What is Pathological Altruism?

According to a 2013 paper on altruism bias, you can define pathological altruism as an attempt to promote the well-being of others that results in harm. The key aspect is that the harm from pathological altruism is reasonably foreseeable from the perspective of an outside observer.

The harm of pathological altruism can occur to the recipient of the altruistic act or the person acting in an altruistic way. The aforementioned paper cites an example of a mother refusing to vaccinate her child in the belief that she’s protecting her child, only for this lack of vaccination to cause a local outbreak of a dangerous childhood infection that results in an infant death.

Selfish Altruism: When Being Selfish Benefits Others

I’ve always considered myself as being somewhat selfish because I don’t seek out traditional altruistic endeavors. I don’t volunteer with a charity or a local animal shelter. I don’t donate much to charity. I rarely put money in the cups of people begging on the streets. Maybe you are the same, maybe not.

The word cerebrotonic, which I named this blog after, has two meanings from my perspective. One is the literal meaning of introverted or introspective people who think deeply about the world, about big ideas, and about their own lives.

The other meaning of cerebrotonic is that some of the articles here are meant to act as a ‘tonic’ for people who are too cerebral—too much in their own heads to the detriment of engaging with the world. This is how I feel my selfishness mostly manifests; I focus a lot on what I can do to better myself rather than bettering the world.

I don’t post about this selfishness lightly. I consider it a personal character flaw and it’s something I have made attempts to address. The above altruistic efforts that I lack are no doubt commendable.

However, I started to think deeper about the topic and how my own seemingly self-serving decisions have benefited other people. The picture became a little less clear cut and somewhat paradoxical.

For example, when I make efforts to eat more healthy food, I notice that the people around me can’t help but to eat better, or at least eliminate crap from their diets. This is something that initially seems like a self-serving decision but it ends up improving the lives of people close to me.

Another example was my recent decision to learn piano at 29 years of age. Six months after buying a digital piano, I can play the main Don’t Stop Believin’ melody, Let It Be by The Beatles, and Lean On Me by Bill Withers.

I often switch on the piano when other people are present in the room, including my 18-month old daughter. She instantly smiles and begins dancing. My apparently self-serving act of learning to play piano brings joy to my child’s life.

I think the message is relatively clear, albeit paradoxical: if you consider yourself selfish, think deeper about your actions. You might be surprised how your selfish interests end up promoting the well-being of others. This is what psychologist Abraham Maslow termed healthy selfishness in an unpublished paper. You can read the paper in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow.

The other lens through which to view this topic is that you can consider traditional altruism can be somewhat selfish. After all, many people report “feeling good” when donating their time to volunteering or other worthy causes. Is this personal “feeling good” the primary motivator in some instances of altruism? I think it would be naive to suggest otherwise.

Closing Thoughts

There are clearly complex psychological forces at play when it comes to selfishness and altruism. And I don’t pretend to understand the full picture. For an in-depth perspective on healthy selfishness, read the recently published 2020 paper: Healthy Selfishness and Pathological Altruism: Measuring Two Paradoxical Forms of Selfishness. It’s co-authored by Scott Barry Kaufman and Emanuel Jauk.

The overarching aim of this blog post was to address this topic from a personal perspective. I wanted to reach out to people similar to myself, who give themselves a hard time for being too selfish. If you go deeper into your behavior, you’ll often find some surprisingly positive ripple effects of what you thought were selfishly motivated acts. And hopefully, you’ll go a little bit easier on yourself, as I am trying to do.

The post Exploring the Paradox of Selfish Altruism appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Dear reader,

I don’t know what year it’ll be when you read this letter, but I hope it’s at a point in which the COVID-19 ‘s destructive effects have been quelled.

Before going on to the body of this letter, if there’s anything good to come from the global coronavirus outbreak, I hope it’s the society-wide recognition that science is paramount.

If this virus eventually succumbs to its human hosts, it will have done so thanks to science. I ardently hope that populist conspiracy theories about 5G don’t gain any more traction than they currently are at the time of writing.

With that said, what was it like to live during the coronavirus pandemic? I will proceed with the rest of this letter by highlighting some of the lessons I believe we’ve all learned.

Lesson #1: Technology is a Blessing

Technology has been getting a bad rep lately in productivity circuits. We’re constantly reminded about the dangers of social media and the problems of too much screen time. These are valid concerns, but technology does not deserve its bad rep.

The first truth you should know about this pandemic is that it served as a great reminder of how much of a blessing technology is in our lives.

Whether reading Buddhism books on a Kindle to deal with stress, playing video games, watching Netflix, browsing the news headlines online, or having a Zoom video call with friends, many of the most accessible ways to keep ourselves occupied during these worrying times have been enabled by technological progress.

