletes your confidence and self worth and contributes to more anxiety and fear in your life.  If you have things you want to contribute to your family (sorry again large orphan readership) and the world, you can’t get anywhere near your potential with quickly decreasing self esteem and quickly decreasing health and brain power.  Instead of leaving your mark on the world, you’re just trying to get through each day.  And that sucks.  So let’s fix it!

It’s fairly simple, and it doesn’t require Tony Robbins Motivation Porn or cutting everything not consumable by vegan mormons out of your life forever.  

First we’ll get the neurological basics down: what’s causing you to crave, and why you cave in and give up.  

Then i’ll give you a small mental switch you can use to immediately change your neurological chemistry to take the biological power away from the part of your brain that’s craving, and activate the smart, reasoned, rational part of your mind to calmly stop the cravings and continue on with your plans for kicking ass.  That’s called Super Human Freedom.  

Background:
By craving I mean a momentary desire for something that goes against your already standing plans and goals, and is strong enough to compel you to give into the desire, despite knowing that you don’t really want to.  This technique will most often apply to things like food cravings, nicotine cravings, drug and alcohol cravings, TV cravings, and things like that.  But it can also be applied to the craving to act angry, the craving to indulge in self destructive thoughts, the craving to distract yourself from doing something that scares you, and the craving to do the selfish wrong thing when you know what and how to do right.  

All sorts of different parts of the brain may be in charge of craving different things.  The basal ganglia is famous for making you insane when it gets a trigger for a reward and the reward doesn't come.  The insula has been pegged specifically for nicotine addiction.  Several more parts are especially susceptible to dopaminergic spike cravings, alcohol habits, sugar cravings, etc.  But what’s most important is the effect these cravings have on your nervous system.  You have two parts of your autonomic nervous system.  

Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS): "fight or flight," spikes when you need to make a fast momentary decision or motor movement.  It excels in its speed and reflexiveness.  It’s automatic and non-thinking.  When its a misplaced reaction, its often not rational.  (spoiler alert: all of your PNS powers work against you when your cake craving lights it up like a christmas tree)

Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS): "rest and digest," spikes when your healing, resting, growing, synthesizing information, contemplating, creating, etc. anything when you’re relaxed and not pressed for time.  (spoiler alert 2: activating this will allow you to beat your craving)

*The two systems work inversely in tandem.  If you stimulate one, you calm the other down, and vice versa.  

A cravings follows this path

1.  One part of your brain, in its limited knowledge, thinks that it needs something, and that what it needs is vital to your health and homeostasis.    

2.  It sends out a small signal, asking the rest of your brain to acquire what it needs.  

3.  This registers as a thought or a small feeling.  “Hmm.  I could go for something salty.”  “Hmm, I could for that thing the other orphans are doing these days where you mix some tylenol PM into your smack before injecting intravenously.”  

4.  Your brain part doesn’t get what it wants.  Because you (another part of your brain, like the pre-frontal cortex that knows about the outside world and your greater goals and how to be happy) say, “nah... I’m on a diet and on track for employee of the month if I keep my shit together.”  

5.  The part of your brain that sent out the request for the chemical, doesn’t understand employee of the month, or cholesterol, or likely even time or language.  So it thinks that the body is in trouble because it can’t get what it needs.  So it activates the “fight or flight response” in the nervous system.  This changes everything.  All of the sudden, you REALLY want something salty.  You develop anxiety about not having it.  You think about all the ways you could acquire it.  Your whole brain and body convinces that small part of you that wants to stick to your diet that it won’t hurt, it’s just one, and it feels stressed out, and it will go right back on the diet afterwards, it just needs some salt NOW!

6.  Now you have two different directions you can go to beat the craving.  The common one that everyone uses, and the one that smart people who read this blog and achieve their goals use.  



What Most People Do
If you’re going to be successful and not just give in, you remind yourself of all the reasons why you want to stay on your diet.  You get motivated.  You get determined.  You get amped up and tell yourself that you’re a strong willed voluptuous african american woman who, despite society being against them and “all the haters” will prevail with her dream of a talk show for women.  You visualize yourself in your swimsuit and you think of that $50 McDonald’s Gift Card.  You get your entire body involved, your heart beats faster and your pupils contract, and you’re focused and determined and in the zone!

Then you distract yourself.  You put your mind towards something else to block out the craving.  And low and behold.  You don’t give in.  You are a genius.  

