Health and Well-being

Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating

October 6, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Beware the Opportunity Cost of Meditating Many people claim to derive substantial benefits from mediation. Experiencing the present moment can help exclude the torrent of diverse thoughts and mind-wandering.

But sometimes, meditation may not be the most prudent use of your time, especially if you’re stressed.

Disruptive thoughts emerge when you sit down to meditate. Not engaging in them can be challenging if you aren’t an experienced meditator.

Unloading your mind precludes thinking and, in turn, making progress on your issues and dilemmas. Meditation increases the sense of time starvation. After your meditation session, your troubles are still there, only that now you have lesser time to solve them. And losing time is even palpable if you attend a meditation retreat for days or weeks.

Idea for Impact: Meditation is not a substitute for action. Sometimes you could benefit more from spending that time on more active approaches to deal with whatever’s stressing them out. Try journaling, thinking through what needs to be done, withdrawing to a secluded corner for focused work, chatting with friends and colleagues, or seeking counseling. As with meditation, these actions allow you to step back from your life to take a meta-view of whatever you want. That can reduce your stress and improve your approach to problems.

Thought Suppression is Counterproductive

October 3, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Thought Suppression is Counterproductive

You can’t make a bad thought go away by trying not to think about it.

Pushing away a thought works, but for a little while. Short-term relief is often worse than no relief, sometimes exacerbating the very emotions you’re hoping to veer off.

Most crutches of choice (drugs, alcohol, tobacco, barbiturates, shopping, or high-carbohydrate foods) offer transitory comfort. The immediate pleasure often gives way to long-term despair, which causes repeated use of the same agent. The consequence is addiction. The same is valid for thought suppression.

Studies have revealed that the more you suppress a thought, the stronger its recoil. For instance, smokers suppressing the thought of cigarettes report that the appeal of smoking comes rushing back with even greater power when they let their guard down. Holding back your thoughts will actually make you think about them more once the period of active suppression is over. In other words, suppressing a thought increases your attachment to it.

Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression Persistence creates resistance; the more you try to push thoughts out, the bigger they get. Further, the fleeting relief of thought suppression pushes you away from more effective and lasting approaches, such as gratitude, acceptance, and forgiveness.

Idea for Impact: Suppress Your Thoughts about Suppression

In a world obsessed with positive thinking, many of us have been conditioned to be so averse to “negative emotions” that we don’t recognize them, much less acknowledge them, or give ourselves permission to feel and process them. Thought suppression causes more stress and anxiety than if you confront what you’re trying to forget.

Replace unwanted thoughts with thoughts that focus on your goals (e.g., “It feels better to eat a delicious fruit than it does to wolf down a s’more topped with melted chocolate.”)
Create an if-then to help you not block unwanted thoughts out but instead plan what you really need to do to act on temptations. Your plans can disrupt the connection between the thought and giving in to temptation. Over time, the thoughts will fade on their own.

Self-Care Isn’t Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation

September 15, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Self-Care: Not about Self-Indulgence, but Self-Preservation The notion of self-care has received some well-deserved backlash lately. The wellness and beauty industry has expropriated it. Self-care has also turned into a way of justifying indulgence for those lucky enough to afford it. (A last-minute holiday in Tahiti? “That’s self-care!”)

But self-care is determining who you are and your limits are—sometimes at the expense of others’ needs. Self-care means noticing when you’re doing more than you’re used to handling and assessing what you can do to slow down. Self-care is figuring out what enriches and soothes your body and mind and attempting to integrate it into your day or your week.

Self-care isn’t frivolous, selfish, or indulgent. It’s self-preservation. It’s merely doing what helps you put your physical, mental, and emotional health back in check.

Idea for Impact: You deserve self-care. You need it. Be kind to yourself and take those deliberate steps to make yourself feel better. Self-care might seem selfish, but putting your needs first actually allows you to interact with others more healthily.

To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break

August 25, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

To Rejuvenate Your Brain, Give it a Break Research suggests that once you hit a “plateau of productivity,” the number of hours you work without a break is inversely proportional to how much you’ll accomplish.

Even brief escapes such as a walk in nature or a run around the block can clear your head and rejuvenate the brain. Just leave the phone behind and seek novelty (e.g., noticing something new or taking different paths.) Engage your mind with the world instead of worrying about the work you’re supposedly taking a break from.

