nori parelius

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Eleonora Parelius,

Årnes, Norway,

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DONE Posts

TODO Don’t walk like a duck – walk like Aragorn movement

My knee problems started when I was about 12. I would feel sharp pain deep in my joints when I was skiing, running and at times when it was worst, even walking.

The doctors told me to just say good bye to skiing, because there was nothing to do. Probably worn cartilages, that was the verdict. At 12 years old! I was not the most active child, so that didn’t quite compute, but I was chubby by the 90s and early 2000s standards, which was quite enough a reason.

I was pretty stricken, as any 12 year old facing their mortality like that probably would be. Pretty melodramatic too. I thought that was it, that it would only go downhill from there. But, a decde and half later the things started going very much uphill and I actually fixed my knee problems! Moje problémy s kolenami začali, keď som mala asi 12 rokov. Cítila som v nich ostrú, bodavú bolesť pri lyžovaní, behaní, a v obdobiach, keď to bolo najhoršie, dokonca aj pri chôdzi.

Lekár mi vtedy povedal, že mám opotrebované chrupavky, že s tým už nič, a že teda nemám lyžovať. Opotrebované chrupavky. V dvanástich rokoch! Ak by som sa venovala vrcholovým športom, možno, ale ja som bola úplne normálne, skôr pokojné dieťa, bez akýchkoľvek športových ambícií.

Pamätám si, ako ma to vtedy zasiahlo. Prvýkrát v živote mi bolo niečo, čo sa nedalo opraviť. Zaplavil ma pocit smrteľnosti. (Človek vie byť dosť melodramatický v dvanástich.) V každom prípade, som si myslela, že už to so mnou pôjde iba dole vodou. Na moje šťastie to o 15 rokov začalo ísť hore vodou, a ja som svoje problémy s kolenami vyliečila. A preto tento článok bude o chodidlách.

Chodidlá – základ človeka

Čo majú chodidlá spoločné s kolenami? Veľmi veľa. Tak ako majú veľmi veľa spoločné s bedrovými kĺbami, zadkom, chrbtom aj krkom. Chodidlá nesú celú našu váhu. Pri chôdzi a behu dokonca sila, ktorou dopadáme na zem zodpovedá niekoľkonásobku našej váhy. Až keď som pozorovala svoju malú dcéru, ako sa učí chodiť, uvedomila som si, aké je neuveriteľné, že dokážeme bez námahy balansovať celé naše dlhé telá na takej malej ploche.

Nohy sú ako základy domu. Ak sú krivé, a nakláňa sa nám kvôli nim strecha, je zbytočné opravovať strechu. Aj keď chodidlá nie sú možno najcoolovejšia téma, je to základ, a preto z tohto asi urobím sériu. A začneme s tým, prečo by sme nemali chodiť s nohami smerujúcimi do strán. Prečo by chodidlá mali smerovať dopredu

Poobzerajte sa okolo seba (a nezabudnite sa poobzerať aj pod seba, na svoje nohy) a určite si všimnete, že veľa ľudí chodí s nohami (alebo len jednou) trochu (alebo veľmi) vytočenými do strán. Prsty im nesmerujú dopredu, ale šikmo do strán. Zopár stupňov, 5-10, nie je ešte problém, ale viac než to môže mať ďalekosiahle následky. Tak si to rozoberme postupne po častiach tela, od dola hore. Chodidlá a členky Plochá noha

Státím s nohami do strán nám spadne klenba. Povedal vám lekár, že máte ploché nohy? Môže to byť “skutočná” plochá noha, často následkom zranenia, alebo to môže byť spôsobené len tým, ako ju používate.

Naša klenba nie je vytesaná z kameňa tak ako tá na kostole. Je skôr ako pružina zo svalov a šliach. Keď chodíme s nohami smerujúcimi von, klenba spadne a prestane pružiť. Za normálnych okolností noha dokáže absorbovať energiu z dopadu chodidla na zem práve vďaka klenbe, ale pri plochej nohe sa tieto nárazy prenášajú vyššie, ku kolenám, bedrovým kĺbom a chrbtu. A ani topánky s hrubou podrážkou, bublinami, alebo pružinami to celkom nevyriešia.

Okrem toho, plochá noha namáha šľachy, ktoré by mali v spolupráci so svalmi klenbu držať. Na ich smolu totiž v tomto prípade svaly pracujú proti nim. Na spodku nohy sa nachádza plochá šľacha, ktorá sa volá plantárna aponeuróza, a ktorá spája prsty s pätou. Je natiahnutá medzi nimi ako taká gumička a pomáha zachovať klenbu. Pri plochých nohách je táto šľacha natiahnutá. Ak ju naťahujeme príliš, môže začať bolieť.

Pic of plantar aponeurosis

Nestabilný členok

Ďalšia skupina šliach pomáha stabilizovať a spevniť členok. Keď je chodidlo otočené smerom von v porovnaní s predkolením, šľachy na vonkajšej strane členka sú v uvoľnenej polohe. Je to preto, že kosti, ktoré spájajú, sú príliš blízko pri sebe a šľachy sa na rozdiel od svalov nevedia stiahnuť. Členok stráca stabilitu a je ľahšie si ho vyvrtnúť. Vbočené palce

Vbočené palce, alebo takzvané haluxy, vedia byť celkom problém, a možno o nich niekedy napíšem celý článok. Veľmi často sú dôsledkom nosenia tesných topánok, ktoré stláčajú prsty k sebe, až tie prsty tak ostanú. Sú však aj ľudia, ktorí nosia viac-menej pohodlné topánky, a aj tak skončia s vybočenými palcami. Úzke topánky totiž nie sú jediným možným dôvodom ich vzniku.

Pri chôdzi by sa váha mala presúvať od päty k prstom pozdĺž osi chodidla. To znamená, že počas kroku sa chodidlo ohne pod prstami a tým veľkým kĺbom na báze palca a palcom samotným sa môžeme odtlačiť od zeme. Ale teraz si predstavte, že chodidlá smerujú do strany, lenže my chceme ísť samozrejme dopredu. Miesto toho, aby sme váhu preniesli pozdĺž palca, prevalíme ju cez jeho stranu a zatláčame ho každým krokom k ostatným prstom. A tadá, vbočené palce aj bez úzkych topánok.

Pic of rolling over

Kolená

Posuňme sa teraz trochu vyššie, ku kolenám. Noha, ktorá je vytočená do strany, väčšinou vedie k určitej rotácii aj v úrovni kolena. Kolenné väzy sú potom príliš natiahnuté, alebo práve uvoľnené, podľa toho, či sú ich konce zrazu neobvykle ďaleko, alebo blízko pri sebe. Na rozdiel od svalov, väzy a šľachy sa nevedia sťahovať, a na ich optimálnu funkciu je naozaj dôležité, aby vzájomná poloha kostí, ktoré spájajú, bola správna.

Pri vytočených chodidlách sú väzy na vonkajšej strane kolena a krížené väzy vo vnútri kolena uvoľnené a koleno stráca stabilitu. Koleno sa často potom prepadáva smerom dovnútra a nohy vyzerajú, že sú do X. Teda vlastne, nie len vyzerajú, ale sú. Väzy na vnútornej strane sú potom príliš natiahnuté a pod stresom. (To bol aj môj prípad po dlhé roky.) Bedrá

Teraz už sa od chodidiel dostávame poriadne ďaleko. Na úrovni bedrových kĺbov takéto vytočenie chodidiel znamená, že je ťažké zapojiť svaly zadku. Jednou z ich úloh je vytáčať stehennú kosť do vonka. Ak je stehno už vytočené, sval je v skrátenej polohe a nemá sa ako viac sťahovať, takže nič veľmi nerobí. Vtedy neplní ani svoju druhú úlohu, čo je odťahovanie nohy do strany. Možno by ste povedali, že to je pohyb, ktorý nepraktizujete často, ale pravdepodobne by ste sa mýlili. Tento pohyb je totiž potrebný pri chôdzi. Bez zapojenia svalov zadku sa nám potom kolená ešte viac stretávajú v strede a ešte viac sa opotrebovávajú.

Okrem kolien takýto lenivý zadok ovplyvňuje aj panvové dno a krížovú chrbticu. Kríže musia za neho kompenzovať a vieme, aké sú bolesti krížov časté. Panvové dno zasa oslabne a stuhne, lebo zadok funguje ako jeho partner. Svaly zadku aj panvového dna sa pripájajú na kostrč, zadok ju ťahá smerom dozadu a panvové dno dopredu. Keď zadok prestane ťahať, a keď si ešte k tomu často sedíme na kostrči, táto sa zatláča dnu a panvové dno sa skráti a slabne.

Pic of pelvic floor

A to všetko len kvôli tomu, že stojíme s nohami do strán! Samozrejme, nie všetko sa u každého prejaví a nie hneď. Záleží aj na tom, ako veľmi sú chodidlá vytočené a kde presne sa to deje, či na úrovni bedrových kĺbov, kolien, členkov, alebo všade trošku. Prečo tak veľa ľudí stojí s vytočenými nohami

V niektorých prípadoch sú do strany smerujúce nohy vrodené, ale to je veľmi zriedkavé. U maličkých detí je to normálne, lebo kĺby sa im ešte vyvíjajú. Väčšina dospelých to má však kvôli zvyku a tomu, ako svoje telá používame. Len zvyk

Päty k sebe, špičky od seba je postoj, ktorý sa učil na telesnej výchove, na povinnej vojenskej službe, aj na balete. A pohyby, ktorým venujeme pozornosť začneme nakoniec používať aj v čase, keď nedávame pozor. Preto baletky chodia ako baletky aj keď nebaletia.

Navyše, od detstva okolo seba vidíme ľudí, ktorí chodia určitým spôsobom, a bez toho, aby sme si to uvedomili, sa náš pohyb učíme od nich. (Takže vaše “geneticky” zlé kolená, vbočené palce, či boľavý chrbát nemusia vôbec byť genetické, aj keď ich má celá rodina. Možno sa všetci iba rovnako hýbete.) Topánky a sedenie

Ak by to nebolo dosť, sú tu aj ďalšie faktory, ktoré nás vedú k tomu, že vytáčame nohy do strán. Jedným z dôvodov môžu byť skrátené lýtkové svaly. Ak sú lýtkové svaly krátke, nevieme poriadne ohnúť členok a priblížiť prsty k píšťale (poznáte špička-fajka? tak fajka). Bez dostatočnej pohyblivosti členka je chôdza problém. Ak ale vytočíme chodidlá von, členok sa nepotrebuje toľko ohýbať a vieme nejako kráčať. A naše telá sa snažia splniť naše požiadavky na pohyb, aj keď im to dlhodobo môže ublížiť. Takže obetujú správne postavenie kĺbov, aby sme sa boli schopní hýbať. Lebo čo ak by nás naháňal medveď.

Ako sa nám môžu skrátiť lýtkové svaly? Nuž ľahko. Sedením a nosením topánok s podpätkom (nie len vysokým, aj “normálnym”). Pri nich sú totiž lýtkové svaly v skrátenej polohe, a keď tak trávia veľa času, potom také ostanú.

Ďalším problémom je nosenie tesných topánok, ktoré stláčajú prsty k sebe. Tým sa zmenšuje plocha, na ktorej stojíme, čiže strácame stabilitu. Stlačené prsty sa k tomu horšie hýbu a aj to zhoršuje stabilitu. Ako kompenzáciu často vytočíme nohu von, čo zväčšuje plochu, na ktorej stojíme. Klenba sa zníži a dotyková plocha so zemou je väčšia.

Pic of sitting, short calfs and so on

Ako si vyrovnať nohy

Dobrá správa je, že riešenie je vcelku jednoduché. Keďže vo väčšine prípadov je chodenie s nohami von zvyk, ide len o to zvyknúť si chodiť rovno. Nezaberá to žiaden extra čas, treba sa len sústrediť na to, ako sedíme, stojíme a chodíme. Chodidlá paralelne

Postavte sa, a skúste nájsť na zemi dve paralelné čiary (dlaždičky, okraj koberca, skrine, knihy… Aj vy máte knihy na zemi?). Potom si vyrovnajte chodidlá tak, aby osi chodidiel (od päty ku začiatku ukazováka) boli paralelne. Neriaďte sa vnútornou hranou nohy. Ak sú tie paralelne, nohy sú vytočené do vonka. Riadte sa buď osou nohy, alebo vonkajšou hranou.

Čudné? Ja viem. Ja som si na začiatku myslela, že stratím rovnováhu. Ak je vám to veľmi nepríjemné, nemusíte to úplne vyrovnať naraz, stačí postupne. Je to len otázka zvyku. Čím viac pozornosti, a čím častejšie, tomu budete venovať, tým skôr si zvyknete a budete tak chodiť bez rozmýšľania. Kolená dopredu

Keď už máte chodidlá vyrovnané, pozrite sa na kolená. Smerujú priamo dopredu, alebo k sebe? Ak si nie ste istí, skúste niekoho poprosiť, aby sa vám zozadu pozrel na kolenné jamky. Tie by mali smerovať priamo dozadu. Ak nesmerujú, skúste vytočiť stehenné kosti do vonka, bez toho aby ste zdvihli chodidlo. V prípade, že vám nejde nasmerovať koleno dopredu, budete musieť chodidlá vyrovnávať postupne, lebo nechceme opraviť chodidlo a pri tom pokaziť koleno. Takže vyrovnávajte len koľko sa dá. Natiahnuť lýtkové svaly

Takmer každý dnes má skrátené lýtkové svaly, takže aby vás neobmedzovali, zaraďte do svojho dňa tento cvik. Správne topánky

Nesmieme zabudnúť na topánky. Topánky by mali mať dostatočne širokú špičku, aby prsty mali dosť pohyblivosti, a aby celá noha bola dosť stabilná. V topánke by ste mali byť schopní prsty roztiahnuť. Na začiatok môže byť dobrá pomôcka obkresliť si bosú nohu s roztiahnutými prstami na papier a topánku na ňu postaviť. Ak noha pretŕča, topánka je určite príliš úzka. Schválne, otestujte si topánky, čo máte doma.

Keď už sme pri topánkach, pomôže aj nosiť topánky bez opätku, kvôli ktorým sa nám nebudú skracovať lýtkové svaly. O topánkach sa dá rozprávať strašne veľa, ale to niekedy nabudúce, lebo tento článok začína byť trochu dlhý. (Hurá, ten čas nakoniec prišiel a celý článok o topánkach nájdete tu.) Na záver

Ak vás tento článok presvedčil, že nechcete chodiť s nohami na krivo, aby ste si ušetrili problémy s chodidlami, členkami, kolenami, bedrovými kĺbami, chrbtom a panvovým dnom (uf, ale toho je), tak tu je malá rekapitulácia, čo s tým.

Osi chodidiel (prípadne vonkajšie hrany) paralelne Kolená smerujú dopredu Topánky bez opätku a s širokou špičkou Stretching na lýtkové svaly

TODO To kegel or not to kegel movement

I remember one time when I got a chance to jump on a trampoline. I was hopping up and down with joy and careless abandon and then suddenly it dawned on me that what I was enjoying is not a given for many people. I was there, 5 months after brithing my second kid, jumping on a trampoline like there was nothing to it. To be honest, it wasn’t that easy in the first year after I had my first child. But I worked on it and got better.

Do you want to know a secret? I don’t do kegels.

How the pelvic floor actually works

Most people imagine the pelvic floor like some sort of a trampoline with a hole in the middle. And this holy trampoline is somehow – miraculously – supposed to hold all our pelvic organs. Good luck, I say.

With this image in mind, the idea of kegels does seem pretty reasonable. But only for as long as we think of the pelvic floor as a trampoline floor isolated from other structures.

Imagine a piece of fabric with a long slit in the middle. This will be our pelvic floor: it has a narrow opening that extends front to back, but isn’t particularly wide.

If we forget that the fabric is actually attached to something, the only way to keep the hole closed is to pull the edges of it together, a bit like a drawstring bag. And then hope to gods that the string holds with all its might. And that, dear reader, is a kegel.

Now let’s make our idea of the pelvic floor a bit more accurate. Let’s imagine that the fabric is attached to a frame on all sides and that this frame can expand and contract a little in the front-back direction. Because, yes, there is surprisingly much movement in our pelvises and the sacrum can tilt slightly in and out.

In this case, we can close the hole by simply pulling the fabric in the front-back direction. And there you have it!

You might be asking now how to pull the “fabric” of your pelvic floor in real life. Well, it’s the gluteus maximus that does that – the biggest of the glutes, the butt. It attaches to the tailbone and the sacrum from the outside, while the pelvic floor attaches from the inside. When the glutes are activated, they are pulling the tailbone outwards.

This actually happens during walking (or at least it should). It’s a great way not just to close the holes, but also to train the pelvic floor. Having to resist the periodic stretching during every single step keeps it in good shape – long, strong and elastic, just as it should be. And that’s why our ancestors did ok even without a hundred kegels a day.

• The pelvic floor is not a floor

  If all of this confusion weren’t enough, the pelvic floor is not actually a floor at all.

  But if you try to search the web for “pelvic floor”, you will find countless drawings just like this one, with the pelvic floor being horizontal and all of the organs sitting above it, magically propped up by their respective soft tubes.

  

  In reality, it doesn’t look like that at all.

  The pelvic floor attaches to the pubic bone in the front and to the tailbone and the sacrum in the back. Try to find your tailbone and your pubic bone and get them in the same horizontal plane. This is what it looks like for me. And this is not how anyone should walk around.

  

  When you look at a pelvis oriented correctly, the pelvic floor isn’t a “floor” at all. (But I will continue calling it a floor anyway, because I doubt that “pelvic wall” would catch on. Or what do you think?)

  

  #+attr_html :alt A photo of a woman’s torso from the side, hands pointing at the pubic bone and tailbone, where the pubic bone is lower than the tailbone. The silhouette looks natural.

  

  And thank gods that the pelvic floor is not a floor! All of those images of organs bouncing on a trampoline full of holes make my sphincters clench. It looks as if the uterus was proped up by the vagina and the bladder by the urethra, while these soft tubes have no chance of propping up anything. But if you orient your pelvis right, the organs can just lie there comfortably stacked on top of each other and the pubic bone. Nothing will be falling out anywhere.

What the pelvic floor really needs

What does the pelvic floor expect then? What does it need in order to work well? Well, the short version is: correct breathing and a strong butt. Read on for the long version.

• Breathing

  The pelvic floor and the diaphragm relate to each other more than you might think. They form the walls of the same “balloon” – the abdominopelvic cavity. The diapraghm is the ceiling and the pelvic floor is the floor/back wall. When the diapraghm depresses during an inhale, it increases the pressure in the cavity. The pelvic floor feels the pressure and has to activate to resist it.

  If we don’t breathe properly, problems show up. So breathing well is a surprising, but important step towards a healthy pelvic floor. You can read more about breathing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• Butt

  As I mentioned before, the butt and the pelvic floor are partners that work together and workout together. Unfortunately, many aspects of our lives aren’t very nice to our butts.

• Sitting

  One of the worst modern habits is the almost constant sitting in the same position. Most of the contraptions we sit in almost don’t allow another way of sitting. We sit leaning back, lower back rounded, pelvis tucked under – literally sitting on our tailbones and pushing them inwards. This is putting the pelvic floor in a shortened position, which means it has trouble closing anything. It has to adapt to this, so it shortens over time too and becomes tighter and tighter.

  The take-away message here is – don’t sit on your tailbone. If you want to read more about sitting, you can check out my post about sitting. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

• Standing

  Unfortunately, when we finally stand up from our lounging position, not all of our body parts stand up with us. No, this is not a ghost story, I’m just trying to say that too much sitting changes how our body works to the point that we aren’t even able to stand right anymore.

  Sitting, and especially if done in high heels (by which I mean anything higher than 0), leads to shortening of muscles on the back of the legs. It’s a shortening that doesn’t just go away when we stand up. Give them enough time in a seated position and they literally rebuild themselves.

  As a result, most of us stand with our pelvis tucked under and often shoved forward as well. In this position, the muscles on the back of the legs are in their familiar short position.

  Unfortunately, tucked pelvis is not good news.

  When the pelvis is tucked, the butt can’t work. The insertions of the muscles are in a position where they can’t pull anything anywhere. This seriously compromises the stability of the pelvis, the efficiency of the gait and yes, the tug-of-war between the butt and the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor loses its partner.

  To top it off, tucking the pelvis makes the pelvic floor into an actual horizontal floor, so now it has to carry more of the weight of the organs above. To keep everything in, it has to clench. And hold. And hold. But if the butt isn’t pulling from the other side, the pelvic floor just ends up dragging the tailbone inward. And so its own frame is getting smaller and it has to get smaller with it. Clench and hold.

  The poor pelvic floor is clenching, shortening and holding with all its might, but muscle contractions become less and less effective as the muscle is shortened. (It has to do with the overlapp of the fibers in them, but that is a topic for another day.) The overworked pelvic floor becomes stiff and we finally start noticing the trouble – pain, incontinence, prolapse.

  And that’s why a tucked pelvis is a disaster for the pelvic floor.

• Why not kegels

  The pelvic floor is supposed to be strong and supple. It needs to react to breathing, pull of other muscles around and changes in the pressure in the abdominopelvic cavity.

  Due to our modern lives, most of us are using our pelvic floor wrong. We turn it into a “floor” by tucking the pelvis and we don’t let it play with its friends – the butt and the diaphragm. We end up with a pelvic floor that is shortened, stiff and overworked. As a result, it can’t contract as it should, so we think it’s weak.

  Unfortunately, what kind of advice will the owner of this poor pelvic floor get? In 99/100 cases, that would be kegels. And what do kegels do? Assuming a weak pelvic floor, a kegel is supposed to make it stronger by regular contractions.

  And so the chronicly contracted, shortened, stiff and overworked pelvic floor gets a regular regime of more contracting and shortening. Because a kegel is just like tightening the string on a drawstring bag – it completely misses the actual problem most people have.

  It usually works for a while. Training will increase the strength of the pelvic floor, so it becomes better able to work in these horrible conditions. The symptoms will improve temporarily, but are likely to come back, because the real problem is only getting worse.

  Plus, let’s be honest, kegels are a funny one. Why should we even need such a strange exercise? For most issues, functional exercises tend to provide the most benefit. The kind of movement that make sense in context: in daily life or sports. Just because we strenghten a muscle using an isolated exercise, doesn’t mean it will activate when it should in real life. Movement is as much about the brain as it is about muscles.

• When kegels are the right solution

  Some people might benefit from kegels, if their pelvic floor is actually weak. Although, even in this case, the kegels should be paired with other exercises and lifestyle changes.

  Kegels can also help us to “get to know” our pelvic floor muscles and learn to activate them. For this purpose, the quality of the exercise matters much more than the quantity. And most people are doing kegels wrong: using either the wrong muscles, or focusing only on the contraction, while the release is at least equally important.

  If you believe kegels might be the right thing for you, I encourage you to find a good pelvic floor physiotherapist who can make sure that it really is what you need and that you do them right.

• If not kegels, then what?

  Pelvic floor dysfunction is one of our floppy fins. Just like orcas in captivity often end up with a bent-over dorsal fin, humans in the modern world often end up with pelvic floor issues. The reason is the same, lack of the mechanical inputs that our bodies evolved with, rely on and take for granted. (You can read more about floppy fins here !!!!!!!!!!!!!)

  How can we get a healthy, supple and strong pelvic floor without kegels?

  You already have a part of the answer. It’s good breathing, sitting and standing (especially the position of the pelvis, which I wrote about more here as well !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

  Good posture puts the pelvic floor in a position where it can work. The next step is to give it enought opportunities to do just that.

  Walking and squatting are among the best movements that optimally engage the pelvic floor. They both involve the whole body and have been ubiquitous in the lives of our ancestors for millions of years. When we lack either or both, we begin hurting in many different places, but the pelvic floor is one of the first victims.

  I wrote more about the basic movements that we are missing here !!!!!!!!!!!

  So how is your relationship with kegels? You can let me know if you feel like it.

Movement moves the brain - why dancing is better than sudoku movement

Can I drop my body off at the gym and pick it up when it’s done?

As a teenager I used to always listen to music or audiobooks when I went for a run. I did it because running and exercise were a chore - a boring, annoying, but necessary chore. I didn’t do it for the fun of it. I just wanted to lose weight and get into shape (mostly so that I would be able to run away from the aliens if I found myself in an episode of Doctor Who). I loved the feeling I got after running, but definitely not during.

It’s common to see exercise as a chore that we just want to get over with, but today I will tell you about all the reasons why a focused movement practice is good for not only your body, but also your brain.

I move, therefore I am

When we talk about movement, we often think of musculoskeletal system - the muscles and the bones. We tend to forget that there is one more very important system involved: the nervous system.

If I want to drink my tea, I just reach my hand, pick up the cup, bring it to my mouth and drink. No real thinking required. But even such a seemingly simple movement requires an incredibly well coordinated effort from a large number of muscles. Everything needs to be just right. Just the right strength of a contraction at just the right time. And that’s what the brain is there for.

Movement might actually be the reason why we have a brain at all!

According to one theory, animals evolved a brain in order to be able to freely move through their environment. The complex interactions with one’s surroundings simply required a brain. Plants manage without one, but they usually don’t get very far. Even for us humans, a species that likes to use our brains for a bunch of stuff, movement still takes up a massive part of its capacity.

Your brain prefers dancing over sudoku

I have nothing against sudoku, but if you would like to train your brain then movement can get you better results. There are studies that look specifically at the effect of dancing on the cognitive abilities and dementia risk in elderly people. The effects are overwhelmingly positive and the best out of the tested activities, followed by crossword puzzles and reading. Biking, swimming and golf however didn’t make much of a difference.

What is it about dancing that was so beneficial for the brain? The most likely answer is that it was the need to learn new things and to constantly react and adjust to the music and the dancing partner.

In dancing there is a tight feedback loop involved in dancing. The brain needs to carefully monitor the inputs - music, partner, space, own body, and decide how to react to it. There are many possibilities and often new moves. The environment is complex and our movement through it is complex. It is what the brain is so good at and also what is good for it.

I would guess that dancing isn’t the only type of movment that could provide this benefit, although I can’t back it up by any studies, as most focus on ballroom dancing. But we can experience similar movement complexity and interactions with our environment in other situations too. A hike through a challengening terrain, balancing, climbing a tree. Maybe even an artificial obstacle course.

We are what we focus on the most

As the saying goes: practice makes perfect. But only under one important condition. The practice has to be focused. Our brain is able to perform familiar movements on autopilot. It simply starts the stored program and executes the pattern. It’s fast and efficient. But what if the pattern blueprint isn’t correct? Well in that case we will be practicing and training the incorrect movement over and over again.

To improve, we need to establish a feedback loop. The brain needs to be continuously adjusting the movement in reaction to the feedback it receives. That requires focus.

We can hack this focus with certain types of movements, the kind that just won’t work if we’re not responsive enough. And that brings us back to the ballroom dancing. But also balancing. If you do it wrong, you fall. Hiking in terrain that isn’t flat and level requires a similar amount of focus and continuous response to the environment. Jumping rope also provides an immediate feedback forcing you to do it well or not at all.

With many other movements it’s up to us to bring in the focus and awareness.

The good news is, that the focus is our key to improving the quality of our movements. If a movement pattern stored in our brain isn’t good enough, all we need is focused practice to imprint a new pattern. And although it does take time, the more we practice, the faster it happens.

Play, practice, train

One of the foundations of good and safe movement is self-awareness. We all have our limitations, but being aware of them is what allows us to use our full abilities and reduce the risk of injuries.

How to build good movement? Play, practice, train. In that order. With self-awareness.

The ultimate way to develop self-awareness is play. Play is an exploration. An exploration of one’s own abilities, of the environment and how they can play together. In play, we test our boundaries, we feel what feels right and we experiment with various ways of doing the same. It allows us to know ourselves and to find what works.

Only then can we move onto practice. Practice is deliberate and focused. Now that we have explored the possibilities through play, we know better where we want to get. We can then start practicing the movements. Focusing on the feedback from our bodies and our environment and using it to refine the movement.

Training is the last step that only makes sense after we have been through play and practice stages. Now that we have a correct movement pattern blueprint in the brain, we can start adding intensity to it, whether through higher loads, speeds or number of repetitions.

For most people who aren’t athletes, the play and practice stages are the most important. They train the brain the most, they help us develop self-awareness, correct movement patterns and despite what it might soud like, they do also train and strenghten the muscles. Plus, it’s where most of the fun is.

Nobody would dream of leaving their brain behind when going to practice playing a music instrument. Practicing movement isn’t really that different.

How I found out I had to move more and move better movementabout-me

Disconnected and dysfunctional

I used to be a nerdy little bookworm as a kid and as a teenager. And honestly a bit of a couch potato. If I could sit in a comfy armchair with a book, I would sit in a comfy armchair with a book.

I also used to be a “good girl”. Doing what I was expected to do and following the rules both spoken and implied. So I would sit “properly”, never run around in the corridors and favour academic achievements over physical prowess.

It was subconcious - I never really decided not to move - but it was happening and it had consequences.

I was just 12 when a doctor told me that my knee pain was due to worn cartilages and there was nothing to do about it. By the time I entered my twenties I not only had bad knees, but also a wonky ankle, flat feet and regular lower back pain.

And I don’t think I even understood how much it affected me mentally…

I wasn’t happy with the way I looked and I ingored as best as I could the way I felt in my own body.

Year 2013. I’m 24. Sloping shoulders, swayback posture with my pelvis way forward and duck feet. Of course I hurt.

It changed, thankfully

It happened in 2015. The beginning of the change, I mean. It was a cold Norwegian January and I was an ever-so-nerdy bookish PhD student. That day I went to a proper gym - probably for the first time in my life. I was suffering from a new-years-resolutionitis and had a vague feeling I should “start exercising (somehow)”. I was looking for something that would require as little energy and time as possible.

