Wired and Tired

We have two opposing forces or rhythms operating in our brains at all times. One is the Circadian Arousal System and the other is called the Homeostatic Sleep Process. Let’s call them the Awake cycle and the Sleep cycle. Certain hormones and various other chemicals are released in the brain to support the Awake cycle. After about 16 hours, other hormones and various chemicals are released by the brain and the Sleep cycle takes over. It is almost as if the two cycles are in competition with each other. But each wins the competition for a certain amount of time and then the other takes over. These two cycles continue throughout our lifetime and seem to work pretty well until something disrupts them, like travelling to a new time zone or using an electronic device right up to bedtime.

Electronic Devices Steal Sleep

There is growing evidence that when we play video games, or even just surf the internet for engaging information, we trigger the fight or flight stress response in our brains. If we do this just before falling asleep, it means that although we sleep, we don’t attain the same depth of normal sleep because our brain is still vigilant (the fight or flight response).

In addition, there are two more problems with using electronic devices just before bedtime. First, the screens are very bright. This bright light shining directly into our eyes shuts down the release of melatonin, one of the important chemicals for turning on our Sleep cycle. Second, anything electronic emits electromagnetic radiation (EMR). Internet use compounds the level of EMR. Like bright light, EMR disrupts melatonin release. Plus it can also enhance our fight or flight state.

According to Dr. Victoria L. Dunckley, M.D, “The Kempton West Study in Germany (2007) showed that residents exposed to a wireless cell phone transmitter (which emits high amounts of EMR) installed nearby, developed dramatic changes in their melatonin and serotonin (another brain chemical, related to feeling calm and having a sense of well-being) regulation. Interestingly, night time melatonin was reduced in the majority of the subjects, while daytime melatonin increased. Essentially, the melatonin release ‘flattened out’ and shifted to being released in the morning. This effectively reduced deep sleep and at the same time caused a feeling of exhaustion upon awakening in the study participants - the ‘wired and tired’ effect.”

Are you or your children waking in the morning with the following complaints?

• Feeling as if you have not slept well
• Dark circles under the eyes
• Poor memory, poor focus
• Hard to wake up in the morning
• Disorganized in the morning
• Irritability and meltdowns
• Difficulty with learning

You might try cutting out all interactive electronic devices, like cell phones, iPads, and e-readers after 7:00pm.

Don’t allow these devices in bedrooms. To stop using interactive electronic devices early in the evening will probably be a real challenge but, if doing so gives longer and more restful sleep, it will be worthwhile.

Remember, when you lack sleep, you’re only working at half power. Not enough sleep could lead to a momentary lack of attention causing an accident, leaving you with a brain injury for the rest of your life.

As William Shakespeare says:

“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,Chief nourisher in life’s feast."- Macbeth (2.2.46-51)

Don’t miss out on your precious sleep.

Are You Sabotaging Your Best Intentions?

“Self-Control is not a problem in the future, it is only a problem now.”

- Shlomo Benartzi

According to eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we each have two selves. There's the Experiencing Self, which lives life continuously and is aware of what is happening about 3 seconds at a time. And then there's the Remembering Self, which thinks it remembers most of what happens, but which actually remembers very little.

Kahneman believes the Remembering Self can (and often does) sabotage our best intentions. Kahneman's insights carry a lot of weight. He's a former Nobel Memorial Prize winner, one of Foreign Policy magazine's "top global thinkers", and the author of the best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Let's see how his theory works in practice. What do you remember about July and August? You experienced a lot in those two months: more than 1.6 million three-second intervals. But, if asked what you remember about the summer, what would you say? How long could you talk about your summer? Twenty or thirty minutes perhaps? That is not much compared with the 80,000 minutes you actually lived during July and August.

Although your mind only remembers a fraction of what you think about moment by moment, your Remembering Self makes almost all of your decisions. Here's where the sabotage comes in. When we make decisions, we don’t choose between experiences - we choose between our memories (or our stories) of those experiences.

How many times has your Remembering Self promised you that you will:

• Save more for your retirement
• Exercise more regularly
• Pay down your credit cards
• Eat healthier foods
• Stop procrastinating

And yet, when you actually experience the moments when you could put those promises into practice (your Experiencing Self), your Remembering Self sabotages the opportunity by remembering  a good reason why you can’t do it this minute.

But there's help at hand. Authors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein suggest we can overcome the 'can't do it now' message if we give ourselves a gentle nudge, rather than a giant task.