Downtime allows the brain to refresh the specific neural network you’ve been using, make new connections, and inspire you to fresh approaches to tasks.

Idea for Impact: Intermittent escapism can be valuable. It distracts the brain from useless worry, helps generate out-of-the-box ideas, and may even restore a sense of wonder.

Novelist Neil Gaiman said it better, “People talk about escapism as if it’s a bad thing… Once you’ve escaped and come back, the world is not the same as when you left it. You return to it with skills, weapons, and knowledge you didn’t have before. Then you are better equipped to deal with your current reality.”

Thirst is a Late Indicator of Dehydration

July 26, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Thirst is a Late Indicator of Dehydration If you’re feeling parched, if your mouth feels dry, your body has likely lost 1 to 2 percent of its water content already. That’s a late indicator of dehydration, particularly in older adults.

Idea for Impact: Amid the current record-breaking heat wave, don’t wait for thirst to set in. Monitor for early clues from your body telling you it needs fluids—darker-colored urine, reduced exercise performance, headache, exhaustion, wooziness, and hunger.

Book Summary: No Filter & The Inside Story of Instagram

July 18, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram (2020) narrates the civil networking service’s ascendance from a Silicon Valley startup to a cultural phenomenon with an ever-present feature of everyday life and an advertising juggernaut.

The book’s author, Bloomberg journalist Sarah Frier, says, “On social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestions by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.”

Instagram evolved from Burbn, a mobile check-in app. The founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger refocused their app on photo-sharing, which had become a well-liked feature among Burbn’s users. Most cellphone cameras were pretty shoddy then, so Systrom and Krieger implemented filters to make the pictures prettier.

The founders didn’t, however, consider the downside of their innovation—reality-adjusting filters made not only users’ pictures but their lives, by extension, look more appealing. “Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently.”

No Filter author Frier shines in analyzing how Instagram rewired society and ushered far-reaching consequences for society, especially on young people’s mental health. Instagram and its ilk have stolen self-esteem and our attention span, leaving us with a needy dependency on strangers’ affirmation for a scripted-reality form of our lives. “The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.” The ability to rework photos to perfection has spread insecurity—even leading to a surge in filter-inspired plastic surgery.

No Filter also fixates on the battle for Instagram’s soul, following its purchase by Facebook for a then-absurd $1 billion, but seemingly a bargain today. There’s considerable corporate drama and cultural clash, but nothing like the co-founder infighting retold in Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter (2013; my summary.) Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg emerges controlling and rather callous. In seeking incessant growth, he continually thwarts the Instagram team. Paranoid that Instagram’s advance could “cannibalize” and replace Facebook in cultural relevance someday, Zuckerberg held them back. As Instagram grew bigger and cooler, Facebook acted “like the big sister that wants to dress you up for the party but does not want you to be prettier than she is.” In 2018, Systrom and Krieger left Facebook.

Recommendation: Quick read No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram (2020) for a compelling founding story and a relevant primer on the sweeping socio-cultural impacts ushered by the heavy use of social media.

How to … Nap at Work without Sleeping

June 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

How to Take the Perfect Nap

Make nap time the new coffee break. A quick snooze boosts productivity and improves memory and problem-solving.

Bill Anthony’s The Art of Napping at Work (1999) states that a shot of shut-eye was an indispensable afternoon pick-me-up for some of history’s greatest achievers, viz., Aristotle, Eleanor Roosevelt, John D Rockefeller, Leonardo da Vinci, Lyndon B Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, Napoleon, Salvador Dalí, Thomas Edison, and Winston Churchill.

According to the University of California-Irvine sleep researcher Sara Mednick, you don’t want to get into a deep sleep because you need to be alert. Her Take a Nap! Change Your Life (2006) uses the term “sleep inertia” to describe the inability to shrug sleep off after a nap. This impaired state worsens as you go deeper and deeper into sleep. So the trick is to avoid getting deep sleep.

If you nap about twenty minutes, you’ll be in light sleep, which is easy to get out of. In other words, twenty minutes is long enough to reach Stage 2 sleep but short enough to ward you off from waking up groggy.

Idea for Impact: Go ahead and snooze for 20 minutes, ideally sometime between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Step into bright light or splash your face with water if you need help regaining alertness after the alarm goes off. The post-nap energy spike can last for several hours.