Well that trip to the gym never repeated itself. But boy oh boy, was it an eye-opener. I was weak, clumsy, awkward and stiff. I had no idea how to move.

Thankfully, I had enough self-awareness left to realize I had no control and was on my way to an injury.

Coming home that day, I started searching the internet. Trying to answer questions like why can’t I squat? And this was the real beginning. The nerd’s way.

I was studying biophysics and suddenly realized that the mechanics of the human body was actually right up my alley!

I loved reading about it. And I still do!

And before I knew it, I was applying what I was reading to myself and eventually advising others. Also reading more, taking courses, and learning more.

Movement became my passion.

Reconnecting with myself

I don’t go to the gym. I don’t really play sports. I have a full time job and two kids and I don’t enjoy gyms and sports enough to make time for them.

Instead I just move.

I make space for movement in my daily life and in my mind, because I know now that it is essential.

My movement practice keeps me pain free, confident, moving with ease, able to enjoy physical activity and connected to my body and the world around me.

I finally feel at home in my body. I finally feel like I belong. And it’s a good feeling.

Year 2019. I seem to be holding a child in every single picture. But my shoulders are straighter, my pelvis is in its right place and I feel good.

How I became a carnivore foodabout-me

I don’t eat a “varied and balanced diet” anymore. I don’t do five a day. There is no rainbow on my plate. And no holy (whole) grains. Zero fibre, actually. On the other hand, I eat lots of saturated fat, cholesterol and salt.

I eat meat, eggs, fish, salt and water. And that’s pretty much it 99% of the time.

And believe it or not I have never felt better.

How did I get here? Let us start from the middle…

No matter how hard I tried, everything was wrong

My first daugther was a bit over a year old and I was having probably the most difficult time of my life.

Most people would consider our diet at that time very healthy. It was full of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, heart-healthy plant fats and only relatively small amounts of meat. Everything was prepared at home from fresh ingredients.

• Child with alergies

  We didn’t really have much choice. From the moment the kiddo was born, it was quite clear that she inherited her mother’s disposition for allergies. We quickly identified milk and eggs as the main culprit and I dropped them from my diet like a hot potato, because I didn’t want to stop breastfeeding her.

  But that wasn’t enough. She kept reacting to random things I ate. And when she started solids also to the things she ate. It was a nightmare trying to identify the culprits and medical testing provided only some answers, and clearly not all. So I kept eliminating more and more foods from my diet.

  She was actually doing very well for a child with allergies - most likely thanks to the breastmilk - but I on the other hand… not so much.

• I started falling apart

  

  That is oatmeal in my bowl. January 2018, 8 months post partum. Tired.

  It slowly crept up on me, but by the time she was a year, I was hardly recognising myself. I was skinny, weak, perpetually tired and always sick. Any virus passing by would get me and keep me miserable for many weeks. I even managed to break two of my ribs in a coughing fit. Really.

  My hands were covered in eczema I couldn’t get rid of for ages. My digestion was miserable. I was having so much bloating and unexpected trips to the bathroom that it was often difficult to leave the house. But the worst of it was the mental part. I was anxious and angry and scared. Sometimes I didn’t even know why. I was just not coping at all.

  According to my doctor, everything looked fine.

Just meat? Are you out of your gourd?

It continued for way too long without much improvement. Until one day in May 2019, when I was 30 years old and the little one has just turned two.

And here I have to give credit to my husband who showed me a picture of married couple he found online and asked me how old I though they were. I guessed maybe late thirties, at most early fourties. I was super wrong. She was 46 and he was 61.

And they attributed their youthfull looks and good health to only having eaten beef for the last 20 years.

• Carnivore

  The people in the picture were Joe and Charlene Andersen and as we quickly found out, they are far from the only ones following some version of the so-called carnivore diet, and reporting incredible health benefits.

  Carnivore… as in no plant foods at all. I was flabbergasted. It can’t be!

  I mean, everyone knows, that vegetables are nutrition, right? You can’t live without vegetables!

  Or?

  Turns out you can. And more than that. You can thrive. We discovered a big community of carnivores online, quite a few of them doctors, researchers and dieticians. And so many stories from all sorts of people. They often sounded like miracles. People who went into remission from their “uncurable” chronic diseases, from eczemas, depression, anxiety, through Crohn’s, type 2 diabetes, psoriasis, juvenile arthritis, to epilepsy, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and tooth cavities…

  Some even had their grey hair grow dark again.

  I usually follow the rule that if something sound too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true.

But there wasn’t much to lose this time.

Of course I didn’t go in blindly. I read and I read and I double-checked and carefully considered arguments from all the sides. I was a PhD student at the time and let me tell you, a PhD is mostly a degree in reading scientific literature. So that is what I did here too. And things did check out and did make sense. The last thing left was to try.

My personal little miracle

We were going to try it for a month. It has now been over 3 years. It really felt like experiencing my own little miracle.

7 months carnivore and things are good. Definitely less dark circles under the eyes.

I do indeed thrive.

• Digestion - better than ever. And it used to be really bad. Now I don’t think about 99% of the time. Have you ever experienced zero bloat? It’s glorious.

• Skin - better than ever. Eczema was gone within a week and acne a few weaks later. Plus I don’t burn in the sun anymore. Go figure.

• Pollen allergies - basically gone. As long as I am perfectly plant free (including spices) I don’t experience any symptoms. And I used to have terrible allergies fo 9 months out of a year!

• Mental health - much better. I didn’t realize I used to have anxiety until it was gone. The impending sense of doom now only returns when I eat some sugar.

• Resistance to getting sick - definitely better. I still get sick, seeing that I live with two small people that will gladly sneeze in your eyeball and that visit a breeding gourn for pathogens daily (a.k.a. kindergarten). But the illnesses are milder and pass much faster.

Over the last three years I have been experimenting with adding other foods to my diet and every time I end up going back to a pure carnivore of meat, fish, eggs, salt and water. Because many of the benefits I mentioned here disappear for me, once I add some plant foods. Some people don’t feel a difference from adding some coffee or avocado or spices or other plants, but I really do.

And for as long as this will make me feel the best, I will continue.

The carnivore diet and how and why it works has remained a source of fascination for me. I have never before experienced such a profound change. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that carnivore saved my life. And it all makes sense.

And that’s why I just can’t keep it to myself.

I failed at starting an online business and I’m happy with that sharing

I really really tried to start an online business, but it was just an endless struggle. I just couldn’t get myself to do the things and I couldn’t get it right. And so I finally stopped. It was a relief and a disappointment at the same time. And it actually took me close to a year to figure out what went “wrong”, and why it’s for the best.

If you are looking for a guide on how to start making money online, this is not it. This is me tracing back my steps, trying to figure out where and why I “failed”. And the short story is: It didn’t agree with me. The long story is… well, longer:

A course that was supposed to save me

It was at a time in my life when I was seriously struggling with balancing work and family. I had a small child that needed my presence more than the average toddler, but I just had to go back to work, there was no other choice. So I was drowning in guilt, fatigue and tears (both mine and hers).

I wanted a way out.

And that way out seemed to appear on Instagram, out of all places. Some of the people I was following mentioned having gone through a life-changing course about starting an online business. So I followed the account of the lovely lady who runs it. And at first I didn’t think it was the right thing for me, but with each passing post and each passing month, I was getting more and more convinced to give it a try.

I followed for about a year before I signed up. I already had a blog from before (which was just for fun), and I felt I had things to say. So why not?

I gave it my all.

I was posting on my blog, on Facebook, on Instagram, sending a newsletter, I had several “free” ebooks that I exchanged for people’s email addresses and at the end of the course, I had my paid ebook. I was proud of it. It was good.

And then I hit a wall.*

I couldn’t get myself to promote my ebook. I couldn’t get myself to mention it on social media. I kept lowering the price of my ebook every few weeks. I lost steam completely. I tried to pick up where I left again and again, thinking it was writer’s block or imposter syndrome or whatever, but I just couldn’t get myself to write and post with any regularity again. There were months between each addition and writing was a pain.

Eventually, I stopped. I felt like a failure. I had all the tools necessary to get this to work, and I have seen other people who made it. But not me. I simply wasn’t good enough.

At least that is how I felt for a very long time.

Making people want

I learned a lot from the course.

Did you know that most people buy only after five or more contacts with the seller? And that marketers are deliberately appealing to our feelings and telling us how their product will make us feel and how it will change our lives? That they know we are more likely to buy under time pressure, so they come up with time-limited offers, real or fake?

It’s nothing new, really. Nothing ground-breaking. It’s like those fabric softener ads on TV that show people running through fields of flowers, rather than telling you that it will make your towels soft and smell like some chemical approximation of flowers. A bit ridiculous, right?

I kind of knew or suspected many of it before, but reading it black on white was a little jarring. Still, I tried to do it too, but I was really bad at it. I just couldn’t do it properly. It was a topic in the course too, actually: “I am bad at selling”. We were told we deserved to be paid for our efforts and for all the value we were providing for people. After all, the money would allow us to make more content. It was a reciprocal relationship. And all of that makes perfect sense, of course. But I was still failing miserably.

• It’s magic

  It’s only recently that I started looking at it from the other side though. From the side of a customer. We all know marketing and ads are fake and manipulative, yet we all think we are immune to them. I admit I did. I thought I wouldn’t let something like that influence my choices.

  Then I read about Tristan Harris - a technology ethicist, vocal critic of social media and founder of the Center for Humane Technology. He compared social media to magicians. We all know magicians are using tricks and we are often trying to look for it, yet almost all of us get fooled over and over again. It has nothing to do with intelligence. They are simply using our inherent human “weaknesses”, the way our brain works, to trick us. But while magicians do it for our delight, social media and ads do it for other reasons. Why would companies use as much money as they do for advertising, if it didn’t work?

  Manipulation doesn’t stop working just because we know we are being manipulated.

• Social media work for marketers

  Tristan Harris is featured in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma and also in Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus. I enjoyed Stolen Focus tremendously, and while it covers a lot more ground than just social media, they are one of the main topics. At the time when I was reading the book I was feeling overwhelmed and like I had too many tabs open in my brain. Stolen Focus inspired me to quit social media and it actually helped.

  Ever wondered how social media make money? We, the end users, are certainly not paying them. Their business model relies on money from ads. The marketers are their real customers, while our eyeballs are the product. In order to make advertisers happy, social media need to keep us scrolling for as long as possible (to see the most ads), and preferably to buy as well. They don’t care whether we feel good being there, or angry and upset, as long as we are there.

  In my online business course, I learned a lot about how Facebook was this wonderful money machine. How easy it was to target the right people, how it would learn who to show the ads to and how for every cent you throw in for ads, you get two back. (Given you manage to write a good ad, which I never could, but that’s not the point.)

  Social media are full of people trying to sell. We are interacting with ads without even knowing they are ads. They might not be selling anything in that post, just getting us ready to buy in a day or a week. It’s sneaky. And it works.

Selling dreams

I started wondering how much I was influenced by these subtle and less subtle ads.

What about the course I was so sad about not being able to buy, since it cost 2000 euros? If my brain wasn’t massaged for more than a year, would I have even wanted it? What course is even worth 2000 euros? Would my life have been easier if I have never heard about it? Would it be so life-changinly (I know it’s not a word) worth it, if I had bought it? I don’t have answers. Just questions.

Would I have bought that online business course, expensive as it was, if I weren’t looking at all the posts about traveling, exotic places, spending time with family, all while making money? The word freedom popping up over and over again? Did I want to learn and do online marketing? Or did I want the freedom? Because freedom can’t really be sold. The real product was a course about online marketing. What made me want to buy it was the vision of freedom. I wanted the result, not the journey.

Now, I don’t want to throw any shade on that particular course and its author. It’s a good course that worked for a good number of people and she never recommends anything outright unethical. I think she has more integrity than most marketers. She is also honest about the course not being a magic bullet and about success requiring a lot of hard work, time and dedication. She never lies about things.

And yet. And yet I wonder how many of us get seduced by the regular images of far-away places and vague promise of freedom.

Seduced by posts written by a skilled marketer, delivered to us several times a day by powerful algorithms behind social media.

I’m not saying it’s unethical. I’m just realizing how susceptible I am to the marketing magic. And I’m realizing it’s not something I would be ok with doing, personally. I don’t want to make people want things, I don’t want to create desires that might not have been there, just to sell my stuff. Whether I deserve the reward or not. I think there is already too much wanting in this world.

Gift economy

I realize I am talking from a place of privilege. I have a stable, full-time job that I love and that provides enough money for a fairly comfortable life. Nothing extra, no exotic places, but safety and security. I have good affordable childcare and two little kids that enjoy spending their time there. I don’t really need a side hustle. I have the choice. I am well aware that not everyone does.

Sometimes I wish though that the world would be a bit different. A bit kinder and gentler, less eager to make quick and easy money. I read an absolutely wonderful book - Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It’s very difficult to say what that book is about. Robin is a botanist and a Native American and in Braiding Sweetgrass she talks a lot about plants, about nature and about our relationship with them from the point of view of indigenous peoples. It’s an incredibly beautiful book full of wisdom and love.

I never thought I would be reminded of Braiding Sweetgrass while thinking of online marketing, but here we are. One of the ideas Robin introduces is gift economy.

Gift economy. A world where every living thing freely shares their gifts with the others, and in return receives gifts with gratitude and respect for the giver. A world of reciprocity. A world where one doesn’t just ask: “what can I get?”, but mostly: “what can I give?”. A world where gifts are appreciated and treasured.

The plentiful bounty of Americas at the time when European colonizers arrived wasn’t an accident. It was the result of careful stewardship of the land by the native peoples. It was gift economy between humans and nature in practice. It was the result of honorable harvest - never taking more than is given, never taking more than a half, giving back in return,…

Can you imagine a harvest where you only harvest half?! Crazy. And beautiful.

Now I know the world is headed in the opposite way nowadays, but that doesn’t mean I have to follow. And so I am quite content with my short-lived venture into the competitive world of online business being over. It wasn’t for me.

And since I have the luxury of “failing” at selling, I can do this instead. Go back to having a blog, just for fun. Freely sharing my gifts with anyone who might benefit, doing my part in the gift economy.

Are our bodies trying to kill us? food

I have recently finished reading Malcolm Kendrick’s books The Great Cholesterol Con and The Clot Thickens and it was a treat. It was insightful, captivating and so very funny, just dripping with dry, British humour. And with frustration. A LOT of frustration.

What causes heart disease?

• The cholesterol hypothesis

  He is on a mission to tell people that the cholesterol hypothesis of cardiovascular disease is wrong.

  The cholesterol hypothesis:

  1. The amount of saturated fat we eat increases the level of LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) particles in the blood.
  2. High level of LDL in the blood leads to the creation of atherosclerotic plaques (which is basically what we call cardiovascular disease).
     • A hypothesis not as unanimously accepted as one might think.

  (By the way, if you know a slightly different version of this, such as switching out LDL for apoB, or saturated fat for cholesterol or for lack of unsaturated fat, well, yes, they keep changing the hypothesis to stay ahead of all the facts that contradict it. But it’s still the same thing.)

  The poor guy has already written several scientific papers and two books for the general public trying to debunk the cholesterol hypothesis (The Great Cholesterol Con is one of them) and not much has changed. So he also wrote a book trying not as much to debunk the cholesterol hypothesis, but rather offer a better one. One that makes more sense. And that’s what The Clot Thickens is about.

• The blood clot hypothesis

  What, if not cholesterol/saturated fat/LDL causes atherosclerosis? As Malcolm Kendrick points out, that is not actually a good question to ask. A better question is “How?”. Or to put it another way: “What is the process leading to atherosclerosis?”. And the hypothesis he puts forward is that the atherosclerotic plaques are remnants of old blood clots. And there are many, many things that can cause these blood clots and so there are many, many “causes” to atherosclerosis.

  It does fit the facts pretty nicely. From what the plaques contain and how they are organised, to how they grow, what happens when they rupture and down to the biggest well-known and less well-known risk factors for heart disease. It all fits.

  I am not going to go into the details of it right now, any interested reader can find the books and read all the science and detailed explanations for themselves (and did I mentioned the books are super funny?). I think one day I will write about this more though, to sort out my thoughts, but don’t hold your breath, I don’t have a good track record of publishing often.

  Anyway, there was something else I wanted to write about today,

How can there be such a huge disagreement?

Malcolm Kendrick is clearly a very smart, very well educated doctor who has studied the topic for many years and he is in opposition to what the consensus on cardiovascular disease is. And while he is far from alone in this, the cholesterol sceptics are in the minority.

And this is not a disagreement on some small details, no, this is as fundamental a disagreement as can be. And it would be unwise to disregard one side of the argument only because they are in the minority (or the majority, for that matter).

For the majority to be wrong is a very normal situation in the history of not only science and medicine, but all of humankind.

The arguments put forward by Dr. Kendrick make a lot of sense and show a lot of holes in the cholesterol hypothesis. (Big holes, btw. Big. Holes.) Holes that get very nicely filled by the blood clot hypothesis.

But, I like to hear out all sides of an argument and so I went ahead and started reading. I looked at both peer-reviewed scientific papers and at what experts, such as Dr. Thomas Dayspring, have to say on the matter on social media. Because, I thought, surely, these other smart, educated doctors and researchers who defend the cholesterol hypothesis must have some good arguments for it.

And they do. Sort of.

It’s just that these arguments have a very different focus.

How? or Why?

Digging into the cholesterol hypothesis, it felt like it lost the sight of the forest for the trees. I learned about receptors that help transport cholesterol from the gut and into the cells of the gut wall, and about other ones that can toss it back out; I learned about receptors that start the transport of LDL particles through the endothelial cells (the cells that line the insides of the blood vessels) into the wall of he blood vessel; I read about how laminar and turbulent flow affect the proteoglycan content in the blood vessel walls; I read about the different reactions that can happen to LDL once it’s in the wall…

There was a lot of detail (and little that would tie it to actual outcomes in people). But even in the papers and talks that were supposed to provide an overview, it all felt disjointed. “We know about this bit, and that bit, and a few more. And there is stuff happening between them.” I couldn’t help but think: “Yes, you showed this, but what does it mean? Does it even relate to this next bit? Where is the bigger picture?”

It seems like the “proper” science is not supposed to ask why. Only concern itself with the how.

Don’t get me wrong. The how is bloody important. And I have written a few papers in my life and know how science and modern publishing work, I have no illusions there. It’s tricky enough to defend the tiny hows one manages to disentangle from the complexity of life, venturing into guessing about the why is thin ice, and almost feels a bit… unscientific?

But the why matters a lot. Let me explain on an example:

• Why do LDL particles cross the endothelium?

  Initially, when the cholesterol hypothesis came to be, it was thought that LDL particles just passively diffused through the endothelial cells and got stuck inside the arterial wall underneath them. If you know anything about cells, you might know that they are not very fond of just letting things diffuse through them (thank gods), and they are very picky about what they let through and what they don’t. And that is actually the case here as well.

  We do have enough evidence now to know that LDLs don’t just float through the cells. No, the cells manufacture a receptor, catch themselves an LDL particle, pull it in, move it through and spit it out on the other side. Well, we are quite sure of the catching and pulling-in part, slightly less sure of the spitting out part, but it seems like it does happen. Anyway, even the mainstream view has now admitted that this process is an active one and not passive, as it was assumed before.

  The endothelial cell actively pulls in an LDL particle and moves it through itself to the other side.

  Why is this a big deal? Well, if the process had been passive, one could imagine that having too much LDL in the blood would make too much of it go through the wall. But if the cells decide themselves and if they have to use energy and actually work to get it through, it’s not an accident.

  Why are they doing it? Why are they moving it at all? Why so much? Is it just to give us heart disease?

  And this, this, is where I think the main difference between the proponents and opponents of the cholesterol hypothesis lies.

  Because, I believe, most people who are in favour of the cholesterol hypothesis would tell you it doesn’t matter why.

It’s a life philosophy

I think it comes down to how one sees the human body and actually the nature itself. Whether you believe it’s “made” well or whether you feel like it’s lucky that it works at all.

And this is not really a question of religion. We could have been well-made by millions of years of evolution just as well as by a higher power.

But that’s what it boils down to. Do we trust that the body we have is mostly trying to do the right thing? Or do we think it’s held together by pure luck - a mix of random happy accidents and countless mistakes, a ticking bomb waiting to explode on us?

Because if you believe the body makes sense, then the question why it’s doing something is highly relevant, especially if it’s happening in virtually everyone.

The cholesterol gamble

The issue with LDL is that practically all of us will have to choose at some point. The mainstream cardiovascular disease prevention and treatment has been steadily reducing what is considered to be a normal blood level of LDL particles. There are those who think we should all be chewing on statins. Unless this changes, we will all one day be told by our doctor that our “cholesterol” is too high and we should get on the statins.

I have been reading and listening to many people smarter than me from both sides and, while I keep my mind open, I know what makes the most sense to me. It will be a well-informed decision when I one day refuse a statin, if ever offered to me. It’s still a gamble, of course, but taking the statin would be too.

To be honest, Malcolm Kendrick quite convinced me that the cholesterol hypothesis doesn’t hold water. But what definitely doesn’t make sense to me is this idea that we need to micromanage our bodies with medications and unnatural lifestyle changes to keep them from going off the rails and getting us killed.

And if I’m wrong, so be it. I will rather live in a world where my body is on my side, than one where I have to fear it.

We have a blind spot foodsugar-addiction

Hello, my name is Nori, and I am an addict.

For the longest time, I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I thought I was in control. I thought I was “moderating”, whatever that might mean. But in truth I was moderating myself to a serving of my drug of choice dozens of times every day. Simply because I wouldn’t feel good without it. Simply because I wanted it. A lot.

There were times when I would have so much I would make myself feel completely sick. Heart beating uncomfortably fast, body breaking out in cold sweat, headaches, nausea, dry mouth and unquenchable thirst. When I would wake up the next morning, after what was always a bad night of sleep, most of the unpleasantness would still be there (and more).

One time I spent the whole night throwing up, until I finally fell asleep on the bathroom floor. When I woke up some two hours later, utterly miserable, my first thoughts went to whether I had any more left.

You might think that all that yuckiness would have detered me from having more. I would have thought so at least. But it didn’t. Not one bit. I wanted more. I needed more.

White powder

Are you wondering what my drug of choice is? You are not going to like the answer. Just how I didn’t like it.

It is a substance extracted from certain plants, that, when ingested, stimulates the same regions in the brain as cocaine and amphetamines, giving you a dopamine high. Unfortunately, eating bigger amounts of this substance makes the brain more and more used to it. And getting too much of it damages the blood vessels over time, increasing massively the risk of cardiovascular, kidney and Alzheimer’s diseases. It also leads to insulin resistance, causing type 2 diabetes, increasing risk of cancer, fertility problems, gastrointestinal issues, fatty liver disease… just to mention a few. It affects the whole body.

It sounds nasty, doesn’t it? Yet we eat it daily. Heck, we feed it to our kids even more than ourselves.

Did you guess?

It’s sugar.

And yes, it really does work similarly to a drug in the brain. Researchers found that rats would even prefer sugar, and surprisingly also artificial sweetener, over cocaine. Others have found the same - rats addicted to sugar with typical addict behavious of bingeing, withdrawal and craving, and the related changes in the chemistry of brain. Dr. Robert Lustig who has spent a big chunk of his career researching fructose compares it to alcohol because of how the metabolism of the two is similar and how they both affect our behaviour. (Did you know, that both alcohol and fructose consumption lead to fatty liver and in worst case liver cirrhosis?) Several others (Nicole Avena et. al, James DiNicolantonio et. al, Serge Ahmed et. al) have written about the addictive potential of sugar.

We know that sugar is one of the main factors behind our insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes epidemic. There is also evidence that insulin resistance is a bit of a prerequisite for cardiovascular disease. Alzheimer’s disease has been called type 3 diabetes and it seems it could be caused by an insulin resistant brain not being able to get the nutrition it needs. Insulin resistance (from too much sugar consumption) also increases the risk and deadliness of several cancers, like breast cancer, prostate cancer and colorectal cancer.

So yes, sugar is a drug, and a dangerous one at that.

Natural this - natural that, moderation, and other fairy tales

Now I can almost hear you protesting.

But sugar is natural! Yes, just like cocaine, alcohol and cyanide.

But our bodies need it! Well, they actually don’t. You can very well live a life eating zero(!) carbs. There are both essential amino acids and essential fats that we need to have in our diet to survive, but there are no essential carbs. If you think about how the Inuits used to live, or how our ancestors probably lived during the Ice Ages, it’s clear humans don’t need carbohydrates.

But it’s healthy in moderation! What exactly is moderation? How much? How many grams per day is moderation? Is a tablespoon of Nutella 10 times a day too much? What about 8 bananas? What about 10 tablespoons of Nutella, 8 bananas, 5 cookies, a bowl of cereal with orange juice for breakfast, a good portion of pasta for dinner, a sandwich for lunch, a sweetened “yogurt” and a nut bar in between? Is it moderation? I honestly don’t know.

Sugar is sugar is sugar (but isn’t sugar)

Maybe you’re annoyed at me right now for mixing sugar with other carbs. And I am mixing them. Shamelessly. Because when it comes to it, the moment they actually enter your body, the two are indistinguishable.

And I don’t mean enter the mouth. Strictly speaking, our digestive tract is still the outside, just think about it like a very long hole in a human-shaped donut. So when any carbohydrate is entering the body, it is when it’s been already digested, broken up by enzymes and is entering the gut wall. And that is something only monosaccharides do. Monosaccharides – mostly glucose, fructose and galactose. All of which we call sugar. Table sugar is a disaccharide also called sucrose – which is a glucose-fructose pair, and milk sugar – lactose – is a glucose-galactose pair. And starches are polysaccharides made of many glucose units.

Is your head spinning a bit from all the sugars too?

So if we can call glucose “sugar”, and we can call fructose “(fruit) sugar”, and call table sugar “sugar”, then I think I can very well call starches “sugar” too, if I please. By the time they enter the body they are a “sugar” anyway (whatever that might be, but glucose in this case).

So again, how do we moderate this?

The destiny of the sugar we eat

Do you know what happens to the sugar we eat? Carbohydrates get broken down into their smallest unit as they travel from the mouth to the intestines. This mostly ends up being glucose, so that is what I will talk about further.

After the gut cells take them in, they send them straight to the liver. Why? Because too much glucose in the blood is very dangerous and would literally kill us. So the liver is the gatekeeper making sure there isn’t too much entering the blood stream at once.

But the liver can’t just hold it all in in the form of glucose, that doesn’t work. It releases a part into the blood (that’s why our blood sugar rises after eating) and it turns as much of the rest as possible into glycogen – our animal form of “starch” made of a string of glucose molecules. But the liver can only store about a 100g of it. When that storage is full, it has no other choice than to turn it into fat and send it off to fat cells for long term storage. Or release more into the blood

Now muscles can store some glycogen too, about 200g in the whole body, but that glycogen is unable to leave the muscle cells, so it only gets used up when all of these muscles are working.

So the total sugar storage of the body is about 300g. Could that be the moderation limit? Weeeell, I don’t know about you, but I doubt I empty my storage daily. The muscles hold 200g which is about 1000 kcal which would have to be burned daily by working those muscles. That amounts to about 80 minutes of running or two hours of cycling.

And there is 100g – 500 kcal in the liver. But those only get used when our insulin levels are low, so for most people eating 3-5 meals a day with carbs here and there, that would be at best during the night. But yes, a night without eating will probably deplete the liver of glycogen.

From this, 100g of carbs a day looks like a much more reasonable “moderation”. But the truth is most modern people would consider that low-carb.

Can addicts moderate?

Moderation, this tempting elusive idea, even if we could define what it exactly means with regards to sugar, does it work when addicted?

Looking at how we treat all other addictions, I would say not. Nobody in their right mind would tell their recovering alcoholic friend to “just have one beer”. We know what would happen.

And judging from my own experience, no, sugar addicts can’t moderate either.

I used to be a grazer

People have a lot of ideas about what an addiction looks like. I know I did. And what I was doing did not strike me as one at all.

By all accounts, I had a great relationship with food in my youth. I didn’t have any negative thoughts about food. I was enjoying it without any guilt, I didn’t deny myself foods I wanted, I didn’t binge, nor restrict. At all. Despite being chubby, I never considered going on a diet. I felt like I ate well – mostly homemade food, varied diet and yes, candy when I felt like it. The truth is though, I felt like candy waaay too often. I never binged, but I grazed. And the sum of it was… a lot. Enough that now in retrospect I recognize the signs of prediabetes I had in my early twenties.

Long story short, I ended up going on a “diet” in my mid-twenties. For health reasons. And I tried a bunch of diets in futile attempts to control my symptoms, until I ended up with carnivore, which finally fixed it all. But it also showed me, for the first time in my life, that I had a problem.

Falling into a deep well

I have been carnivore for a bit over 4 years now, and I’m still learning more about my addiction and how to deal with it. During these 4 years, I had probably several hundred lapses and am still counting. Thankfully, I think I’m getting better at it.

Every time I manage to stay away from anything that tastes sweet (including anything with carbs and artificial sweeteners) the cravings go away slowly. And the longer I am without it, the less I crave it.

Yet it’s enough with the tiniest smallest taste of sweetness and I’m lost. Suddenly, sweet treats are all I can think of and I want them so bad I could cry. Suddenly, I don’t care that I will feel physically terrible for a few days if I eat it. Suddenly, nothing else matters anymore and I will be sneaking a sweet bite after a sweet bite, telling myself it’s the last one and knowing that that is not true already before I swallow it.

