Quotidian Chatter: 2011-06-12

16 June 2011

How to reduce stress.

By Jonah Lehrer
July 28, 2010 |
Wired August 2010

Reduce Stress — With Science!

Make friends

Social relationships are a powerful buffer against stress. In fact, several studies in Europe and the US have found that people with fewer friends and family members they’re close to have significantly shorter life expectancies. (The magnitude of the effect is roughly equivalent to smoking cigarettes.) One likely explanation for this phenomenon is the stress of loneliness. Studies of monkeys found that more socially isolated animals have higher levels of stress hormones, a reduced immune response, and a higher mortality rate.

Get enough sleep

Sleep deprivation is not just about feeling tired. Recent studies have found that even a single night of insufficient sleep — whether it’s spent working the night shift or playing World of Warcraft — triggers an automatic spike in stress hormones. And here’s where biology gets cruel: This stress response then makes it harder to fall asleep when you actually want to, since your sympathetic nervous system is revving at a higher rate. The result is more stress and more insomnia, which helps explain why sleep problems are such an important risk factor for depression.

Don’t fight

While observing baboons, Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky found there was a set of personality traits linked reliably with lower levels of stress hormones. One of these was the ability to walk away from provocations that might send a normal baboon into a snarling hissy fit. Interestingly, this less aggressive personality turned out to be exceedingly effective: The nice baboons remained near the top of the troop hierarchy about three times longer than the baboons who were easily provoked into a fight. They also had a lot more sex, which is a great stress reliever.

Meditate

Numerous studies have demonstrated that even a short training session in meditation can dramatically reduce levels of stress and anxiety. In fact, a recent study led by Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, demonstrated that a 10-minute lesson in mindfulness meditation seemed to reduce stress in those taking a high-stakes math exam, leading to a five-point increase on average. She argues that meditation allows people to do a better job of not fixating on negative and stressful thoughts, thus freeing up brain space to focus on the arithmetic.

Confront your fears

When paratroopers are first learning to parachute, they experience a massive stress response. In fact, one study of Norwegian airmen found that this response started before the jump and lasted for hours afterward. But something interesting happened when the soldiers kept jumping out of planes. Instead of being stressed for hours at a time, they showed elevated levels of stress hormone only while in midair, which is precisely when they needed it. The chronic stress response that causes long-term harm had all but disappeared.

Drink in moderation

Alcohol is an anxiolytic — it melts away anxieties by dampening the response of the sympathetic nervous system and reducing the release of stress hormones. That’s why a beer tastes so good after a long day. But don’t get carried away: While the moderate consumption of alcohol might reduce the stress response, blood alcohol levels above 0.1 percent — most states consider 0.08 the legal limit for driving — trigger a large release of stress hormones. Although you might feel drunkenly relaxed, your body is convinced it’s in a state of mortal danger.

Don’t force yourself to exercise

While exercise is remarkably effective at blunting the stress response, at least for a few hours, this effect exists only if you want to exercise in the first place. After all, a big reason working out relieves stress is that it elevates your mood; when mice are forced to run in the lab, their levels of stress hormones spike. So when you force yourself to go to the gym and then suffer through 30 minutes on the treadmill (lamenting the experience the entire time), you don’t reduce your stress levels. In fact, you might be making things worse.

Illustrations: Iconwerk

What is literature for?

Excerpted from Jonathan Franzen's remarks from a memorial service for David Foster Wallace, held in New York City October 23rd 2008.

Dave loved details for their own sake, but details were also an outlet for the love bottled up in his heart: a way of connecting, on relatively safe middle ground, with another human being.

Which was, approximately, the description of literature that he and I came up with in our conversations and correspondence in the early 1990s....

But that “neutral middle ground on which to make a deep connection with another human being:” this, we decided, was what fiction was for. “A way out of loneliness” was the formulation we agreed to agree on...

And so now this handsome, brilliant, funny, kind midwestern man with an amazing spouse and a great local support network and a great career and a great job at a great school with great students has taken his own life, and the rest of us are left behind to ask (to quote from Infinite Jest), “So yo then, man, what’s your story?”

Why it is wrong to say that "The rain is falling."

The falling is the rain

The week after I get back from Istanbul I go on a meditation retreat with Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Zen master. I've been studying with him off and on (mostly off) for eighteen years now. I will sit for a week in silence, listen as he speaks, but I end up talking more than planned. My dharma discussion group's focus is addiction, and a handful of us addicts climb a great maple tree each afternoon to talk among the branches until sunset.

Thich Nhat Hahn says it is a mistake to say, "The rain is falling," to say, "The wind is blowing." What is rain if it is not falling? he asks. What is wind if it is not blowing? The falling is the rain, the blowing is the wind. The next day, in the tree, I bring it up. He's talking about impermanence, someone says. It's the same reason we climb trees, someone else offers -- it's that we were once monkeys.

From The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn.

