Category: Health

Connections

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Friday, February 26th, 2016

When companies are optimizing everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.

Teams are now the fundamental unit of organizations. Studies show that groups tend to innovate faster, see mistakes more quickly and find better solutions to problems.

Google has scrutinized everything.Working to figure out what made a team successful, Google kept coming across research focusing on what are known as ‘‘group norms.’’ Norms are the traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules for how we function when we gather. Norms can be unspoken or openly acknowledged, but their influence is often profound. Team norms typically override individual proclivities and encourage deference to the team.

There were two behaviors all the good teams generally shared.

First, members spoke in roughly the same proportion. On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount.

Second, the good teams were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. The more successful teams seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams seemed, as a group, had less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

On the better teams people may speak over one another, go on tangents, and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team might seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They’re sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While the team may not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.

Other behaviors seemed important as well — like having clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

Establishing psychological safety is messy and difficult to implement. The kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.

No one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office, leaving part of their personality and inner life at home. But to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things without fear of recriminations. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning we want to know that our team mates really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

At the core of Silicon Valley are certain self-mythologies and dictums: Everything is different now, data reigns supreme, today’s winners deserve to triumph because they are cleareyed enough to discard yesterday’s conventional wisdoms while searching out the disruptive and the new.

The paradox is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

When companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized.

That’s my condensed version of a NYT article about successful team at Google.

It turns out that the best teams engender a feeling of psychological safety through building “connections” between team members.

This finding struck me because the importance of connections with other people has showed up in two other spots I know of.

One is in the Harvard Medical School study that began monitoring a group of young men starting in 1939 (the ones left are now old).

For 75 years, at least every two years, the participants were evaluated on their mental and physical health, career and retirement satisfaction, and marital happiness.

The study’s goal identifying the predictors of healthy aging. What’s the big takeaway from the study? Connections (good relationships) make us healthier and happier, and live longer. It wasn’t money or fame.

And the other spot I know of is from sociologist Dr. Brene Brown who says that the surest thing she took away from 12 years of research is “that connection is why we’re here.”

Keep building those connections for a better life at work and at home.

Exercise Health Ideas

Everyday system for walking more

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Friday, January 8th, 2016

This is the fifth of seven posts about simple everyday systems for managing your time, health, and eating developed by Reinhard Engels. Fifteen or so years ago, Reinhard was an overweight computer programmer who ate poorly, sometimes drank too much, and avoided exercising.

For most things simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and according to Thoreau, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

So Reinhard created habits that were easy to do and could be sustained forever. He didn’t like complicated exercise routines – he wouldn’t like doing them and would likely stop if he made it to a goal.

About ten years ago, I stumbled across Reinhard’s idea for exercising for 14 minutes a day using a sledgehammer to mimic shoveling and other common movements.

Starting there, I checked out his other systems. They were easy to implement and claimed longterm results for himself.

I didn’t really go whole hog on his system because I was already doing, and enjoying, other stuff like lifting weights, but I have used his sledgehammer idea, more as a fun way to rehab from injury.

Anyway, what follows are my shortened versions, from his website and podcast explanations, of his “everyday systems.” I did it for myself to have the ideas in one spot, and for you too, if you’re interested.

“Urban Ranger” is a system for convincing yourself to build the habit of purposeful walking. It’s probably the everyday system I’d choose if I had to pick just one, because it’s at least as good for the mind as for the body.

You’ve probably heard a million things about how great an exercise walking is supposed to be. What you need, then, is something to get you fired up about this humble, uninspiring activity, so you’ll actually do it.

You need to convince yourself that walking is not some last ditch compromise shadow exercise, but that it’s exciting. That’s where urban ranger comes in. It’s like a role that you play, an alter ego. A way of re-imagining yourself so that walking becomes the most important, the most exciting thing that you could possibly be doing. Sound excessive? If you’re like me, that’s what it’s going to take to get you walking at all.

Think about it. We’ve invented one class of machine to spare us physical exertion and another class of machine to inflict it back on us again, but in an infinitely more boring, painful, and useless manner. We berate ourselves that we don’t labor in our leisure time, that we don’t spend our freed hours in that torture chamber, the gym.