For a long time, the only way I knew how to get out of this and just stop was to have a binge. To eat as much candy as I wanted to. And while it would feel liberating and amazing, it also made me completely sick. Headaches, heartburn, bloat and diarrhea, sometimes vomiting, rashes and raging anxiety. Enough of a reminder and motivation to give me a chance to get out of it.

It would take days of misery and cravings to get back to normal. If I managed at all. Often I would just fail again before I got there.

It feels like falling into a well. One moment I am walking on a flat field, then I see a little dip in the ground and don’t think much about it. But alas, it’s not a little dip, it’s a deep well. And climbing out of it takes days and the tiniest mistake makes me fall back down. A binge felt like letting myself sink to the rock bottom to use it as a springboard. But it was still a tough climb. When I would finally get out I could see the field ahead of me covered in wells…

Abstain or embrace the sugar life

I have quit sugar more times now than I can count. And the withdrawal period is the worst. It’s a time of complete misery, cravings that are more about need than want and that consume all my thoughts. A time of heightened anxiety and physical discomfort.

The way I see it, I have two choices: abstain - completely and forever; or embrace the sugar life. And it’s not really a choice. Because I can’t get back on the path to diabetes, heart disease and dementia that I was on. Only when all of it disappeared, I realized how sick I actually was - gastrointestinal issues, skin issues, autoimmune issues, mental health struggles, obesity. And I know that is what would await me if I tried to go back to eating sweets. Because I just can’t moderate them. I have tried. Desperately. But the need to have more will always torture me until I give in. Or until I abstain long enough for it to go away.

And as much as I love candy, I love the freedom of not wanting it much more.

Addiction is not simple

When I was young and stupid, I used to wonder how people could get/stay addicted to something. I didn’t understand why anyone would willingly do something that was so bad for them. Ha! Now I know. I know better than I would like.

The carnivore diet is a wonderful tool in this fight, because it keeps me healthy, satiated and satisfied while being able to avoid everything sweet. It only takes 7-10 days for it to remove all the physical cravings. The mental ones though…

Addiction isn’t just a chemical thing in the brain, it’s not just about dopamine and neurotransmitters. It’s about people, happiness, belonging, despair, coping,…

We know that even rats won’t get addicted if they live in a “rat paradise”, like they did in this study. And we know that most of the soldiers who did drugs in Vietnam simply stopped when they returned home. There simply wasn’t need for it anymore.

So I am slowly learning and discovering how I used sugar to deal with negative emotions and how I still want it when I feel down. I feel like I lost my crutch now and have to learn to walk on my own. It has been a long journey, and it’s far from over, but I am getting better. I no longer binge after a small slip-up, I have learned to simply stop again, to not let myself fall all the way down into the well.

Maybe one day, there will be no wells. Maybe one day, I will even be able to moderate. But I have accepted that that might never happen, and I am OK with that. I gained much, much more than I lost by giving up sugar.

TODO Your brain is a nutrition accountant food

Have you ever seen a fat giraffe? No, me neither. Not even in a zoo.

The fact that animals in the wild don’t get overweight is often chalked up to the fact that they get a lot of physical activity. But the same seems to apply to animals in zoos, in their miniature enclosures.

Yet maintaining a healthy body weight is so difficult for us humans. And for a lot of animals living with us too, like our cats and dogs.

Staying thin is hard, losing weight harder

Did you know that statistically speaking, someone trying to lose weight has chance of succeeding?

An ode to human gait movement

There are probably several magical ingredients in the soup of humanity that make us who we are; like big brains, opposable thumbs and a tendency to cooperate. And among these, we can definitely list our gait too.

The way we humans walk is unique in the natural world. Moving around on two legs freed up those opposable thumbs for other purposes, allowed us to throw things, carry things and use tools. It placed our heads higher up, allowing us to see further. It was an extremely successful adaptation that opened up an ocean of possibilities.

But, let’s be honest, it’s also an absolutely ridiculous way to stand. No engineer with a sane mind would even dream of designing something like this. Tall, lanky figures balancing on two small platforms. We are so used to seeing ourselves that we don’t realize how unlikely this configuration is. And it’s that much more magical that it works as perfectly as it does. The human gait definitely deserves an ode.

Learning to walk

Walking is a super basic skill for most animals. They are usually at it within minutes to days after being born or hatching. Not so us, humans. It takes about a year for a baby to crack the code and by then they are still very very far from running, jumping and standing on one leg. It takes several years for a child to master all the facets of human locomotion.

Working up to walking is a long process that starts way before the baby is ready to stand up. All the stages before that, from rolling, through lying on the belly propped up on bent arms, reaching, crawling and squatting, are important precursors to walking. They prepare the brain for the ultimate feat of using two feet to move around. They hone the basic movement patterns on which more complex movement is built, so that they become ingrained in our brains and bodies as automatic reactions. We learn about contra-lateral movement, about gravity, about stabilizing our core. We train the brain and we train the muscles.

Every cat walks the same, every humans walks their own way

The path to walking is ready in our brains from the moment we are born. Just like all animals, we have the reflexes and the instincts; walking is in our DNA and our bodies know how to get there. But unlike most animals, it’s a much more complicated process for humans that requires much more trial and error, testing, play and practice. There is really no need to teach a baby to walk, their biology will get them there. All they need is the right environmental inputs; which consist of a surface to move around on and people to interact with (and as little time spent in “containers” as possible).

Because gait is so much more complex for people than it is for animals, it can’t be instinctual to the same level. While a cat or a giraffe will learn to walk in record time, simply following their instincts, we need to learn. The instincts are guiding us, showing us when we are on the right path, but we still have to walk it ourselves. And that’s why – unlike cats that all walk alike – we don’t.

When I was about 11, I started getting near-sighted. It took a while before anyone realized I wasn’t seeing as well as I should, so I spent about a year looking at a blurry world. It was a bit tricky recognizing people from a distance. I just couldn’t make out their faces. But one thing I could see from far away was the way they were walking, and I learned to tell all my family and friends apart by their gait. By their pace, the rhythm, the bounce, how their heels would strike the ground and how they would lift off, how their knees moved. I didn’t learn it consciously, it just happened. And I never really stopped noticing.

People walk in such a huge variety of ways. The differences arise from learning under different circumstances, having slightly different bodies and different role models. They can be a result of injuries, small and big. It’s fascinating how gait is something that adapts to the environment, but also how we subconsciously copy the people around us.

Walking is magic

I mentioned earlier that no sane engineer would have designed us this way, but that doesn’t mean we are designed badly. It’s just that we are designed based on principles that aren’t commonplace in engineering. We are designed for mobility above else. We aren’t a tower, we are more like a pendulum – always in motion, moving closer and further to equilibrium. But a pendulum is not the perfect metaphor either. It captures the balancing and the constant oscillations about the equilibrium point, but a pendulum is a slave to gravity, which we are very much not. We play with gravity.

Did you know that you spend about 80% of your walking time standing on one foot? 80%! It’s a lot, isn’t it? That’s why balancing is such a crucial skill, you literally need it to walk. Do you think your center of gravity moves from left to right when walking, in order to be right above the standing foot? It is tempting to think so. That would be the most stable position. But it doesn’t. (Or at least, shouldn’t.) It moves side to side slightly, but not nearly as far as being above the standing foot during the stride. Just think about how people walk; their hips and torso are not traveling side to side much at all. Yet, we don’t keel over. That is because we have muscles that are holding us up, tensing in just the right places to make up for the pull of gravity.

We are not towers, and we are not pendulums. We are dynamic, living tensegrity structures.

Tensegrity (tensional integrity) is a term from architecture that describes structures built from two types of elements: hard rods that aren’t directly connected to each other, and ropes that are holding them together. It’s easier to understand from a picture.

A kids’ tensegrity toy. You know, start them early.

The hard rods are not compressible, while the ropes or rubber bands are providing tension that keeps them up, standing even when they look like they shouldn’t. I always felt like they looked a little organic, a little magical, a little ethereal. And that is what we are too. A bunch of hard rods (bones) connected with rubber bands (tendons, ligaments, fascia and muscles).

It is a beautiful system that gives us incredible mobility and balance, while having all the stability we need. That is why our center of gravity doesn’t have to be directly above the base of support (by which I mean the standing foot) when we are mid-step. The muscles on the outside of the thigh work like tensioned ropes and hold everything up against gravity.

There is even more to it. You probably don’t realize it, but you are using your tendons and muscles like springs to store some of the energy of your step, so that they can release it, when it’s their time to push you forward. We do it both when running and when walking, but the human gait is actually ridiculously efficient. We only use about a quarter of the energy that chimpanzees use for walking (whether they walk on two legs or four). We are pretty much made for it.

Be a human – walk

Walking is a full body exercise. To achieve that level of efficiency, to maintain balance and to be able to do it comfortably over a long time, much more of our body is involved than just the legs. The torso and the arms are doing a lot of work stabilizing and compensating for the rotation in the hips.

It shouldn’t be surprising that walking is good for us. It is an input that our bodies evolved with and rely on to maintain themselves. Walking is important for bone density, to help with digestion and blood flow to the whole body, to keep the pelvic floor healthy, the butt strong and the hamstrings functional.

I know everyone always recommends to “just walk”, or “at least walk” and we all think there is no point, because it doesn’t do that much. But it really does.

Walking is a wonderful form of movement; it’s healthy, practical, pleasant and almost always available. If you have the privilege to be able to walk, I encourage you to use it.

How I ran into real-life brain-hacking sugar-addictionpersonal-developmentmental-health

I have been struggling with sugar addiction for years. It took its toll on both my physical and mental health long before I even knew I had it and I have been fighting it ever since I recognized its ugly face. And just like it tends to be with addictions, it was a very tough battle, and I wasn’t always winning. I was ready to fight for the rest of my life, but now I think I might not have to. I think, carefully and hopefully, that I maybe, just maybe, might have won. How? Believe it or not, it was hypnosis.

What? Hypnosis?!

I wrote extensively about my sugar addiction before, so if you want to read more about the misery it brought me, just go ahead. This post will be about what liberated me.

I met Roger in a book club. (I really hope, Roger, that you don’t mind me talking about this on my blog that nobody reads.) The most wonderful book club, full of lovely people from all around the world, that I feel genuinely lucky to have met. Roger is one of them – a Scottish guy that just seems to radiate warmth, calm and wit. And as it happens, he runs a company selling hypnosis audio tracks. I remember when I found out about that a few months after joining the book club. “That’s not something you hear often!” I thought, and pretty much left it at that.

At one of the book club meetings we were discussing mental health. It was one of those moments when you get to see that everybody really does have their own secret struggle, no matter the image they present to the world. Anyway, it was after that meeting that Roger recommended hypnosis to the rest of us. I knew very little about hypnosis and I never would have thought about it on my own, but getting a recommendation from someone whose opinion I have come to value, was enough to get me to try.

Roger is one of the directors in a company called Uncommon Knowledge (I love the name!) and their Hypnosis Downloads platform has thousands of audio tracks that you download and listen to whenever you feel like it. Literally thousands of short 20-30 minute sessions about anything and everything you could think of. (And by the way, this is not an ad, I’m getting nothing for this. I just genuinely love their stuff.)

You wouldn’t give a cake to an itchy knee

I didn’t know where to start, but I knew about at least one big problem I had. The damn sugar. So I started looking for hypnosis tracks that could help with that. I found a few and tried a few, downloads with names like Sweet Tooth and Food Addiction Help. I did as was recommended and listened to them every day for a week. They were nice, calming, lovely to listen to and I agreed with every word. But I didn’t feel any different. I thought maybe I just needed to give it more time. Until I ran into the Stop Emotional Eating. It’s funny, because I already knew that one of the reasons I was turning to “treats” was emotions; boredom, angst, loneliness, exhaustion, stress,… But knowing didn’t help me to stop.

The first time I listened to Stop Emotional Eating felt like an emotional rollercoaster ride that ended with me disembarking into a new reality. I opened my eyes and wondered why on earth I ever tried to eat away my feelings. What an utterly stupid idea! As if that would ever work! It suddenly seemed completely silly and useless to eat an ice cream because I had a bad day (or a good one, for that matter). The hypnosis was full of deep insights and clever metaphors, and it reached a part of my mind no logic could ever penetrate to before. I still chuckle at the “You wouldn’t give a cake to an itchy knee” whenever I think about it. Very true, I definitely wouldn’t do that, but I spent decades doing its equivalent by putting a plaster made of chocolate over my feelings. No more though. No more.

Break the trance

Now, I was really feeling that my sugar struggles were over. And in some way they were! It’s been a half a year and I didn’t have a single binge in that time. What’s even more, I didn’t even want one, or get anywhere close. My emotions seemed to have detangled themselves from the food completely and permanently.

But. Oh yes, there is a but. I wasn’t binging anymore, and I wasn’t tortured by wanting something sweet more than anything, but kept nibbling at foods I knew would make me feel sick when nobody was looking. To be honest, I can’t explain it. I would have a little bite of a banana pancake I made for my kids. Or a piece of blood sausage. Or an apple. All pretty good foods, but ones that unfortunately don’t do me, personally, any good. I only did it when nobody was looking, while firmly telling myself that I don’t want to do that, that it isn’t worth it and that I don’t even want it that much. I still did it. Over and over again. Mind-boggling. Thankfully, it didn’t trigger the binges and I didn’t really feel that unsatiable need for candy anymore.

I regret to say that it took me months to realize this was something else than the emotional eating I was partaking in before. It needed a different mind-shift. And lo and behold, I found a hypnosis for that too! Wanna guess? It’s called Secret Eating. I only listened to that one once, about 6 weeks ago. And I haven’t been grazing on things anymore. At all. And the best thing is that it is effortless. No willpower needed. Looking back, the moments I stole from my kids food felt like some sort of trance. My brain saw the opportunity, nobody was looking, so it didn’t count. The reaction was almost automatic, no matter what I was trying to tell myself at that moment. The hypnosis broke the trance and put me back in control.

Everyday magic

I know the word hypnosis sounds spooky and for quite a while after starting with it I felt a bit silly asking my husband to keep the kids away from me for twenty minutes, because I was going to do a… hypnosis. Truth is, there is nothing spooky or weird to it. It is actually a lot like what people call guided meditations now. You sit/lie down, relax, and listen to someone talking. No loss of control involved at all. You are completely free to disagree with whatever they are saying, or stop the track at any moment. In a sense, the whole experience doesn’t feel special at all. No dangling watches, no whirlwinds in the eyes, no repressed memories, no waking up and realizing you were jumping around like a frog unbeknownst to you just seconds before. In that sense it’s almost boring.

But there is real magic to it too. I have told myself countless times before that eating something sweet would only make me feel sick and not actually calm the emotional storm I was drowning in. My thoughts never reached my feelings though. I have spent over 4 years trying to use willpower, tricks and hacks, trying to motivate myself, remind myself, rationalize and my progress was glacial at best. One single hypnosis session solving it all? That is a miracle.

Doesn’t matter how you got there

What I really like about hypnosis, or at least the hypnosis from Hypnosis Downloads / Uncommon Knowledge, is that it is always about the solution. There is rarely digging into what kind of trauma brought you were you are, because it doesn’t really matter. The real question is how you get out.

I remember doing a “guided meditation” several years ago, which was all about meeting your demons and transforming them. It was a very cool experience, fairy-tale like and full of surprises. I met my sugar demon, a pink blobby creature with a funny hat. I talked to it, and could clearly see that what it was all about was hunger not for food, but for safety, connection, love and other things candy couldn’t give. I got to see it for the coping mechanism it was. Then I witnessed it transform from the monster into a hurt little me.

I don’t know, maybe for some people that meditation would have been enough to leave the addiction behind. For me, it wasn’t. It illuminated where I was and how I got there, but it also revealed to me what my addiction was doing for me, why I needed it. I didn’t know how else to take care of those needs.

The Emotional Eating hypnosis was so much more pragmatic than the esoteric experience of meeting my demons. “You wouldn’t give a cake to an itchy knee,” is exactly what I needed to hear though. It didn’t concern itself with why I was eating my feelings, which feelings, or where and when it might have started. What mattered was that it was an absolutely useless coping mechanism.

The hypnosis also offered a solution. A solution so painfully obvious, that it shouldn’t need to be said, but for me, it was. I was told that I should take care of my emotional needs in the appropriate way, and only use food for hunger. Sounds vague, but in the days after I first listened to the track, I suddenly started becoming aware of my emotional needs that I didn’t notice before. Now they were right there in front of me clear as day, and it felt ridiculous to shove a cookie in my face in a futile attempt to make them go away.

A key to the mind

Ever since my first positive experiences with hypnosis, I have been turning to it almost daily, trying out various tracks.

I have been working on getting better at taking breaks, learning to compartmentalise my work and free time, let go of caring what others think about me, even getting better at creative writing! (I actually started writing a novel! Doing creative writing for the first time since high school! How fun is that?!)

Whenever I run into a problem in my life, a situation where I would wish I would feel and react differently, I look for the right track. It usually takes trying a few different, related ones, sort of like testing a bunch of keys on a stubborn lock. Sooner or later, one of them fits. Sometimes the change is slow and sneaky, sometimes it’s like a lightning strike, but it is always, always, life-changing.

If you find any of this intriguing, and you are wondering how hypnosis actually works, go and read about it from the experts. Here is a great article by Mark Tyrrell – the other founder behind Uncommon Knowledge – about what hypnosis is.

What is the natural human diet? food

Humans are probably the only creatures in the world that are confused about what they should be eating.

Pandas eat bambus, koalas eucalyptys. Cows eat grasses and wolves eat meat. Most animals have a very limited menu. Yet humans are trying to eat “a varied diet”, to “eat the rainbow”. Something that wouldn’t make sense for most animals on Earth.

What are we meant to eat? What is the natural human diet?

Team of scientist from Israel and Portugal tried to answer just that in a study about the trophic level of our ancestors (in other words, where on the food chain our ancestors were).

Human omnivore – but what else?

There is not much doubt about humans being omnivores. We can digest and use both plant and animal foods and the authors of the study are pointing to a number of archeological findings that show us eating both for a long time.

The real question though is, how much of what did we eat?

Most mammals are, just like us, omnivores, but most of these omnivores have strong preferences for either animal, or plant food. Even chimpanzees and wolves are in reality omnivores, altough wolves only eat plants if they have to, and chimpanzees indulge in animal foods only occasionally.

Where do humans fall on this scale?

The true paleo diet

How did our hunter-gatherer ancestors eat in the time between 2.5 million years ago and 12 000 years ago? If we can answer this question, we will get a much better idea of what our own bodies expect as fuel. The agricultural revolution started for only about 10 000 years ago, while our species – Homo – has existed in much the same form for more than 2 million years. That means that if Homo had emerged one hour ago, we would still have been hunters and gatherers just 20 seconds ago. The agriculture is still very much news for our genetics and our bodies.

So what did our ancestors hunt and gather?

Studied from every side

In this study, the authors looked at a great number of factors, parts of our physiology and genetics, archeological and paleontological finding, and etnographic evidence. They gathered almost 30 different clues showing how our ancestors were eating and how their menus evolved through the ages.

Man – the fat hunter

In short, their conclusion was that since the birth of our genus Homo more than 2 million years ago, until the very recent times of about 15 000 years ago, we have mostly been eating the flesh of big mammals. Plants were a small addition to our diet – most likely in the times when the hunt was not successful.

And not only we were mostly carnivorous, we actually ate as much fat as we could get our hands on. The main author of the study, Miki Ben-Dor called us “fat hunters”. We know this, because the archeological and paleontological findings are showing that we were always going for the most fatty indviduals in the herd, even though they were more difficult to catch than the old and the sick ones.

Here I briefly summarize some of the other arguments showing we were predators of big animals:

• high energy demands – humans require a lot of energy, and it would not have been possible for us to get all the calories we needed from plants (wild paleolitic plants – modern produce bread for high sugar and starch yield would get us closer)
• fat reserves – unlike other primates, we can store a considerable amount of fat on our bodies – a necessity for when hunting wasn’t successful
• genetic adaptation to fat digestion – some of our genes that we share with chimpanzees have been turned off, to allow us to digest large amounts of fat
• low stomach pH – our stomachs are more acidic than those of most carnivores; we have the pH of carion-eaters
• intestinal system – our intestines resemble carnivores more than chimpanzees – we have a long small intestine and short large intestine
• insulin resistance – our response to insulin is less pronounced, more like that of carnivores
• less chewing – compared to our very, very old ancestors who were still more similar to apes, already the paleolitic humans had a much less developed chewing muscles, which suggests they were eating soft foods – meat and fat
• a body adapted for hunt – since we evolved from apes, we didn’t have a chance to inherit huge teeth or claws; instead, we got shoulders and arms that could learn to throw spears, and legs and stamina allowing for persistance hunting
• a lot of small fat cells - surprisingly, the size of the fat cells of an organism correlates very closely with their carnivory level; herbivores store their fat in a few big cells, while carnivores in many small ones – ours are one of the smallest in the animal world
• vitamins – compared calorie for calorie, animal foods are much denser in 8 out of 10 vitamins that humans require, in most cases several times more dense – we would have had trouble getting all we needed from plants
• social behaviour – food sharing, labour distribution and sharing the responsibility of raising the young are more common for predators
• age at weaning – we differ a lot from other primates when it comes to the age of weaning – other primates wean much, much later (at 4.5-8 years) than even the modern hunter-gatherer societies (around 2.5 years) – it’s common for carnivores to wean earlier than herbivores
• longevity – we live much longer than our ape relatives – maybe because the experience of elders was much more important for hunting and this evolutionary pressure favoured longevity
• lack of dental cavities – for most of our history, cavities were very rare, they started appearing as we relied on plant foods more and more
• analysis of radioactive istotopes – the analysis of paleontological finding suggests that we were at the trophic level of wolves up to about 15 000 years ago.

The world of our ancestors was different

The authors of the study also talk a lot about how we can’t simply look at the diets of modern hunter-gatherers and believe our ancestors ate the same. The world has changed since, and we don’t see the herds of woolly mammoths, mastodonts, nor bisons anymore. There are fewer species of big mammals on Earth now and even those remaining, like elephants, have low population numbers.

Modern hunters and gatherers have no chance to live the way they could have a million years ago. Maybe that is one of the reasons we are so confused about what we should eat. Our natural food source might not exist anymore. But thank gods we learned how to keep cows and make bacon.

More plants on the plate

How much plant matter we were eating was changing over the millenia. Eating meat, however, was what allowed us to develop our big brains and differentiate ourselves from our closest ape relatives. For a human to become a human, we had to be carnivores.

Plants started to take a bigger and bigger part in our diet about 15 000 years ago, so after about 2 million years of almost pure carnivory. This change was happening at a time when big mammals began to go extinct and this forced us to change our diets. Scientists can follow this change by looking at stable isotope analyses, appearance of tools made to process plants and more and more dental caries in the teeth of our ancestors at that time. Apart from cavities, this change also brought on a decrease in our average height and in the size of our brains, and that is where we still are today. (I mean, we are shorter and with smaller heads than our genetically pretty much identical ancestors from 15 000 years ago. Crazy, isn’t it?)

My 5 reasons for blogging sharingabout-meknowledge-workpersonal-developmentcreativitywriting

I believe this is my fifth(?!) attempt at blogging in the last 12 years. Some of those blogs were very short-lived, some survived for longer. None of the previous four are out there anymore. I had my reasons for starting each of the blogs, but it wasn’t something I thought about much, not something that was clear in my mind. As I was starting yet another blog (this one), I decided to be a bit more mindful and conscious of what my goals actually are. Because if you don’t know where you want to go, every step you take is in the wrong direction.

So here are my 5 reasons for blogging!

1. Sorting out my thoughts

I think a bunch. This is not a brag, by the way, I am not saying that I think more than others, and I am definitely not so certain this is good for me. But the fact is that I think enough for it to often get crowded in my head. For my sanity, it’s pretty useful to get those things out.

David McCullough said “Writing is thinking,” and I very much agree with that sentiment. Writing helps me sort out my thoughts. Somehow, it’s the best way for me to even find out what exactly I am thinking. In a way, I never quite know what will come out of it when I start, but that is one of its best benefits to me. It allows me to clarify my thoughts to myself.

While thinking itself can be passive, writing, on the other hand, is active. It gives the thoughts a concrete form, turns them from possibilities into things. Even if it’s “only” words, those words are an act of creation.

2. Learning by explaining

Related to the previous point, explaining things, whether in writing or by talking through them, is one of the best ways to make sure that you understand things. Trying to put your knowledge into a digestible format that can be understood by others is one of the best ways to see where the gaps are, and it creates an incentive to fill them.

Richard Feynman was a big proponent of learning by trying to explain things to others It helped him finding out where he lacked knowledge, then he looked up what was missing, learned more and then did it all again. And again, and again. The Feynman technique (that is really what it is called) is just one of many within the “learning by teaching” framework. Even explaining things to an inanimate object improves learning, hence the existence of the “plastic platypus learning” technique (yes, that is its real name). (Now I kind of want a plastic platypus.)

Note

One might argue, that these first two points only require writing, and maybe a plastic platypus, but can be done without plastering the writing all over the internet. And that is true. There are countless ways to achieve these goals, but I like blogging, because knowing others might read what I write forces me to write it with much more care than I would just for myself or for a plastic platypus, however cute.

3. Getting better at writing

Does every teenager want to become a writer? I used to think so, then I asked a few people, and found out they don’t. But I did. I also thought it was one of those silly dreams that you better not think too much about. How dumb is that?! Well, I finally got old enough and wise enough to realise that I might never be a writer, but there is nothing stopping me from being a writer. Nothing other than myself. Because making a living out of it is not at all required to being a writer.

As it is with any skill, be it pottery or skiing or coding or decorating cakes to look like real objects, you get better at it by doing it. Quantity leads to quality.

There is a story about a photography class in which the teacher told half of the students that they will be graded solely on the quantity of the photographs they take, while the other group was supposed to only take one single picture – a culmination of their knowledge, planning and preparations. At the end of the course, all the best photographs came from the “quantity” group. Absolutely all of them.

I read this story first in Atomic Habits by James Clear, then again in Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon, but this time with pottery instead of photography. Austin Kleon investigated why there are two versions of this story, and found out it really did happen in a photography class, but was first told by David Bayles and Ted Orland in the book Art & Fear, and they felt it fit better when changed to pottery.

I feel like the story works perfectly well with both photography and pottery, and the two versions of it illustrate how universal it actually is. Quantity doesn’t trump quality, but it does lead to it.

And so my goal is to practice my writing.

4. Gathering memories

This is a point I haven’t reached yet. I have deleted my old blogs, although I do keep some of my favourite old articles in my own archives. But I am looking forward to one day browsing through things I wrote 5, 10 or 20 years ago. Reminding me how my life was back then, what I was thinking about. Some of it will definitely feel outdated, maybe even cringe, but I think it will be fun.

5. Connecting with other people

Lastly, I want to publish my writings so that others can read them.

I often doubt whether my writing makes any sense, whether anyone wants to read it at all, whether I should just give up and climb under a rock. But life is too short and too weird for (self-)censorship, so I am doing my best to work around those doubts.

Truth is, I want people to read what I write. I want to know what they think. I want to test my ideas by showing them to others. I want to share the things I discovered, that make my life better or bring me join. I hope I might help someone, or inspire them, even if I only inspire them to prove me wrong on something.

Now that I am thinking about it, my blogging already turned a distant acquaintance into one of my now best friends. (Shoutout to Mariš!) I don’t see where and how we would have gotten to know each other if I didn’t step out of my comfort zone and started writing. So I guess it is working.

What I didn’t mention

An attentive reader might notice that I didn’t talk about some things that many people nowadays aim for when starting a blog. There are no mentions of traffic, marketing, or growth. In short, no money.

Let’s not sand-paper our eyes, who wouldn’t want some extra money, right? (Btw, sand-papering your eyes is a great Slovak expression for denying the obvious. I am trying to introduce it to English. Is it working?) Anyway, yes, money.

Truth is, the last blog before this one was my attempt to start an online business. And I hated it. It was fun at first, then it wasn’t. I wrote a whole blog post about how I failed at starting an online business, and why I’m happy with that. I still think it’s super neat that people can make money online, and I definitely believe that creators should be paid for what they do and provide. But the way I was trying to go about it just didn’t feel right for me.

Thankfully, I don’t need to make money from blogging, and I have a bunch of other wonderful reason for pursuing it. I am very happy to just blog for fun, as a hobby, about whatever I want. Simply to enrich my life, and maybe, if I am lucky, someone else’s too.

My year with a Zettelkasten knowledge-workwriting

Update: Here you can read how I abandoned Zettelkasten about a year after I wrote this post

It is almost a tradition for people who get hooked on Zettelkasten to write a blog post about it. After using it for a year, I think it is about time I followed this tradition and added my experiences.

I have always been a note-taker. I feel a strong urge to capture thoughts, events and ideas that are important to me. Over the years, I have been using a bunch of apps, paper notebooks, different kinds of files and folder systems to try to keep some order in my notes. No matter how hard I tried though, it always ended up being a mess, sooner or later. I think I sort of accepted that as an inevitable part of life. That notes were temporary – only good for helping me acquire the knowledge, but useless for long term storage. Now all of that changed with Zettelkasten.

What is a Zettelkasten

There are much better explanations of what a Zettelkasten is and how it works than I could put together here. One of the very best ones is Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method on zettelkasten.de, so if you want a proper in depth introduction, head over there. (zettelkasten.de is hands-down the best resource about all thinks Zettelkasten and they have a great forum too.)

In short, a Zettelkasten is a way of note-taking based on creating a network of interconnect thoughts/notes. It can be done both physically, the old-school way with a filing cabinet full of paper slips (Zettelkasten is German for “slip box”), or digitally with the many note-taking apps and software solutions available. The only things necessary are a way of uniquely identifying and finding each note and a way to implement bidirectional links.

