Friday Book Report: A Leg to Stand On

Oliver Sacks’s book A Leg To Stand On tells a great story.  It’s a story of personal triumph over adversity, including a near-death adventure, a giant bull, and swelling classical music.  And it is a great exploration of proprioception at the same time.  Sacks, as a neuropsychologist and doctor, brought unique skills to bear on an exploration of his own major injury and the resulting loss of recognition of his leg.  The surgical repair went well, but somehow he could not feel his leg at all.  It vanished from his sense of his body.  He does, eventually recover both full use of his leg and his leg does rejoin his body-concept, but it is a fascinating and frustrating process.

What he learns, among other things, is that our bodies define themselves in action.  Our movements make ourselves.

Even if I hadn’t been interested in the subject itself, I think I would have enjoyed the book because he is a smart, literate person with a flair for language and a poetic sense of the world.  I recommend the book!

In which we investigate clues from literature...

This is a picture of lavender.  Every time I see it, I think, “Rabbit tobacco,” because I spent many, many hours reading Beatrix Potter with my kids when they were small.  In The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, the aforementioned bunnies eat some lettuces, which have “a very soporific effect.”  Who says children’s literature can’t use interesting words?  The resulting nap almost results in bunny pie, but the bunnies do get rescued in the end.

I am not writing this to encourage the reading of Beatrix Potter, although that is a perfectly good idea.  Rather, I would like to point out that what we eat affects how we feel.  If we are lucky in our lives, we will never be in danger of becoming a pie.  Nevertheless, it might be a good idea to notice how we feel based on what we eat.  Maybe we will discover that we can feel more energetic or calmer or happier if we include or avoid different kinds of food.

Experiment!

Remind me...

I absolutely believe that mindfulness is a Good Thing.  But sometimes mindlessness can be our friend, too.  When we build a habit, a real one, we don’t have to spend a lot of energy making ourselves do whatever it is.

This is the theory behind exercising first thing in the morning, right after using the bathroom and brushing our teeth.  All of a sudden, there we are, finished with our cardio and we’re just about awake.  We didn’t think about it.  We didn’t have to talk ourselves into it.  We just put on our shoes and went, on autopilot.

Not everyone is a morning person, so maybe the autopilot needs to kick in on the way home from work, making the car travel to the gym on the way home, so that when we come out of our freeway daze, there we are, ready to work out.

Do whatever works!

Hot off the press...

Sometimes working out when it’s hot seems like way too much trouble.  It’s not.  It is still good for us to move and work and stretch.  However, there are a few ways to make it more bearable:

Do it early or late:  Avoid that middle of the day boiling period.  Go before the sun gets up and enjoy the stillness, or after the sun goes down and we can all breathe again.

Take it inside.  This might mean working out in the air conditioned gym, or doing our walk at the mall.

Get wet, inside and out.  Sprinkler tag anyone?  Swimming, paddle-boarding, surfing, and water polo are also good choices.  And it is super duper extra double important to drink water during the workout when it is hot out.  Dehydration is Very Bad and will make us feel like we have been run over by six bulldozers and an elephant.

Embrace the heat?  If all else fails, this might be the time to decide that the yoga practice is really Hot Yoga.  Maybe Hot Weights haven’t caught on yet, but we can be trend-setters.

We can do this.

Monday Workout: Heavy duty!

This week we’re going to do some heavier squats.  Heavy weights are a challenge in an interval workout, so we all get bonus points.  Four rounds.

1 min cardio
heavy squats	10
rows	20
mountain climbers	20
deadlifts	20
tricep kickbacks	20
brains	10

Friday Book Report: The Happiness Project

Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project is my kind of book.  I like the whole idea of projects where a person takes a year to do some thing or other.  I like lists.  I fantasize about charts.  And who does not want to be happy?  (Put your hands down, Shoe Gazers.  I don’t believe you.)  As a person with depression, I am always looking for ways to fight the monster, although the book specifically says, perhaps on the advice of lawyers, that it is directed not at people with clinical depression, but at average humans who would simply like to be happier.

There is lots of research stuffed into the text.  The anecdotes are amusing.  One could simply go forth and do what Rubin did and it would probably make a good amount of difference.  The more intriguing possibility is to take what she did and customize.  She chose a focus for each month, beginning in January with working on having more energy (getting enough sleep, exercising, acting as if, etc.).  Some of her foci might not make sense for different people; those of us who are not parents of small children don’t need to work on our parenting skills.  I haven’t checked it out, but there is also a blog with online resources.

The book also came at a good time for me.  As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the process of doing my Behavior Change Specialization for continuing education.  It is almost June, an excellent time to check in on how my plan for this year is coming along (remember that vision board?).  In the remaining days of May, I’m going to be getting my ducks in a row to Happiness Project and Behavior Change my way through the rest of the year.  Anyone want to join me?  If so, let’s talk and figure out how we can work together.  (It should be obvious, but just in case, I’m talking about this as a personal project and not a work project, even though it intersects with my work interests in general well-being.)

Let’s get happy.

But don't flip off the freezer...

In general, I would argue that we need more politeness in the world rather than less.  A little social lubrication goes a long way toward preventing riots and mayhem and freeway shootings.  However, I think there is one way the politeness habit does us a disservice.  We feel we have to respond.  And that can get in the way of mindful behavior.  Go with me here…

We all have or know of someone who has a toxic relationship.  At a certain point, the only way to deal with the mess is to get out of it, block the number, move away, get the restraining order, whatever is necessary.  No matter what stimulus the toxic person offers, we have to ignore it because nothing good will come of responding.  But every time, when the phone rings or the text comes or whatever, we have to fight our politeness training that says we have to answer.

Now let’s apply the principle to a more metaphorical relationship.  Let’s imagine we have a toxic relationship with ice cream.  There we are at the store and the ice cream speaks to us.  It would be rude to ignore it, right?  We are trained to reply to stimulus.  When we are mindful, we can choose not to answer the ice cream.  We can blow it off, no matter what promises it makes about how this time it is going to be different.

Maybe ice cream will stop liking us.  I think we can cope with that.