You probably don’t exercise as often as you think you should, if at all. Your problem is that you’re squandering willpower on a hopeless task: exercise divorced from purpose. The solution: purposeful exertion; in particular, walking.

You probably can’t kill a caribou for dinner, or plow a field, or do most of the useful work that your ancestors did for thousands of generations. But you can still walk. And believe it or not, walking is enough.

Walking is still useful, interesting, and pleasant. You can think and observe while you walk. You get somewhere. You don’t need any special equipment or outfits. It provides great health returns on very little investment. And you can do it for the rest of your life.

Walk to and from work. If you work too far from home to walk the whole way, practice the noble sport of distance parking and walk part of the way. Walk to run errands. Walk up stairs instead of taking the elevator or escalator. Walk during your lunch hour. Walk when you’ve got cell phone calls to make. Walk to listen to an audiobook. Walk when you’re depressed. Walk when you don’t know what to do next.

The question should be “when shouldn’t I walk?” Walking is the default activity. It’s everything else that needs a justification.

For the sake of your own dignity and the beauty of the world, please don’t put on any silly outfits and pump your arms like a maniac. Just dress and walk normally. That 5% extra health benefit or whatever that you supposedly get from pumping your arms won’t mean a thing when you stop after 3 months because you are tired of looking like a bozo. You’ll unconsciously get faster as you do it a lot. So relax.

You are smarter when you walk. It’s not just the physical movement, it’s the changing scenery around you. I bring a digital voice recorder along to capture my brilliant ideas, to-do lists, and diaryesque inanities. Once a week or so I transcribe it to my computer. I thought of most of the other everyday systems like this, while walking.

How’d Alexander the Great’s army get to India from Greece? How about the Grande Armee of Napoleon, how’d they get all the way from Paris to Moscow? They walked. For thousands of years winning a war was largely a matter of being there before your enemy. So get the aqua sweatpants out of your mind, this is man stuff!

Food Health Ideas

Everyday system for eating less

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Tuesday, January 5th, 2016

This is the fourth of seven posts about simple everyday systems for managing your time, health, and eating developed by Reinhard Engels. Fifteen or so years ago, Reinhard was an overweight computer programmer who ate poorly, sometimes drank too much, and avoided exercising.

For most things simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and according to Thoreau, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

About ten years ago, I stumbled across Reinhard’s idea for exercising for 14 minutes a day using a sledgehammer to mimic shoveling and other common movements.

Starting there, I checked out his other systems. They were easy to implement and claimed longterm results for himself.

We all can see there’s a big problem these days of being overweight. The solution, the everyday system that solves this problem, is called the “No S Diet” (you can pronounce it the no-es-diet).

The No S Diet is: No snacks, NO sweets, no seconds – except (sometimes) on days that start with S. That’s actually the whole system right there. 14 words. The worlds shortest effective diet plan.

“Don’t eat too much” is shorter, just 4 words, but it isn’t effective. But the No S is effective. I lost over 40 pounds on No-s and kept it off for almost 5 years now. No yoyoing. Other people on the no s diet bulletin board have lost even more weight than this. If you’re antsy to learn more now, go to nosdiet.com. Or everydaysystems.com.

Drink Happiness Health Ideas

Everyday system for moderate drinking

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Tuesday, December 29th, 2015

This is the second of seven posts about simple everyday systems for managing your time, health, and eating developed by Reinhard Engels. Fifteen or so years ago, Reinhard was an overweight computer programmer who ate poorly, sometimes drank too much, and avoided exercising.

For most things simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and according to Thoreau, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

About ten years ago, I stumbled across Reinhard’s idea for exercising for 14 minutes a day using a sledgehammer to mimic shoveling and other common movements.

Starting there, I checked out his other systems. They were easy to implement and claimed longterm results for himself.

This might be a good one for the New Year. Just say’n.

“The glass ceiling system” for healthy and pleasurable moderate drinking.

This isn’t intended for people who suspect they may be alcoholics. Please keep looking, but don’t look here.

Ok, so what’s the problem “the glass ceiling is trying to solve? Occasional excessive drinking.

Most of the time you’re fine, drinking like a normal person, but every once in a while you get smashed, and could find yourself in trouble.