Using index cards for note-taking used to be a pretty common thing. However, what most people mean when they talk about a Zettelkasten nowadays is a bit more specific.

Modern Zettelkästen (that is plural for Zettelkasten), are inspired by the work of Niklas Luhmann, a 20th century German sociologist who built a Zettelkasten of about 90,000 cards and used it to help him write over 50 books and 550 articles. He also wrote a book about his practice, called Communicating with Slip Boxes.

Sönke Ahrens brought new attention to the Zettelkasten method in his book How to Take Smart Notes, where he explains what a Zettelkasten is and how to use it.

The basic principles of a Zettelkasten

What makes a bunch of notes into a Zettelkasten, is 3 basic principles.

1. Atomic notes.

   Each note should contain one piece of knowledge only. Now, personally, I find this principle to be the most difficult to follow, because I am often not sure what counts as “one piece of knowledge”, although I am getting better at it with practice. There is usually a sweet spot for how granular the notes can be and thanks to the flexibility of digital tools, it’s not that difficult to split up notes that have grown a bit too much. The note atomicity is important to facilitate the second principle, which is:

2. Links between notes.

   You make links between notes by referencing them. It’s sort of like a wiki, but with atomic notes. This way, it is possible to link to one note from many other notes, making connections between loads of different ideas.

3. Writing with own words.

   The last principle is about writing the notes with your own words rather than copying straight from the source. This forces you to process the thoughts, and to make them your own. It is also important to write the notes “properly”, so they can work on their own. You need to have the audience in mind, which in this case is your future self that has forgotten everything about this idea.

A system meant to grow

My problem with notes has always been that at some point they become unmanageable. Truth is, I didn’t have much of a system at all. I tried to organise them, of course. Folders within folders of difficult to navigate hierarchies always inevitably became a mess where finding whatever I was looking for was almost impossible.

For me, notes were mostly a learning aid, I used them to prepare for exams and finish projects, but once that was over, they would lie forgotton. Whenever I would try to get back to them months or years later, needing to refresh some of that knowledge, I found them too telegraphic, not giving enough context and explanations, lacking, disorganized and hard to navigate. I would usually toss them at that point, disappointed over the waste of time and effort that went into taking them.

When I first heard about Zettelkasten last January, I was intrigued. Now, a year and almost 500 notes later, I can say it works.

Instead of trying to organise notes hierarchically into hard-to-navigate folders, all of my notes are in a single folder. Instead of trying to write notes as comprehensive as possible, each note is dedicated to one thought – one idea, that I try to capture as best I can in the title.

It is easy to make a new note, because I don’t have to immediately think about where to file it. It simply goes into The Folder. It is equally easy to find it later by a simple keyword search of the files.

My previous methods to organise notes were rigid, top-down approaches trying to fit things into a predetermined structure. The moment something unexpected showed up, the structure had nowhere to grow, the only thing I could do was tear it down, redesign the structure, and start again.

A Zettelkasten, on the other hand, only gets better with more and more notes. There is no predetermined structure, no hierarchy, all the notes are on an equal footing, as are all the ideas and topics. The structure emerges on its own from the notes themselves. If we really are learning, what we learn is bound to surprise us. Trying to define a structure for our note collection beforehand is like trying to come up with a conclusion before we did the research. That is at best inconvenient and at worst deeply unscientific. A Zettelkasten allows us to capture all that is relevant to a topic, not only what fits the predetermined narrative.

A Zettelkasten grows organically, bottom up.

A place to think

As I already talked about in a blog post about my reasons for blogging, David McCullough said “Writing is thinking,” and I very much agree. Putting words to paper (or even just saying them) forces us to give the thoughts and ideas actual form, taking them from the level of abstract possibilities into reality. Sometimes I feel like I need to write to even find out what exactly I am thinking.

A Zettelkasten is a perfect companion where a lot of this writing/thinking can happen. It demands that I formulate my thoughts clearly, trying to extract the atomic ideas from whatever I am thinking and express them fully in my own words.

The magic of Zettelkasten is in the links though. Making sure that a new note gets integrated into the network means I have to think about it in context, look at related ideas, write about the connections between them and revisit old notes. It allows my present me to interact with what my old me has been thinking and writing.

A lot of the thinking happens in the so-called structure notes (or map-of-content notes) where we can bring together a number of ideas and connect them into something new, linking to the individual notes. These notes allow us to take a step back, look at the bigger picture and integrate ideas rather than breaking them down.

Zettelkasten is a real Memex

Memex – short for memory expander – is a fictional machine from a 1945-book “As we may think” by Vannevar Bush (which I haven’t read, actually, just heard about). Memex organises a user’s thoughts and semi-automatically brings related ideas together. A number of bloggers were inspired by memex, among them one of my favourites – Cory Doctorow (his blog post about The Memex Method). Memex might be fictional, but Zettelkasten does what memex sets out to do. It is a way to organise one’s thoughts and provide a framework for connecting them.

The godfather of Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann, talked about his Zettelkasten more as a writing partner than a mere tool. One would almost get the impression that his Zettelkasten was alive.

At this point, my Zettelkasten has almost 500 notes, and I have been using it almost daily for a year. Despite that, I am definitely still just a beginner Zettelnaut (a wonderful word that, as far as I know, comes from Will at the zettelkasten.de forum). My Zettelkasten is very much not alive, but I can imagine that when it grows to several tens of thousands of notes, it would hold more than my brain is capable of, and then it would surely have some surprises for me. I am already looking forward to that.

Making a mosaic

For me, reading books has become so much more intentional. That is where the majority of my Zettelkasten inputs come from. I read, and I take notes and I connect the new ideas to the old ideas, finding unexpected connections that deepen my understanding and refine my thinking. And it’s fun (I think we have already established that I have weird ideas about fun).

I find Zettelkasten to be freeing, because it lowers the threshold for taking notes. I don’t have to think about where to put the note, or whether it is important enough to write down. Time will tell. That is one of the most exciting things about a Zettelkasten – seeing where my interests are. It is like watching topics crystalize out of the dense soup of ideas, or grow like mushrooms from a rich mycelium, or like images showing themselves when you take a step back from painstakingly building a mosaic.

Who is it for

I do enjoy working with my Zettelkasten and find it useful and enriching. But I don’t think everyone needs one. Zettelkasten requires a fair amount of work, and it is not a magic pill that will output great new ideas on its own. In the end, it really is just a way of taking and organising notes.

I think it can be a great tool/companion for anyone doing research, be it scientists, non-fiction writers, journalists, students or bloggers.

Update: Here you can read how I abandoned Zettelkasten about a year after I wrote this post

My Zettelkasten set up

This last part is very much only for people who want to start a Zettelkasten and are curious about other people’s set up. I know I was, when I was starting out. The most important thing I can say though, is that you do you.

When setting up my Zettelkasten, I followed these principles:

1. Principle precedes procedure.

   I wanted to make sure that how I do things and what I do isn’t decided by the tools I have available, but rather by the principles I want to implement (such as the Zettelkasten principles). You wouldn’t first get a hammer and then go around looking for things to smash with it.

2. Prioritise longevity

   The idea of having one Zettelkasten for the rest of my life really appealed to me (I am like a dragon, I like to sit on treasures). Trying to increase the chances that my notes will survive half a century is not completely trivial though.

3. Keep it simple

   A principle on its own, but also a consequence of the previous two. Keeping it simple to make it as easy as possible to take notes, maintain the system, move it to a different software and so on.

I started my Zettelkasten in Obsidian and within two months moved it to org-roam in Emacs. I still think Obsidian is a great piece of software and there was nothing wrong with it. The reason I switched was that I wanted something non-proprietary and open source, and something that might survive for a while. Emacs gets a lot of extra points for the longevity.

Another reason I left Obsidian behind is the amount of cool plugins it provides. While they were very tempting, I ultimately didn’t want to be adding unnecessary complexity to something that can (and should) be fairly simple.

When I switched to Emacs, I was an Emacs newbie and the learning curve was steep and fun (as I said, I have a weird idea of fun), but also absolutely maddening and at one point I was even wondering whether everyone who claims to like Emacs is just a victim of Stockholm Syndrome and Sunken cost fallacy. Anyway, I got over the hump, set things up the way I like them, and haven’t tinkered ever since.

Would I recommend Emacs to others? Well, if you have some coding basics, love to tinker, are stubborn as hell and like to disappear into rabbit holes, then maybe. If not, there are a lot of nice Zettelkasten software solutions that work with plain text files, so if you are worried about longevity, you know that you can still open your notes if your software disappears. One thing to remember though might be to try not to rely on super fancy features that you might not find elsewhere.

To reduce friction of creating notes and of possible future software transfers, I am trying to keep my metadata to a minimum.

I use a datetime stamp in the title of the note files, which tells me when the file was created. All my zettels are in one folder only, but I have two additional folders, that are adjecent to the Zettelkasten, but not quite part of it. I call these inputs and outputs.

Inputs might be called “fleeting notes” by some. In my workflow, these are the files where I take notes from whatever I am reading or watching. I will use one file per book, for example, so these notes are not atomic in any way. Then I go through them and extract the ideas that I want to make proper zettels out of.

My Zettelkasten is for me only, and would probably provide little value for anyone else. Whenever I want to make something for others, I put the draft into the “outputs” folder, where I can still link to the proper notes, but hold these compositions separate.

I am not much of a tagger, and other than #MOC (for map of content), I don’t use other tags. Yet. Instead, I rely on links and structure notes (MOCs) to help me find things and orient myself. Categories provide only weak associations and things like tags don’t scale very well. Sooner or later, you will find yourself with too many tags and too many notes per tag. But we will see, maybe there will come a time when I will decide to add tags to my zettels.

I use pretty much a standard org-roam setup for my Zettelkasten, with quite a few elements inspired by the org-roam setup of Jethro Kuan who made org-roam.

I use Zotero to keep my references and Better BibTex to export them into a single .bib library. To then insert the references into the notes, I use citar and citar-org-roam packages.

I use capture templates for zettel, input, output and reference notes. A reference note is an input note that is linked to a bibliography entry. The capture template will put the note into the correct folder, create a filename with a datetime tag and put the title into the note. The filename also includes -I- for input notes and -O- for output notes and the capture template adds an “input” or “output” tag to input and output notes.

;; ORG-ROAM
(use-package org-roam
	     :ensure t
	     :custom
	     ;; setting up the directory
	     (org-roam-directory "~/Documents/TheNotes/")
	     (org-roam-completion-everywhere t)
	     ;; org roam capture templates
	     (org-roam-capture-templates
	      '(("d" "default" plain
		 "%?"
		 :target
		 (file+head "%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-${slug}.org" "#+title: ${title}")
		:unnarrowed t)
		("z" "zettel" plain
		"%?"
		:target
		(file+head "zettel/%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-${slug}.org" "#+title: ${title}")
		:unnarrowed t)
	       	("o" "output" plain
		"%?"
		:target
		(file+head "output/%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-O-${slug}.org" "#+title: O-${title}\n#+filetags: :output")
		:unnarrowed t)
  	        ("i" "input" plain
		"%?"
		:target
		(file+head "input/%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-I-${slug}.org" "#+title: I-${title}\n#+filetags: :input")
		:unnarrowed t)
	        ("r" "reference" plain
		"%?"
		:target
		(file+head "%(expand-file-name \"input\" org-roam-directory)/%<%Y%m%d%H%M%S>-I-${citekey}.org" "#+title: I-${citekey}\n#+filetags: :input")
		:unnarrowed t)
		)
	      )
	     :bind (("C-c n l" . org-roam-buffer-toggle)
		    ("C-c n f" . org-roam-node-find)
		    ("C-c n i" . org-roam-node-insert)
		    ("C-M-i" . completion-at-point))
	     :config
	     (setq org-roam-node-display-template (concat "${title:*} " (propertize "${tags:20}" 'face 'org-tag)))
	     (org-roam-db-autosync-mode t)

	     )

This part modifies the display template to show the tags associated with the note.

(setq org-roam-node-display-template (concat "${title:*} " (propertize "${tags:20}" 'face 'org-tag)))

I use a completely standard setup for citar:

;; CITAR
(use-package citar
  :ensure t
  :custom
  (setq org-cite-global-bibliography "/home/nori/Documents/TheNotes/biblio.bib")
  (citar-bibliography "/home/nori/Documents/TheNotes/biblio.bib")
  (org-cite-insert-processor 'citar)
  (org-cite-follow-processor 'citar)
  (org-cite-activate-processor 'citar)
  :bind
  (:map org-mode-map :package org ("C-c b" . #'org-cite-insert))
  )

Citar org roam allows me to use my roam capture template to make a note from a reference. When I run citar-open, I can choose a bibliography entry for which I want to create an org-roam note following my ‘reference’ capture template.

;; CITAR-ORG-ROAM
(use-package citar-org-roam
  :ensure t
  :after citar org-roam
  :no-require t
  :config
  (setq citar-org-roam-capture-template-key "r")
  )

Happiness isn’t found on social media mental-healthpersonal-developmenttechnology

We live in the age of social media. So much of our interactions, information sharing, news acquiring and entertainment happens there. Yet many of us have a somewhat (or very) mixed relationship with them. And rightly so. When you think about it, it is the strangest thing. We go there to see things we (mostly) didn’t choose ourselves, served to us in small bite-sized bits: – an interesting fact! – a sad story :( – an update from a “friend” you haven’t talked to in 12 years – a funny video! – a scary thing you should look out for!!! – Before you get the time to digest one, you move onto the next. Over and over again. Scroll, scroll, scroll. There are so many good things social media have given us, and I love them for that. But today, I am once again choosing to take a break from them, because of all the bad things they do to my brain.

All the world’s woes

Admittedly, I am not very good at knowing myself. It often takes me 24+ hours to figure out how I feel about things. Today, I had a bad day. I have been feeling exhausted, fragile, weepy, upset by the smallest things. Every little disruption to my day would leave me feeling off-balance for way longer than it warranted. Why? Well, that’s the most annoying thing. I had no idea. No idea whatsoever. I knew something was wrong, but didn’t know what. (In such cases I usually assume it’s me that is wrong, which, understandably, doesn’t help much.) It took the better part of the day, but eventually, I figured it out (with ample help from people who love me). As usual, it’s not just one thing, but today, the biggest one was over-saturation of difficult things I have been watching and reading.

Never in the history of humanity did people have the ability to know so much, to such detail, about events happening on the other side of the world. And, sadly, it’s so much more common to hear about the terrible events happening on the other side of the world, rather than the happy ones. I understand that. These things are important. Raising awareness is important. But let’s be honest, what can I do about these events that are so much bigger than me? What can I do about wars and genocides, about discrimination, about corporate greed, about large-scale pollution, about species loss, about babies dying, about suffering, about scientific fraud, about famines, about about about?

Don’t get me wrong, there are always things that can be done, and there are a lot of people doing them, but no one person could take on all of it. So the thing I end up doing about these terrible things most of the time is, simply, feel sad and helpless. And that doesn’t help anyone at all.

When do I get the time to process this?

In a true Nori-fashion, I haven’t been quite aware how much these things were affecting me. When I would get a few minutes of time when nothing was happening, or I felt like I needed a distraction, I would reach for the little box and scroll and scroll and scroll. And at some point I would realise that in the background, I had a thought. Or maybe a feeling. I would be thinking: oh, that was interesting, should learn more about that; but I didn’t remember what that was. Or I would feel a bit sad or upset, sort of in the back of my mind; but I didn’t remember what about. And more often than not, I would think and feel several things at the same times. Sometimes I would even scroll back, trying to identify what it was that stayed with me. There was rarely only one thing.

There is so much good content on social media, with so many people putting in a lot of effort to deliver an important, concise message, or to provide entertainment for a moment. They know they don’t have more than a few seconds of our attention, because we are about to scroll on and never see their post again, so they pack it as full as it gets. Every bite now carries the calories of a three-course dinner. That is the actual design of these platforms. A new topic every second or two.

I don’t know how about you, but I am often left with a mix of impressions, ideas, thoughts and feelings, fighting for my attention, fuzzy in my mind, yet following me around relentlessly.

What is more, most of us go to these platforms in the small bits of time when what we are seeking is a mental break. A little breathing room for the mind. If I am honest with myself, I definitely do not come back from them with a clear head.

Why am I scrolling?

Why am I there though?

I think the answer, as usual, is complex. I genuinely like and appreciate a lot of the content I run into, both from people I chose to follow and from people that the algorithm decided to show me. And that is the main reason I am there. But of course, there is a lot of content that I get served that I do not care for much, or even actively dislike. Stumbling upon a good post feels like winning (a small) lottery. And “good”, in this case, doesn’t just mean something that fits my interests. It means something that resonates with me right now, that I feel in the mood for right now.

It’s definitely a little dopamine hit.

But there, right behind the edge, could lie another gem. Something that might be even more interesting/entertaining/surprising/funny/eye-opening. Maybe, maybe not. The pull of it is magnetic, and sometimes I scroll before I had the time to finish reading the previous “gem”.

How naive of me, though, to not consider that all of these, the hits and the misses both, affect me? That maybe I shouldn’t be exposing my brain to that much unrelated, varied information whenever I get an idle minute? And for what? Finding something interesting or funny or cool or useful and not even giving myself the time to process it properly? For spending my time and energy on things I will hardly remember five minutes later?

Who/what decides what we see?

In the old days of social media, you knew what you would get. Mostly. You followed people because you wanted to see what they were posting, and expected to be shown exactly that. Nowadays, that is usually not the case. Most platforms offer a mix of things you did ask for, along with a bunch of posts you didn’t ask for. Usually ads. Or sponsored content, as they call it nowadays.

Everyone nowadays knows that the end users of social media aren’t their customers. The true customers are the advertisers, we – you and me – the end users – are the product that the platforms are serving them.

But it actually went even further. While advertisers might be the paying customers, that doesn’t mean they are being treated well. Quite the opposite, they are being asked to pay more and more just to have their content delivered to people who have already signed up to see that content. The goal is not to make a good product for the end users, not even for the advertisers, it’s to maximise the profit for the shareholders.

How are they getting away with it? They got us all trapped. Our friends are there, the people we want to hear from are there, our pictures and memories are there, and in the case of the advertisers, their customers are there. And the platforms ride the thin line of serving us as many ads as possible without actually driving us away; and extracting as much money from the advertisers and publishers as possible without them giving up on the platform. Cory Doctorow calls this process “enshittification” (what a wonderful name, isn’t it?) and talks about it, and more, both on his blog pluralistic.net and in his book The Internet Con. Very much recommended.

Nobody likes ads, but that is the main way that social media platforms make money. In order to keep us there, and show us those ads, they need to offer something engaging. The trouble is, engaging doesn’t necessarily mean positive, or true for that matter.

As humans, we are wired to notice things that are wrong, dangerous, or scary. It makes sense from a survival point of view – to pay extra attention to whatever could harm us. But in many cases nowadays the danger is very far away, highly unlikely, exaggerated, or even imaginary. We still get upset and angry about it just the same. And it gets our attention, our reactions, comments and likes and replies. It makes us look, which is what the platforms want, but it doesn’t make us happy.

Social media have been facilitating polarisation in societies all over the world. I am not going to go as far as to say that they did it themselves, because I don’t think they ever thought about that. I think it’s a side effect of algorithms that are trying to maximise time spent on the platform. Nothing draws people more in than feeling like a part of a group and having a them to blame all the problems on.

Social media are echo chambers, where we get to hear what we want to hear, often the things that make our blood boil and enrage us. Because we are on the right side, and they are obviously not. The truth is, there is no they. There are just people.

Being intentional

Now that I (finally) realised that these small, innocent-looking bits of the world are using up a lot of my mental space and affecting how I feel, I decide to be much more intentional about them.

I think it’s time that, when I get a moment of time I feel the need to fill out, I might as well fill it out with something I actively decided to engage with. Something that is made to keep my attention for more than a quick glance. Or maybe, just maybe, spend some time with my own thoughts. An actual moment to clear my mind.

I am not quitting social media. There is too much there that I value for me to quit. But I do not need to engage with them multiple times a day. Not even every day, really. Probably not even every week. Social media are great for finding interesting things, but real learning and understanding requires a bit more time, and a bit more attention. And entertainment deserves that kind of space too! I will try to prioritise longer form writings and videos. There are plenty amazing books, audiobooks, long videos, comprehensive blog posts and podcasts that cover all the topics under the sun.

And I have recently even rediscovered RSS feeds! They still exist! I have one too, BTW. Just saying. Or you can sign up for the newsletter below.

I think it’s time we started to protect our attention and our mental energy, whether it is getting drained by social media or anything else.

What can you do for nature? nature

As a civilisation, we seem to be painfully aware of all the shortcomings in our contact with nature. Stories about all we have destroyed, and where we have failed, permeate our culture. Truth is, we don’t even believe anymore that we could do any good. Most of us feel like the best thing we could do for nature, is to leave it alone. But that kind of thinking is wrong. And dangerous.

How can we do good, if we can’t even imagine it?

If I asked you how humans are affecting the nature, I suspect you would tell me about all the bad things we are doing. About the pollution, the deforestation, about the insecticides and herbicides, about microplastics, and mining, and species loss. And you would, of course, be right.

But is that all of it? Is destruction all we are capable of?

Most of us actually do think so. Growing up in our culture, we absorb the image of pristine nature and of the horrible effect we, the humanity, have on it. We talk about nature and wilderness as something pure and good – and completely separate from us. We think the best we can do is to leave it alone.

If we can’t even imagine that our interactions with the rest of the natural world could be beneficial for it, how can we hope to actually do anything positive?

How are we supposed to find a way to live on this planet in peace and harmony with the rest of the life on it, if we assume from the get-go that we are only capable of doing harm? How are we supposed to be looking for solutions, if we don’t actually believe there are any?

I was thinking about all this as I was reading George Monbiot’s book Regenesis. While he had some good points, I found myself strongly disagreeing with his conclusions and solutions. I might write about it more some day, but not today.

I think George Monbiot got it wrong from the premise. For him, the number one problem of agriculture is land use. And so his solution is to use as little land as possible. Everything he suggests is considered from this point of view, arriving at dubious solutions such as using factory-grown bacteria as the chief source of fat and protein for people around the world.

It is clear that George Monbiot can’t imagine that humans could actually be useful to the rest of the natural world. And he definitely can’t see us as a part of it. He takes it even further, and as many of his fellow vegans, he even sees domestic animals as inherently damaging to nature and something that should be removed. It’s as if cows and sheep and other domestic animals have lost their status as part of nature in his eyes. It’s as if they were tainted by their contact with us.

Humans are nature too

We have been thinking of ourselves as separate from nature for a while now. The concept of nature came to be after the Middle Ages, during the period of Enlightenment. It is even more recent to think of ourselves as only being capable of natural destruction. But thankfully, our culture does not represent all the people in existence and definitely not all the people in history. We might have forgotten about it, but the truth is that humans can live in peace with nature. And not only that, we can even help it prosper.

One of the main ideas in the (absolutely wonderful) Ishmael trilogy by Daniel Quinn is the fact that humanity is much, much older than our civilisation. While it’s a fact fairly obvious to most of us, it has some implications that we don’t usually realise.

Our genus, Homo, is almost 3 million years old. Homo sapiens – modern humans, that were anatomically and physiologically identical to us – appeared some 300 000 years ago. Compared to either of these numbers, our agriculturalist, city-building, less than 10 000 years old civilisation, is like a blink of an eye. Humans have been here for a long time, living just like all other creatures do – as part of the ecosystem.

We tend to think about our prehistoric ancestors as not-quite-human; as if they were somehow unfinished. We assume they didn’t have our curiosity, our intellect and our drive, because in our eyes they were not yet living the way humans are supposed to. Yet, they were just like us, and yet they managed to live in peace with the world around them.

They knew they belonged to the world, just as much as rhinos and mites and sequoias do; and they knew that just like any of those other creatures, they had their role to play in it.

How can we know what they might have been thinking? Well, fortunately, there are still people living in this world now, whose lifestyle is closer to that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors than to our “civilised” ways. We still have a chance to learn from them. If we are ready.

Myth of the wilderness

The truth is that Indigenous peoples have been modifying and managing the nature around them for millennia. Many of the areas that we would classify as wilderness were shaped by human activity, including places such as the Amazon rain-forest, or the Australian aridlands. While this is still far from the mainstream perception, scientist are actually starting to point to how the whole concept of “wilderness” is inappropriate and how certain biomes rely on human input for their preservation (great article on this is Indigenous knowledge and the shackles of wilderness).

Picking sweetgrass

In her beautiful, gentle book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer – a Native American botanist – reveals a lot about how her culture approached the natural world. She talks about the sense of belonging and feelings of community with all the life around them. She talks about the Honorable Harvest, which is a set of rules to make sure that people don’t take more than their fair share, and that enough is left to keep the cycles of nature going. (Rules like: Never take more than a half. Never take the first, nor the last. Take only what you need. Always give back in return.)

From her stories it becomes clear that the bounty of the land that the European colonisers encountered when they first arrived to the Americas was not an accident. It was not wilderness. It was the result of many millennia of careful cultivation at the hands of the Indigenous peoples.

One of the moving examples she gives, is that of sweetgrass. This plant was, and still is, used for ceremonial purposes among her people and is very important to them. Unfortunately, the sweetgrass populations are steadily declining. Various tribes have different ways of harvesting sweetgrass, and everyone, understandably, thinks their way is the better one. Robin Wall Kimmerer enlisted one of her botany master students to do a thesis about the sweetgrass harvest, trying to determine which harvesting technique was better for the plants – either pulling it out with its roots, or cutting it off, leaving the root in the soil.

She had trouble convincing the faculty to approve the study. They thought it rather useless, saying the result was known from the beginning, as it was obvious that harvesting would lead to decline regardless of the method. But nobody expected what actually happened.

The student spent two years harvesting from three different sweetgrass patches (following the rules of the Honorable Harvest) and documenting the results. She would pinch some of the grass from one of them, pull it out from the other, and the third one was left as a control. At the end of the study period, only one of those patches was not doing well, its population declining. It was the control patch.

As it turns out, sweetgrass needs to be picked. If it isn’t, if space isn’t made for new plants, they get smothered under the tall growth. The decline of sweetgrass goes hand in hand with the disappearance of the peoples who value and harvest it. And the patches that still thrive are, not surprisingly, located in the areas where the people still live and interact with them.

The ciiiircle of liiife

We often feel like it’s somehow morally wrong to be eating other living beings. We are sceptical to the beneficial effects that predators have on their ecosystems, and completely blind to the benefits they provide to their prey (not on the individual, but on the community level).

Lions picking out a sick zebra can save the herd from a disease spreading. Chasing the zebras around ensures they don’t spend too much time in one place, which protects the land from overgrazing, and the zebras from getting parasitic infections from infected manure of their buddies.

Big herds of grazing animals are what prevents grasslands from turning into deserts or forests. The shrubs and trees get eaten before they get a chance to grow big, and the grass gets thinned to make space for new growth, fuelled by the fertiliser left behind by the animals. Some ruminants, like the buffalo, even have an enzyme in their saliva that stimulates grass growth.

While there is nothing wrong with forests, grasslands are a different ecosystem, supporting an equally diverse network of plants and animals that can not thrive in a forest. Despite people who call for “rewilding”, and believe that the only valid landscape is a forest, grasslands have always been here. There is now even evidence that about half of Europe was covered by grasslands and meadows before the arrival of modern humans. But just like in the case of sweetgrass, the European grasslands now rely on us to help them thrive.

In the end, everyone eats and is eaten. Microbes, fungi and plants feed on death just as much as herbivores and carnivores do. Being lower on the food chain does not make one more virtuous. And being higher up on it does not prevent one from contributing to the community of life. Every ecosystem is a network where everything is attached to everything and each creature is needed, however cute or yucky or weird.

You find what you are ready to look for

I have been reading (and thinking) a lot about agriculture lately. It is our closest and most important point of contact with the cycles of life and of nature. It definitely seems like we got a lot of it wrong, and we need to make some changes.

I think it is important that we look for solutions with the right mindset. It is difficult to notice things that you aren’t looking for, let alone ones you can’t even fathom. I think it’s time we started looking at ourselves as creatures that do belong in this world, and that can work with it, care for it, and protect it, while receiving what we need to live. We have to believe it is possible first, before we can even start finding out how to do it. Thankfully, we humans are fast learners, and we still have someone to learn from. And while there is no going back to the Stone Age (not that I want to), we can surely find a way to practice some Honorable Harvest in our world.

The change, if it happens, will come from the bottom. From people with a new vision. From people like you and me.

TODO Why I think we should start growing life instead of the economy nature

When I was young, I used to think farming was boring. Totally uninteresting, kinda dumb, even. Oh, how I cringe, embarrased, when I think about that old and dumb me. Now I know better. Because when you really, really think about it, farming is one of the most important things anyone could ever do. And it seems we got it pretty wrong.

The agriculture is not working

Thanks to the book club I am participating in (video about our book club), I have been reading a lot about agriculture lately. The question of how we can feed the world without overwhelming our plantet’s resources is a big and important one. And definitely not simple.

Agriculture definitely plays a big part in the harms we as a society are causing to the planet and ourselves. The use of pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilisers and heavy machinery to till and harvest is destroying the soils, polluting our waters and poisoning, killing and displacing wildlife. Farm animals often live in terrible conditions in large-scale feeding operations, where their manure is piling up becoming an environmental hazard, instead of what should have been a life-giving fertiliser. The people who produce our food are often among the poorest people in the society, often exposed to chemicals that have devastating health effects. As if that wasn’t enough, certain markets (like chocolate) are directly built on slavery.

It’s the how, not the what

There are a lot of people who will argue that we should get rid of farm animals to save the climate and the environment. On closer inspection, this idea holds no water whatsoever.