OR

You try the same thing again.  But now your tired, your blood sugar is low, you haven’t had enough sleep, you’re stressed from work and you’re depressed.  You try and get yourself motivated to beat the craving but you just don’t have the energy.  You cave.  And you feel like shit afterwards.  And all of your motivational success story is halted.  Enjoy your hour long masturbation sesh to pictures of kids with siblings and parents.  Also enjoy the nuns whacking your dick with a ruler when they catch you.  



What’s going on?  Why Do You Always Fail?

When you motivate yourself out of giving into the craving, you are re-enflaming your Sympathetic Nervous System and trying to make it work for another part of your brain.  Your working against yourself and your pitting one part of your brain’s demands against another.  It’s like Israel and Palestine (i’ll let you decide which is the pre-frontal cortex and which is the less evolved turban wearing craver terrorist) trying to occupy the same territory.  The craving started by lighting up the SNS, then your having another part of the brain light up the SNS even more, but ask for something different.  It’s a confusing and high metabolic process.  You’ll notice your racing thoughts, your confusion, and your inner conflicts from this type of response.  

Whether or not you succeed isn’t dependent on what thoughts you think and what decisions you make, (because you’ve done the same exact thing ten times successfully and now it’s failed).  It’s dependent on what type of biological cocktail your working with at the time.  Sadness, stress, sleep deficiency, etc. all can be managed and avoided but they will happen eventually, and then you will fail.  

So what do you do?
You don’t fight fire with fire.  You fight it with water.  You shut down your entire Sympathetic Nervous System and kill the craving.  There’s no need to fight against yourself if there’s nothing to fight with.  The way you do this is to activate your Parasympathetic nervous system.  This cues you into the natural state in which you made your goals, your smart, wise, restrained, and contemplative side, as well as shuts down your fight or flight automatic no-thinking response.  It allows you to make an informed decision without a mind with a thousand screaming rationalizations pressuring you.  

DISCMAIMER
If you’re normally resistant to alternative crazes and new agey mumbo jumbo about the universe and secret visualization, this technique will give you a knee jerk high enough to break your nose.  But, this technique isn’t about Tom Cruise magic granting your BMW wishes and the universe aligning with the vibrations of your genitals.  

Pay attention to the scientific mechanisms of action and, most importantly, results (with all information, not just this).  Don’t let your cultural assumptions turn you away from anything that doesn’t smell like American cheese and motor oil.  The rest of us level headed superhumans will be leaving you in the dust.    

The technique solely involves thought changes and an attitude shift.  “The Secret” is bullshit.  But not believing that thoughts alter the biochemical state in your brain and body is throwing out the orphan with the tax cuts.  Your thoughts don’t cause neurons to fire, they are the neurons firing.  

Thought shift can seem trivial and weird, but it is this technique is purely based on measurable neurobiological principles.  And bottom line: it works with an incredibly higher rate of success and takes less mental energy and effort than traditional techniques.  Win-Win.  Bang-boom.  


The Technique

Rationale of the Technique
The SNS is what gives your cravings teeth.  Its your body forcing you into emergency alert mode, trying to get you to act immediately without thinking.  Without it, the craving is painless and powerless.  It’s just a fleeting thought.  “I kind of want ice cream right now,” can be immediately and easily squashed with, “Nah, I’ll stick to the diet and continue being awesome.”

The key to beating cravings on a regular basis, even when you’re depressed, stressed, sleep deprived, low on energy and motivation is stopping the sympathetic nervous system response that the craving induces.  You do this by activating the PNS.  So instead of fighting yourself, it quells the craving and activates a mental state in which you can make a balanced rational decision, follow through without massive amounts of energy and motivation, and move on kicking ass and doing what you really want to do with your life.  It gives power to your intelligence instead of your craving.    

Here’s how you do this.

Step 1:  When the craving arises, acknowledge it immediately.
Do not ignore the craving.  Identify what your craving and prepare to confront it directly. Most people’s instinctive reaction is to immediately ignore, so you’ll have to make the conscious decision to stay focused for a few seconds.  Acknowledge to yourself exactly what you’re craving, even mouth it silently or say it aloud.

Step 2:  Acknowledge the objective that is conflicting with your craving, and allow both desires to coexist within you.  