The obvious solution is to just stop drinking. But there’re two problems with the cold turkey strategy. One is that research shows that moderate drinking is ridiculously good for you. Moderate drinking defined as a drink or two a day, depending on how big you are. The other is that moderate drinking is a great pleasure. For moderate alcohol consumption, with its clean bill of health, the claim of pleasure is real and legitimate.

So how do you balance this if you’re given to occasional over drinking, and still want to get the health and pleasure benefits of moderate drinking? A two drink a day absolute maximum. No more than too glasses a day. That’s your glass ceiling. Yes, there’s fudge room. But not so much fudge room that you’re going to wind up with problems.

Two glasses are clearly different from three. On the other hand, there is wiggle room. You could get an enormous Bavarian beer stein and fill it up with Everclear, but you can’t do it without seeming like an astonishing drunkard. You can’t hide your excess in lots of dainty little increments, and excess, when it’s out in the open like that, is shameful.

Shame has a bad rap these days, but shame can be good. Shame has been around for all of recorded history. It isn’t going anywhere. You might as well use it instead of fighting it or pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s powerful. Make shame your ally and shame will keep you reasonably moderate.

OK, other ambiguities and potential loopholes…

No refills. This should go without saying, but common sense sometimes has trouble with the obvious after a couple drinks.

And no saving up. Use it or lose it. If you don’t drink for ten days that doesn’t mean you can drink 20 drinks on day 11.

Allow for the occasional 4 drink event. Yes, 4 drinks is a binge. But as binges go, it’s as small as they get. If you’re the kind of person that needs a system like this, you probably would have had much more otherwise. But if you find yourself doing this a lot, alarms should go off.

A word of advice to those with unsympathetic drinking buddies: don’t tell them what you are doing. If you play it cool, chances are they won’t notice, especially if you alternate between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. A tonic and tonic looks amazingly like a gin and tonic.

Conversely, when you’re starting out at least, I’d avoid mixed drinks that you mix yourself. The mix is camouflage. With a dash of cranberry juice you can bypass the shame of drinking a big glass of vodka. Shame is your friend.

If you are physically small or want to give yourself some extra buffer, lower the ceiling to 1 drink. Or have a variable ceiling of 1 drink on week days, 2 on weekend days. But be sure you can stick with this. Much better to abide by a liberal law than break a strict one.

You’ll have a much easier time exercising moderation if you genuinely enjoy and respect what you drink. Don’t view it as drunk-juice. You’ll be drinking less, so spend a little more and get the good stuff. Moderation is an opportunity for greater pleasure.

And as an additional benefit is that your tolerance will go way down. I can now get a nice buzz from two drinks.

I haven’t been more than a little tipsy since I started this in early 2002, yet I enjoy alcohol far more than I ever did in my youth. Frankly, I’m amazed.

That’s it for glass ceiling. It’s probably the simplest system I’ve discussed yet, but it changed my life.

Exercise Food and Drink Health Ideas

Everyday systems

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015

This is the first of seven posts about simple everyday systems for managing your time, health, and eating developed by Reinhard Engels. Fifteen or so years ago, Reinhard was an overweight computer programmer who ate poorly, sometimes drank too much, and avoided exercising.

For most things simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and according to Thoreau, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

About ten years ago, I stumbled across Reinhard’s idea for exercising for 14 minutes a day using a sledgehammer to mimic shoveling and other common movements.

Starting there, I checked out his other systems. They were easy to implement and claimed longterm results for himself.

Moderation. Everybody from Aristotle to your Grandmother agrees that moderation is a good idea. It’s the wisdom of the philosophers and the virtue of the common folk. At least, it used to be. Of course, they had little choice but to be moderate.

Sheer scarcity kept them in line. Powerful traditions formed an additional line of defense. We, on the other hand, live in an age of material superabundance and declining traditions. So how, in the absence of the external pressures of scarcity and tradition, can we give moderation the teeth it needs to be effective? Think in terms of habit, semi-automatic behaviors requiring little willpower to maintain once they’ve been established.

It’s about establishing a consistent, almost automatic pattern of behavior over time. Much of the challenge of successful self-discipline is throttling your enthusiasm so you don’t burn out. Keep the focus on meeting some clearly defined, rigorously un-ambitious daily “good enough.”

Sustainability has to be the first thing you consider when evaluating a habit you want to acquire.