Lesson #2: We Need to Love Nature, Not Conquer It

No, this is not some hippy-dippy flowery crap inspired by taking psychedelics. The truth is that mankind’s modern religion of Inevitable Progress leads us to attempt to conquer nature in the pursuit of achieving ill-considered, temporal ends.

We eat animals that shouldn’t be eaten and we keep very different beings confined in small enclosures, ready for consumption because of our greed.

Ancient wisdom, from the Greeks to the Taoists, regarded nature as something to live in accordance with rather than bend to our will.

The Greeks believed that a hubristic lack of respect towards Logos, or nature, would be punished by an avenging nemesis. We certainly got our nemesis with COVID-19.

Lesson #3: Boredom is Valuable

With all the available forms of entertainment during this pandemic, powered mostly by technology, there’s still been plenty of boredom. Not as much boredom as there would’ve been if this happened 50 years ago, but still.

I feel like boredom is something that is underappreciated. The value of boredom is that it causes us to take stock of our lives and our values and adjust things accordingly.

Great insights and creativity can come from boredom as can the pursuit of new hobbies. Career changes are made possible by boredom too.

Sometimes we get so caught up in the daily grind of life that we don’t take a moment to question what we’re doing and where we are going. I hope more people give themselves the space to be bored after this pandemic because I think it’s essential in life.

Lesson #4: Humans Are Remarkably Resilient

I am, by nature, quite an anxious person who worries a lot about future events and ruminates about past mistakes. If you told me 6 months ago that a global pandemic would wreak havoc upon society within the next few months, I probably would’ve had a panic attack.

A strange thing happens though when you actually live through this type of situation: you get used to it. Despite the huge shift in how we live our lives, I’ve noticed my anxiety has paradoxically lessened.

Observing people around me, I’ve been both impressed and surprised with the resilience we’re all showing. Having to stay at home and keep contact with others to a minimum is hardly wartime, but it’s still a huge and rapid shift in how we live. We’ve (mostly) coped admirably.

Lesson #5: The Present Moment is Paramount

When people like Alan Watts or Ram Dass spoke about the present moment and its importance, I tend to intellectually agree with what they were saying rather than experientially knowing it.

However, I believe we’ve all learned just how fragile and delicate the balance of life is during this pandemic. And correspondingly, we can all see the reality of how important the present moment is. I delved further in another post on how coronavirus helps us deal with our mortality.

The present is where life happens. And life can be taken from us in a flash, so it makes no sense not to try and pay attention to life as it happens.

Whether you’re watching television, brushing your teeth, learning a song on the guitar, or playing with your child, own every moment and be there for it.

That’s what I can muster up at the moment, as I sit here reflecting about these strange times. I hope some of these lessons will stick.

Yours sincerely,

Ronan

The post A Letter to Future Generations About Living During the Coronvavirus Pandemic appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Countries closed their borders, airplanes stopped flying, bars and restaurants shut, and millions of people lost their jobs. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered into our lexicon, even though most of us had never used those terms four weeks ago. Over a third of the world is on lockdown, as of writing.

But perhaps the most significant change of all is that coronavirus has led so many of us to confront our own mortality head-on. This is a unique opportunity to make good of a really shitty situation.

The Immortality Project

It was Ernest Becker who first brought the idea prominently into contemporary mainstream thought that everything we do as humans collectively and individually, is underpinned by the terror of our own death. This idea is not new, but modern psychology somewhat neglected it before Becker.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death, Becker postulates that humans create shared cultural worldviews and projects of personal significance to give our lives a sense of order and meaning. We do this to escape the fear of our own deaths. Becker calls these our immortality projects, and they apply at both the individual and societal level.

An immortality project is something we create or become a part of that is bigger than us or we think will outlast our own lives on earth. Examples are:

• Creating works of art
• Performing scientific research
• Passing on our genes
• Participating in religious practices
• Doing work we find meaningful
• Paying taxes to help run the country
• Contributing to society through work, volunteering, sports, etc
• Being part of a functioning society and/or nation
• Accumulating wealth that we can pass on

The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly and ruthlessly exposed the utter fragility of the human societal constructs that we cling to in order to escape the terror of death. Not since World War 2 has such a large chunk of the planet been confronted with their mortality simultaneously.

Everyday activities that imbued our lives with a sense of order and meaning have ground to a halt. Many of us aren’t working. Governments have imposed widespread restrictions on what we can do. We watch news reports of overwhelmed hospitals and see people of all ages succumbing to this virus. Order has quickly turned to chaos. Immortality projects are collapsing.

There Was Never Any Permanence

By creating shared cultural constructs and feeling like we’re personally contributing to them, we play a psychological trick to convince ourselves we’re doing something permanent in life.

These constructs are now in doubt and many of our personal contributions halted. The societal game we were playing is on pause. With a contagious, dangerous viral illness on the loose, the deep existential fear of death faces all of us.