This skill is perhaps the most hard to grasp initially, but also the most quickly learned.  Psychology would call this a compartmentalization strategy for dealing with cognitive dissonance.  However, compartmentalization is usually seen as an unhealthy defense mechanism, this version (Super Human Compartmentalization) is extremely healthy and productive, in fact the mastery of this ability has been used in other studies as a metric for success and happiness.  

These two thoughts are coming from different parts of your brain that don’t speak the same language or make decisions based on the same information.  Trying to reconcile them is a losing battle that will surely involve a whole bunch of rationalization, higher spikes in SNS activity, and giving into the craving.  

It’s key to allow both thoughts to coexist.  Listen to both of them talk.  Most importantly, listen to your craving talk.  It will produce emotions, sensations, feelings, and thoughts.  Acknowledge them.  Give them value.  Just don’t act on them.  Listen curiously.  You’ll hear the thoughts screaming and whining at you.  “I want pizza.  Give me pizza.  I’m stressed.  It would taste good.  I’m sad.  It would make me feel better.”

Or it will be a feeling.  An unnerving tingling in your lips that doesn’t go away.  A headache and a stiffness in your throat.  Sometimes cravings are more ambiguos and sensory than straightforward thoughts you can listen to.  In any case, pay as close attention to them as you can.  

Step 3:  Change the attitude you have towards the craving.

This is the most important aspect of this technique.  For good reason, 99% of the time people will feel the tension and confusion that a craving creates within themselves, and immediately dislike the feeling.  They treat it with annoyance and aversion because it’s causing them pain.  

But what if you step back and look at what your craving is in isolation.  It’s a part of you that is in pain, and is screaming out for relief in the only way it knows how.  It’s a bit pathetic.  It’s like a baby orphan that’s stubbed its toe.  It’s crying out for toys or candy or a hug from it’s abandoned mother.  But you can’t give it any of that.  It’s diabetic, in a joyless nunnery, and if its mother came back you would lose your job.  You have long term goals.  So what do you do? You give it a hug, and rub its back, and tell it that everything is going to be OK.  But most importantly, you show it affection, and let it cry out the pain.  Eventually it will quiet down.  It will either come to terms with the pain or the pain will subside.  Babies are great analogies for cravings.  They cry because they feel tension or pain.  But they don’t understand it.  Their screams are raw emotion or feeling.  This is what you’re craving is experiencing.

If you yell at a baby for crying, it will only cry louder.  If you sternly explain the long-term effects of crying to the baby, it will continue crying.  If you hug the baby, rock it back and forth, and show it affection, it will cry for a little bit, and then it will always settle down.

FIGHT YOUR CRAVINGS WITH LOVE AND AFFECTION.  Imagine they are a baby that you care for.  Take a deep breath and give them a little boost of extra oxygen.  Rub your shoulders and release some endorphins for them.  Drink a warm glass of water, stretch, listen to relaxing music.  Most of all, tell your craving that “everything is going to be OK.”  Don’t address what its craving.  Don’t tell it how it’s going to be fine without it.  Just give it love and affection, and assure it that everything is going to be OK.

Step 4:  Allow the craving to subside at it’s own pace

Continue with step three with some patience.  Once you activate the loving PNS, your  craving might only last five seconds or it might last a minute and a half.  These times seem short but they may feel like an eternity at first.  A craving will very rarely ever pass three minutes, unless it’s for an addictive drug like nicotine or pain pills.  Even then though, it will likely not surpass four minutes.  At first it might be hard to sustain this attitude, but very quickly your body will switch into this mode automatically by habit, as it releases plenty of benefits for your brain and body.  

Your craving will die down.  You’ll feel better about yourself.  Your self confidence will increase.  Your momentum for success will gain.  And cravings of all kind will be even easier to beat the next time.  the more often you use this technique and use it successfully.  The more automatic and easy it becomes.  

AFTER, the craving is fully subsided and you feel victorious and confident, then you can bring in the SNS motivation that Tony Robbins has always been telling you about as well as the distraction techniques.  Go do something else, remember your goals, visualize your success, blah blah blah.  It will all definitely help stave off the next craving.  But the next one will come!  And when it does, use this technique again.  Especially when you’re tired, stressed, and the world is shitting on you.  You will shit right back on it!

There’s LOTS more details, techniques, and information to learn to completely waterproof your Super Human Cravings Plan.  So subscribe here for more email updates.  I ONLY post amazing content, and it doesn’t come up too often, less than once a week, usually once a month, so don’t worry about spam or annoying stuff.  Just worry about your foot getting sore from kicking so much more ass.