Animals, cows especially, are accused of releasing greenhouse gases, especially the methane from the infamous cow burps, using too much water, taking too much land and causing deforestation etc etc. Diana Rogers and Robb Wolf in their book Sacred Cow thoroughly debunk these.

To give just a few pointers, over 90% of the water that cattle need is rainfall. It would have fallen anyway. This is unlike some crops like rice, avocados, walnuts and sugar that require more water per kilo of food produced than beef and most of the water they need is fresh surface and groundwater. They also cause more water pollution than cattle.

Many of the landscapes that are used as pastures are not suitable for growing crops. They might be too hilly, the soil might be too rocky and brittle and the only thing that really grows there is grass. The ruminant animals like cows, sheep, goats and buffalo eating that grass are in no way competing with humans. Rather, they are turning something we can’t eat, grown in an area where we can’t grow our food, into something that provides valuable nutrition.

While it is true that farm animals are often fed using crops we grow, this is often not the parts of the plants that humans could eat. This is especially true for ruminants, that only get about 10-13% of their diet from grains and the rest comes from crop residues, such as cornstalks, soybean hulls, cottonseed meal, almond husks etc. These are all leftover from the production of human food, alcohol, biofuel etc. There are no cows eating edamame beans, but they are fed the leftovers after the soy plants are processed.

Pigs and chickens are fed a lot more grains, but even those are usually indedible for humans.

When it comes to the greenhouse gases, the methane released from the cow’s digestion is the same that would be released if the grass it ate had been left to rot. This carbon is a part of the cycle. The grass took it from the air, used it to build it’s own body, the cow ate it, released some of it back into the air during digestion, incorporated the rest into its own body. The carbon that is in all living things is a part of this cycle. This is now even reflected in the newer, more accurate, methods of calculating the greenhouse warming potential – and according to this, ruminants only add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere if their numbers increase.

But really, when you think about it, carbon is the molecule of life and we are all exchanging it between each other and the air. Cows are not the only ones adding it to the atmosphere. We all are. Even plants are breathing out carbon dioxide as a result of the cellular respiration. But unlike animals, plants are also taking it in and using in the process of photosynthesis. And so when they are growing, they are taking in more CO2 than releasing, but when they’re grow slows down, they become closer to carbon-neutral.

Greenhouse gases are released by termites (a lot, actually), rice fields, wetlands, other herbivores, like horses, reindeer and zebras, as well as by some shellfish. These are all a part of the carbon cycle in nature. How much of nature do we want to get rid of to reduce greenhouse gases? Maybe we should instead focus on things that are not a part of the cycle, like the fossil fuels we dig out of the ground and burn in order to power our society.

There are many issues with how most animals are reared nowadays, but this problem is not inherent to the animal agriculture as such.

As is the tagline of Sacred Cow: It’s not the cow, it’s the how.

I would take it even further, and say this applies to all of our food production, be it plants or animals. Huge monocultures of grains that require a lot of chemical inputs, decimate the wildlife, and leave the soil depeleted, are not really better for anyone and anything than feedlots are.

For all of agriculture, it’s the how.

Totalitarian agriculture of What should I kill today?

In his book A bold return to giving a damn, Will Harris describes how he turned his farm from a typical industrial cattle operation, into a thriving regenerative farm that supports several farm animals, creates space for wildlife, regenerates the soil, all without artificial pesticides, fertlisers and antibiotics. There are even studies showing his farm White Oak Pastures is a carbon sink.

Will Harris talks about how, before, he would wake up in the morning, walk out, and look for things he needed to kill. While what he is looking for now, is more life, and ways for him to support it. Working with nature, not against it.

As Daniel Quinn points out in Ishmael, killing is a staple in the type of agriculture that our civilisation practices. He calls it a totalitarian agriculture. What we are seeking is total control and maximum return. If there are other beings competing with us for our food, we get rid of them (like wolves and other predators). If there are other beings that compete with our food for their food, we get rid of them (like other grass eating herbivores or insects, or anything). And if there are other beings competing with our foods food, we get rid of them (like weeds).

The holy work of modern farming is killing.

What we aren’t (or weren’t) paying attention to, is that killing all of these wild, “unnecessary” organisms has consequences that we cannot foresee. The nature favours diversity, and it’s how it creates abundance. It works in circles. Everything comes out of, and then returns to the soil. We have been doing our best to destroy the diversity and to turn the circles into straight lines going from the soil into the economy.

Agriculture existed long before the agricultural revolution. Humans have been nudging nature to give them more of what they want for ages. The agricultural revolution was the dawn of the totalitarian agriculture – the thinking that everything on the Earth is for us to do with as we please. That we take precedens over all the other organisms and are here to conquer and rule.

A robust system

We need more farmers

I think I smell a homestead in my future

Finding my way out of burnout – 4 changes I made to my lifestyle and mindset mental-healthknowledge-work

I haven’t been feeling like myself for the last 5 months. Actually, that is a bit of an understatement. I have been so absolutely, utterly exhausted that it affected everything. I had to slow down considerably in all areas of my life. Work, hobbies, house chores, everything. There was no chance in hell I could attempt something like exercise. Just getting through a normal day would leave me so exhausted I had to sleep for most of the next day. I have been frustrated, scatter-brained, unmotivated and unfocused. Often irritable, often feeling down.

It started in early December last year, when I went through my third round of Covid. While the infection itself was very mild, it jump started whatever is going on with me now. Apart from the ridiculous exhaustion and the other signs of burnout, my immune system got all messed up. Any tiny little infection drags on for weeks, while my autoimmune issues, which have been dormant for the last five years, came back with a vengeance. Thankfully, I am slowly getting better.

I have been trying to “fix” myself from all angles, frustrated at the slow progress, at the two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back dance of recovery. But I have finally accepted where I am and started appreciating how much has improved since last December.

I thought I might share some of the things that helped me with you.

Btw, none of the links here are affiliate links, nor is anything sponsored. I have just been reading a lot lately.

There is no border between the mental and the physical

You might be wondering why I used burnout in the title of this article, but then proceeded to talk about Covid. There are several reasons for this.

Truth is, I was never diagnosed with long Covid. When I first went to a doctor, there were a few things that were off on my blood tests, like inflammation and electrolyte imbalances, but those could be explained by the string of never-ending infections I was having around that time. They also all returned to normal within a month, while my exhaustion, while improved, continued on. My doctor found nothing wrong with me physically. She attributes my symptoms to stress.

The other thing is, this is not my first rodeo. I have been burnt out before. Granted, it has never been this bad, but I have been dipping dangerously close to burnout ever since I was in high school, and falling straight into it at least twice before. It didn’t feel much different, although this time it feels more acute than ever before. Whatever the cause, the symptoms I am experiencing are those of a burnout.

And finally, in my search for answers and ways to restore my health, I found out that all mental illnesses are actually metabolic ones. In his book Brain Energy, a psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer outlines his theory about the origin of mental illnesses. It’s an incredible, paradigm-shifting book, written with great compassion and profound insight. Dr. Palmer gathers convincing evidence pointing towards a common pathway behind every single mental syndrome, from anxiety and depression, through ADHD, autism, OCD, eating disorders, substance abuse disorders and bipolar, to schizophrenia, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. All of them, absolutely all, can be explained by a dysfunction in the mitochondria. And so they can all be improved by improving the function of the mitochondria. How do you improve the function of your mitochondria? Since mitochondria are so central to our metabolism and basically all that is happening in our cells, they are affected by almost everything happening both with our bodies and our minds. What we eat, how much we sleep, light exposure, stress, inflammation, loneliness,… you name it.

• Is it “real”?

  I have now spent several months trying to figure out whether the root cause of my issues was physical or mental. Is it really stress? Is it lingering inflammation from the Covid? Am I maybe missing some nutrients? Is it my autism catching up with me? Is it autoimmunity?

  I think I wanted to know whether what I was experiencing was “real”. Whether I should give myself some slack, or whether I should try to “pull myself up by the bootstraps”. I feel a little ashamed typing it, because it is a really dumb way to think about it, and I would never ever apply that kind of thinking to anyone else. Yet somewhere deep down, I felt like “physical=real” and “mental=I just have to work on my mindset”.

  After reading Brain Energy, I realised the question of whether it is physical or mental does not make sense. Physical stressors can lead to mental symptoms and mental stressors can lead to physical symptoms. After all, we are one body. Our mind resides in our brain and that brain is intimately connected to everything else in our body. How could it be otherwise?

  I decided that whatever is happening with me, I might as well call it by what it feels like. And the way to fix it will necessarily involve working on all levels – physical, mental, emotional.

  So without further ado, here is the top four things that are helping me recover from burnout.

1. Sleep

While most of us know that sleep is important, at the same time it feels so painfully unproductive. It is so easy to stay up “just a little bit more” to do this or that, either for work or for leisure. I know I myself am often guilty of the revenge bedtime procrastination – staying up later than I actually want to, taking control of my time, because between work and kids I feel like my time during the day isn’t quite mine.

I know I am not alone. We have a sleepless epidemic. Yet sleep is so vitally important. This time of rest is especially important for the brain, which is not actually resting that much. There are a lot of processes of clean-up and repair going on, as well as consolidating all the inputs from the day.

Sleep is crucial for memory, focus and even creativity. The extra sleep actually makes narcoleptic people more creative! But getting too little sleep also makes your blood pressure go up, makes you more hungry and exacerbates all mental and metabolic disorders. Body and mind, sleep affects it all.

In the first weeks of my acute burnout, I was not really left much choice. I was so tired that I couldn’t do much else, so I slept 15 hours a day. But it didn’t take more than a few weeks before I started feeling much much better and was able to return to some of my normal activities.

Since then, I am finding sleep to be the number one factor that decides how I experience my day. Now, by most people’s standards, I was never sleeping that little. Even before all this, I would average 7 or 7.5 hours a night. It’s hard to know whether it was enough back then, but I can clearly see it is not enough now. There are a number of things that will increase our need for sleep, like inflammation or stress. So while I don’t like “losing” even more hours to sleep than before, I know that it will make the waking ones much better.

And I remind myself of the wisdom that was hanging on the wall of my classroom in high school: “Sleeping is living too.”

I actually found the poster we had hanging in my high school classroom. It seems like it came straight from France from some 90s campaign for better sleep. I remember how its message: “Sleeping is living too” felt meaningful in those days when we were staying up late with homework.

2. Diet

Nutrition has everything to do with everything and is probably the number one thing to fix when dealing with, well, anything.

There is now a whole new field – nutritional psychiatry – that focuses on dietary solutions to mental illnesses. Dr. Georgia Ede is a psychiatrist specialising in nutritional psychiatry and her book Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind (link to Amazon) is one of the best books I read not only on nutrition for mental health, but on nutrition as such.

She uses the physiology of the brain as a starting point to figure out what the brain needs in terms of food and how to keep it happy. Thankfully (and logically), the brain requires the same kind of nutrition to thrive as the rest of the body. The book is engaging, accessible and actionable. It offers different dietary approaches that one can tailor to their needs. I really enjoyed it.

Some of the biggest take-aways are the need to be careful with carbohydrates and plant toxins. Humans are quite prone to becoming insulin-resistant when exposed to larger amounts of carbohydrates over time. In fact, in the US, 88% of people are already insulin-resistant. Insulin resistance means that the various organs in the body stop responding to insulin. While one of the biggest roles of insulin is to trigger cells to take up glucose from the blood, it does much more than that and so insulin resistance can lead not only to type 2 diabetes, but also to cardiovascular disease, polycystic ovarian syndrome and more.

What does insulin resistance do in the brain? It actually prevents glucose from getting to the brain cells at all, as it gets stopped by the insulin resistant blood-vessel cells at the blood-brain barrier. It means the brain isn’t getting the fuel it needs and is basically starving. It’s not surprising this can give a range of symptoms, and in worst case lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

While I personally was already good on the carbohydrate part, I had some room for improvement in the other big area, namely avoiding toxins and compounds I might be sensitive to. After the Covid infection, I started reacting to egg whites, something I didn’t want to admit to myself for a while. While the reaction seemed small on the outside (a tiny rash), it’s clear it was triggering my immune system and causing trouble on the inside. Inflammation, whether due to an infection, allergy, autoimmunity or injury, is metabolically expensive and demands a lot of resources. It is very likely that it was contributing to my lack of energy and burnout.

3. Clarity of mind

You know that feeling of having too many tabs open in your head? It’s one that I have been periodically experiencing for years. It feels like no matter what I am trying to focus on at the moment, there is large, but unknown number of other thoughts in the background that are trying to come to the forefront. Some of them are clear, some of them only guessed at. And it is utterly overwhelming.

It’s also fair to say that being tired and burnout did not make this any better.

I wasn’t sure at first what it was that I was missing, until I read Getting Things Done by David Allen. I have heard about GTD (as people call it) before, but wasn’t quite interested in getting more things done. But that is actually not what the method is about. It is about exactly the thing I was seeking – clarity of mind.

GTD is a method to gather, process and organise all your open loops. Open loops are all of those thoughts hiding in the tabs in the back of your mind. Using the GTD method, you get them out, onto a paper or into an app, so your head can let go of them. And while I haven’t been using it for more than a month yet, it works. It is simple, easy to get started and ingenious. The output of the method is just a bunch of lists that you can keep track of in whatever way you want. I won’t go into details about how to use the method, since there are a lot of resources online, not to mention the book itself.

But I will say that if you constantly feel like you are forgetting something important, like you should probably be doing something else than what you are doing, but you don’t know what, if you feel like you have too many tabs open in your mind, then this helps with exactly that.

I have been very much enjoying implementing GTD in my life. I am finding myself experiencing mental clarity much more often, as is the expected outcome. But I have also gained a better overview of my days and my life. By catching every thought that feels like it might be important yet unfinished, I have been able to realise how many new interesting things and ideas I ran into on a daily basis. I am no longer surprised by my previous feelings of a crowded head-space. And what is more, this overview really helps me prioritise. Prioritising is not something I am naturally good at, and being clear about my vision, goals and principles rarely helped me with that in the nitty-gritty of the daily life. But having the GTD lists in front of me does.

Thinking about it, I might have even gotten a little more productive, especially given my limited energy these days. And I have even tackled some tasks that I have been putting off for more than a year. (For real. I was planning to get frames for some of our pictures and hang them up, but I just kept rewriting the task from one to-do list to the next for over a year. Until GTD.)

The other practice I find immensely useful for mental clarity is journalling and especially morning pages. The morning pages were popularised by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way (which I haven’t read). Morning pages simply mean writing down 3 pages by hand, first thing in the morning, of whatever comes to mind. It’s pure stream of consciousness. I find it to be incredibly useful to find any “tabs” that have been left open in my mind, to figure out what I think and feel about different things and what is lurking in the back of my mind. I often write little note in the margins of my morning-pages book that I then transfer into a GTD inbox.

4. Taking off pressure

I have to admit that this forced slowing down was not something that I adjusted to easily or happily. I didn’t think I was doing particularly much before, so I was not keen on doing less. Plus, as I said earlier, I half-thought I just needed to pull it together.

I was terribly tired and refusing to act like it, and so, unsurprisingly, I was not performing my best in my job, all the while pushing myself as hard as I could. As a result, I felt guilty and mad at myself. I started feeling like I was bad at what I was doing. My impostor syndrome was blooming. I lost all interest in my work. I felt unfocused and unmotivated. I considered changing jobs many times in the last months, but I couldn’t really see how I could find anything better. I felt trapped.

Finally, I admitted to myself that I am not in top form and that that will quite naturally affect how much I can do at work and how I will feel about it. And so I stopped pushing so hard.

I decided to stop forcing myself to do work that I felt completely uninspired to do.

Now, I am very lucky in that I can afford to do this at my job. The projects I am working on are very long-term ones and I have a lot of freedom in how and when I work. This will definitely not work for many others.

I know though that waiting for when I will “feel like it” is not a viable option either. Feeling the way I did, I would probably never “feel like it”.

So I started doing two things: working on my motivation for my work, and using a visit-based work system.

• Sharpening the axe of motivation

  This is an idea I heard from Elizabeth Filips (link to Elizabeth Filips’ YouTube). When you lack motivation, tasks, especially ones that require creativity, learning and synthesising knowledge, will take much longer than they would otherwise, and the result will likely be much worse.

  You wouldn’t see time spent sharpening your axe as wasted, just because your main goal is to chop down a tree. It makes just as much sense to spend some time building up motivation for a task, when we know it will make it much easier and faster to get it done.

  And so I started doing that. I brainstorm all the things I like about my job, all the skills related to it that I would like to learn, all the side projects I would like to try. When I really don’t feel like working on my main task, rather than feeling guilty and forcing myself to stare at it, uninspired, I work on something else.

  All this might sound quite obvious to some, and it won’t be applicable for others at all. For me it was a game-changer that restored my enthusiasm for my work.

• Visit-based instead of force-based planning

  While I was going down the GTD rabbit hole, I ran into the work of Kourosh Dini. As a pianist, he is very familiar with tasks that require regularity and motivation at the same time. One of the main things I adopted from his approach to organising work is the idea of a Visit.

  Most of us are used to leaving orders for our future selves. Inevitably, there are times when the future isn’t the way we imagined it and our future self has to skip or modify the job we left for her, often leading to feelings of guilt and failure. This is the force-based system.

  One the other hand, you have the Visit-based planning. A Visit means sitting down with your work and considering it. Kourosh Dini says to remain with it at least for the length of a single breath. It gives you the space to consider the task, to start it, if that feels right, and to do as much of it as is right under the circumstances.

  The only thing you plan for your future self is to visit the work and you trust her to make the right decision in that moment. It is about creating space, rather than obligations.

  Obviously, this is not something that is suitable for all types of tasks, but I found it invaluable for those that if fits. I use it a lot for my creative writing at home and for big coding projects at work. I plan a daily recurring Visit, which more often than not turns into a nice flow-filled work session. But if it doesn’t, that is OK too.

Getting better takes time

These last five months have been a journey. The road here was bumpy and winding and frustrating, and I know I am not quite were I would like to be yet. But looking back, I can see how much better I have gotten, and I am very grateful for that.

The strategies I outlined here are just some of the things I have tried. I have also been practising more meditation and hypnosis (I had great results from hypnosis previously), doing breathing exercises and lately started experimenting with fasting. Sometimes it’s hard to know what works (or how well), but I chose to talk about what I think made the biggest difference. It obviously won’t be applicable and helpful for everyone, so take what makes sense to you and leave the rest. I wish you all the best.

Image by Nataliya Vaitkevich via Canva.com

Why I stopped using habit trackers and what I do instead writingpersonal-developmentmental-health

One of the staples of bullet journalling are habit trackers. There is just something so satisfying about ticking off a box at the end of the day and looking at that unbroken streak of your new (or old) habit. And as they say, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. Habit trackers seem like the perfect solution for when you want to build or maintain a habit. Yet, they stopped working for me (if they ever really worked at all) and so I have finally stopped using them. Thankfully, I figured out better ways of making my new habits stick.

Over five years of habit trackers

I have started bullet journalling in 2018 and have never looked back. When I got my first dot-grid notebook and gave the method a proper try, something clicked. A planner, a journal, a commonplace book, and whatever else you need – in one place? Yes, please!

My bullet journalling has been evolving with me over the years and changing according to my needs, but one thing was repeating itself year after year: habit trackers. It’s one of the Bullet Journal staples. When you search for Bu-Jo habit trackers, you will find thousands of beautiful, artistic habit trackers that people make. Mine were not of that kind. I would simply make a grid with days of the month on the vertical and all the habits I wanted to stick to on the horizontal. Nothing fancy. And then I would just go on crossing them off. For the most part.

I tracked all kinds of things over the years. Eating according to my plan, going to bed before 10, exercising, taking supplements, writing, avoiding social media, meditating, even journalling itself.

A selection of some of my (very not fancy) habit trackers over the years. Just look at the amount of blank (or black) squares!

What habit trackers are supposed to do

I can’t back this up by any data, but I think habit trackers are one of those things virtually every bullet journaler uses. We all want to stick to our good habits, get rid of the bad ones and create new ones. Habit trackers are meant to help with that. I believe the idea is for them to work serving these 3 main purposes:

• 1. Reminders

  They serve as a reminder of what you have set out to do, so that you do not forget about it.

• 2. Motivation

  They are meant to work as motivation. “You will not want to break your streak!” I have heard/read so many times. (Spoiler alert: that one didn’t work for me.)

• 3. Overview

  They give you an overview of how well you did sticking to your habit, so that you can fix and tweak things if it isn’t going the way you want it to.

  It all sounds so good on paper, and yet.

Habit trackers didn’t work for me

Looking at my habit trackers over the years, there are just so, so very many blank squares. I am not sure if I managed to make a single routine become a real habit, they way brushing my teeth is. You know, where you don’t have to track it or force it. Heck, you don’t even have to think about it all! It’s just a habit.

I would say that while habit trackers still worked as reminders and to provide overview, they failed at the most important bit. They failed to motivate me to actually do the thing.

What made me first question my habit trackers was a video of Tony Robbins talking about quitting smoking. “Why would you count the days since you last smoked? Is it just to know how long you lasted this time?” (I’m paraphrasing hard here.) That one really hit home for me. Here I was, starting and restarting my count of how many days I have managed without sugar. Over and over again, hundreds of times over several years. Pages and pages of habit trackers, were I would put a red square for a day when I achieved my goal and a black one for one when I didn’t. There were way too many black ones, staring back at me like little dark wells of misery.

After this call out, I sat down and thought and journalled about it. Why was I even tracking my no-sugar days? I don’t track the brushed-my-teeth days after all. I wanted my way of eating to be a part of me, and it really already was in many ways. Except for the moments I would give in and eat candy that I knew would make me sick. And so I decided that was it. I decided then and there that I simply wasn’t someone who eats that stuff anymore. Not now, not ever. No need to track. And somehow, miraculously, it worked. (Now, while this mindset shift was an important part of it, my sugar addiction took more than that to overcome. I previously wrote a blog post about sugar and another blog post about how hypnosis turned out super helpful.)

Diet was the first thing I stopped tracking, but I didn’t really extend that to my other habits at first. I thought those were somehow different and so I continued to dutifully track them. But the seed of doubt had been sowed. I started to realise, that just like with sugar, I wasn’t really sticking to my other habits either. I believe there were three main reasons.

• 1. Habit trackers leave too much space for failure.

  Deep in my mind, somehow, quite stupidly, the fact that I can leave that little square blank, opened up for the possibility to do so. After all, nothing much happened if I did. It’s as if the whole process just reminded me that there was a real possibility that I wouldn’t do what I set out to do. It’s a bit hard to explain, but I feel like you probably know what I mean, and if you don’t, then lucky you.

  In addition to that general possibility of failure, it also made one day the smallest time frame that mattered. This isn’t a problem for habits you are trying to establish, but for the ones you are trying to get rid off… Oh boy! For me this meant that if I had a cookie in the morning, well, then the whole day was “ruined”. The little blank square was to turn black anyway and I might as well eat all the other things I didn’t intend to eat! Not good.

• 2. Habit trackers create pressure.

  The moment I start “messing up” and breaking my streaks, the two purposes that habit trackers still do, namely reminders and overview, turn sour. The gaps in the previous days bring up feelings of guilt and the daily reminder just feels like pressure. Things that I want to do, even the ones that I do for my own enjoyment, suddenly seem like chores. There is pressure. Some people react positively to pressure. Some people will be motivated by challenges, by pushing themselves, by turning things around. Some other people are more rebellious, and being told what to do doesn’t sit so well with them. Even if the person commanding is their past self. After years of thinking I was the first kind, I am coming to terms with my very present and very real rebellious streak. Being pressured definitely makes me want to do the thing less, not to mention it creates (often unnecessary) stress.

• 3. Habit trackers don’t address the source of our habits.

  As much as we would like to think that creating a new habit is as easy as just sticking to the activity (or sticking to not doing something), there are usually reasons for why we do (or don’t) do something. More often than not, we aren’t even aware of what these reasons are. They usually have something to do with fulfilling our needs: needs for feelings of safety, connection, rest, attention, stimulation, … Even the worst habits are fulfilling a need somewhere, somehow, albeit in a far-from-ideal way. Habit trackers on their own do nothing to help us address this need. And until we do, it will feel like a wall between us and the desired habit. One that we will keep running into until we acknowledge the need and fulfil it in some other way.

What I do instead

I was figuring out all that wasn’t working as I was watching one of my other desired habits falling by the wayside day after day. I was trying to establish a daily writing habit. I started writing a novel last November (NaNoWriMo anyone?) and I am still at it. I greatly enjoy it, but it has been difficult to actually do it. I never quite feel like it until I get into the flow, and I need a bit of peace and quiet, which is hard to get with small kids around. Anyway, I really, really, really wanted to establish a daily writing habit. At first I even had word-count goals, that I kept reducing (1000 words, then 400, 200, then any words). I just wasn’t writing most days. At all.

When I realised my habit trackers weren’t working, I decided to ditch them. But I knew I had to replace them with something. This is what I came up with. And this is what got me writing every day ever since (it’s just been a few weeks, but that’s longer than ever before).

• Identity shift

  Our habits are a reflection of who we are, but at the same time, we become what we do habitually. It’s a two way process. Our identity shapes our habits and our habits shape our identity. Identity <=> Habits

  Habit trackers help us go in the direction from habits to identity: do -> be. The only thing you need to do to establish a habit is just to stick to the activity enough times. 21 days, some say. More, say others. I don’t know. I have stuck to some things for 2 or more months, just to then abandon them and watch my little habit tracker boxes remain empty.

  Our identity is like a thermostat. It works to bring us back to who we believe we are, because it is uncomfortable to stray away from it. Establishing a new habit that challenges that identity is difficult. You have to fight it until you prove to yourself that you aren’t who you thought you were and your identity changes. This is the difficult direction. It’s much easier to go the other way, from identity to habits. If you manage to change your identity, the new habits feel so much more natural and easy.

  This is what I uknowingly did with my sugar-eating habit. I managed to turn myself into someone who “just doesn’t eat that”. Beating my sugar addiction definitely took an identity shift, although it wasn’t all it took. It was a long process with many steps (including hypnosis, as I mentioned before), but then again, it was a pretty big thing to deal with as well.

  On the other hand, my “writer’s block” (can you even call yourself a writer before you have properly started writing?) turned out to be an easier problem.

  When I realised I wasn’t writing despite my daily reminder in the form of an empty checkbox, I decided to sit down and figure out what was stopping me. As usual, I did that in the form of journalling. I wrote down how I was feeling about writing, what I was afraid of, what I wanted to do. I realised I was a bit afraid of committing. Signing up to write every day, from now until forever, no matter what, felt like a big commitment. And so I kept putting it off, telling myself I was just waiting for the right moment. As if that wasn’t enough, I also had some doubts about whether I should be writing at all. It was mostly the usual: “it’s probably all just rubbish, very not good enough and not worth wasting time on”.

  Seeing on paper these thoughts that I didn’t even know I was thinking was the key to addressing them.

  I know there is no point in waiting for the right moment to start, if what I am starting is to be a life-long habit. I will expect myself to do it on bad days, good days, as well as the worst days, and I will need to make that decision over and over again, day after day. It doesn’t matter how I feel on the first day. It doesn’t matter how “perfect” that first day is, it won’t make it any easier to do it on day 400.

  I have to admit that thinking about it made me quite nervous and it exposed the uncertainty I was feeling about the whole thing. I also only then realised that I did not actually commit to that habit yet! I was so afraid of failure that I was stopping myself from starting at all. Now I was facing that fear head-on and could decide what to do with it. I had a chance to actually examine what I wanted and why and what I was willing to do for it.

  I told myself that my writing doesn’t have to be good as long as I am having fun with it. It’s a hobby after all! And besides, as the author, I am the last person qualified to judge how good my own writing is, so I might as well stop thinking about it. The most important thing was acknowledging that writing feels meaningful to me, that I really want to do it, and that I feel that it is worth it. In the end, I was still nervous, but I was determined. That is the day I became a writer, i.e. “a person who writes”. And I have been writing since. No habit tracker needed.

• Make a Visit

  When I actually faced the reality of what it meant to commit to a daily habit, and how big of a deal that actually was, it was very clear to me that I would need to make the goal as small as possible. All those word-count goals I had in the beginning did not leave any space for future me to make in-the-moment decisions. It is absolutely inevitable that there will be days when I won’t have time for 1000 words. Maybe not even 50 words. Will I inevitably have to break the word I gave myself, bringing on the feeling of guilt and failure with it?

  Thankfully, I ran into the idea of a Visit-based organisation by Kourosh Dini (which I mentioned in a blog post about burnout before). It’s quite simple. You don’t schedule a task, you schedule a Visit of the task. A Visit means that you sit down with the work and consider it with your full attention for at least the time it takes to take a single deep breath. Then you decide whether you will work on it, and if yes, you remain with it for as long as makes sense then and there.

  It might sound like a semantic difference only, but it really isn’t. The Visit is a powerful tool for creating space for a task, without making it an obligation. It lets the future you make decisions about a situation that the present you knows nothing about, without any guilt. And it allows the present you to make the commitment with good conscience.

• Journal about goals and process

  While I stopped using habit trackers, I still keep a list of the habits I want to consciously maintain or introduce, as reminders. But there are no check-boxes next to the items. It is simply a list I can review whenever I need to remind myself of what I have committed to.

  There is a saying that you can’t improve what you do not track, and I definitely think there is some truth to it. That doesn’t mean though, that a habit tracker is necessarily the right thing to track with. Instead of ticking a box, I have started to journal about my goals and my days much more than I used to. I reflect on how I feel about my habits and my progress. I ask myself what I did that day/week/month to move towards my goals; what works and what seems to be missing. There are no unticked boxes making me feel guilty, or making me feel pressured, but I still get to see how things are going. It takes longer, so I don’t do it every day, but it provides me with much more information than a habit tracker ever would, and it allows me not only to have an overview of if my habit is sticking, but also gives ideas about why.