Anyone familiar with Buddhist philosophy will tell you there was never any permanence in life to begin with. Accepting the flux of life is arguably the whole point of walking the Buddhist path.

The British writer and lecturer Alan Watts, who is best known for popularizing Eastern philosophy in the Western world, summed up the impermanence of life brilliantly in his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity:

Man seems to be unable to live without myth, without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him part of a vast social effort, in which he loses something of his own emptiness. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.

The subtitle of Watts’ book is “A Message for an Age of Anxiety”. It was written in 1951 when the Cold War brought about severe anxiety at a societal level due to escalating tensions and the threat of nuclear warfare between global superpowers.

Almost 70 years later, ‘an age of anxiety’ is exactly how you’d sum up what the world is going through with the coronavirus pandemic.

How to Accept Our Mortality

Confronted daily with the reality-check that is the fact of our own impermanence and mortality, is there a way to make good of this situation? How can we accept our mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic?

I don’t have all the answers, but here are some suggestions:

• Accept flux as an inextricable part of existence — no living thing, no relationship, no government, no society stays the same. Make peace with the fact that living means changing.
• See the good side of flux— life wouldn’t have evolved without changing conditions, scientific advancements wouldn’t be possible without change, reading the article on the Internet is the result of flux. Crisp autumn mornings, long summer evenings, comfy winter nights in front of the fire-they are all made possible because of change.
• Engage with the present — the present moment is all we really ever experience. Many of the societal constructs we create and participate in depend on thinking about and planning for the future. Reframe your attention to engage much more with the present and your mortality becomes less of a problem.
• Practice self-inquiry —spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says “the secret of life is to die before you die”. What he meant was to investigate the nature of your own consciousness and see what you find out. You don’t have to like Eckhart Tolle or be religious to practice self-inquiry. Ask yourself who you really are underneath the ego—the set of images and thoughts you construct to give you, as a physical organism, some meaning in this world. You might be surprised at what you find out.

The post How Covid-19 Gives Us All the Chance to Accept Impermanence appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

It is a perplexing dilemma for the unlucky people who tend towards pessimism, negativity, rumination, and neuroticism as their default mental state: Why do other people seem so happy all the time? What is wrong with me that I seem to feel unhappy by default? Was it early childhood experiences that made me unhappy? Is it the fault of my parents?

While our upbringing can absolutely shape our personalities, what many people don’t know is that our genes play a huge role in our default happiness levels. In his excellent book, The Happiness Hypothesis, writer and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes being a happy person by default as “winning the cortical lottery”.

The cortical lottery refers to the fact that some people are lucky enough to be born with naturally higher proclivities for optimism and joy. Others are less fortunate and tend to be biologically wired to experience unhappiness as their default state.

Your upbringing and current life conditions of course impact how happy or content you feel. However, hope is not lost for people who are not lucky enough to win the cortical lottery. There are several excellent ways to improve default happiness levels and become a happier person.

What is Happiness?

Happiness is a state of experience characterized by positive thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Some of the happiest people you’ll ever meet live a life of squalor compared to what you are used to in Western society. I have lived extensively in Thailand, a developing country, and encountered many more happy people there than years of living in Ireland.

Outside circumstances can affect happiness levels to a certain extent, but they don’t tell anywhere near the full story. As mentioned, some people are lucky enough to be born happy. Other people become happy by default thanks to being raised in a positive, encouraging environment.

But what explains my admittedly anecdotal observation that people in poorer countries seem happier? To me, it is the power of community and social connection. Individualism is the predominant mindset in the West. People strive to prove how independent and self-reliant they are.

But this individualism brings with it a problem; the loss of community values and social connections. People in richer nations typically stay indoors outside of work hours, watching Netflix or browsing the Internet. There is a real loss of community values bred by focusing on only oneself. Isolation is rampant in the West.

Poorer nations tend to have more of a social culture with friends eating together, people selling food on the road, night markets, friends drinking in little pop-up bars at the side of the road. Humans are tribal by nature—we function best in social situations via collaboration, similar to how ants and bees also function best by working together. It is no surprise, therefore, that social isolation breeds unhappiness.

Note that while my observation about happiness in rich vs poor nations is anecdotal, it is also a widely shared perspective. Ask anyone who has travelled to Thailand or other Southeast Asian nations and they’ll tell you one of the most striking things was how happy people seemed despite their relative poverty. The same is often said by people visiting Africa and South America.

How to Become a Happier Person

Before delving into specific tips, it’s a good idea, first of all, to clarify why you would want to change your default happiness levels. The old saying goes that misery loves company, and it is actually quite easy to become attached to your own negativity. It can be difficult to let that part of you go, which is why changing your affective style, as it is termed, is difficult.