Great Jobs are Overwhelming, and Not Everybody Wants Them

June 13, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

One of my friends, a senior executive at a Fortune 500 firm, recently said, “no, thank you” when asked if he’d like to be considered for the post of CEO of his company.

My friend is an ideal CEO candidate: he’s accomplished and well-liked, he’s about 10 years from retirement, he’s been a company “lifer,” and he’s worked hard grabbing the gold ring.

Great Jobs are Overwhelming, and Not Everybody Wants Them When I asked what caused this change of mind, he reflected, “At what cost, however?”

Well, his response wasn’t unexpected. A successful corporate career demands a high level of performance for sustained periods.

Ambitious professionals, especially top performers, have started to think differently about the tradeoffs of a demanding job. They’re asking questions such as “How much is enough?” and “If I get that job, what is it that I’m giving up?”

Most new CEOs are overwhelmed, disclosing that their jobs are more demanding, complex, and stressful than expected. Little wonder, then, that the average CEO’s tenure has gotten shorter over the years.

The brutal reality is that CEOs have less time than ever to prove their worth. The tolerance for mistakes and short-term underperformance has really gone down.

CEOs have to perform or perish. The CEO job is no longer a tenured role, and the ground has shifted over the decades. Several factors have made the jobs of business chiefs much more complicated than in the past. There’s immense pressure to produce consistently excellent results and keep everybody satisfied. It’s so stressful just working hard to keep the job. Then there’s the unremitting pressure of walking a tightrope; managing the conflicting interests between various stakeholders is exhausting.

Ceos Have Less Time Than Ever to Prove Their Worth CEOs’ performance must be more transparent than ever due to the never-ending demands imposed by global competition, geopolitical volatility, technological disruptions, ever-watchful regulators, increasingly engaged boards, and the specter of activist shareholders. A job with such challenges can quickly overwhelm, and CEOs end up working days, nights, and weekends in a futile attempt to pull free. They feel guilty about sacrificing precious family time for their work.

Above all, CEOs feel lonely at the top—being “where the buck stops,” they don’t have anyone to confide in. CEOs tend to isolate themselves due to the overwhelming responsibilities and the pressure to appear calm to employees.

Idea for Impact: Not everybody wishes to climb the top of the ladder. A high-pressure climate is not for everybody. Remember, burnout happens not when you work too much but when you invest emotionally in work and don’t get a commensurate return.

If Meditation Isn’t Working For You, Try Intermittent Silence

May 27, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

If Meditation Isn't Working For You, Try Intermittent Silence Mindfulness meditation is tough. There’s no easy way around it. It can make you feel discouraged at best and miserable at worst when it doesn’t work.

If you’ve failed at trying different forms of meditation or don’t find them as calming as you hoped, try intermittent silence.

Intermittent silence is straightforward—it’s as simple as closing your eyes for 5 or 10 minutes, enveloping yourself in silence, and attending to the sounds of nature.

Intermittent silence quietens your mind. It shifts your attention from the incessant chatter in your head, disconnecting you from everything around and trying to reach a state of tranquility.

As disruptive thoughts emerge, let these thoughts pass by, acknowledging them but not engaging in them, just as you would glance at a butterfly fly around graciously. Make a deliberate effort to shift your attention away and focus on something else, e.g., a gentle breeze.

Why You Can’t Relax on Your Next Vacation

April 23, 2022 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Why You Can't Relax on Your Next Vacation Some managers can’t slow down even on vacation. They keep worrying about their work and won’t come back feeling rested and rejuvenated.

If you feel the added guilt of being away, it may be time for you to look inward and reflect upon your ability to delegate. Don’t bring fear of inadequacy with you on vacation.

Sure, most people responsible for delivering big things find it difficult to be away. Feeling out of control is always stressful. Here’s how to make time off as restful as possible:

Schedule 1-hour check-ins every day.
Manage your team’s expectations and make sure everyone knows what matters you want to be bothered about.
Build-in buffers at both ends. Don’t work right until you leave for the airport and don’t get back to work right off the plane. Schedule an extra day off before you depart and another when you return. Dive back in slowly.

Idea for Impact: Time off should be time off. Get the most out of your time off by unplugging completely.

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