The Monday Five is exactly what it sounds like — 5 things I found noteworthy and interesting from the past week. It’s a bit of an experiment, so if this tickles your fancy then hit like / comment and let me know!
Brain Devices I Tried
I just got back from a short 2-day adventure to Nikko with my friend
.This is what our schedule looked like:
Friday: meditate.
Saturday: meditate and hot springs.
Sunday: meditate some more.
It was pretty standard for us, but I’m fairly confident that 99.9% of people traveling in Japan last weekend didn’t book their hotel, show up and just sit there with their eyes closed for 2 days. I guess we’re a little bit weird.
The thing is, after one of these mini retreats I always feel 100% better. It’s like I took a whole week off. It beats the sort of “relaxing” vacation where you drink mojitos, scroll through your phone and eat over-priced french fries in a noisy-ass hotel with Pitbull blaring 24/7.
During the trip, we hooked up a Muse device to my head as I meditated for 1.5 hours. It passively picks up your brain waves and gives you the live EEG read-out on your phone. There’s a biofeedback setting that can help you fall asleep faster, too. I thought it was pretty cool, although to be honest it’s not the most comfortable thing to wear for more than a few minutes (unless you’re used to wearing tight hats, I suppose, which I’m not).
It’ll take a bit more analysis and tracking to see how my brainwaves change after deep meditation, but for now I can at least say that my Alpha waves increased. A bump in alpha waves are associated with greater relaxation and decreased depression. One study found that loving-kindness meditation (what I’m practicing lately) :
“…was associated with significant increases in delta, alpha 1, alpha 2 and beta power compared to baseline, while prayer induced significant increases in power of alpha 1 and gamma oscillations, together with an increase in the gamma: theta ratio….suggesting that increases in these frequency bands are the neural correlates of spiritual love, independent of the type of practice used to attain the state of this type of love.”
I’m curious to compare how an EEG looks like for different types of meditation; i.e. loving kindness vs. breath-focused meditation vs. vipassana body scans. And, perhaps, even see how it changes as you progress through the different stages of meditation. I’ll keep you updated with any intriguing findings. ;)
4-7-8 Breathing
This is a spin on the paced-breathing / boxed-breathing technique. My friend Tim Van Der Vliet shared this with me recently. I’ve been using this in my weekly meditation group here in Tokyo. It’s simple:
Breathe in for 4 counts
Hold your breath for 7 counts
Breathe out for 8 counts
Slowing down your breath activates your parasympathetic nervous system and tells your body to calm down. Do this for 4-5 rounds and see how it feels. He recommends it for falling asleep but you can use it any time you need to chill out.
FYI Tim is a breath work instructor and flies around the world teaching people how to breathe. Pretty badass job, right? I met Tim in Amsterdam when he was doing a breathing and ice bath workshop. He was part of Wim Hof’s team (they’re still close) before he went off and did his own thing. Anyways, we’re planning a 7-day retreat in Japan next September. We’ll climb Mt. Fuji, meditate under waterfalls, and pray with Nichiren Buddhist monks. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Check it out here.
Books I’m Reading — Skip The Line and the 10,000 Experiments Rule
Malcolm Gladwell says that you need to practice 10,000 hours before you can become truly world-class in one thing. The creator of the Dilbert comics Scott Adams said it probably takes less time to become world class at the intersection of two things. In James Altucher’s book Skip The Line, he says the it only takes 100 hours to become world class at the intersection of three or more things. That’s not very long.
To find a niche, start a new career, or find a quicker way to your goals he says, you’ll need to try a bunch of experiments. A good experiment is one that:
is easy to setup and do
there’s little downside
there’s huge potential upside
it’s never been done before
you’re learning something new
Example: What if you wrote a Linkedin recommendation for 1 person everyday for the next month. What would happen?
Example: If you have an idea for an app, why not just post it on Upwork or Fivver, get a cheap prototype design sketched out for $100, and send it to your friends?
Another Example: today’s newsletter is an experiment with pretty low downside but high upside that I can get quick feedback on.
Do enough of these low-risk, high-reward experiments and you’ll bypass the 10,000 hour rule and find your own niche.
“The key to skipping the line is to constantly live in the world of ‘not knowing.’ To constantly be curious but not threatened by what’s next. To live in the world where everyone else is scared but you are so comfortable with the land of not knowing that you can still navigate the rough waters.”
What Surprised Me
My friend Joseph ate 30 eggs every day for an entire month. That’s 900 eggs. A traditional view might scream, “you can’t eat that many eggs, it’ll raise your cholesterol and you’ll have a heart attack!” But that’s not what happened at all, and in fact, the results are the opposite of what you'd expect.
Podcast Episodes I Enjoyed
I don’t listen to the Jordan Peterson podcast very often, but as I’ve been writing about relationships recently, this conversation caught my eye. They go into the nitty-gritty of how to make a relationships actually work, the conversations/topics we avoid, and practical tactics to build a strong foundation for a marriage.
One nugget that I implemented after listening to this is an “backlog of communication” meeting with my wife once a week (Sunday dinner) where we fill each other in on what’s been going on and articulate anything that hasn’t been said. For example, “Oh, I forget to mention it but it kind of hurt me when you said…” or “You did a great job this week and I’m really thankful for…” This doesn’t sound sexy, perhaps, but it’s highly effective.
In a perfect world you might express your emotions on the fly, but most of us don’t have that skill (myself included). I find there are things left unsaid throughout the week. Some couples have things left unsaid for weeks, months…or years. That’s when things get sticky and a lot harder to unravel. I find it’s best to get things of your chest every day and every week, consistently, that way things don’t blow up in your face later down the line in the form of explosive rage, resentment and guilt.
The part that I liked starts from (28:35) “Your life is what you repeat, focus on that.”