Furthermore, change is often scary. Sometimes it is easier to stay entrenched in current ways of feeling, thinking, and behaving. We worry about what awaits us on the other side and we’d rather the certainty of knowing what life is like in our current state than the uncertainty of finding out who we are and how we live when we are happier people.

The happier you might decide to end a relationship because you realize you were in the relationship out of fear of being alone. The happier you might dump your current batch of friends because they are toxic and hanging out with them makes you unhappy. Your parents might not understand where the happier you has come from and why you seem so different.

These are not small life changes. You need to understand that becoming a happier person is likely to lead to at least a few major life disruptions. But it is precisely these changes that provide a good reason to try and change your default happiness levels.

Change is where growth occurs. It is easy to carry on the way you’ve been living, even if you rarely feel happy. It is hard to change but it is a worthwhile endeavor. If you are convinced, then try adopting these five proven ways to become a happier person.

Meditate 15 Minutes Each Day

Pretty much everyone has either read or heard about the benefits of meditation by now. The thing about meditation is that not all of us have the time to spend entire days like Buddhist monks, cross-legged and contemplating the breath.

But you don’t need to meditate all day to receive its happiness benefits. A 15-minute meditation session suffices. Meditation does not need to be remotely religious or spiritual. Treat meditation like an experiment you are conducting on your mind. What you are doing is training your mind not to attach so readily to thoughts.

Whether you sit down and cross your legs or lie down, it is up to you. The aim of meditation from a happiness perspective is that you want to get to a point where you attach less to your thoughts. You see your thoughts for what they are—transient things that come and go in your mind.

With consistent daily meditation practice, you attach less to the negativity that manifests in the form of your default thoughts. You come to an innate understanding that these thoughts are not you; they are the activity of the mind and they are constantly in flux.

The aim is to get to a point in which your thoughts are not sticky things that you attach to and get bogged down in.

Get Your Heart Rate Up

In one of the more informative episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Dr. Rhonda Patrick discusses the physical benefits of exercise in depth.  But just as impactful as these physical benefits are the profound mental benefits of exercise.

Exercise is a powerful treatment for depression, according to several studies. A 2017 study on exercise and depression concluded that exercise is an evidence-based medicine for depression.  Personally I enjoy a brisk walk as much as anyone, but I do think you feel better when getting your heart rate up, whether by swimming, rowing, running, cycling, playing soccer. The key is to pick an activity that you enjoy.

CBT

Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a therapeutic intervention that relies on challenging unhelpful cognitive distortions. These distortions are a collection of inaccurate thoughts and beliefs we have about ourselves. The goal is to challenge these distortions and replace them with more realistic and adaptive thoughts.

By challenging one’s own distorted thoughts, the practitioner of CBT changes their feelings which in turn results in different, more positive behaviors. These behaviors then further reinforce new, more realistic and less neurotic ways of thinking.

The best book on CBT is still Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. I would really recommend this book to get an excellent overview of what CBT is all about. Finding a good CBT therapist or psychologist is straightforward in most developed cities nowadays. I think many people would benefit more from CBT with the aid of a qualified CBT psychologist.

ACT

Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is a type of therapy that works well for people who don’t get any benefit or change from CBT.  it also works for people who don’t particularly get on with the idea that we need to constantly challenge our thoughts.

ACT observes (correctly in my opinion) that constantly challenging our thoughts is a pain in the arse, tiring, and extremely difficult. What is nice about ACT is that it begins with the assumption that the human condition is often marked by negativity and suffering. This is in line with the Buddhist idea that life is marked by Dukkha, a sort of fundamental dissatisfaction.

ACT states that much of our suffering and unhappiness in life is caused by fusing with our thoughts. When we fuse with our thoughts, we avoid experiences that could potentially cause psychological growth. We become rigid in our ways of thinking, behaving, and interacting with the world.

To become happier, more psychologically flexible people, the ACT approach advocates taking action in line with personal values. In order to take such action, we first need to learn how to defuse from our thoughts. This is where ACT links nicely with meditation. You try to get to a point where you attach less to the content of your mind.

To learn more about ACT I really recommend a fantastic book called The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris. I’ve read this book three times and it still takes a prime position on my bookshelf. You can also seek out a qualified ACT therapist but they can be awkward to find.

Antidepressants

We live in a world in which it is fashionable to rebel against the status quo. There are people who take pride in being cynical about certain things, and one of those things lately is Big Pharma and their apparent hidden agenda with antidepressant medications.

People speculate that these mammoth companies like Pfizer and co push these mental health drugs to the public for profit in full knowledge that they either barely work or that most people who take them don’t need them. But the truth is that generic competition for these brand names drugs means they are not as profitable as they once were and that many people do benefit from them.

Skepticism is often healthy but online wellness blogs, self-improvement forums and blogs, and YouTube video sections and comments too readily dismiss antidepressants like Prozac and Lexapro. Read the reviews on Drugs.com for depression meds like Prozac and you’ll see overwhelmingly positive reactions (and some negative reviews).