New Year's Resolution

Excerpted from the short story New Year's Resolution by Lydia Davis. From The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing.... at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as, something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, bur so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.

What I Feel, a short story by Lydia Davis

WHAT I FEEL

These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important. I've read this in several books now: that what I feel is important but not the center of everything. Maybe I do believe this, but not enough to act on it. I would like to believe it more deeply.
      What a relief that would be. I wouldn't have to think about what I felt all the time, and try to control it, with all its complications and all its consequences. I wouldn't have to try to feel better all the time. In fact, if I didn't believe what I felt was so important, I probably wouldn't even feel so bad, and it wouldn't be so hard to feel better. I wouldn't have to say, Oh I feel so awful, this is like the end for me here, in this dark living-room late at night, with the dark street outside under the streetlamps, I am so very alone, everyone else in the house asleep, there is no comfort anywhere, just me alone down here, I will never calm myself enough to sleep, never sleep, never be able to go on to the next day, I can't possibly go on, I can't live, even through the next minute.
      If I didn't believe what I felt was the center of everything, then it wouldn't be the center of everything, but just something off to the side, one of many things, and I would be able to see and pay attention to those other things that are equally important, and in this way I would have some relief.
      But it is curious how you can believe an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it. So I still act as though my feelings were the center of everything, and they still cause me to end up alone by the living-room window late at night. What is different now is that I have this idea: I have the idea that soon I will no longer believe that my feelings are the center of everything. This is a comfort to me, because if you despair of going on, but at the same time tell yourself that what you feel may not be very important, then either you may no longer despair of going on, or you may still despair of going on but not quite believe it anymore.

From Conjunctions:21 Fall 1993

This story is also included in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Trying to Learn, a short story by Lydia Davis

TRYING TO LEARN

I am trying to learn that this playful man who teases me is the same as that serious man talking money to me so seriously he does not even see me anymore and that patient man offering me advice in times of trouble and that angry man slamming the door as he leaves the house. I have often wanted the playful man to be more serious, and the serious man to be less serious, and the patient man to be more playful. As for the angry man, he is a stranger to me and I do not feel it is wrong to hate him. Now I am learning that if I say bitter words to the angry man as he leaves the house, I am at the same time wounding the others, the ones I do not want to wound, the playful man teasing, the serious man talking money, and the patient man offering advice. Yet I look at the patient man, for instance, whom I would want above all to protect from such bitter words as mine, and though I tell myself he is the same man as the others, I can only believe I said those words, not to him, but to another, my enemy, who deserved all my anger.

From Conjunctions:21 Fall 1993

How to cope with the overwhelming bleakness of the universe.

Woody Allen on why he keeps making movies, the agony and terror of human existence, and why a sense of humor is important.

Excerpted from Robert E. Lauder's interview.

RL: Why do you continue to make films?

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.

RL: In Everyone Says I Love You, the character you play gets divorced, and as he and his former wife review their relationship near the end of the film, she says, “You could always make me laugh,” and your character asks very sincerely, “Why is that important?” Do you think what you do is important?

WA: No, not so much. Whenever they ask women what they find appealing in men, a sense of humor is always one of the things they mention. Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence…but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them. So I’m saying to that character played by Goldie Hawn, “Why is that so important?” But it is important apparently because women have said to us that that is very, very important to them. I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again. It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.

RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

How to spice up your life

Top craigslist > SF bay area > Nemesis required. 6-month project with possibilty to extend

Nemesis required. 6-month project with possibility to extend

I've been trying to think of ways to spice up my life. I'm 35 years old, happily married with two kids and I have a good job in insurance. But something's missing. I feel like I'm old before my time. I need to inject some excitement into my daily routine through my arm before it's too late. I need a challenge, something to get the adrenaline pumping again. An addiction would be nice, but, in short, I need a nemesis. I'm willing to pay $350 up front for you services as an arch-enemy over the next six months. Nothing crazy. Steal my parking space, knock my coffee over, trip me when I'm running to catch the BART and occasionally whisper in my ear, "Ahha, we meet again". That kind of thing. Just keep me on my toes. Complacency will be the death of me. You need to have an evil streak and be blessed with innate guile and cunning. You should also be adept at inconspicuous pursuit. Evil laugh preferred. Send me a photo and a brief explanation why you would be a good nemesis.

British accent preferred.

it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Compensation: $350 up front

PostingID: 672031640

Can divine will be the foundation or source of morality?

To paraphrase: In Plato's dialogue "Euthyphro," Socrates argued that goodness cannot be defined as what the gods favor because there is no merit in a goodness that is the result of mere fiat. It must rather be true that the gods favor things because they are good.

But, if God or the gods favor things because they are good, then this implies a standard that exists outside of God. And where did this come from?

This dilemma shows that the divine will can never be the foundation or source of morality.

- David Keranen

EWG's 2011 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce

EWG analyzed pesticide residue testing data from the US Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration to come up with rankings for these popular fresh produce items.

Lower numbers = more pesticides.