We’ve gotten used to struggling. Resting in the River, Thich Nhat Hanh

My dear friends, suppose someone is holding a pebble and throws it in the air and the pebble begins to fall down into a river. After the pebble touches the surface of the water, it allows itself to sink slowly into the river.

It will reach the bed of the river without any effort. Once the pebble is at the bottom of the river, it continues to rest. It allows the water to pass by.

I think the pebble reaches the bed of the river by the shortest path because it allows itself to fall without making any effort. During our sitting meditation we can allow ourselves to rest like a pebble. We can allow ourselves to sink naturally without effort to the position of sitting, the position of resting.

Resting is a very important practice; we have to learn the art of resting. Resting is the first part of Buddhist meditation. You should allow your body and your mind to rest. Our mind as well as our body needs to rest.

The problem is that not many of us know how to allow our body and mind to rest. We are always struggling; struggling has become a kind of habit. We cannot resist being active, struggling all the time. We struggle even during our sleep.

It is very important to realize that we have the habit energy of struggling. We have to be able to recognize a habit when it manifests itself because if we know how to recognize our habit, it will lose its energy and will not be able to push us anymore.

Ten years ago I was in India visiting the ex-untouchable community of Buddhists. A friend who belonged to the caste organized the trip for me. I was sitting on the bus, enjoying the landscape outside, contemplating the palm trees and the vegetation. Suddenly I turned and I saw him looking very tense. There was no reason why he had to be tense like that. I thought that he was trying to make my visit pleasant and maybe that was the reason he was so tense. I told him, “Dear friend, I know that you want to make my trip pleasant, but I am already very happy. I’ve already enjoyed the trip. So why don’t you sit back, smile, and relax?” He said, “Okay,” and he sat back and he tried to relax.

I was pleased and I turned my face toward the window again and I enjoyed the palm trees and other things. But just a few minutes after when I looked back at him he was as tense as before. He was not able to relax, to allow himself to relax. I knew that he belonged to that section of the population that had been struggling for many thousand years. He was discriminated against. He had suffered so much, his ancestors and himself and his children. So the tendency to struggle has been there for many thousand years. That is why it was very difficult for him to allow himself to rest.

We have to practice in order to be able to transform this habit in us. The habit of struggle has become a powerful source of energy that is shaping our behavior, our actions and our reactions.

When an animal in the jungle is wounded, it knows how to find a quiet place, lie down and do nothing. The animal knows that is the only way to get healed-to lay down and just rest, not thinking of anything, including hunting and eating. Not eating is a very wonderful way of allowing your body to rest. We are so concerned about how to get nutrition that we are afraid of resting, of allowing our body to rest and to fast. The animal knows that it does not need to eat. What it needs is to rest, to do nothing, and that is why its health is restored.

In our consciousness there are wounds also, lots of pains. Our consciousness also needs to rest in order to restore itself. Our consciousness is just like our body. Our body knows how to heal itself if we allow it the chance to do so. When we get a cut on our finger we don’t have to do anything except to clean it and to allow it the time to heal, because our body knows how to heal itself. The same thing is true with our consciousness; our consciousness knows how to heal itself if we know how to allow it to do so. But we don’t allow it. We always try to do something. We worry so much about healing, which is why we do not get the healing we need. Only if we know how to allow them to rest can our body and our soul heal themselves.

But there is in us what we call the energy of restlessness. We cannot be at peace with ourselves. We cannot be peaceful. We cannot sit; we cannot lie down. There is some energy in us to do this, to do that, to think of this, to think of that, and that kind of restlessness makes us unhappy. That is why it is so important for us to learn first of all to allow our body to rest. We have to learn how to deal with all our energy of restlessness. That is why we have to learn these techniques of allowing our body and our consciousness to rest.

I would like to offer you some instructions about walking meditation. The first thing we shall do early tomorrow morning is to practice walking together, which we call walking meditation. Walking meditation means to enjoy walking without any intention to arrive. We don’t need to arrive anywhere. We just walk. We enjoy walking. That means walking is already stopping, and that needs some training.

Usually in our daily life we walk because we want to go somewhere. Walking is only a means to an end, and that is why we do not enjoy every step we take. Walking meditation is different. Walking is only for walking. You enjoy every step you take. So this is a kind of revolution in walking. You allow yourself to enjoy every step you take.

The Zen master Ling Chi said that the miracle is not to walk on burning charcoal or in the thin air or on the water; the miracle is just to walk on earth. You breathe in. You become aware of the fact that you are alive. You are still alive and you are walking on this beautiful planet. That is already performing a miracle. The greatest of all miracles is to be alive. We have to awaken ourselves to the truth that we are here, alive. We are here making steps on this beautiful planet. This is already performing a miracle.

But we have to be here in order for the miracle to be possible. We have to bring ourselves back to the here and the now. Therefore each step we take becomes a miracle. If you are able to walk like that, each step will be very nourishing and healing. You walk as if you kiss the earth with your feet, as if you massage the earth with your feet. There is a lot of love in that practice of walking meditation.