The truth is that antidepressants are viable options for those of us not lucky enough to win the cortical lottery. They can help those of us who have developed depressive personalities whether through bad genes, a less than optimal environment for our upbringing, and general life experiences so far.

I like the analogy Jonathan Haidt uses in the aforementioned book, The Happiness Hypothesis. He says that those of us who are not happy by default are like people who live life with functional yet cloudy eyesight. You would have no hesitation to give contact lenses to someone to improve their vision; how they see the world. The same should ring true for giving someone a tablet to change how happy they feel by default.

Antidepressant therapy does not work for everyone. But if you are truly unhappy in your default state and you have tried other methods, I see no harm in giving these medications at least a six-week trial. You can always stop taking them after the trial if there are no changes or stop during the trial if you can’t handle the side-effects.

Closing Thoughts

Saying that you can become a happier person and providing tips to do so isn’t the same as saying that happiness is some destination that you can arrive at. I look at happiness as an ongoing experience that comes and goes. There will always be pain and negative psychological suffering; it is part of the human experience.

But it is my firm belief that how much happiness we experience in our everyday lives is malleable through taking certain steps, such as exercising regularly, undergoing therapy, meditating, and taking antidepressants to correct genetic bad luck.

None of these things relies upon the modern consumerist view of happiness that if you achieve or have X, you will be happy. None of these things is easy; even though popping a pill sounds easy, antidepressants often come with side-effects that people can’t tolerate.

I recommend starting with exercise and meditation at a minimum, as both of these things have personally made the biggest impact on how happy I feel each day. From there, you can gauge how you feel and move on to therapy, medication, or both. Good luck and please leave a comment or share this post if you enjoyed it. I’ve provided some of the main reading recommendations below.

The post Five Proven Ways to Become a Happier Person appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Entering the present moment sounds like a bit of a contradictory phrase. After all, “it is only ever now”, as the spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle is fond of saying.

The problem is that while we might always physically be present in whatever location our body happens to be in, mentally, most of us rarely actually live in the moment. Anxiety, by definition, entails worrying about the future, which means mentally not being aware of your current experience.

Even when in the grips of in-the-moment panic, your worry is not about right now; it is about the prospect of dying or some other terrifying thing happening. Anxiety is rife in society if statistics are anything to go by.

Rumination about past mistakes and failures is something common to all but the most privileged humans and it is the default thought process among many depressed people.

Even those who are lucky enough to live what would be considered a life without much suffering from anxiety or depression tend to spend most of their time mentally outside the present moment, making plans, pondering whether to have a takeaway for dinner, among a plethora of other things the mind likes to preoccupy itself with.

Most of us have had experiences in life of intensely living in the moment and we tend to recognize them as times that profoundly impact us, often for the better. Anyone who has ever been at a concert completely engrossed in the performance of a musician they enjoy knows about this experience. So does anyone who has ever had sex, climbed a mountain, played sport.

Life takes place and unfolds right now, which makes it somewhat of a travesty that many of us tend to sleepwalk through life without paying attention to it. Indian yogis and Buddhist monks were on to something when they espoused the virtues of being present in life.

The Attention Economy

But how do you become more present? In the modern world, it is exceedingly difficult to pay attention to the nature of experience as it is right now because there’s always something more compelling competing for our attention spans.

Addictive smartphone notifications, social media platforms, 24/7 newsreels,  Netflix, video games, porn, Internet browsing, even books…the list is endless. Such mediums ostensibly seem to provide an ideal outlet for escaping mental anguish, however, they mostly just avoid and perpetuate suffering in the long run.

Pretty much all modern big tech companies see human attention as a scarce commodity and a valuable resource.  Therefore, all technology companies compete with each other for our attention. The result is an onslaught of notifications, apps, and content that is difficult to resist.

Genuine feelings of contentedness tend to arise when we realize that truly being present in life eliminates most of our suffering.

Furthermore, when we are not present enough, life seems to flash by too fast. Days rapidly merge into weeks and before you know it, six months have passed in a timespan that felt like about 8 weeks.

Ways to Enter the Present Moment

But how do we enter this elusive present moment? Well, there are a few important ways that are simple yet require discipline.

Entering the present moment is something that Jeff Olson, author of an excellent book called The Slight Edge, would consider as “easy to do but easy not to do”.  According to Olson, our results in life, whether the goal is improved health or reduced mental suffering,  are dependent on implementing simple daily habits that are easy to do but also easy not to do.

1) Listen 

“The easiest way to get into the meditative state is to begin by listening”. The spiritual entertainer Alan Watts uttered those words and I have found them to be very useful. Just listening to the general hum and buzz of the world is a brilliant way to become more present in life.