Nudge Yourself and Improve Your Life

According to their new book, Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, you can achieve your goals more easily, and live more happily, if you get into the habit of giving yourself... a nudge. For example, if you would like to increase your retirement fund, arrange with your bank to transfer $25, $50,or $100 per week into an RRSP fund. Once the arrangement is made, you will hardly notice the deduction, but you will enjoy seeing your fund steadily increase.

Want to eat more healthily? Here's how the nudge strategy works. Instead of declaring you are going to lose 10 pounds (a giant task), give yourself a nudge: remove all sugary, fatty, and salty snacks from your environment and replace them with your favorite fruits and veggies. You can also explore stickk.com to choose other nudges which will help you achieve your goals.

So, when that self-sabotaging Remembering Self tells you can't pay your debts, or improve your diet, or get fitter - give yourself a nudge.

Scarcity: Why Having so Much Means so Little

How is it that we can be so smart in many ways, and yet some of us can't manage our time? How come others are smart in different ways, but still find themselves maxed out on their credit cards? A new book helps us understand why the poor stay poor, and the busy stay busy.

In their book, Scarcity, Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Princeton psychologist Eldar Shafir paint an alarming picture of how completely scarcity - whether money or time or some other asset - colonizes our minds and destabilizes our decision-making.

Mullainathan and Shafir show that scarcity creates a similar psychology for everyone struggling to manage with less than they need. Busy people fail to manage their time efficiently for the same reasons the poor and those maxed out on credit cards fail to manage their money. The dynamics of scarcity reveal why dieters find it hard to resist temptation, and why students and busy executives mismanage their time.

Once we start thinking in terms of scarcity and the strategies it imposes, the problems of modern life come into sharper focus. Chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, demonstrate impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting family for work. Lonely people, suffering from a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-focused on their loneliness, prompting behaviours that render it worse.

Mullainathan and Shafir have written a book that provides a new way of understanding why the poor stay poor and the busy stay busy. And it reveals not only how scarcity leads us astray but also how individuals and organizations can better manage scarcity for greater satisfaction and success.

Richard Thaler and UCLA Economist Shlomo Benartzi have worked together for years on finding the crucial steps to help people save for the future. You might enjoy Benartze’s TED talk “Saving for Tomorrow, Tomorrow.”

Wired for Easy Answers

Good decisions take time.

Daniel Kahneman demonstrates that we have two systems of thinking:

System 1 is what he calls 'thinking fast'. It represents intuition, and engages us three seconds at a time. It tirelessly provides us with quick impressions, intentions, and feelings. It is also called the Experiencing Self.

System 2 is 'thinking slow'. It represents reason, self-control, and intelligence. It is also called the Remembering Self. But the Remembering Self only remembers a tiny fraction of what happened, although it thinks it remembers almost everything.

The Remembering Self is also reluctant to put much effort into thinking and will only do so when it has to. For example, if I ask you to tell me the answer to 2+2 you would give me the answer easily. But if I asked you to tell me the answer to 271 x 37 you would resist - unless you could reach for your calculator.

Of course, we are working with both 'selves' simultaneously. But both compete for our attention and the Experiencing Self often wins, even though the Remembering Self is more rational and cautious. The big problem for the Remembering Self is that it has to work harder to stay on task and quickly forgets most of what the Experiencing Self has been experiencing.

Watch Daniel Kahneman for more of an explanation.

When System 2 thinking gets tired, the brain goes with System 1. So when you have an important decision to make, you will get a better result if you allow time for careful, step-by-step thinking, and don’t let yourself be swayed by your fears and hopes of the moment. Ask critical friends or colleagues for their honest input and sleep on the decision for at least one night.

If you are a manager or a technical expert, you tend to be convinced very easily that you know best, that you have very good intuition about your particular field. But this depends on whether the domain you work in is inherently predictable and whether you have had sufficient experience to learn the regularities.

In today’s fast changing world, those conditions are very difficult to maintain. To keep your expertise up-to-date, you need to be able to listen without pre-judgment to many different resources, especially front line employees and customers.

This information about our Experiencing Self and Remembering Self ties in directly with the insights from my April newsletter on Willpower. The fact that our willpower can be easily depleted and then we are more subject to immediate temptations, sounds a lot like the collaboration/struggle between thinking fast and thinking slow.

It also explains why it is so difficult sometimes to concentrate, as discussed in my December 2012 newsletter.