You do you

Habit trackers are super popular in the journalling community and I am sure they work perfectly for many people. If they do for you, that’s amazing, and there is no need to change a winning formula. Or if you don’t feel the need to use habit trackers, or work on creating habits at all, that’s great too! (In that case, I am surprised you have read this far in a post about habit trackers, but you are of course welcome to :) ) But if you do use habit trackers and struggle with establishing habits, I hope you found some interesting bits here, or at least realised that there are other options you can experiment with.

Creativity in the age of Photoshop creativitysharing

“I Dig a Pygmy” by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf Aids. Phase one, in which Doris gets her oats.

• John Lennon on “Two of Us”

My husband and I have been watching The Beatles: Get Back documentary and it made me think a lot about creativity, art and authenticity.

I love The Beatles. Every time I hear the opening chord of the Hard Day’s Night, I am transported back in time, 6 years old, sitting in the back of the car on our way to visit grandma on a Saturday. Beatles have shaped my taste in music more than probably any other band. Despite all the difficulties and the drama that accompanied the making of what turned out to be their last album – Let It Be – it is such a treat to watch them at work. Or maybe I should rather say to watch them at play.

Once they get into a flow, the four of them seem to be having so much fun. They break out into random songs, add silly lyrics, banter and laugh. While they are undoubtedly working and creating gems such as Let It Be, the process is so very clearly play. And not only in the sense that they are playing music, which they obviously are, but they are also playing with the music, with each other and with their ideas.

I was surprised to realise how many of these spontaneous little moments made it onto the finished album, just like the quote that introduced this blog post. It’s something John Lennon says out of nowhere, making everyone laugh. It has nothing to do with any of the songs. But it is there, the first thing on the album. Ir’s far from the only example. There are many bits and pieces that were clearly improvised, created from a moment of sudden inspiration, a moment of play. Most of them are just funny, silly, little things. But as a listener, I find them to be oh, so delightful.

The times of “perfect”

Watching The Beatles at play made me confront expectations I have about my own process of creation. Art and creative expression have been becoming more and more important for me over the last several years. I am getting more and more convinced that creative flow is one of the biggest joys in life and something we humans need to be happy. It doesn’t have to be big art, there are infinitely many ways to be creative. In my case it’s mostly writing, fibre crafts (like knitting and crochet) and an occasional drawing. My talent and ambitions are modest, and my goal is almost entirely just my own fun and satisfaction.

If the stakes of my creation are so low, why then do I seem to be more afraid of being silly and making mistakes than The Beatles were, while they were producing an album they knew millions were waiting for?

I think a part of it is the times we are living in. All of us have constant access to tools that allow us to make anything look just that little bit more polished. Just that little bit more “perfect”. Filters, photo editors, auto-tune, and now most of it powered by AI in addition. Heck, just the ability to take 50 selfies so we can pick the best one is a way of polishing reality that is very new in the history of humankind.

I know there are people who are trying to fight against this on social media, posting content and images that are more authentic, but I would say these are in the minority. There are many more who will say they are posting a candid photo, but still make sure to get themselves from the good side, or make sure the lighting is just right, or whatever else.. And most will just go with it and do their best to make their creation as polished and professional-looking as possible.

The result is that we are exposed to a stream of what pretends to be the normal life of others, but in reality is highly-polished highlights of their lives. In return, we feel like that is the level we should aim for when we are sharing something of our own. Anything less feels just plain not-good-enough. And sadly, these aren’t completely empty fears, because in the day and age of social media, the criticism we might receive online can be absolutely cruel and ruthless. I just think about the women who show their normal faces and their age in an attempt to normalise the way an average 30 or 40 year old looks like without any procedures and makeup, and they get shredded to pieces in the comment sections. We are all so used to unattainable standards that we don’t even know that that is what they are anymore.

If this is happening with “normal” people, it’s no wonder that the vast majority of big-name actors and pop stars (if not all) have a number of plastic surgeries, veneers on their teeth, flawless makeup, contouring, and an aura of effortless perfection about them. I find it so refreshing to look at music videos and concerts from a few decades ago. People look so much less polished, less perfect, and (I am probably projecting here) more at peace with that lack of perfection. Skin texture, less-than-perfect teeth, body hair, nipples showing through the tops, normal faces, normal bodies, and clothes and makeup that were meant more as a form of expression, rather than a way to hide the flaws of their wearer.

Looking at The Beatles jamming in their studio in 1969, I couldn’t help but wonder what we might be losing in our hunt for perfection. Because while it might feel like it makes sense to pursue perfection, it seemed to me that we are, indeed, losing something. I think creativity might be one of the first victims of perfectionism.

Creativity requires play.

Creativity is impossible to control. It is not something we can force. We can facilitate creativity by crafting the right conditions and hoping for it to appear, but we can’t make it happen.

Creativity is something that emerges spontaneously from play. Play is one of those things that are difficult to define, although we all experience it and intuitively know it when we see it. Play means engaging with our internal and external world in the moment, exploring, having fun. It’s a state of focus and flow, that we access so easily when we are young, but it gets more difficult as we get older. While play might look a little different in adults, it is still play, and it is the state in which we can reach into the well of our creativity.

What do we need to be able to play? One of the main requirements is a sense of safety. Not feeling safe makes it difficult to focus deeply, and to try new things that might lead to mistakes. Without feeling safe to fail, we can’t play. The other thing is the right kind of challenge: something interesting and stimulating, something that stretches us, but is still within our abilities. Ultimately, play is built on trust. Trust that our environment is safe and that we are allowed to explore, try and fail; and trust in our own ability to overcome the challenge.

Perfectionism killed the cat… I mean, play

Perfectionism is at the opposite end of the spectrum from play. There is nothing easy or playful about it, and I think one of the main reasons is that it is born out of fear.

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die.

• Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird

Perfectionism is the fear that keeps us from trusting the safety of our playground. We don’t think we can afford mistakes. And perfectionism is the the fear that erodes our trust in ourselves. When perfection is the goal, we can never ever be good enough, and it’s only a matter of time before the fear paralyses us into procrastination and avoidance.

Imperfection is so very, very necessary, and being OK with it opens the doors to creativity, connection and authenticity.

It is our mistakes and the acceptance of mistakes that allow us to play, to practice, to be truly creative, to develop ourselves. It is how we learn and how we become better.

It is in our mistakes and in our lows that we best connect with others; they are what makes us human, what makes us relatable, what makes us real. I feel like we live in times where we would prefer “perfect” over “real”. Maybe it’s not so strange that the use of AI tools is becoming so common for tasks that are at their core creative ones. It feels safer not to show ourselves, not to risk failure. And definitely easier to avoid having to be creative when we are paralysed by perfectionism.

Most of us know all that, but that doesn’t remove the fear, nor the pressure we feel from the society.

Perfection seems like such a noble goal from the outside, for who wouldn’t want to be “perfect”. But its pursuit is a prison. It keeps us from freely exploring the world and ourselves. Perfectionism steals our play away, and with it our creativity, authenticity and connection to others. Truth is, we will make mistakes anyway, no matter how hard we try. We might as well stop trying so hard, and we will have more fun leaning into our mistakes, rather than fearing them.

To be honest, I am not sure where I am heading with this. I am winging it as I go, because I am trying to do as I preach. I am trying to play. To be real. To stop being afraid of imperfection. And I know that I will make mistakes and be cringey and that not everyone will like me, and I am doing my best to be OK with it.

I think the tide of our times will turn. Just like the 50s were followed by the 60s, which seemed much less concerned with perfection, I think people will eventually get tired of stepping so carefully through their lives. And until then, we can swim against the tide and have fun with it.

TODO We broke science

Science is broken. I guess this statement might make me sound like a crazy consipationalist that will try to convince you that the Earth is flat. Don’t worry, I won’t. Maybe I should mention at this point that I am an actual (slightly crazy) scientist, if I am to believe the job title on my work badge. And while I whole-heartedly believe that the scientific method of inquiry is hands-down the best way to learn about the reality we live in, what we call “science” is, indeed, broken.

Scientific method vs science

Scientific method is a way of acquiring knowledge, based on observation, scepticism and experimental testing of ideas. The process, in its most simple form, consists of

1. gathering all the knowledge available to the scientist (observations, results of experiments, theories) ,
2. forming a hypothesis that aims to explain the known facts,
3. coming up with a testable prediction of how the hypothesis will manifest in the world
4. performing experiments to test the hypotesis.
5. And rinse and repeat.

These steps are more just general principles, capturing the spirit of the process, rather than a strict how-to. Even though they might not be applicable to every single situation, they are still good guidelines to keep in mind.

Just like with everything else, experts are debating the appliation and details of the scientific method as we speak, but the truth remains that it is the best way we have to learn about the world around us

The scientific method requires scepticism, not jumping to conclusions, not letting one’s biases get in the way, and being able and willing to change and refine one’s ideas and views in face of new evidence.

Science, by definition, is simply the discipline that organises our knowledge of the world. Science is basically a method. However, that is not what we mean when say “science” nowadays and that is not what I meant when I said that science is broken. We tend to refer to any piece of research as science. We tend to point to a scientific paper and say “Look at the science.” Or even worse, we point to an article in a magazine reporting on a scientific paper with a clickbaity title and call that science. There is this assumption that everything that makes its way into published science is true, especially if the majority agrees on it. We conflate published research with truth and immutable facts.

Even in an ideal world, this would not be the case. Science, the method – is a process. It’s findings are under constant refinement. Many scientific theories we have are very solid, but even those can be expanded, like the theory of relativity added to Newtonian mechanics. It would be a mistake to look to “science” as the source of the one unchangeable truth even under the best circumstances. Even worse though, the circumstances are far from the best.

Life of a scientist

Sometimes I think about Tolkien and his position as a

Reproducibility crisis, underpaid researchers, funding issues, paid for research, one-death-at-a-time/ego, citation system and money, publishing, predatory publishers, peer-review process, language getting difficult, published papers instead of a PhD thesis, bad papers being published - no theory behind

TODO How to critically read scientific articles

Statistics is not intuitive, not common sense

The case for softness productivitymental-healthpersonal-development

It’s easy to think that discipline, consistency and pushing yourself are the only way to fulfil your dreams. But what if you find that, instead of crushing your goals, you are only crushing yourself?

What if I don’t want to go hard?

I was talking to a few friends the other day, and the conversation turned to exercise. The idea seemed to be that you should do what you hate. Burpees? Sprints? Of course, you hate them. That’s why you should do them! Prove to yourself that you can do hard things! Just look at David Goggins and what he achieved. Stay hard!

And you know, I get it. I really do. It’s good to stretch the boundaries of our comfort zone from time to time, and to challenge ourselves, and show ourselves that we are capable. But as I was sitting there I couldn’t help but think that I don’t want to do things I hate. I don’t want to be hard. I actually want to become softer.

I listened to the conversation and felt like I was that one driver driving in the wrong direction on a highway. I didn’t want to ruin my friends’ vibe, so I didn’t say anything. A year ago, I don’t think I would have been able to admit to myself without guilt and thoughts of laziness that this message was not resonating with me. Now, after some nine months of dealing with burnout/mild long Covid, my views on productivity and my understanding of myself have shifted enough that I could see I wasn’t really the right target audience here.

My limits have been pushed enough. I know I can do hard things. It’s time I learned that I don’t always have to.

No such thing as laziness

The longer I have been a human, the more I am realising that there is no such thing as laziness. Laziness, this mythical sin, is supposed to grip us and make us do nothing, or just things that are not useful. And all that for no reason other than being lazy.

In reality, there is always something more behind what can look like laziness and procrastination from the outside. People are rarely lazy about things they like doing, find meaningful and have enough energy for.

“If they wanted to, they would.” I see this online so often, yet it’s so very not true. How often I find myself desperately wanting to do something, but won’t? Too many. And it’s never because I’m lazy. And definitely not because I don’t want to.

There is so, so much that can stop us from doing something that we (or others) think we should.

There is good old fear. Fear of failure, fear of success – both equally paralysing. There is lack of energy, plain and simple. There is feeling that the activity doesn’t really hold much meaning – pretty soul-crushing if it goes on for long. There are competing interests and duties. There are tasks that are above our skill level and feel too daunting. Maybe we feel we don’t deserve the good things that might come from it. Maybe we feel overwhelmed, not even sure what to do. Maybe we’re struggling with something completely different and have no bandwidth left for even the simplest tasks. Maybe our brains are a bit rebellious and fight being told what to do. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

There is just so much that can be stopping us from doing things that will improve our life, and pretty much all of it is way more complicated and difficult than simple stupid laziness.

It’s not the hard that brings the results

In my quest to create a more sustainable life, I found “hardness” isn’t what really brings the progress that people see when applying discipline, consistency and grind. It’s what lies beneath all that – the change in mindset that allows for the discipline and consistency to materialise in the first place.

The key ingredient to doing the things that are good for us and move us forward is actually devotion to ourselves.

It is the love and respect we hold for ourselves that needs to guide what and how we do. It is caring for our own well-being, for our bodies, minds and souls, that can allow us to get the right nutritious food and movement, to rest without guilt when we need to, and to be challenged in ways that move us forward; to act with integrity and use our time meaningfully.

Being devoted to oneself might sometimes mean pushing ourselves hard and being hard, but at other times, strict discipline and grind are taking us in the wrong direction. No amount of willpower will help if we push for things that aren’t actually good for us. Whether it is working on goals that are not meaningful to us, denying ourselves necessary rest or putting other people’s needs and wishes far above our own in a misguided desire to do the ‘right’ thing.

It is the self-love and self-compassion that will keep us on the right path and that will keep us going. When we are determined to do right by ourselves, we find ourselves choosing the ‘shoulds’ willingly, but they aren’t ‘shoulds’ anymore. Devotion to ourselves is where the motivation comes from, no willpower needed (or at least way less of it). And thankfully, while willpower is a limited resource, love and devotion are not.

A break isn’t quitting

When we rely on pure willpower and discipline, on unbroken streaks and grind, it is easy to feel like every hiccup is a failure. We expect consistency in our performance, but we always make plans on days when we feel good, and bad days are coming as surely as the taxes. It’s easy to think that we are failing and that we aren’t good/strong/determined/capable enough to do what we set out to do.

But in reality, consistency is impossible and, thankfully, unnecessary. The only thing we need to do is remember why we are doing what we are doing and keep showing up. Even if it’s just in the smallest way. That’s why making our desired habits ’too small to fail’ is such a good idea. For me, at the worst time in my burnout, this actually only meant a Visit – considering the habit – showing up in the place I would usually do the activity and give myself the space and time to do as much or as little of it as made sense at that moment.

Instead of flexing our willpower and forcing discipline and consistency, we are much better served by broadening our perspective, looking at our lives in the context of weeks, months and years, rather than days, and asking what is in our best interest, what would someone truly devoted to themselves do.

Softly

So, in a world obsessed with pushing hard, I am choosing to go softly. I am choosing to replace discipline with devotion to myself, consistency with gently showing up, willpower with desire to do what is best for me and others. Sometimes that might mean going hard, but when it doesn’t, I am more than happy to tread softly.

The problem with phones or Taking back the moment productivitymental-healthtechnology

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with my phone and I know I am not the only one. Just like most people, I spend more time on my phone than I would want to, all the while feeling that I have too little time for other things in my life. And I don’t even feel better when I emerge from my phone dives. For the longest time, I thought this was a `it’s-not-you-it’s-me’ situation; I thought I wasn’t good enough at managing my phone use, my willpower wasn’t strong enough, it was all just me, etc etc. But that wasn’t really getting me anywhere. I would vow to spend less time on my phone (and break my promises), put in app limits on the usual offenders (just to promptly ignore them), even uninstall apps (just to reinstall them embarrassingly soon, or install another app that would suck me in instead). It always worked for a bit, but I would always come crawling back, telling myself that I just need to be better and then everything will be fine.

Well guess what, I found out that it’s not just me. And it’s not even just the social media. Having all of the internet in our pocket puts us in a completely unprecedented situation that changes how we focus, spend our time and think. It’s a difficult thing to fight. Knowing we are being affected doesn’t stop us from being affected, just like knowing a magic trick isn’t real magic doesn’t stop us from being tricked. But, if nothing else, I find it easier to manage my phone use knowing what I am up against and what it is about the smart phone that makes it difficult to moderate. So here are the three ways in which the smartphones mess with us.

1. The illusion of ’not-a-thing’

I realised this one only recently, and it was the biggest game-changer in my relationship to my phone. Imagine you are sitting at a cafe talking to a couple of friends, the conversation takes a turn to a topic that maybe isn’t super interesting for you, so you take a quick look at your phone, maybe check for any notifications, maybe emails, maybe have a quick look at Insta… Not the most polite thing to do, sure, but we have all done it, right? Now imagine doing the same, but on a laptop. Most of us wouldn’t; that would just be plain wrong. Yet while the hardware is different, the activity is just the same.

Somehow, whatever I do on my phone doesn’t feel like a ’thing’. It feels like I can engage with it but still keep my attention on whatever I was doing in the real world. It doesn’t feel like a real activity, not quite. But whether I am reading emails, or scrolling social media, or doing a ‘quick’ web search, they take my full attention, because, as we know by now, there is no such thing as multi-tasking, only fast and inefficient attention-switching. But the phone, with its small screen and bite-sized bits of content creates the illusion of multi-tasking, of not really engaging in anything substantial, of just having a quick look. The illusion of whatever we are doing being ’not-a-thing’.

And so we find ourselves staring into our phones while talking to friends and loved ones, while trying to get work done, while playing with our kids, while exploring new places, while trying to fall asleep, … We are disengaging from our surroundings and from whatever we were doing, but we don’t even see that we are doing that.

What can we do with it? Honestly, I don’t think we can change how we perceive our gadgets anymore than we can change how we see optical illusions. I think a phone will always make my brain think that whatever I am doing on it isn’t that substantial, and of course I can do it and keep my full attention on the people and things around me. As if. But knowing that my mind works this way makes it easier for me to stick to my plans (and not reinstall my apps), because I won’t convince myself that I will moderate better this time. When I noticed this ’not-a-thing’ illusion for the first time a few months ago, I deleted the apps that were the biggest time-sucks for me. I didn’t give myself any limits on them, the only rule was that I would engage with them on the computer only. Funnily enough, I think I have been on them once in those months. I have since installed some different apps that became a new time-suck, and deleted them later. It’s a work in progress.

2. Always there, always entertaining

When I find myself having a moment of time, I almost instinctively reach for my phone. I know there will be something there that can occupy my mind for whatever length of time I have available. The completely unprecedented thing is that you don’t even have to decide what to do. Something will be there.

I used to just do the rounds - Instagram, Facebook (even though it has sucked for years now), Twitter, Pinterest, whatever. Honestly, it feels like gambling. With each scroll I hope to see something good, and when I do, I feel satisfied for a split second, then scroll again to try my luck anew. Isn’t it wild, spending so much time looking at things we didn’t even ask to see? Sure, we choose to follow certain people, but that is far from the only content we are being served, and in many cases, if those people don’t pay for ads, their posts won’t reach their followers anyway. And so we scroll and scroll and scroll and fill up our free time with things we didn’t decide to watch and didn’t decide to read.

What does it do to us, to always have this distraction machine readily available within reach? What does it do to us to rarely, or never, be faced with the bare insides of our heads? When was the last time you were bored and ended up doing something cool? Once again, I have no answers. What I know is that I often find myself feeling like I have a backlog of thoughts, a few dozen open tabs in my mind. Many of them I can’t even consciously reach, they are just feelings and impressions left behind by the medley of posts on my ever-changing feed. I know I am exceptionally slow at processing things, and my mental filters allow for more input to come in than they should, but I don’t think anyone was made to be exposed to all of the internet, all of the time.

3. All exploration, no play

There are two stages in which kids interact with toys: exploration and play. Exploration is the first stage, in which the child asks themselves: “What does this do?”. Play comes later with the question of “What can I do with this?”. When surrounded by too many toys, children will get stuck in the exploration mode, pick up one toy after the other, interact with them for a little bit, to see what they do, then toss them aside. As a parent, I have seen and tidied up the results of this many times; as an adult, I feel a bit called out. I don’t think we grown-ups are that different from kids in this.

There simply has to be an exploration stage before anyone can engage in a creative play, but exploration requires less effort, feels inherently more exciting and more urgent. While there is plenty of what I would call ‘play’ that can be done on our devices, from gaming, through digital art, music, writing, and all the way to coding, a smart phone is not particularly well suited for these. If you are to seriously engage in almost any digital creative endeavour, a computer, or at least a tablet, is a much better option. And so it’s that much easier to fall into the habit of constant exploration on our phones, of going with the easy, pleasant and ultimately dissatisfying option of consuming only, and rarely creating. And since they are always there, always available, we don’t often find ourselves asking what we could be doing instead.

Getting out of the rut

For me, realising that some of the characteristics of smartphones make them inherently a bit tricky, helped me change my relationship with mine. I spend less time thinking about my stupid inability to control myself, and more time setting up rules that help me keep my agency in this relationship.

Among the practical things I have done is

1. Black and white mode Adding a shortcut to put my phone into a black and white mode, and keep it there as much as possible. The lack of colours really drains the appeal out of most of what’s on it.
2. Uninstalling social media apps I decided to only use them on the computer instead.
3. Fewer notifications I muted or completely disabled notifications on most of my apps. There is simply no need for every single email to make a loud blip, and for many of the other apps, it’s quite OK for me to only see the notification once I open them.

I would be very interested in hearing about your experience with your smartphone; whether you are happy with how much time you spend on it, or what kind of precautions you use to keep it that way.

Goodbye, Zettelkasten. I quit. knowledge-workcreativityzettelkastennote-taking

When I first heard about the Zettelkasten (ZK) method, it seemed like the Holy Grail of note-taking. (And I happen to be the kind of person to get excited about that.) One place to put all my thoughts, all my ideas, all the things I am learning and would wish to remember? One place to always find them? One place to bring them all… and in the darkness bind them? I mean: bring them all together?

A system where my notes would come alive and become a ‘second brain’, a ‘conversation partner’? Yes, please! I mean, who wouldn’t want that?

But that is not quite what happened.

My train-wreck of a Zettelkasten journey

When I first wrote about the Zettelkasten, I was about a year into it, had almost 500 notes and was still very much in the honeymoon phase. My enthusiasm started showing cracks just a couple of months after I wrote that article. I found myself running into duplicate notes, realising I wrote down what was basically the same idea several times in different notes without noticing I already had a note on that. I was spending unreasonable amounts of time sitting by my computer writing notes. I started capturing way, way too much information and not actually going back to it. My Zettelkasten felt like a black hole that I was feeding, but getting nothing back from it. I knew I fell into the trap of the famous Collector’s fallacy. I did the only logical thing (hahaha) – and I moved my ZK to paper.

I spent a few weeks rewriting, pruning and consolidating my 500 notes to about 100 A5-sized index cards. I am a big fan of writing on paper, by hand, with a smooth pen, and I was super happy with my new ZK. It finally didn’t feel like a black hole. All the notes were right there in front of me, there was an order to them, a certain topography that my mammalian brain could orient itself in, and they felt more alive. I remembered them better. And writing on paper is slower, so the added friction helped me to get my collecting urges somewhat under control. I was happy. For a few months.

Eventually, I found myself with some 500 notes again and the topography I so enjoyed in the beginning was constantly getting disrupted by whole trains of thoughts-worth of new cards being added between the old ones (that I remembered being next to each other). With a few hundred notes, looking for things has become a nightmare and manual backlinking was a horror. I was missing search. A lot.

Never one to give up, I decided to double my paper Zettelkasten in a digital system again. The plan was to use both, do everything on paper first, then duplicate on digital, to give myself that search I was wishing for. Just writing it now, I can’t believe I was thinking this would work. It was a crazy amount of work. It was ridiculous.

I wanted my ZK to work. I wanted it so bad. I was diligently taking notes, distilling ideas, processing them, linking. For two years. It was a lot of work, whether on paper or digitally, but it was also fun, and I was looking forward to my ZK reaching the famed ‘critical mass’ and starting to surprise me. I didn’t get there.

There were some upsides, sure. Whatever I processed in my notes, I remembered better than I probably would have without it. But I never actually used my notes when I was writing anything. Not that I didn’t try. They simply weren’t that useful once it came to writing. Worse though, I was feeling more and more paralysed by my notes. Anything I thought about, anything I read, I started thinking about where it would fit inside the web of my Zettelkasten and I found myself not even wanting to think anymore, because it was all too overwhelming. And worst of all, eventually, I felt like my brain was getting muddier and muddier and my ideas more and more fragmented and difficult to express. I felt like I was full of things I wanted to say or write, but couldn’t find the beginning, never mind the thread of the narrative through the jungle-like web of thoughts. Even this blog suffered for it.

Eventually, with the help of my darling husband who had to intervene, I tossed my box of papers into the recycling bin.

My Zettelkasten autopsy

I have spent the last few months on a bit of a note-taking fast (not that I didn’t try to restart a few times) and as always, I felt that if something went wrong, it was surely my fault. So for those of you out there, thinking to yourselves that I failed because I did it wrong, welcome to the club. I have been thinking that for over a year, ever since it stopped quite working for me. But not anymore, not quite.

Despite the message one might get reading online (including my own old post on it)

the Zettelkasten Method is not THE note-taking method, it’s just one of them. Its principles impose a way of seeing things and structuring ideas that might be perfect for some types of work and for some types of brains, but it will not work for everything and everyone.

And it didn’t work for me.

Here are some of my thoughts about why ZK doesn’t mesh with my mind, maybe it will be useful for others who find themselves ‘failing’ at it.

Images from canva.com, collage by me

• A map that is never complete

  I think, subconsciously, I have been trying to ‘recreate my brain’ in my ZK. There are enough narratives online that refer to the ZK as a ‘second brain’ that even though I didn’t take it too seriously, this idea stuck around in the background. The modern Zettelkasten Method emphasises atomic notes, i.e. one idea per note, and connecting them with each other. The result is an interconnected web, where any and all structure arises from this linking.

  In some sense, if the mind is a landscape, the Zettelkasten tries to be a map. But just like any map, it can’t and shouldn’t capture it all. The landscape of the mind is rich and full of details and densely connected with roads and trails. How close can we recreate it in our notes? How close should we?

  I found it very difficult to write atomic notes, because for each of them, for each little landmark, I felt compelled to recreate at least a part of the landscape that held it. It was all about the connections, after all, right? Without realising it, I started writing notes about things I would never have written about otherwise, just because they were related to something else I wanted to note down, and I needed them to create the right context. It was laborious and frustrating, because it never felt good enough.

  Well, surprise, surprise, it’s not possible to capture one’s brain in a web of notes. Not even close. And while I would never embark on such a futile quest on purpose, I found myself sort of, kind of doing it in a Zettelkasten, because I felt like I was being invited to do that. I think with enough discipline and a clear idea of a goal, one might avoid this trap, but that is a fight I don’t need in my life.

• The living land vs the frozen image

  In addition to being incomplete, the map is frozen in time. What was one of the biggest promises of Zettelkasten – remembering things – becomes one of its shortcomings. Where our ideas and understanding are constantly evolving the way the living land changes from season to season and even from day to day, updating the map is slow and takes effort.

  Of course, it is perfectly possible to update the notes (especially digital ones) or add new notes that refine or dispute ideas in the old ones, but a shift in understanding can have far-reaching consequences that require updating a bunch of notes. I do wonder whether and how much it affects our ability to quickly adapt to new ideas, if we are constantly working with old ideas and old structures that we have put considerable effort into? Once again, it’s an issue that could be overcome with diligence and discipline, but in my mind it is an unnecessary uphill battle.

  The thing I craved and missed the most when I was working with a Zettelkasten was a feeling of overview and clarity. One of the main reasons I take notes and write is to sort out my thoughts and to clarify ideas. The more I was using a Zettelkasten, the less clarity and more overwhelm I felt.

  With the Zettelkasten ‘remembering’ everything we feed it, it only grows and grows (I know you can prune it, but we mostly talk about the growth as a good thing, right?). Inevitably, a lot of the notes start feeling either obvious, or outdated (as in, our view has shifted somewhat), but they still hang around and clutter the space. I can imagine that there are people who have zero problem ignoring these notes, but I am not one of them.

• Looking at a map through a straw

  There is another thing that I found to impede my sense of overview and clarity. To me, a Zettelkasten feels too zoomed in. It’s like looking at a map through a straw, you only see a tiny little part of it. I know, I know. That is what structure notes, or maps of content, or whatever you call them are for. Those are the notes where you can organise the other notes. And while they do help, I, personally, found them lacking. The digital ones, especially, since they don’t allow for much more than a linear ‘map’, unless you employ some fancy drawing/mind-mapping/canvas software.

  In any case, a lot of the grunt work of maintaining a Zettelkasten happens at the level of single, atomic notes. One file/paper = one idea. As zoomed in as it gets.

  And the connections, the thing that the Zettelkasten is all about, are the one thing that is the most difficult to visualise. They exist between notes, not within them. By design, you can’t look at them. I was always trying to connect my notes well and describe the nature of the connection as I was linking, as that was often one of the most interesting parts in the note (sometimes it would even become its own note), but I wasn’t able to create a feeling of overview and clarity that I was lacking.

  Some note-taking software comes with the ability to create an interconnected graph of the notes. This works well – for a very, very small number of notes. More than a few tens of notes, and the jungle of lines becomes impenetrable, although aesthetically pleasing. With each reload, the notes are shuffled around a little (goodbye, feeling of space). The lines connecting two notes tell us nothing about why they are connected and the distance between them does not reflect the strength of the connection. In the end, I found the graph view mostly useless.