2) Get into the Flow State 

Eckhart Tolle describes eternity as being outside of time. This is also an apt description of what it feels like to be in a state of flow. It is important to note that being in a state of flow is not the same as distracting yourself. In a state of flow, you completely merge with both the task you are doing and the present moment in such a way that you live entirely in the now.

Flow involves complete mindful attention and focus on what you are doing. This is what distinguishes flow from mere distraction, which typically occurs by focusing our mind on some other place, fantasy, or time.

To get into flow, pick a task, eliminate all possible distractions, and focus solely on that task. For me, it’s playing a musical instrument or writing that achieves this state. For others, it could be something like cleaning your home, building a bookshelf, or climbing a mountain.

3) Eat Mindfully

Eating gives us a great opportunity to become more present and it’s an opportunity most of us waste at least three times each day. Most of us cram food into our mouths and try to clear our plates as quickly as possible. We treat eating as a kind of distraction that we do out of necessity rather than savouring each bite.

By truly paying attention while eating, not only do we become more present, we also better tune into our real levels of satiety. We then make more informed and healthier choices about the amount of food we actually need.

4) Focus on Breathing

It would be a disservice if I was to write a piece on how to become more present without mentioning the classic method of focusing on the breath. When you focus on breathing, you notice that your thoughts naturally come and go; they are always in flux. This teaches you that you don’t need to attach to any particular thought.

Much of our suffering arises because we treat our thoughts as these sticky things. How often have you woken up thinking, “oh shit, I feel so unhappy with life” and then pursued that thought for the remainder of the day, focusing on everything that is making you unhappy?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try to fix aspects of your life that make you unhappy. But fusing with our thoughts too readily is the driving force behind a lot of mental anguish.

A 10 to 15-minute focused session every day on the breath is an incredibly powerful way to become more present during the rest of your waking hours. When you learn not to attach so much to thoughts, you naturally become more aware of your current experience without mentally labelling it.

5) Focus on Tactile Sensations

Pick up an object, like a marble or something. Hold it in your hand and truly focus on what it feels like. I sometimes use this technique when I am stuck in an anxious or ruminative thought loop and I find it very helpful. I grab a nearby object and just focus on how it feels for 10 or 15 minutes.

6) Grab a Beer or Two

Alcohol is a poison and it comes with a range of negative health effects. However, I am not going to deny that one of the most pleasing aspects of indulging in a couple of tipples is how remarkably it clears mental chatter.

A common way people describe how they feel after drinking is that the booze “takes the edge off”. The reasons for this are chemical⁠—alcohol decreases excitability in the brain and increases relaxation.

I advise you to treat booze with caution because it is very easy to begin to use booze as a crutch for achieving peace of mind. In the long run, this will cause problems in your life.

I hope you have got something from this post and that you will use some of these tips to experience life as it occurs right now instead of spending too much time fused with thoughts about the past or future. Please share this post on social media if you enjoyed it or comment if you have any thoughts.

The post How to Enter the Present Moment appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

Where the fresh hell did those 9 months go? I turn 29 in nine days and I’ve noticed this phenomenon of time speeding up every year; something that pretty much every adult over 20 can relate to. Those three months of holidays back in school used to feel like three years. Now, three months feels more like three weeks.

I’ve used my bemusement and general despondency about time flying so fast as the inspiration for this post exploring why time speeds up as we get older. I think it’s also an ample opportunity to get a conversation going about some possible ways to alter our perception of time (and no, I’m not going to suggest LSD!).

Why Does Time Speed up as we Age?

There are a number of reasons for this universally shared perception of time moving faster as we age. The first and probably most explanatory is time as a matter of proportion. When you are 5 years old, one year is twenty percent of your life. When you are 52 years old, one year is not even 2 percent of your lifespan. It’s logical that less than two percent of your lifespan feels a tad shorter than twenty percent.

This Washington Post article provides some useful graphics to visually reinforce how proportion makes such a difference to how we perceive time.

A second reason time flies as you age is that your biology is different as an adult compared to when you were a kid. I vividly remember waiting for Christmas each year on December 1st and feeling like it was ten years away. There are differences in working memory, attention, and executive function between the adult and kid brain, which suggests a possibly slower perception of time for kids.

However, these biological differences are redundant in late childhood, so it appears the proportional idea of time is the best one for explaining why years seem to go by increasingly faster as we age.

What is the Holiday Paradox?

The Holiday Paradox is an interesting phenomenon of perception in which a holiday feels like it flies by while you are experiencing it, but in retrospect, you perceive it as lasting longer. Psychology writer Claudia Hammond coined the term “Holiday Paradox” in her book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception.

The explanation for the holiday paradox is that novel experiences while you are abroad create a bundle of new and unique memories that can make your trip seem longer in hindsight. When you enter that post-trip nostalgia reflection, a three-day getaway to a new city can feel like you were there for two weeks.