Focusing our pre-frontal cortex on important tasks takes effort. When we do concentrate our attention, extra blood rich in oxygen and glucose flows to the relevant neurons, helping us concentrate even more.

However, our cave-dweller past can upset our plans. We are hard-wired to switch our attention to bright lights or colours, loud noise or movement, or even a moment of fear. It's one of our many survival mechanisms. In an office, it could be the ping of an email or a flashing light on your phone or a worrying thought. Once your attention has been distracted, it takes real effort to re-focus.

To teach our brains to focus more predictably, we need to set up conditions which reduce distractions.

originally published June 2013 Newsletter

Read Faster, Remember Longer: Technique

We see and we think very rapidly, much faster than we can talk.

Have you ever been in (or narrowly avoided) an accident? Do you remember how much thinking went on in only a few seconds? We think that fast all the time and our subconscious works even faster than our conscious thinking. When you’re driving down a multi-lane highway, changing lanes, talking to your passenger, assessing hazards and watching for cops in the rear-view mirror, your eyes and your brain work almost automatically to use your well-developed driving skills and keep you safely on the road.

Are you skilled at a hobby, or a sport, or at playing a musical instrument? Do you remember how slow and clumsy you were as a beginner? Yet now you can apply the skills rapidly and easily.

Boost Your Reading Speed and Comprehension

Just as you can drive rapidly, you have the brain and eyes that allow you to read really fast. Being able to read your work related material quickly with good concentration and retention is a skill you can improve dramatically.

Here are some tips to help you read more effectively.

1. Take a document you need to read this week. First scan the whole document quickly, asking yourself “Why am I reading this now?” The answer to that question is your purpose - the reason you need to read this document this week. You need to find certain key information, you need to refresh your knowledge of some other information, and you need to page rapidly through the document to the end to get a better sense of where the “good stuff” is. This overview helps focus your attention and improve your concentration.
2. Try sliding the forefinger of your preferred hand (or your cursor) under each line, reading as quickly as you can understand. Reading is getting information from print. Keep in mind the information you are looking for and read quickly to meet your purpose.
3. Try to finish a section or chapter in 5 minutes or less, then look back over what you read and talk to yourself about what you’ve learned. You might want to make a few brief notes.
4. Continue through the document this way, reminding yourself about your purpose and looking for the information you need. If you notice that your mind starts to wander at any point, speed up. Mind wandering indicates that you are reading more slowly than you can think and that is a waste of time and energy.
5. When you have found the information you need to meet your purpose, add to your notes.
6. Then review your understanding of what you have learned and look through the document once again to pick up any additional detail which will be helpful.

This is very similar to a study technique called SQ3R, which stands for Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review, a study method introduced by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1964 book, Effective Study.

This technique causes you to work much more effectively with your brain when you’re reading. By surveying the document and asking yourself questions about it, you draw information from your long-term memory and prepare your brain to learn more.

Then you read with more engagement and concentration using your finger to keep you on track.

Next you recite to yourself what you've understood while looking back over the document to remind yourself of the various aspects of what you've learned. Then you review the questions you asked yourself as you surveyed the document and make sure you know the answers.

Even if you never take a speed reading course, this focused and concentrated reading will help you read faster and remember longer. If you time yourself and keep a record of your progress, you’ll see steady improvement. If you want to push your speed and comprehension even more, consider a speed reading course.

Strengthen your Willpower

The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up. That's the conclusion of Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney in their book Willpower - Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. They found willpower gives people the strength to persevere and to make good decisions - but willpower is easily depleted.

Things that deplete our willpower include difficult decisions, lots of decisions, lack of sleep, lack of food, disorganization, trying to change a habit, making other major changes, starting to exercise, chronic pain, and dieting. Once our willpower is depleted, we tend to make more mistakes, to find decisions harder to make, to be more irritable, and to eat, drink, and spend too much.

You can strengthen your willpower by making sure you are getting enough sleep, eating regularly - especially at breakfast time - and recognizing your supply of willpower is limited. To strengthen your willpower, you want to develop effective habits. Your brain loves routines and habits, but it hates changing them. So just developing new habits will deplete your willpower. But your strengthened willpower will pay off in the future.