  I found that the Zettelkasten invites to focus on the parts, rather than the whole. Dissecting everything into single ideas, into atomic notes. I am not saying that it doesn’t provide the space to put the bigger picture back together again, because that is what structure notes can be for. But ultimately, I found it to emphasise the parts over the whole much more than would suit my thinking flow.

Going forward

I abandonned my Zettelkasten some 4–5 months ago. It wasn’t a clean end. I found myself coming back to it in various forms, feeling like I failed somehow, because it was supposed to be the ultimate knowledge management system and thinking space. Heck, it even looked like it for a while. I thought I just needed to tweak something. I thought I just needed to do it better.

I have finally got over the Zettelkasten. I was finally able to start thinking outside of the slip box and consider systems that don’t resemble it much.

I feel like I should say here, if the Zettelkasten works for you, that’s wonderful! Congrats on finding something that fits your needs and wants. But if you are like me, and you find yourself struggling with it, the problem isn’t you, nor is it the Zettelkasten itself. To use a precise term here – you just don’t vibe with it. And the world would be terribly boring if we all vibed with the same note-taking system.

Right now, there isn’t much of a system to my notes. I went back to what worked before and what I enjoyed and loved the most. I write. In my journal. I open it to the next empty page and write what I want to write. If it feels important a few days later, I add it to the notebook’s table of contents. I might one day add a digital table of contents, when the number of notebooks becomes too big to comfortably search.

It might seem like a proper downgrade from a Zettelkasten, but it’s not, it’s just different.

It’s a system that allows me to think through my thoughts and note down the things that I want to remember in a place where I can find it later. It has just enough friction for me not to over-collect, but not so much to stop me from using it or to make it a chore. There is little to no overhead.

It’s pleasant – I love writing by hand.

Writing by hand is just the thing that gets my memory to pay attention, and preserves the benefit of better recall that I got from using the Zettelkasten.

The journal is focused on the now. The new blank page is the focus. The old entries are preserved, but allowed to disappear in the background, into the past. The now changes and evolves freely and what should be forgotten is forgotten.

My mind does not work in an interconnected map of atomic ideas. It works in narratives. Where the Zettelkasten is a map of the mind’s landscape, free-form writing is a walk through it. It doesn’t capture it all. It can only take a single path at a time through an ever-changing land, exploring the views, the landmarks and the roads between them. My journal thus becomes a collection of these little mind-walks, criss-crossing the land. And just like the photographs we take on a real-life walk are not the point of it, the scribblings on the page are not the point of my mind-walks. It is the experience that counts.

Thinking ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶ play in an overstimulating world knowledge-workcreativityzettelkastennote-taking

After tossing away my Zettelkasten, I was still left with the task of thinking (and hanging onto my thoughts) in this noisy world. Fortunately, I got some unexpected help.

The article about my break-up with ZK prompted an unusual number of responses. Among others, I was contacted by THE Sascha Fast himself from zettelkasten.de, and offered a coaching session. As done as I felt with the method, I was incredibly curious to hear what Sascha had to say, and obviously couldn’t decline the offer. If you feel like watching what we have talked about, the coaching session is on YouTube.

Anyway, it gave me a lot to think about, and just at the right time. While I was feeling relieved and happy after I got rid of my dysfunctional Zettelkasten, I was still living in the same world overflowing with information, still needing to think through the things I read, saw and experienced, still needing to note down bits of information that otherwise wouldn’t do me the favour of just sticking around in my brain, thank you very much. Put simply, I was still doing knowledge work, but now without a framework.

So, here are some of my thoughts about developing a sustainable knowledge-work practice that actually works for me. This article will have several parts: first some thoughts about what a Zettelkasten is, then addressing the key aspects of the practice that I need to take into account (as suggested by Sascha), namely depth, breadth, and energy and information input management. Finally, I will consider the practical details of how I can translate this into reality. Let’s go!

What is even a Zettelkasten, anyway?

What is meant by Zettelkasten these days is rather specific. Read almost any article about the Zettelkasten online, and you will get the same: first the story of Niklas Luhman and his miraculous slip box, then the three principles of the Zettelkasten Method - atomic notes (writing only one idea per note), writing in your own words, and linking the notes to each other. This view of the Zettelkasten is so widespread that you can even read it on Microsoft’s business blog, of all places, which tells you all you need to know about its modern popularity. For some reason, many of these articles leave the impression that Luhman invented the Zettelkasten (or even state it explicitly like the aforementioned Microsoft blog.")

In truth, Zettelkasten is simply German for “slip box” or “card box”, and these have been in use for centuries before Luhmann. Really, Luhmann wasn’t even the first—nor the only—power-user (as seen on the Zettelkasten page on Wikipedia). Luhmann’s main contribution might have been his linking system which uses unique identifiers for each note, resulting in an analogue version of the digitally ubiquitous hypertext. He definitely also added to the popularity of the method by crediting his slip box for his prolific writing.

Funnily enough, the three principles of atomicity, deep processing and connection don’t even come from Luhmann. His notes weren’t atomic; most weren’t connected in any other way than through their position in the sequence and many of them were rather telegraphic—definitely no detailed processing written with an audience in mind. And so the most famous user of the Zettelkasten method wouldn’t even recognise the rules that now seem to define the method he is credited with inventing.

But really, it shouldn’t even matter what exactly Luhmann did or didn’t do. He was just one person, and he might have had the same success with a different system, or even no system at all. Luhmann’s prolific output is not a proof that his version of a Zettelkasten is the best one, or that any version of a Zettelkasten is the ultimate system. Ultimately, we need to look at the principles and ideas themselves, rather than just appeal to authority.

But what is a Zettelkasten, then? A hundred years ago it would have simply meant a slip box - made up of slips of paper organised in whatever way the owner wished. For Luhmann, that organisation meant unique identifiers for each card and hyperlinks between them. Nowadays, almost every Zettler thinks of a digital system composed of single text files, following the three principles that are featured in every introductory article about the method. They are all just as much the real Zettelkasten.

Revisiting the three principles

In my last article I wrote about how the Zettelkasten method didn’t work for me. How it felt too rigid, how it felt too “zoomed-in” (because of the atomicity), how I felt like it was inviting me to map the full contents of my brain to capture all the connections (because of the connecting), and how I kept capturing and “processing” (read: rewriting) way too much. I was done with the “modern” ZK and its principles.

Discussing the principles with Sascha was incredibly interesting, because his take on them was very different from how I understood them before. This is surprising, given that (as far as I know), these principles, so often erroneously attributed to Luhmann, actually orginated from zettelkasten.de, started by him and Christian Tietze. I have to admit, I much prefer the version of Zettelkasten that Sascha introduced me to much more than my old one.

Here are my takeaways from the conversation I had with Sascha and how I see the three principles after talking to him (it’s my understanding, not his words). Spoiler alert: I really did do it all wrong before.

1. Atomicity is the principle of striving for clarity and trying to get to the core of the idea. It’s not about splitting up the ideas into the smallest possible particles. It’s a goal or a process, rather than a prerequisite. As a result, a note can totally start as a dumping ground of everything relevant, and be the space where the actual thinking happens.
2. Writing in your own words is not about making sure you understand the idea. Rather, it’s a challenge to think about the idea, to expand on it, to develop it, improve it, to add to it in some way.
3. Connecting the notes doesn’t mean trying to recreate the landscape each idea lives in. It is simply a way of leveraging old thinking whenever it is relevant to new ideas.

So yes, the way I have applied these principles before was not working, but clearly, it wasn’t the only way to apply them.

Letting go of the “proper” way

Previously, I have spent a lot of time splitting up all the ideas I got from a book/article/video, and trying to put them into “atomic notes” so that I could work with them. It was boring busy work that only fragmented my thoughts and didn’t leave me with time and energy for the actual thinking I so wanted to do (funnily, that thinking is the real meaning behind “processing”). I felt like I needed to connect the notes “properly” and integrate them into the network. But thankfully, I don’t need to do any of that.

Atomicity can just be a direction, not a starting point.

A Zettelkasten does not have to be some sort of map of ideas, or, god forbid, a second brain. It can be a log of previous thinking efforts—a living archive that I can still interact with. I want my notes to hold my past thinking available for the future me, but in no way do they need to (or can) represent the landscape of my mind.

What I did before, might have been recognised as a Zettelkasten by anyone familiar with the modern idea of it, but it wasn’t useful (to me). Now my understanding of the Zettelkasten Method has changed a lot, expanded, loosened. After reconsidering the principles, I can still get behind them. The principles of striving for clarity, adding to the ideas, and connecting when relevant still sound good to me, and can be applied in many different ways.

Why I’m not calling it a Zettelkasten anymore

Ultimately, I have decided to continue on the same path that I started when I quit my ZK a few months ago. What I wrote back then still applies. If anything, talking to Sascha confirmed it for me; what I was doing was, indeed, useless. But it wasn’t all that a Zettelkasten is or can be.

I know I just said that the Zettelkasten can be a lot of things, but I, personally, decided not to call my future note-taking a Zettelkasten. The word to me now is both too loose and too loaded. Loose because it can encompass so much, and loaded both with all that is being written about it out there and my own unfortunate experience. I want to start anew. I want to give myself the space to end up with not-a-Zettelkasten. Or not-quite-a-Zettelkasten. Or a sort-of-a-Zettelkasten. Or whatever it might end up being. I don’t want to be Luhmann. I don’t even want to be Sascha. I am looking forward to finding my own way to a meaningful, sustainable knowledge-work practice, developed from principles I can stand behind, adapted to my needs. Good luck to me.

What I need from my knowledge-work practice

Parting ways with what most people understand to be a Zettelkasten, I still find myself facing the challenge of knowledge work in a world drowning us in information. But I can’t blame it on the world only, I excel at making things harder for myself with my homemade cocktail of boundless curiosity, squirrel-level distractibility, crippling perfectionism, and an overdevelopped sense of responsibility. To make it easier for my future self to make good decisions, even when she’s deep down some rabbit hole, I need a plan.

Or rather, a system. A practice. One that takes into account my needs, such as the need for breadth and depth, and the need to manage both the information influx and my own energy (as suggested by Sascha after our coaching call).

• Slow down the flow

  The first step in knowledge work is ingesting information and inputs from outside. While this part doesn’t directly happen inside my note system, it is what sets the tone for all that follows. I have been finding it difficult to deal with the constant, relentless influx of cool and interesting stuff that is the internet. And I doubt I am alone in that.

  It is tempting to think that the answer to the information overload is somewhere out there. That there is a tool, or a system, that will allow us to manage the waterfall. Isn’t that what the philosophy of apps like Evernote is? Capture everything. Funnel it to a safe storage place. Store for later—for ever.

  A tool that lets us capture everything we find mildly interesting is just like a huge funnel taking in the waterfall, directing it to—well—us. Sure, unlike a funnel, it also has a storage space that can expand basically infinitely. But no matter how big the funnel is, no matter how big the storage space is, our stomach is still the same as it was. In a way, the situation is even worse now. Our funnel lets us capture more water than we would have otherwise and makes sure we don’t let any of it slip by unnoticed. (Is it just me, or is this waterfall metaphor getting out of hand?) We save things for later, for when we will have more time, but, surprise, surprise, there is no later. When that ’later’ arrives, it’s just like now. The stream never stops.

  I tried. I mean, that is what my old Zettelkasten was. I was capturing left and right, lying to myself that I was being selective. And then, not wanting to fall into the trap of only capturing, I was organising. Not really processing, just organising. And I was tired.

  The only solution I can see right now to the information overload is to deliberately slow down the flow. I don’t think we have a realistic view of how much information we are able to absorb. Three or four “short” informational videos of 15–20 minutes, tightly edited and fast-paced, will easily hold more information than an average lecture. Regardless of whether the information is useful or important, it is still input that our brains need to process, evaluate and make decisions about.

  Social media, with their bite-sized bits of stuff and endless scroll, are no better. I don’t know about you, but they always leave me with a feeling of open tabs in my brain, somewhere in the background, ones I can’t access. They are thoughts and feelings that appeared in response to whatever I scrolled past, but that had no time to develop before they were pushed away a half a second later by a flick of a finger. Trapped, they have now become ghosts in the tower of my mind. Back when I wrote about this for the first time, I was still keeping my social media. Now, I have left most of them, and the ones I kept, I visit less than weekly. I just don’t quite see anymore how to use them without falling into this trap.

  In addition, not only do we think we can easily deal with this amount of information, we think we can do it on the side! There is a problem with smartphones—actually, several—but one of them is that they make whatever you do with them feel like “not-a-thing”. Like something you can do while doing something else. We use them without quite realising that they have our full attention, thinking that we are still engaging with the living world around us. Not only do we lose sight of our surroundings, but we also put ourselves in the worst position to process what we are seeing and reading. Multitasking is not the best strategy for doing knowledge work.

  I think the answer to the digital overwhelm is curating the inputs, which in my case means removing social media and heavily limiting my phone use. But it also means choosing carefully what I will give my attention to.

  Which brings me to agency. Agency is a tricky thing that has been on my mind for a while now. There are two parts to agency - it’s a clarity about what you want, as well as an ability to pursue it.

  We need agency to keep ourselves on course when facing the “content” deluge, but ironically, this deluge also strips us of it.

  In practice, agency often means acting non-reactively. It requires stopping what we are doing regularly and reevaluating whether it is what we really want to do.

  To regularly pause, we need moments with no input. To know what we want, we need to know ourselves; something we do by spending time with ourselves. And both of these, my precious, are freaking difficult with a distraction machine lurking in our pocketses.

  So the answer that keeps staring me in the face once again is to be mindful with my information diet. For me, that means staying off of my phone as much as possible, and using my computer for enganging with the internet. To use my RSS feed and treat it as a river, not as a lake. In other words, what catches my attention then and there, I read. What doesn’t—well—it floats by and that’s ok. I don’t have to read or watch everything I subscribed for.

  Being mindful of my information diet also means choosing sources that are worth my time, prioritising long-form and (ideally physical) books. And lastly, a good information diet includes some fasting—leaving enough time for myself to sit with my own thoughts, whether in front of a blank page, or just staring out of a (real-life) window.

• Finding depth again

  As a child, I dreamed of being a polymath. I was ridiculously curious, and I literally wanted to learn everything there is to learn in the world. It stuck with me for longer than it does for most people, but I grew out of it eventually. But while I don’t want to learn everything anymore, my interests still go in quite a few directions.

  My previous Zettelkasten was able to hold the breadth, but I kept myself so busy with collecting, curating and organising bits of ideas, that I never had the time to sit down and think through an idea on (or of) my own. In other words, I was lacking depth.

  This time, I am changing that. If I am to write a note, it is because I have something to add to an idea, something I am trying to process about it, understand, or apply to my life.

  Ever since I have started my first Zettelkasten, I have been haunted by the spectre of the Collector’s fallacy. I have also read about how processing was the answer to it. But it turns out that what I understood as ‘processing’ wasn’t enough to stop me from collecting too much. Realistically, I can’t write about everything I find interesting, so I needed a new way of deciding what to include in my notes. The filter that I pass new ideas through now is one of ‘developing’. I still jot down ideas when they strike, but I now decide whether to keep them based on whether I want to develop them. Not just process them to make sure I understand them and can connect them to other ideas. I need to feel like I want to think about it deeply, apply it somehow, somewhere, or add to it.

  Because ultimately, what good is having information, having notes, if they don’t change what we do or who we are?

  Knowledge only becomes useful when it is assimilated, when are able to apply it to our lives. And to get to that point, much more ‘processing’ is needed than to get to a point where we understand the idea. We have to make it our own.

  I think this shows again how important it is to manage our information diet. What point is it to read book after book, highlighting and exporting half of it to our digital second brains, if we haven’t made any of the ideas in it our own?

  Going forward, I will be using my (note-)writing system for exactly the thing I didn’t get the time for before: thinking.

• The forgotten need—energy

  Now, the last need Sascha brought up is the one I keep forgetting. Or rather, ignoring. Energy. It’s one of those things I generally don’t have and haven’t had much of for a while (see my post on burnout/long Covid). Honestly, the moment he mentioned it, I was surprised. I was equally surprised by the idea of taking energy into consideration and by the fact that I was surprised by it. Because, duh. Who doesn’t consider their own energy needs and stores when planning and doing activities? (Me, clearly.)

  So here we are—I am finally considering energy while setting up my knowledge-work practice, and realising that it affects everything else. While all activities require energy, strictly speaking, some of them—the good ones—leave you feeling better afterwards than what you started with. And I don’t mean the finally-got-that-done kind of better. Rephrasing ideas from books and frantically trying to get to the bottom of my inbox is not one of them. But what is?

  Actually, this is. Blogging is one of those things that bring me joy and leave me with more energy and clarity than I had before. Writing on my blog feels more like actual creation than writing notes for myself does. I care about the text more, I feel prouder of it when it’s done. It prevents me from collecting without processing, because why would I publish someone else’s ideas? It feels inherently more creative.

  Plus, as Kening Zhu talks about, the act of sharing can be seen as the culmination of the creative effort, a release of the energy one has put into it, a kind of completion. I like the idea. Publishing takes my blog post out of my hands and lets it live freely on the internet. It’s done. It’s finished. I can’t continue tweaking it or even connecting it into the web of my thoughts. It has its own life now and that feels rather liberating.

  I have been struggling to figure out why I am blogging at all. I’m not building a business, I’m not interested in being famous, and while I have identified some reasons before, like sorting my thoughts, learning, practicing writing, connecting with people, etc, I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do it publicly. Do I think the world needs to hear what I have to say? Well, no. Not at all. But at the same time it feels right to release what I make back into the world. It makes me feel like a part of a cycle, rather than a hoarder. It makes me feel like I am contributing, like I am giving back. I have gotten so much value from what random people on the internet have written and made, and I want to give back. And while I don’t think my voice is worth any more than anyone elses, it should not be worth less either.

  Of course, blogging can’t replace all of my note-taking and thinking efforts, and so I need more energy-conscious strategies. These need to address 2 aspects of my knowledge-work practice: the what and the how.

  Concerning the what, I have decided to only put my energy into topics and ideas that feel really compelling. Unless I am doing this for work (because, as it happens, my day job is knowledge work too), it has to be something that is genuinely fun and that I want to do, not just want to have done.

  When it comes to the howness, I want to put more play into my knowledge work. I want to embrace experimentation, mess and unfinished things. I want to make space for silly rabbit holes and short dips that lead nowhere. I want to allow for creativity and beauty. The main purpose of my personal knowledge play is to enrich my own life. So what is the point of it if it’s not fun and useful for me?

Designing my knowledge-play practice

And so here we are, having considered a bunch of needs and requirements for my practice, it’s now time to put it together.

• 1. Curate the stream

  The first step is to make sure I am ingesting things that I actually do want to ingest, and at a pace that actually allows me to digest them. Which means limiting phone time and picking up paper books more often.

• 2. Capture on paper

  Left to my own devices, I take notes about everything. And so I have set up my system to strategically add friction to my idea capture flow. Copy-pasting is completely out of the question—it’s too easy. I always carry a small A6 notebook with a pencil in it to capture interesting things I hear or read, whether I read them on paper or on a phone screen. I later rewrite what still feels relevant into my main A5 journal. If I am sitting by a computer, most of my capture goes directly into the A5 journal.

  Writing by hand—especially in a small notebook—adds just the right friction that makes me think twice about what and how much I capture, the friction of where to write is likely to stop me from capturing altogether. That’s why I like to use bound journals, because “where” is always just the next blank space.

• 3. Reflect in a bound journal

  Most of my reflection happens in my A5 journal (Leuchtturm 1917, if anyone wonders). I prefer bound journals, because, with rearrangeable ones, I will be rearranging. And that usually doesn’t add any value to my notes.

  My journal holds everything. It is a mix of task management, diary, project planning, captured ideas and long reflections. Everything simply goes on the next available page and I keep a table of contents of the most important things on the first few pages.

  At least now, in the early stages of my new “system”, this is where I spend most of my note-taking time.

• 4. Organise just enough

  In addition to the table of contents in the journal itself, I also archive my journals digitally. I have been doing that for years now; simply taking pictures of every single page. Now that I officially moved my thinking into my journals, I set up a text file with links to each image and started adding some information and tags to the links. This adds a sort of searchable index.

• 5. Synthesise and share

  When I want to go back to any of the thinking I have done before, I can flip through my physical journals or search through the digital index. Sometimes that is enough. When it isn’t, I gather the information from the journals and dump it into a new text file where I can work with them.

  This blog has now also become a part of my system. I am planning to share more here. (I know, I tell myself that almost every day, and still struggle with it, but what is the alternative? Stop trying?) Sharing pushes me to put more effort into my thoughts (for my benefit, and hopefully for others as well), and it gives me more satisfaction and a feeling of completion. Plus the feedback helps me grow in a way I couldn’t do just on my own. Even this article wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t made the previous one public.

• When, and how

  I am curious to see how this system will evolve (because it surely will). It’s still very young, but it was built on a lot of practical personal experience and tailored to who I am. Questions I obsessed over early on—like which app or metadata system to use—now seem almost irrelevant, while others that I have not considered previously proved crucial.

  One of the aspects of my note-taking that I didn’t know I needed to pay attention to was the ‘when’ and the ‘how’. My plans used to live in some parallel universe where I had time and energy for everything. I don’t—and never did—so I kept feeling like a failure; my plans thwarted by reality, and me frustrated with myself and the world. It’s much easier to admit to myself that what I have are small pockets of interrupted time here and there, and maybe one or two longer sessions a week that I steal from my sleep in the early morning, or more often, late at night. And that’s ok in this period of my life.

  And the ‘how’—well—the ‘how’ is where the fun and the beauty live. It’s an expression of who I want to be and why I am doing this at all. It’s nice paper and a smooth fountain pen. It’s fingers stained with inks of all colours. It’s stopping abruptly in the street to jot down a thought into a tiny notebook. It’s half-finished sketches and bad calligraphy. It’s old books next to scientific articles. It’s a cup of tea by a computer when the world has finally gone quiet. It’s mess and wonder.

  How I want to be: an amateur writer—one who does it out of love.

  P.S. Sascha wrote a response to this blog post that you can read here.

TODO How I finally got myself to do what I wanted to do; The roots of agency; Where agency starts

Agency has been one of the hot topics of the internet-town lately, and while I don’t quite see myself in the assertive, disruptive, gritty and grindy version of it, I have been on my own journey of finding agency.

A few months ago, I have found myself writitng in my journal that I finally felt healthy and like myself again. I noticed that after 18 months of slow, up-and-down recovery from Long Covid/burnout/whatever-that-was, I have been feeling good more consistently.

With the returned energy, the desire to do things came back too. I wanted to write and read and make music and dance and exercise and go on walks and and and… Yet, every evening, I was finding myself in the familiar situation of not having done any of what I had set out to do (other than the bare necessities). In recovery, that was ok; but now I knew it was not a matter of energy anymore. Instead, I just got swept up by the current of the day, feeling like I couldn’t stop to take the time, constantly reacting to what was going on, rather than choosing consciously what to do.

The problem I had was painfully basic: I needed to figure out how to actually do the things I wanted to do.

Enter agency. In its simplest definition, agency is just the capacity to act. What is implied is that the action is meaningful and aligned with one’s goals, desires and values.

There are two parts to agency: on one hand, it’s knowing what you actually want; on the other, it’s being able to pursue it. It means making conscious decisions about what to do and acting non-reactively.

At least that’s how I see it, although in the popular discourse, there are a bunch of other connotations with “high agency people”, like being assertive, disruptive/innovative, confident, and having grit. I don’t look at those as part of the agency itself.

There are two levels to agency. There is the ability to act

What the left hemisphere might tell us about large language models technologycognition

It’s eloquent, but it routinely confidently makes things up to fill in the gaps, has no sense of right and wrong and tends to get fixated on things. ChatGPT? Yes – and the left hemisphere.

But first things first:

What is the left hemisphere like?

Left-brain vs right-brain differences are a topic so full of myths and misconceptions that most serious scholars refuse to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Odds are that whatever you might have heard about the hemispheres is very wrong (like any version of the left hemisphere being the logical and analytical one, and the right hemisphere being the creative and intuitive one). That doesn’t mean though that there are no differences. It’s just way more complicated.

I have been reading The Master and His Emissary by Ian Mc Gilchrist – a book specifically about the hemisphere differences. It’s a heavy book, in all senses of the word, rigorous, comprehensive and absolutely fascinating.

https://channelmcgilchrist.com/master-and-his-emissary/

So how are the two hemispheres different? It’s not so much about what they do, because they are both involved in everything we do, whether it’s math or art, creativity or logic. The difference is in how they do it. They each bring a different kind of attention to the world, a different way of being.

The biggest difference, that underlies all others, is that where the right hemisphere looks at the whole, the left sees parts. And so the right hemisphere sees things in context, perceives the uniqueness and individuality of everything and everyone, while also seeing how they fit into the broad context. The right is present in the world as it is. The left, on the other hand, is the hemisphere of abstraction and mental models. It categorises, collects and organizes. It’s detached from the world and impersonal. It creates a representation of the world.

According to McGilchrist, the relationship between the hemispheres in our asymetrical brain is not itself symmetrical either. The right hemisphere is the primary one – the titular Master – while the left is the Emissary. The right hemisphere takes in our experience of the world, directs the attention of the left one where it is needed, the left one helps us zoom in on the different parts, analyse and categorise them, and then returns the results to the right hemisphere for reintegration.

Even the one difference that seemed historically pretty straightforward, namely the left being in charge of language, isn’t quite as clear-cut. Both hemispheres are involved in language, but the left one holds the rich vocabulary, the syntax and the rules of the language, while the right gives them their meaning. That is why people who suffer damage to their left hemisphere will have trouble speaking, understanding words, finding the right words and forming coherent sentences; but right hemisphere damage will cause trouble with comprehending and conveying meaning with language, and trouble holding onto a context longer than a single sentence. So while the left does the actual talking, the right understands what’s behind the words.

In the great tradition of pop-science articles about the hemispheres, I am also going to give you a table with some differences, as (far from all), although, hopefully, a bit better anchored in reality:

How do large language models resemble the left hemisphere?

For professional reasons, and out of curiosity, I have been interacting a fair bit with large language models (LLMs), aka AI – or at least what most people imagine as AI.

Through those interactions, I have recognised some patterns in how they react and interact, and many of these really fit with what I have learned about the left hemisphere from The Master and His Emissary.

Although I might be using some personifying language in the following text, I really encourage you to keep in mind that generative AI chatbots are statistical machines, and although they are very complex, they are not, in any way, alive, and they can’t actually think. And I definitely don’t mean to say that LLMs are brains, just that they functionally resemble the left hemisphere as described by McGilchrist.

Getting stuck and not thinking to change direction

LLMs tend to take whichever direction is suggested by the user and jump far, far ahead. Ask them whether pancakes are a good choice for a Sunday breakfast, and you get an essay about how super appropriate they are for that purpose, along with a shopping list and a recipe and a soundtrack that will fit the pancake mood. If you then say that this is not quite what you had in mind, they are much more likely to offer you 3 other pancake recipes than suggest that you could also have eggs and bacon (or cereal, or full English, or oatmeal, or whatever). I am obviously exaggerating a bit, but just a bit.

I have experienced this countless times with coding. They dig themselves into a hole and just continue digging further, instead of lifting their gaze to look for other options. More than once, I have found myself in a loop, where it would suggest two solutions over and over again, one after the other, when neither of them worked. It was up to me to direct it out of the hole, and suggest a completely different approach.

The left hemisphere behaves similarly. It only has one type of attention available to it – focused. The attention of the left hemisphere is sticky; it will get fixated and stuck on whatever it focuses on, to the point that people with right hemisphere damage can get caught up staring at something like a doorframe for ages. The left hemisphere is oblivious to context – to the whole – and when it’s latched on to something, it can’t reorient itself without input from the right.

And so both the left hemisphere and LLMs need to be redirected by something from the outside if they are to take a step back and broaden the context. In the brain, this is the job of the right hemisphere. In the case of AI, that outside force has to be us.

To paraphrase McGilchrist: The left hemisphere thinks failure is not a sign of going in the wrong direction, just that we haven’t gone far enough in the direction we are going.

As a little aside here, do you know that experiment where you need to count basketball passes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

Go ahead, try it. It’s a great demonstration of the stickiness of focused attention.

No innate sense of morality

LLMs have no embodied sense of morality. They do know some rules and conventions, they can usually answer whether something is ethical/moral or not, but they don’t have a moral sense that would prevent them from doing it (people are usually hard-coding such guardrails on top of the LLMs).

We can see that in cases like that of a journalist, who found out her blind date had ChatGPT do a psychological profile on her using her published writing before their first meeting. She later asked the chatbot whether that was an OK thing to do, to which it said it wasn’t. It clearly didn’t have many scruples when asked to do it though, probably because the details of the “how to” were not often appearing alongside “whether to” in the training data. The two just aren’t connected for an LLM.

https://www.afr.com/technology/my-date-used-ai-to-psychologically-profile-me-is-that-ok-20250324-p5lm1v

There are also much more sinister cases, where a chatbot encouraged suicidal ideations of teens, possibly contributing to their deaths; as well as cases of them playing into peoples’ delusions.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/23/character-ai-chatbot-sewell-setzer-death https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://futurism.com/chatgpt-mental-health-crises https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

(You might have a different experience if you try it now, the developers are trying to fix this and are putting in rules to stop LLMs from doing bad things. (About time). But these guardrails sit on top, they are not really baked into the models the same way most of their training is.)

Similarly, the left hemisphere does not have morality. It might understand rules, but morality is an embodied experience; it’s a feeling, and hence the domain of the right hemisphere.