Want to Slow Down Time? Seek Out New Experiences

The Holiday Paradox offers a unique opportunity to contemplate how we might all combat the seemingly relentless speeding up of time. By regularly seeking out new experiences without necessarily going on a holiday, you create more memories so that retrospectively, it feels like time has passed more slowly.

It appears that by getting bogged down in routine mundanity, our lives pass us by without us even realizing it. The key then is to integrate novelty in your life in as many ways as possible. An unimaginable variety of new experiences await all of us if we’d just venture outside our comfort zones. And going outside our comfort zones makes life feel richer and longer.

Speaking to myself as much as you, the reader; take up a martial art, join a cooking class, get piano lessons, go camping. Any time you do things outside your normal routine, you create many new memories and you can alter how fast you perceive time to be moving.

In an interesting way, this circles back to how differently we perceive time as adults compared to as kids. Constantly seeking out new experiences and learning new things resembles how you spend your time in childhood. Many of us fall victim to comfort zones when we get older and I’m one of the worst culprits.

Mindfulness Meditation and Altered Time Perception

Touted as a panacea treatment for every ailment from stress to depression to anger, you’ve probably heard a lot about mindfulness meditation in recent years. When your rolled eyes return from the direction of the sky to focus back on this article, I’ll happily inform you that mindfulness meditation can also alter your perception of time.

An interesting 2013 study on the effect of mindfulness meditation on time perception found that 10-minute periods of guided audio meditation caused participants to overestimate durations of time. The control group listened to an excerpt from The Hobbit, which didn’t lead to any change in estimations of durations of time.

What is even more intriguing about the study is that the effect occurred after just a single meditation session. The researchers who carried out the study speculated that the experience of shifting your attentional focus inwards during mindfulness meditation techniques slows down time perception.

From my own experience with meditation, this seems plausible. Force any beginner meditator to meditate for 10 minutes and those ten minutes will feel more like 20. However, from the perspective of someone who considers himself an intermediate meditator by now, it’s interesting that time seems to dissipate completely as a subjective perception when you get deeper into meditation. It is as if time no longer exists.

I think the overall long-term effect of meditation extrapolated out to the rest of our time is that it can make the days, months, and years feel longer. Because long-term meditators get less caught up in the constant chatter of their minds, they are more focused on the “Now”, as Eckhart Tolle likes to call the present moment. Being more present in life lets you appreciate its richness of experiences more fully and better process those experiences.

Seneca on Time

People have been pondering the nature of time since, well, time immemorial. One man who expressed his views on how much time people tend to waste in life was the Stoic philosopher, Seneca. In his book, On the Shortness of Life, Seneca reflects that people tend to complain about how short life is while squandering most of it on meaningless crap.

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Considering I’ve just spent 20 minutes reading the comments section under (yet another) an article on The Guardian about Brexit, I can’t exactly disagree with Mr. Seneca. The Roman Stoic argues that people fritter time away as if destined to live forever, saying that “the greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.”

I’ll probably revisit this post five months after my 29th birthday when I turn 30, but for now, I’ll make it my aim try and spend the final year of my 20s in such a way that it actually feels like a year. Thanks for reading and feel free to comment.

The post The Holiday Paradox, Time Flying, and Altering Your Perception of Time appeared first on Cerebrotonic.

I was listening to the radio the other day and one of my favourite feel-good tunes came on. It was Tom Petty’s Learning to Fly, which is a quite simple song based on four chords. One of the reasons I like the song so much is that it invokes a complex emotion in me. It is an obscure feeling of nostalgia for a time I’ve never known. 

What I feel when listening to Learning to Fly is a longing for a simpler life as a teenager in 1980s America even though my own teenage years were spent in early noughties County Dublin, Ireland. The song itself was actually released in 1991, however, to me its melody is strongly evocative of the 1980s. Upon listening to Learning to Fly, I immediately become nostalgic about different aspects of how I imagine life as a teenager was during that decade.

I miss driving on the open road with a pretty girl beside me in my second-hand Chevrolet Camaro, listening to Boston and Queen at full-blast on the car’s radio. I miss drinking foamy root beer with my friends. I miss the cultural euphoria of the beginning of the end of the Cold War in 1989, the excitement of the first IBM personal computer, and watching Live Aid on TV. I miss being present with friends, drinking a cold Coke on a balmy summer day; laughing together without the distractions of mobile phones or game boys. 

I miss all of these things even though I’ve never experienced them.

Tom Petty’s 1991 song is not the only thing that invokes this type of emotion in me; it happens when listening to certain other tunes or when looking at old photos from bygone generations. The beauty of language is that simple sounds can symbolize highly complex feelings and ideas, however, when I went looking for a dictionary-listed word for this unique type of nostalgia, I was left disappointed.