To strengthen your willpower:

• DO have one clear annual goal.
• DO convert your annual goal into monthly goals.
• DO identify your top three To Do’s for each week.
• DO your top three To Do’s first.
• DO have a To Don’t list, which outlaws phrases like:
• “I’m too busy.”
• “I’m too tired.”
• “I deserve a cookie.”
• “I’ll do that later.”
• DO recognize that whatever your conscious mind says to your subconscious, your subconscious believes every word. Instead of saying “it’s too hard”, say “it’s hard, but it’s not too hard”. Instead of saying “I should/I must”, say “I would prefer to”.
• DO set up to avoid crises. For example, hitting the snooze button too often, procrastinating, and believing that last minute rushes work as well as a systematic planned approach.
• DO review your progress regularly and reward yourself for good progress.
• DO remind yourself that like any development, strengthening your willpower takes time and effort.
• DO resist poor decision making, by writing out your rationale for the decision.

To strengthen your willpower:

• DON’T work on important decisions when you are tired, hungry or angry.
• DON’T forget Murphy’s Laws when you’re planning.
• 1. Nothing is as simple as it seems.
• 2. Everything takes longer than you think.
• 3. If anything can go wrong, it will.
• DON’T set unrealistic deadlines.
• DON’T procrastinate on fun, allow specific time for it.

Use these do’s and don’ts to strengthen your willpower. You will decrease your stress and increase your enjoyment of life. Your enriched willpower will do more than just help you get through crises; it will help you avoid them.

In the Conclusion chapter of Baumeister and Tierney’s book, they say:

“Everyone appreciates the benefits of self-control - someday. But when, if ever, is that day ever going to arrive? If willpower is finite and temptations keep proliferating, how can there be a lasting revival of this virtue? 

We don’t minimize the obstacles, but we’re still bullish on the future of self-control, at both the personal and social level. Yes, temptations are getting more sophisticated, but so are the tools for resisting them. The benefits of willpower are appreciated more clearly than ever. You could sum up a large new body of research literature with the simple rule: The best way to reduce stress in your life is to stop screwing up.”

How to Remember Names

Here is a mnemonic - a memory technique - to help you remember names.

You need to pay attention to the sound of the name as the person is being introduced. Then interest yourself in the person and have the intention to remember. Find ways to repeat the name to yourself while you visualize how you’ll link something in that person’s face to his or her name. Then check that the link you’ve created will remind you of the name.

It’s usually more effective to work to learn both the first and last name of each person you’re meeting. Both names together are more unique than just a first name. There are many people called Jack in the world, but not so many called Jack Pease.

The mnemonic is HELLO:

H - Hear
Make sure you’ve heard the name clearly enough to repeat it correctly.

E - Explore
Repeat the name back to the person and ask whether you’re saying it correctly. Ask how it is spelled, where it is from, and so forth. Repeat the name silently and out loud as often as you can while you...

L - Look
Look carefully at the face for any feature to which you can mentally attach the name. Sometimes just visualizing the name written on the person’s forehead will work.

L - Link
Link a feature of the face to the sound of the name by creating a ridiculous mental picture. Use action, colour, humour, or 'sounds like'. (Keep your mental image to yourself; they might not appreciate it.)

O - Organize
Make sure your mental picture or link triggers the name in your mind when you look at their face. As soon as you get the opportunity, write down the name of the person you met and add a few notes so you will be able to recall the person's face later.

You will find that if you use the HELLO technique consistently when you’re meeting someone for the first time, your name remembering skill will improve. You will not always be able to think of a visual image that reminds you of the name, but just by focussing your attention on the person’s face and thinking about the sound of the name, you will improve your ability to remember.

Here are some examples of visual images linking someone’s face and name:

• Patricia Williams: Patricia sounds like patches, so I have patches on her face and she is writing her will using a yam.
• Michael Taylor: I use a white glove (Michael Jackson) on the top of his head, which also has an old-fashioned, cross-legged tailor sitting there sewing the glove.
• Zelia Chouinard: I imagine a big Z over her face and her hair is quite bushy and flat on top. Chouinard sounds like shoe-in-yard, so I stick a shoe in the yard of her hair.

Because so many people have difficulty remembering names, your effort will be much appreciated and the people you meet will tend to think you’re caring and intelligent. You will also be improving your ability to use your memory more effectively.

Attention, Interest, Repetition, and Organization

Whether you want to improve your ability to remember names or to learn another language, improve your knowledge of a certain subject or to play a musical instrument, the following four steps are essential.

Attention and Interest will get the information into your short-term or working memory. Repetition will get it into your long-term memory, but if you link the Repetition with Organization, you will be able to retrieve the information when you need it.

Your memory works on a reminder and recreation system. If you build in the reminder while you are learning anything new, you can remember whatever you want.