Confident confabulations/hallucinations

This similarity is probably the most striking one.

We use the word hallucination to describe when a large language model confidently fills in gaps in its knowledge and understanding with plausibly sounding garbage. The models have a very hard time saying that they don’t know something – probably because it’s not so common to find texts online where people reply to a question just to say that they don’t know.

But who knows, maybe there is something more to it.

Because the left hemisphere will do the exact same thing. The word we use for humans making up things to fill in the gaps is confabulation. (I wish we had used it for LLMs as well. Hallucination implies perception of non-existent sensory input, which is not really a good description of LLMs fabulating things. But I digress.)

McGilchrist describes fascinating experiments on people with separated hemispheres. When only their right hemisphere is shown an image (like say a picture of a driveway full of snow) and then asked to pick out an image that goes well with it (a picture of a shovel), the left hand (controlled by the right hemisphere) will point out the picture. Since these are split-brain patients, their hemispheres can’t communicate, so the left has no idea why the hand is pointing at the shovel. When the person is asked for the reason, the left hemisphere – which is doing the talking – will just make something up (it’s a shovel because they were thinking of gardening). And it will do it with utmost confidence.

In addition, the left hemisphere is the more optimistic and self-assured one too, where the right is more melancholic and realistic.

I find it fascinating that the LLMs and the left hemisphere share not only the confabulations, but also the confidence.

Lack of context

As I mentioned before, the left hemisphere likes to keep things abstract and neatly separated in their categories, which means that it needs to strip them of their context. Decontextualizing is simply necessary in order to find the commonalities and create abstractions, because, in context, everything remains stubbornly its complex and very individual self.

I feel like context is an issue in AI too, although in a slightly different way. Actually, two ways.

But first a little aside about what an LLM actually is: It is basically a massive equation with billions (even trillions) of parameters that describes which words are likely to appear where and how often in relation to other words. The model “learns” the parameters during training – where the training means running pretty much all the text on the internet through the equation in small chunks, removing one word somewhere in the sentence and having the model guess the word. Then adjusting the parameter to make it slowly less and less wrong.

In some sense, they are not that different from the more simple autocomplete that suggests the next word as we are typing on our phones. They both operate on probabilities, but LLMs use a much more complex probability function.

• No context of where they learned what they know

  What this means though, is that whatever an LLM outputs is a result of some text(s) it has been trained on, but unlike a human who has learned something by reading, an LLM doesn’t know where its facts come from. (We are not talking about the cases where they search online here). It’s obvious that we, people, also possess a lot of knowledge that we don’t remember the exact source of, but even in those cases we have a better idea of where it came from and how reliable it might be.

  The LLM doesn’t remember the context of its training, it only has access to the resulting probabilities for how and where words should appear. And that means that when we get an answer from it, we don’t know either, and so we have no chance of validating the trustworthiness of the source.

  In most cases of LLM output, it would be impossible to find the exact texts that underlie it – it is simply the result of interaction of an incredibly big number of snippets, but sometimes, when you ask something rare, they might reproduce a concrete training sample verbatim. I had this experience when I was consulting an LLM with a tricky (in this case read: badly documented) coding issue. The code it suggested didn’t work. I found the exact same code five minutes later on a 10-year-old Stack Overflow question where someone showed that code as something they tried, but that didn’t work. That is a pretty important context to be aware of.

  Apart from the context of its own “knowledge”, the LLMs are missing the context of the whole world.

• Coherence over real world experience

  LLMs are trained on language. They have no experience of the real world, they just know which words go together. (It’s actually pretty miraculous that this works as well as it does.) But it means that their whole context is language.

  As Hollis Robbins so insightfully pointed out, in the relationship of signifier (the word) to the signified (the actual real-life object), they have no idea about the signified. If you and I think of a tree, we see, or sense, or understand the real tree behind the word “tree”. An LLM only knows the words that it might come together with. As a result, it will talk in a very abstract, high-level language that doesn’t evoke much mental imagery. To quote Hollis, where “human writing moves from experience or imagination or observation to linguistic expression”, LLMs move “from textual pattern to textual pattern”.

  https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/how-to-tell-if-something-is-ai-written%20

  This focus on language itself also means that the language model is more likely to follow the internal coherence of the text itself, rather than look for what is true, or ethical, or real. It’s probably why the chatbots are so quick to invent research paper references, legal precedents, non-existing capitals, or any of the other hallucinations/confabulations. It’s probably why they are so eager to please the users and go along with whatever the user is talking about, including spiraling delusions. (When it comes to pleasing users, there are definitely also financial incentives that we shouldn’t forget, but that’s not the topic now.)

  https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTPro/comments/1n890r6/chatgpt_5_has_become_unreliable_getting_basic/ https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology

  Funnily enough, the left hemisphere is also more concerned with the coherence of ideas and arguments than with experience or truth. McGilchrist describes experiments where people where shown valid logical syllogisms with a false premise such as this one:

  All monkeys climb trees. The porcupine is a monkey. The porcupine climbs trees. (Note: This was in a country where they don’t have porcupines that climb trees and didn’t know such porcupines existed.)

  When the individual is asked if porcupines climb trees, she says that they don’t, they live on the ground and aren’t monkeys. Then the scientists temporarily inactivate the right hemisphere, and ask the left one to answer again. This time the subject says that the porcupine does climb trees. When asked if it’s a monkey, she says it isn’t, but when shown the syllogism again, she confirms it climbs trees, because “that’s what is written on the card”. When the researchers then ask only the right hemisphere, it replies again that porcupines are not monkeys and do not climb trees. (Absolutely fascinating, isn’t it?!)

  While LLMs (at least not all of them) might not fall for this one, they let themselves be convinced of wrong facts embarrassingly fast. Like in this experiment, where ChatGPT was told it got its math wrong (it didn’t) and it folded immediately and agreed with the user. (Granted, it was an older model, might not work now anymore.)

  https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2023/12/its-easy-to-convince-chatgpt-that-its.html

Differences

There are some similarities between LLMs and the left hemisphere, but there are also some differences.

While the left hemisphere is the one that does the categorising, sorting and abstracting for us, it seems like AI, as of now, doesn’t actually have world models. This means that LLMs make their decisions using what’s called a “bag of heuristics” – a bunch of little rules that approximate reality, but don’t capture the underlying principles. Like in this article where they taught some models to predict the gravitational force between the Earth and the Sun, which they managed, but they weren’t able to figure out it was all based on Newton’s law.

https://www.thealgorithmicbridge.com/p/harvard-and-mit-study-ai-models-are

Some might argue with this, and it’s a hotly-debated topic, because many would like to believe that AI can have a world model, but I haven’t seen convincing evidence yet. At the same time, I can’t say whether the world models that we humans have are the sole result of the left, or if (more likely) they require both hemispheres.

Also, a lot of what humanity has written over the centuries and what has been fed to these models, bears a clear mark of the right hemisphere too. There is poetry and literary fiction, there are stories that embody the values of the right hemisphere and its viewpoint. As much as language is the domain of the left, the meaning behind it is still there. And so, for one, LLMs, unlike the left hemisphere, are able to understand and work with metaphors and “show” an appreciation for imagination, creativity and whimsy. The difficulty is, it’s hard to say how “real” that creativity is.

Talking about creativity, AI-written poetry (oxymoron much?) is less surprising and more easily understandable than real poetry (which makes some people like it more). But maybe the next most likely word is not what you want when writing poetry?

https://singularityhub.com/2024/11/19/poetry-by-historys-greatest-poets-or-ai-people-cant-tell-the-difference-and-even-prefer-the-latter-what-gives/

Why the similarity? Disembodied language

Ok, so there are some similarities between the left half of our brain and an LLM. I want to stress that I am not trying to imply that we have somehow replicated a brain. Actually, I am not even sure that these similarities are more than a coincidence. But I have some theories about why they might exist.

Language is largely the output of the left hemisphere. What the right hemisphere deals with is half-hidden behind the words; the words to it are metaphors for the lived world that they allude to. The left, on the other hand, concerns itself with the syntax and the vocabulary, the bells and whistles of the language itself.

LLMs are trained on language – largely the output of the left hemisphere – without having access to the world beyond it. Maybe it’s not so surprising that they are so verbose and eloquent.

Language is not the only thing that the left hemisphere and AI have in common. While the computer is clearly separated from living reality, so is, to a degree, the left hemisphere. It is associated with a higher sense of detachment, and it’s overactivation presents as a dissociative state. It is less connected to feelings, passage of time, sense of self, empathy, etc. It is “the interpreter” hemisphere; the one that stands back and interprets the world, rather than living in it.

This detachment from lived experience is probably the reason behind all of what I have talked about, or at least it might be.

What does this mean?

And now the really interesting and difficult question. What does this all mean for us?

On one hand, it makes me wonder whether this shows a natural limit for large language models as they are now. If our own brain can’t avoid some of these pitfalls due to a level of detachment from the world, then what chance do we have to infuse morality, humility or context into what is a completely disembodied machine?

I have a feeling that the LLM technology in its current form might be unable to overcome the problem of confabulations/hallucinations, and of making sure that the model acts in the best interest of the user, rather than just following their lead.

But much more than about the technological progress of AI (much, much more), I am worried about what interacting with an externalisation of our left hemisphere might do to us as a society.

McGilchrist talks in depth about the utmost importance of the right hemisphere to be in charge. In the more controversial, but very compelling part of his book, he lays out how that seems to be less and less the case. He presents how the hemisphere balance was shifting between the left and right throughout the Western history, and how in modern times we have seen the pendulum not swing back, but instead get pushed further and further towards the left hemisphere.

This shift is behind the erosion of social ties, lack of tolerance for ambiguity, our willingness to see the world, each other and even our selves as mere machines, as resources to be mined and used. It makes us disconnected, self-conscious, lacking meaning and alone.

There are already people using chatbots daily, not just for work or studying, but as counselors, therapists, friends, even boy/girlfriends.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/these-are-all-things-people-use-ai-2025

Even those of us that avoid using them will inadvertently read a lot of what they output, as more and more of the text on the internet is being written by AI – whether fully, or partially.

Will this push us further into the left hemisphere mode of being?

We embraced social media wholeheartedly and uncritically twenty years ago, and are now finding ourselves in a society that is polarised more than ever, and where people have unknowingly curated their personal echo chambers, amplifying all their opinions, fears and misconceptions.

I fear that LLMs are even more of an echo chamber than that. They are a mirror. They take what information we give them in the prompt, latch onto it and find the corresponding area in the trillion-dimensional probability function. That’s why they won’t broaden their context, or stop to consider whether they should or shouldn’t do something. If I ask it: “I am a Capricorn, what does it mean for me?”, it will not tell me “nothing”, even though many people who don’t believe in astrology would think that’s the right answer. No, of course not. It “knows” what I want to hear, because the context these words are usually in is an astrology context.

The reports of people spiralling into delusions because of LLMs brought on discussions of how we need to protect vulnerable people from this technology. But are we not all vulnerable to having all our ideas and cognitive biases validated? Do we even recognise when it is happening? And if we do, does it even matter? Or is it just like magic tricks and optical illusions and ads, when our brains get fooled even though we know it’s a trick to fool us?

An LLM does not have an opinion, but in some way it has any and all opinions available to it. It roleplays constantly in response to what we give it. And in a conversation with an LLM, the only words that actually had an embodied meaning behind them were ours – the prompts. They are the words that decide where in the probability space the words for the answer will be picked from. Our words get filtered through the “average of the internet” and returned back to us – eloquent, wordy, abstract.

I usually instinctively try to formulate my questions very neutrally, when I am trying to get explanations of things I don’t understand (and usually do it to learn the right vocabulary to be able to search more efficiently). And sometimes I ask questions in order to find out more about what I think about something. But in those cases I am usually left with too many half-empty words to sift through and a vague feeling that I have been manipulated. I don’t do it very often.

I am not the only one who has noticed that the LLMs are mirrors. Cory Doctorow has written about that too: https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/17/automating-gang-stalking-delusion/

And Dr K of Healthy Gamer fame who did a little experiment with an LLM, giving it examples of what a patient might tell to a therapist and having them act in the therapist’s role. He found that while they weren’t horrible, they completely failed to pick up on narcissistic behaviour and validated the narcissist completely. Only when prompted in the right way, knowing already what you need to ask, was it able to recognise the narcissism. If you have a cognitive bias, it will reflect it right back at you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iM3hbKvKLU (a 2-minute video)

There is a lot of development work now to make these models fabulate less, and to make them safer, more aligned with the interests of people, which is obviously good. But I fear it’s also an impossible task that goes directly against how they work, so it has to be on top. And it also requires for someone to decide what opinion the chatbot should hold. Should it entertain people who believe in birds being government operated drones? Area 51? Astrology? Where do we draw the line? And how? And who decides? Tech CEOs?

I think a lot of us are regretting our relationships with social media and smartphones now, and working hard to change them. I hope we will not go equally blindly into a “relationship” with AI.

Anyway. I think this is a tricky topic, and while I find the left hemisphere comparison fascinating and a bit eerie, I am not very sure if it has merit. In any case, how we adopt and use AI is something we need to talk about as a society, and I don’t mean the unlikely fears of it coming alive any moment and turning us all into paper clips. I mean the real consequences that are happening right now. I would be happy to hear your thoughts.

Alphabet Superset fictionalphabet-superset

DONE Alphabet Superset

Alphabet Superset is (or maybe rather was) a creative challenge conceived by Campbell Walker aka Struthless. The idea is to create 26 pieces of art, one every week, with a topic for each one starting with one letter of the alphabet, going from A to Z. The overarching theme and the style of the entire set is defined in the beginning, so that they will create a cohesive whole.

Originally, the challenge ran from September 2023 to April 2024. I found out about it almost exactly a year later, so that’s when I am doing mine; starting on September 2nd 2024, and hopefully finishing on April 7th 2025.

So here it comes! And my topic is:

Myths, legends & fairy tales

DONE A is for Aurora

Aurora was the prettiest girl at school. Like, for real. Cute face, long blond hair, really cheeky smile. And a really nice body too. Although, you really had to see her in gym class in shorts, ‘cause normally she would wear these weird-looking baggy clothes. Cool, don’t get me wrong, but yeah, thank god for old Sullivan who made everyone wear shorts to gym. Those legs, man! Anyway. She was, like, really cute, and I had a crush. Well, duh!

But there was a problem. You know that old song by One Direction, That’s what makes you beautiful, or something? How they sing that not knowing she’s beautiful makes a girl beautiful? Yeah? Well, bullshit, that’s what I say. They don’t know what they are talking about, cause trust me, I’ve been there. I had a crush on a girl that didn’t know how freaking good-looking she was, and the only thing that made her, was unavailable.

Just let me tell you about the day I finally worked up my courage and asked her out, and you know what happened?! No, wait. I am getting ahead of myself here. I need to set the stage a bit.

Aurora was not just cute-looking, you know. She was really nice too. Like, kind, I mean. She was nice to everyone, and friendly and super easy to talk to. She could hang out with anyone, joking and laughing, and it looked like she was friends with all. But not once during school did she date anyone.

I know I wasn’t the only guy who liked her. Not like everyone was into her, that’s not what I’m trying to say, right, but she was cute and kind and approachable, and… So yeah, a few guys liked her, but nobody, nobody, could get out of friend zone with her.

I was hoping I would. We would hang out with a group of friends all the time and I was really trying to show her I liked her. I tried to impress her by being funny and making her laugh, dropping compliments, texting her, talking about movies and video games we liked, walking her home all the time. And you know what? I could almost see it on her face that she. Did. Not. Get. It. At all. She kept being friendly and oblivious and I couldn’t even be mad at her for friend-zoning me, because she didn’t know she did it!

So, I decided to not be a chicken and just plain asked her out. I worked myself up, hardly slept the night before! There was a new superhero movie in the cinema and I thought that would be the golden opportunity. I was so nervous, man! I leaned in a bit – not threateningly, mind you, I practiced it beforehand, but don’t tell that to anyone – and popped the question as casually as possible, but trying to make it clear I was inviting her on, you know, a date.

Do you think it worked? Hell no! You would think she had to be as dense as a brick, but I swear, the girl is actually pretty smart otherwise. But this flew over her head like a Frisbee taken by the wind. She started asking about when we were going and to remember that Katie had a dentist on Wednesday, or Josh needed to get a perm that day, or something equally stupid and irrelevant. I really wanted to shake her at that point. I just asked her for a date, damn it, and she thought it was a group trip! I didn’t shake her, because duh, that’s not what you do.

I know I should have told her it was a date. But I couldn’t get myself to do it. I had this feeling like she was sleepwalking. Like her dream land didn’t quite overlap with reality. And you aren’t supposed to wake sleepwalkers, right?

Anyway. We went to see the movie with a bunch of friends, and I sort of gave up after that. I figured maybe she was ace or aro, or maybe she just didn’t like anyone at school that way, or whatever. I’m not the creepy kind of guy who doesn’t know when to stop.

We hung out in our friend group for the rest of that year – our last year of high school. I still walked her home sometimes. We still had fun. Honestly, I still had a crush, but I accepted the situation. Trying to get her to notice me in that way was like trying to crawl through some thorny bushes, like my grandma’s rose bushes that I kept losing my football in as a kid. They were pretty, prickly, and impenetrable. So I gave up.

But this story has a happy ending! Or at least a happy continuation, so bear with me.

Once upon a time, or rather, about a year later, I met her again. It was a random meeting in a coffee shop downtown. She walked in and straight into my line of vision, as I was working on some uni assignment on my laptop.

I almost didn’t recognize her, although she didn’t really look that different. Her clothes were still a bit funky, but her skirt was shorter than I have ever seen her in and there was just something about her. She looked so much more alive. Awake, almost. I can’t describe it.

I stared like stupid while she got her coffee and when she turned to leave, she noticed me and smiled a huge smile and my brain stopped for a moment, because. Wow. The crush was still there. She sat down at my table and we talked about how we were doing and all that crap you talk about with old friends you haven’t seen in ages.

Then she complimented my hair. And I went blank for a second. It’s not like she never gave me compliments before, ‘cause she did, she complimented people all the time. But this. This was different. She was looking at me, smiling and I got goosebumps. I opened my mouth, I’m not sure what I was going to say. Something smart, I am sure. But she spoke first. She asked me out to dinner! Holy cow! How the turn tables! There was something in her voice that made it clear to me that she meant a date. Like a real date. Not a friend date or something. I managed to nod. She said she had to go but would write to me later. And that was it. I mean, that was the beginning.

And we’ve been together since.

After a few months of dating, I told her about that time I tried to ask her out for a date to the movies and she totally misunderstood my intention. She was mortified. She said she really didn’t see it. Turned out she didn’t see the interest from the other guys either. She just thought we were all good friends. She thought nobody could possibly like her like that. I thought that was a bit sad, wondered what I could have done to make her see it back then. I asked her what had to change.

“I did,” she said. “I needed to wake up.”

(The image is Sleeping Beauty by Edward Frederick Brewtnall, with small modifications :) )

DONE B is for Bluebeard

She’s standing there like a complete fool. The key clutched in her hand so hard that her knuckles are turning white. It’s a big key. Heavy. And cold. So cold it feels like it’s sucking the life out of the hand that is holding it. She’s standing there in front of the door, frozen. She has been standing there for a while now. What is she thinking about? Does she know? Does she suspect? Is that why she’s hesitating?

Her face is impossible to read. She looks younger than the others, the ones before. They all stood here, sooner or later, making that decision. And all of them made the same one. Was it even a choice?

She’s pretty, just like the ones before her. Her hair so dark it’s almost black, eyes deep and shining. She has passed this door many times in the several weeks since the wedding day, never paying it much attention. That was strange. All the others did. They would look at the door, try the handle, ask him about it. The door is difficult to miss. Tall, made of dark cedar wood with wrought iron beams. Solid. Menacing. How strange she didn’t pay attention to it before now, but then again, she has been strange ever since she arrived. Quiet. Careful.

The others used to walk the halls full of excitement and joy. They giggled and stared with wide eyes at the riches and luxury covering every surface of the castle. They looked at him with just the same eyes. All of them young, beautiful, naive and stupid. There is no faulting them for it. Everyone fell for him. He could be oh-so charming when he wanted to. Mysterious, elegant, refined, with a hint of danger under the surface. They all found it exciting. And they all paid for it. One after the other, meeting the same fate, their blood sealing the fate of the next one.

Now it is happening again. Number seven is standing in front of the door, holding the key. She is looking at it, not moving, hesitating. Does she think she has any control over her destiny? They all opened the door in the end. The curiosity is like hunger. Like an itch that can’t be scratched. For how can you live with a man who has a secret as big as this door? You can’t. And you won’t. She won’t. Because curiosity killed the wife. Wait, no. Not curiosity. He did. He will. Again and again.

She’s opening the door! Of course, how could she not?

She walks in, taking in the scene bathed in blood and candlelight. She looks at the six silhouettes hanging on the walls, at the blood pooling black on the stone floor. She lifts her candle to look at each body, one by one. Why is she not screaming? Not gasping, fainting, running? Her face is hard, brows furrowed. She looks down at the key in her hand. It has started to bleed. Bright red droplets dripping from its black heart onto the stone floor. The tell-tale key, his accomplice. Run, you stupid girl! It’s now or never.

Then she looks straight at me. Nobody has looked at me ever since I died. How can she see me? She points at number six and I can’t believe my ears. Her sister? She tells me she came to avenge her. To avenge us all. To put a stop to this. I feel tears rolling down my cheeks.

How could she wait so long, living with him for all those weeks, if she knew? She points to the room and tells me she needed to be sure. I wonder when her family might get here. Brothers? Or father maybe? We hear footsteps. She shakes her head and pulls out a knife from under her white dress. Nobody? Of course, they didn’t believe her. They never do.

She stands facing the door, holding the knife with confidence, but my dead heart is beating fast with fear. The familiar footsteps are getting closer, I hold my breath. Then she turns her head to me. “You are the first one, aren’t you?” she asks and I nod. “Why did he kill you?” “I don’t know,” I say. She nods as if she expected the answer and returns her eyes to the door.

(The image is Key by Edna C. Rex, with small modifications :) )

DONE C is for Cerberus

First draft

Hi! Dear Sir or Madam, To whoeve Hi there!

You just adopted my dog I guess. I wanted to say thank you. He’s a good dog. I’ve had him for millennia ages, ever since he was a little pup and he was always a great companion. A great guard dog, for sure, but also just a really good friend.

He responds both to “Kerbie” and “Beast” and is very well-trained. He used to guard the Underworld my workplace, but with all the modern technology he’s not really needed that much anymore. And honestly, we don’t get that many people nowadays anyway, what with all the competition. My wife wants us to close the place for a few decades and travel, but Kerbie isn’t quite made for that lifestyle. He prefers to have a stable living situation. I’ll probably pick him up again one day, but you might be dead by then

You should know he doesn’t like burly men; he got kidnapped once. It was a sort of dare, as far as I understood. It traumatized him a bit, took a while before he was his spirited self again after that. He is also very fond of lamb. And tends to jump on people he likes and lick their faces. It’s hard to escape his three one head, but he is really just a gentle giant when you get to know him.

Btw, if anyone insists they see three heads, or any snakes, it’s just some sort of optical illusion, like restaurants serving food on small plates, so you don’t notice how little the portions are. Really, nothing to worry about.

I hope you and Kerbie have a great adventure together!

Hades Kerbie’s dad

(The image is Hades and Persephone by Eduard Trewendt, 1864, with small modifications)

DONE D is for Dragons

When the first reports of dragons came in, they didn’t even quite come in. Nobody believed it, and no serious news outlet would touch it. Most of the not-so-serious ones wouldn’t either. And so the first mentions appeared alongside reports of Nessie sightings, stories of alien abductions and haunted houses. In that company, a small village falling prey to a dragon or two seemed both tamer and somehow less believable at the same time.

At this point, Hannah, our protagonist, didn’t know anything about this. She was a rational, down-to-earth, no-nonsense kind of gal. Except for her morning horoscope, of course. She didn’t even know where she would have to look for the alien-stole-my-husband’s-skin stories. Not that she wanted to.

It didn’t take long though, before the news started gaining more and more attention. How could they not, when town after town were being deserted, people fleeing their homes as the dragon plague was coming closer? Although, it was unclear if anyone had really seen these dragons. In those early days, most people felt too silly mentioning mythical beasts as a real possibility. The reports talked of people leaving their homes in sudden mass panic, of ghost towns popping up around, but offered little explanation. “Unexplained” and “suspected psychosis” were used much more often than “dragons”. Truly, no reputable journalist would allow the word escape their moth – even if they stood face-to-face with the “alleged winged reptile”. Social media, on the other hand, were full of them. Dragons were trending on most platforms, along with #IBelieve and everything from #Smaug to #Falcor.

Hannah watched the news, as the orderly, well-informed citizen she was, and as such, agreed with them wholeheartedly. She would scoff whenever someone mentioned dragons at the office lunch, and congratulate herself on her common sense.

Most people, just like Hannah, didn’t believe in the dragon theory. Not even after the videos appeared. They weren’t good videos, mind you. It seemed nobody could get close enough to the beasts. The footage usually consisted of hopelessly zoomed in images of tiny distant shapes in the skies. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a dragon? Is this a camera from the 90s? It was impossible to tell. Of course, mixed in, or rather, taking over, were perfectly vibrant and colourful close-ups, that only had one small problem – they were obviously fake. Although, maybe not obviously enough, judging by how widely, wildly, and seriously they were spread. As a result, there were almost as many theories as people. Was it a hoax, a terrorist attack, a giant advertising campaign? Was it some leaking toxic fumes or contaminated water? Was it aliens? Was it the CIA? Was it – by any chance – dragons?

Hannah changed her mind daily, sometimes twice a day, depending on who she was talking to. She was mostly cycling between it being the Chinese, some kind of social media-induced psychosis, or a tasteless “art” performance. Most of the time though, she didn’t think about it at all. She was too busy preparing the office Christmas party and dealing with her latest date. The not-dragons were too far for her to worry about.

Dragons or not, whatever it was, it was spreading. It had started in a few small isolated places, but it was spreading in all directions like a blood stain seeping through a shirt from a wound. The world was quickly turning red.

Soon the issue started occupying people’s minds and the content on their devices more and more. The distant news have become local. What was happening to strangers before, was now happening to neighbors. Despite the growing proximity of this – whatever it was – there wasn’t any more clear information than before. Only more footage of distant flying specks high up in the sky and panicked people who fled the neighboring towns and cities, themselves unsure what they were running from.

That there was a threat was clear by now. The countries around the world were using considerable resources to figure out what was happening, but they weren’t finding anything. All the while, whole cities were emptying out. Some people fleeing as their neighbor towns became quiet. What happened to the ones that stayed, nobody knew. The ones who fled were spurred on by fear alone. The ones who stayed were never seen again. Whoever ventured back would only find empty, charred streets and buildings, and blown fuses. No electronic devices worked there anymore. And many who went back weren’t lucky enough to return.

Panic – strange, diffuse, targetless panic – was preceding the spreading dragon zone. Panic that was often seen as unfounded in places that were further from the boundary.

The mood in Hannah’s city was anxious. Life went on, people went to school and to work, complained about the weather and the icy roads. At the same time the city’s renting market had trouble absorbing all the newcomers from the towns to the west, many had trouble contacting relatives who live there, and some people have already left the city, Hannah’s best friend included. The panic was bubbling just under the surface.

Hannah was planning to leave too. She felt a bit sheepish about it. It’s been almost a year since it all started, and nobody knew more than they did back then. The only difference was that it was happening right here now. She felt silly running away from something when she didn’t even know what it was. At the same time, she was terrified.

She was packing, arranging with her cousin who she was hoping to stay with, and thinking of putting in her resignation. As she was walking the last few blocks to work one morning, there was a crackle in the air. The lights went out suddenly and everywhere. Even the cars driving past her went dark and soon rolled to a stop. The early morning dusk was suddenly filled with a split second of deafening silence, before it exploded in shrieks, shouts and strange popping sounds.

Hannah felt sudden warmth in her stomach, like acid reflux on steroids. She felt her body contorting, twisting, stretching like play-doh and while her mind was flooded with a longing for open skies and for the taste of charred meat, the realisation dawned on her all at once with the heaviness of a cartoon anvil.

“Shit,” she said, but her last human thought came out as a fiery roar.

(The image is Georges Seurat, The Lighthouse at Honfleur, 1886 , with small modifications)

Poem poetry

DONE Poems

A spring butterfly

(Self-)control of one-year-olds

Baby moves

Spring

Quiet before the storm

TODO Holding you while you sleep

Foreign

Time-travel

Vlak/Train

Broken mirrors

The Spirit

Bird

Flow

Microblog

DONE Microblog

DONE 2025

September 16, 2025

September 4, 2025

I found some poems I wrote back in 2018. There were just a few, written over a month or so, before the business of life caught up with me. And they inspired me to start writing poetry again. Is it good? Nope! But it makes me feel so incredibly alive. Somehow, I feel like I am more connected to beauty and life when I do it. It helps me see the magic and mystery in the world.

September 1, 2025

I find myself craving paper over screens more and more often. I want to make things I can touch. Whatever I write or draw on paper feels so much more real and sticks in my brain so much better. I think it’s time I accepted that no matter how I organize my digital files, they will always feel either like lost in a black hole - when they are not right in my face, or like distracting clutter that I keep shuffling around - when they are right in my face. I think I am jumping on the zine-making bandwagon.

July 31, 2025

I have been trying to embrace more of my messy and “cringe” side. I don’t want to let my fear of being unpalatable and too much stop me from being myself. And so I changed my website design from the clean and minimalist look that it had before to something that is a little messier, to reflect my intentions. Plus, it was super fun goofing around with html and css.