Zoë > Recent Status Updates

Our bodies think that lack of sleep is an emergency, so they prepare by raising blood pressure, wanting more fast food, wanting more sugar for quick energy, etc.

Keeping that in mind, I paid attention to how I felt when I did get enough sleep, and I really did seem to eat healthier without effort, just because I felt like it.

It should go without saying, yet needs to be said: "you are more efficient when you are rested... it takes you less time to do things."

Rest is not the opposite of productivity; it's in many ways the prerequisite. Now if only I could learn to implement this in practice.

"One day I woke up w/o any alarms after sleeping for nine hours and realized that I didn't want any coffee. This was such an alien sensation.... Then it finally occurred to me what I was feeling—I had awoken from my sleep feeling fully refreshed. My body didn't feel heavy. I was alert. As the weeks passed, I realized that I felt like this every day. The last time I remembered feeling like this was when I was a child"

"After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn't care.... I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace.... I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back!"

"It was hard. I didn't particularly enjoy it. But the next day, conscious that I had to retrain my habits, I made myself do the same. And so it went on, day after day. I struggled. I disciplined myself.

By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come... and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it."

"Once I knew [about flow], I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been."

Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.

"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"

"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."

Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.

"After the war, he + his parents ended up in a refugee camp, which he found squalid, + lacking in hope. One day, in these ruins of a life, Mihaly was told that he was going to join a Scout troop for boys in the camp, + he started going out into the wilderness with them. He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult, like navigating a steep ascent.... He thinks this experience saved him."

"I turned to my piles of books, thinking idly of how, all through my teens and twenties, I would spend days on end lying in bed, doing nothing but reading in one great gulp. But [now]... I had been reading in a rushed, hyperactive way...."

"The study found that 'technological distraction'—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers' IQ by an average of ten points.... in the short term, that's twice the knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you'd be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot." (p. 39)

"Life in Attawapiskat is not just a grim determination to follow tradition, no matter the cost. We live in close proximity to those we love. We depend on those who love us and sustain those around us unbegrudgingly. Would anyone say that's a poor way to live? ... the kind of sharing that defines us is wealth, not poverty."

"One day, I spent three hours reading the same first few pages of a novel, getting lost in distracted thoughts every time, almost as though I was stoned, and I thought—I can't continue like this. Reading fiction had always been one of my greatest pleasures, and losing it would be like losing a limb. I announced to my friends that I was going to do something drastic."

"The writer James Baldwin—the man who is, for my money, the greatest writer of the twentieth century—said: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.' "

"He said it might help me grasp what's happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the Western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent.... The way we lived changed dramatically—our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or bike around...."

"I watched him scrolling through his phone.... Milling past him was a stream of people also staring at their screens. I felt as alone as if I had been standing in an empty Iowa cornfield, miles from another human."

"At every stage in this trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down... he immediately took out his phone, while we were still in our seats. 'You promised not to use it,' I said. He replied: 'I meant I wouldn't make phone calls. I can't not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.' He said this with baffled honesty, as if I had asked him to hold his breath for ten days."

"our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking. I could feel it happen to me—I would buy piles of books, and I would glimpse them guiltily from the corner of my eye as I sent, I told myself, just *one* more tweet. I still read a lot, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. I had just turned forty... we would lament our lost capacity for concentration"

"Our default mental model is that the work is like work in a factory—the results are all but guaranteed if we follow the right process."

This is a wild claim to me, and helps me appreciate yet another way that education is so different from business. I'm glad I work in a field where the outcome of my effort, good or bad, is immediately apparent, where it's easy to see what I'm working for and why it matters.

Quote from Sapiens within this book: "Human babies are helpless.... This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind's extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other[s].... It takes a tribe to raise a human."

"as soon as we feel truly seen in our experience and our desires, we can let our guard down—after all, as humans, we are less invested in any specific decision than we are in feeling seen. This is almost always what matters most."