I then stumbled upon a video on YouTube with 3,000 views entitled Anemoia: Memories You Never Had. Someone must have coined the term anemoia for the exact feeling of nostalgia I’ve described. This was reassuring⁠—it showed me that there are other people who feel this same nostalgia, and that I’m not a complete crackpot :-). 

The fact that anemoia isn’t listed in any official dictionary doesn’t deter me; this type of word-play excites me. It’s always nice to know that despite the beauty of the English language, its official lexicon still doesn’t quite yet encompass the full diversity of possible human emotions. 

Nostalgia in Other Languages

There are, of course, approximately 6,500 other languages spoken around the world. And being someone who loves language, I felt writing this blog post provided ample opportunity to seek out words that describe this anemoia; this yearning for a time you’ve never experienced. 

Thankfully, my research was fruitful. Part of my professional writing work is to be a whizz with Google and unearth research, statistics, or insights that articles on similar topics have not yet mentioned. My Googling prowess transferred nicely to this bit of personal blog research, and I found two words that are somewhat sufficient in their definitions. 

What is Sehnsucht?

The first term is a German noun: Sehnsucht. This is described as an intense yearning or longing for something that you can’t quite pin down or explain. Sehnsucht kind of describes what I feel when listening to Learning to Fly.

I know I’ve mentioned longing for specific things about 1980s America, but the emotion itself is less concrete—it is a general nostalgia for life back then, and the examples I gave were just snippets of what that nostalgia encompasses for me. 

(As a random tangential tidbit of information, the German band Rammstein’s second album was named Sehnsucht.) 

Anyway, an interesting 2009 paper in the Journal of Research in Personality explores Sehnsucht from a scientific, experimental, and psychological standpoint. The paper is titled, “What is it we are longing for? Psychological and demographic factors influencing the contents of Sehnsucht (life longings).”

According to the authors of the paper, Sehnsucht is a word that captures feelings of an incomplete aspect of one’s past, present or future, coupled with the desire for alternative experiences. One of the central characteristics of this complex emotion is the feeling of lack or incompleteness in one’s life.

Relating this back to my original nostalgia, I guess I possibly spent too much of my teenage years playing video games, and not enough time being present with my friends. Certain songs and images can tap into this feeling of incompleteness, creating a longing for something different; a depiction of the lifestyle of American youths that was perhaps subconsciously idealized from reading Stephen King’s novels (you know, the background story before the killer clown kills everyone or the telepathic demon child destroys the place). 

The second interesting characteristic of Sehnsucht is that it invokes yearnings for utopian versions of what we lack. All of my examples above highlighting what I “miss” about life in 1980s America were not only strikingly positive; they were also utopian in nature. This nostalgia for times we’ve never known tends to entirely overlook the struggles specific to what we imagine we’re missing about a time we’ve never lived in.

The 1980s, of course, were not all fine and dandy. Raegan’s economic policy caused a terrible recession in early 1980s America, which the country admittedly recovered strongly from towards the middle and latter part of the decade. America in the 80s went through a huge cocaine and crack problem. There was a global AIDS epidemic to contend with, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster caused serious, widespread damage both to the environment and to human life. 

Life longings like these seem to hint at an individual’s reflection on their imperfect stages of development. Playing the role of a self-diagnosing amateur psychologist for a moment, maybe my nostalgia for the 80s arises because I feel my teenage years were not what they could’ve been or what I wish they were. But don’t we all have regrets about some parts of life?

Maybe there’s no need to analyze my anemoia or Sehnsucht so deeply⁠—it could be a latent feeling that everyone has the capacity for, even those who feel like all stages of life have gone well for them. 

Saudade

The second word I found is Portuguese in origin, and it probably describes even more succinctly the type of nostalgia that is the topic of this article. This is a deeply emotional state of longing that is difficult to translate into English. 

According to a really nice blog post on the Rosetta Stone website, saudade is “a yearning for a happiness that has passed, or perhaps never even existed. It carries with it a touch of melancholy, yet in that wistfulness, there is love as well.”

This more accurately encapsulates the emotion I feel when listening to certain songs or viewing certain images. I gave some utopian examples above of what I felt like I miss about 1980s America, but what those examples neglected to convey was a kind of bittersweet undertone to the nostalgia. 

Whether Sehnsucht or saudade represent this feeling better, I haven’t quite decided. Both words are great, and it has been fascinating to explore this intersection of complex human emotions and linguistics. 

I don’t know if I’m shouting into the void on this blog or if I have readers, but if you have read this and it resonates, I’d love you to share some of your own personal experiences of nostalgia for a time you’ve never lived in. Write a comment below the article.

Thanks for reading. The below suggestions are some excellent books set in the 1980s that kind of influenced my perception of growing up during that era, particularly in America.

The post Exploring Anemoia: Nostalgia for a Time You’ve Never Known appeared first on Cerebrotonic.