Maintenance is more important than progress. Progress is intrinsically temporary; maintenance is what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.

Habit Branding. A good system should be “branded” with a striking image, pun, or metaphor. That way you’ll be much less likely to forget or ignore it, even when things get stressful. Some Everyday Systems are little more than a striking brand. Others have significantly more rules or back-story, but even these systems are well served by a brand: the brand gives you a handle, all you have to do is have the brand flash into your mind and you can easily retrieve all the rest.

No keeping track of things. The system shouldn’t require you to keep track of anything beyond the day of the week. You have too many things to keep track of already. Sometimes it’s interesting, but it gets unbearably boring and onerous fast.

Small time footprint. Ideally, the system should free up time, not take more of it. If your exercise routine, for example, competes in any significant way with your social life or even with your favorite television show, sooner or later your exercise routine is going to lose.

Socially Unobtrusive. Consider whether your habits are going to be unbearably irritating to the people around you. It’s not simply a matter of common courtesy: the consciousness of others’ disapproval will quickly wear you down.

Free or cheap. If you need anything at all, it should be nothing you can’t pick up at your local hardware store.

Simple but specific. Common sense is great, but too vague to be a practical guide. Behaviors involving complex decisions, might be precise, but can’t be automated into unconscious habit. A good system finds the happy medium: unforgettably simple but unambiguously precise.

Comic pragmatism. Self-help tends to take itself dreadfully seriously. But crazy is a great mnemonic device. If something is a little nuts, you’ll remember it. It’s a joke, but it’s also serious. It’s effective because it’s a joke.

Enjoyable. Successful self-discipline requires plenty of carrot as well as stick. Everyday systems make pleasure integral.

Health Ideas

What’s up?

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Tuesday, December 8th, 2015

What’s up with all the mass shootings in America?

At the lowest level, it’s embarrassing that nothing gets done about something that’s really a public health issue. I’ve had non- Americans tell me they’re afraid to visit the US. The likelihood they might be shot is low, but that sounds hollow.

There’re other weird ideas in America concerning guns.

Things change. In 1975 the term “active shooter” wasn’t around because the idea of someone walking into a building and shooting people was an alien idea, but in 1975 people also thought glaciers were permanent.

With less than 5% of the world’s population, America has almost half of the world’s civilian-owned guns. Countries with more guns have more gun homicides, and it turns out that Americans with guns at home are likelier to be killed or to kill themselves with guns.

Nowadays, overall shootings and murders are way down, but nearly two-thirds of gun deaths in the US are suicides.

Connecticut passed a law requiring gun purchasers to first obtain a license and gun homicides fell by 40% and suicides fell by 15%. Missouri repealed a similar law and gun homicides increased by 23% and suicides increased by 16%.

Freeing people from chains they revere is hard. We tend to explain our successes and failures in ways that allow us to live with ourselves afterward. Consider the 2nd amendment guaranteeing our right to own guns, back when it was written it was also legal to own another human being. Things can change.

Some people say, “Everything happens for a reason.” What they’re really saying is, “I neither recognize nor accept that my actions have consequences I’m ultimately accountable for.” Albert Einstein said, “He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.”

It’s hard for someone to learn what he thinks he already knows, but if you find yourself digging a hole you don’t need – stop digging.

Health Ideas

Could you hang in there for three days?

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Friday, November 27th, 2015

rabbit on couch
Say you get lost. If you’re found within three days, your chance of surviving and being rescued is about 97%. Could you hang in there for three days until you’re found? If you can, statically you should be ok.

I’m not a “prepper” or a survivalist, but an ability to feel and be self-secure goes a long way and it doesn’t require too much mental conditioning.

In our society we’re probably more vulnerable today than we ever have been before because our systems are too complex for any one person to master. I’m not talking about returning to primitive living which is opened-ended. I’m talking about a situation you’re expecting or hoping to be rescued from.

In other words, if you find yourself in an emergency, potentially life threatening situation. Your primary goal will be dealing with immediate conditions until you’re out of that situation.

In the wilderness, if you have a good attitude and a down jacket, you can survive for quite a while because two key areas are covered, your body’s core temperature and your mindset. Next, if you have access to water and can make a fire, Yahtzee.

Food won’t be an issue. You can go a few weeks without food, and a few days without water. Even at home we’ve become very dependent on things outside of our control, like a steady supply of electricity. If the lights go out for a long time, we’d all be in a tough spot.

You don’t have to sweat the fancy knots, building traps, or morse code. Just maintain your core temp and stay calm. Here’re three tips to remember from Lars Fält, a top survival instructor. His three suggestions for cultivating the right survival attitude are:

1. “Accept” early on that you are a person who’s going to survive.

2. Cultivate good social relationships. They’re essential to creating the will to survive and the desire to fight on.

3. Break the big task down into smaller ones. Thinking about the big picture is usually counter-productive to survival. Getting down to the business of successfully completing a series of tasks is a winning strategy.

You can hang in there for three days.

Health

Thanks twins

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Friday, November 20th, 2015

Can building muscle strengthen your mind? Fitter legs were strongly linked to fitter brains in a recent study. Because twins are so alike, comparing twins from the same pair can be useful in medical research.

Just in case my legs weaken in a few years and I forget, I’m keeping some highlights from a NYT article about stronger legs being linked to a stronger mind.

Muscular power is widely accepted as a marker of healthy aging. …scientists looked for twins who, 10 years previously, had completed extensive computerized examinations of their memory and thinking abilities, as well as assessments of their metabolic health and leg-muscle power, which measure muscles’ force and speed.

The scientists focused on the twins’ muscles rather than their exercise habits largely because the power measures were objective.

The scientists then asked the twins to visit a laboratory and repeat the cognitive tests. Twenty of the identical twin pairs also completed brain-imaging scans.Then the researchers compared leg power 10 years earlier with changes in brain function over the same time period.

They found that of the 324 twins, those who had had the sturdiest legs a decade ago showed the least fall-off in thinking skills, even when the scientists controlled for such factors as fatty diets, high blood pressure and shaky blood-sugar control.

The differences in thinking skills were particularly striking within twin pairs. If one twin had been more powerful than the other 10 years before, she tended to be a much better thinker now. In fact, on average, a muscularly powerful twin now performed about 18 percent better on memory and other cognitive tests than her weaker sister.

Similarly, in the brain imaging of the identical twins, if one genetically identical twin had had sturdier legs than the other at the start of the study, she now displayed significantly more brain volume and fewer “empty spaces in the brain” than her weaker sister.

Of course, this study involved only a single snapshot of the brain health of middle-aged female twins. Over all, among both the identical and fraternal twins, fitter legs were strongly linked, 10 years later, to fitter brains.

…the results imply that whatever your genetic make-up, building muscles can strengthen your mind.

Health Ideas

Blindspots

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Friday, November 13th, 2015

Eliminating blind spots feels good.

You often don’t know what you don’t know.

And sometimes you don’t know what you thought you knew.

I just realized the upper arm bone rests in a socket that’s on the shoulder blade. Maybe I never needed to think about it before, so I vaguely thought the socket for the upper arm bone was connected to the rib cage with the shoulder blade floated behind it.

Why would the structure of the shoulder be on your radar if you’re not in the medical profession? Until your get a frozen shoulder. I was diagnosed with a frozen shoulder and started googling it to see what the different treatment options are.

It took a while before I understood how our shoulders work. Not because it’s that complicated, though it’s more complicated than the model of it that was in my mind. I guess I was a little slow on the uptake because I assumed I knew how the joint worked, plus at first most of the shoulder joints presented showed the joint with muscles and other soft tissues in place.

Finally the scales lifted from my eyes and I understood that the socket for the arm is part of the shoulder blade itself.

I’m sure I’ve seen pictures like the one here before, but it never overwrote the blindspot I had of how I imagined the joint.

Health Ideas

It’s a public health problem

Post author By Stocker Cary
Post date Monday, October 5th, 2015

This chart is part of a bigger chart from The Guardian showing mass shootings in the US.

If you have a look, you’ll see that a mass shooting, defined as four or more people shot in one incident, happens every few days in the US. What about about shootings in the US that aren’t mass shootings? They claim an average of 36 lives a day.

The bloodbath last week was the 142nd(!) shooting at a school since December 2012. That’s the date of the children being killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Last week’s shooting also marked the 45th shooting on a school campus this year.

They can happen anywhere. It’s a public health problem that won’t go away.