The Buddha said that the past is gone and the future is not yet here. Let us not regret the past. Let us not worry about the future. to the present moment and live deeply the present moment. Because the present moment is the only moment where you can touch life. Life is available only in the present moment. That is why walking meditation is to go back to the present moment, in order to be alive again and to touch life deeply in that moment. In order to be able to touch the earth with our feet and enjoy walking, we have to establish ourselves firmly in the present moment, in the here and the now.

In walking meditation, we walk like a free person. This is not political freedom. This is freedom from afflictions, from sorrow, from fear. Unless you are free you cannot enjoy walking. I would like to propose to you a short poem that you might like to use for walking meditation:

I have arrived. I am home. 
In the here. In the now. 
I am solid. I am free. 
In the ultimate I dwell.

You might like to take two steps and breathe in and say, I have arrived, I have arrived. And when you breathe out, you take another two steps and say silently, I am home, I am home. Our true home is really in the here and in the now. Because only in the here and the now can we touch life. As the Buddha said, life is available only in the here and the now, so going back to the present moment is going home. That is why you take one step or two steps and you awaken to the fact that you have arrived. You have arrived in the present moment.

If you are able to arrive, then you will stop running-running within and running without. There is a belief in us that happiness cannot be possible in the here and the now. We have to go somewhere. We have to go to the future in order to be able to really be happy. That kind of thinking has been there for a long time. Maybe that feeling has been transmitted to us from our ancestors and our parents. That is why we have to wake up to the presence of that habit energy in us and to do the reverse. The Buddha said that it is possible for us to be peaceful and happy in the present moment. That is the teaching of trista dharma sadha vihara. It means living happily right in the present moment. When you are there, body and mind united, you have an opportunity to touch the conditions of your happiness. If you are able to touch these conditions of happiness that are already available in the here and the now, you can be happy right away. You don’t have to run anywhere, especially into the future.

When we practice walking, we might be aware that we have strong feet. Our feet are strong enough for us to enjoy running and walking. That is one condition for happiness that is available. When I breathe in and I become aware of my eyes, I encounter another condition for my happiness. Breathing in, I am aware of my eyes. Breathing out, I smile to my eyes. This is an exercise, a very simple exercise to help you realize that you have eyes which are still in good condition. You need only to open your eyes to see the blue sky, the white cloud, the luxurious vegetation. You can see all kinds of forms and colors just because you have eyes still in good condition. Your eyes are another condition for your happiness. We have so many conditions like that for our happiness and yet we are still unhappy. We still want to run away from the present moment, hoping we’ll find some happiness in the future.

Breathing in, I’m aware of my heart. Breathing out, I smile to my heart. That is another exercise. When you practice like that you touch your heart with your mindfulness. If you continue a minute, you realize that you still have a heart that functions normally. It is wonderful to have a heart that still functions normally. There are people who don’t have a heart like that and their deepest desire is to have a heart like you. So conditions for happiness may be more than enough for us to be happy, but we are not able to be happy because of that tendency to run away from the present moment.

To take an in-breath, to smile, and to touch the conditions of happiness that are available, is something that all of us can do. Because of that we can stop and establish ourselves in the present moment. That is the teaching of living happily in the present moment. Please train yourself to make the present moment, the here and the now, into your true home. That is the only home that we have. That is the only place where we can touch life. Everything we are looking for must be found in the here and the now. In that way walking meditation can be a great pleasure and can be very healing.

Do you have to make any effort to practice walking meditation? I don’t think so. It is like when you drink a glass of orange juice. Do you think that you have to make an effort in order to enjoy the orange juice? No. Walking is like that. To really enjoy a glass of orange juice, you have to be there one hundred per cent mind and body together. If you are there, mind and body firmly established in the present moment, then a glass of orange juice will become a real thing for you. You are real; therefore, the juice is real. And there life is real. Life exists. Life is deep during the time you drink your orange juice.

When you contemplate a beautiful sunset, do you have to make any effort? I don’t think so. You don’t have to make any effort in order to enjoy a beautiful sunset. You need only to be there, to be there mind and body together. But if your body is there and your mind is in the past or in the future, then the beautiful sunset will not be there for you.

There is a kind of energy that helps you to be there body and mind together. That energy is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is the capacity of being there body and mind united. When you drink your orange juice, drink mindfully and you will enjoy your juice because you are really there one hundred per cent. If your body and mind are united when you contemplate the beautiful sunset, it means that you are mindful. Mindfulness helps you to be there in order for the beautiful sunset to be there too. While you walk, if you allow yourself to be there mind and body together, then walking will become mindful walking; it will be healing, refreshing and nourishing.

To meditate means first of all to be there, to be on your cushion, to be on your walking meditation path. Eating also is a meditation if you are really there, present one hundred per cent with your food. The essential is to be there. So please when you practice walking meditation, don’t make any effort. Allow yourself to be like that pebble at rest. The pebble is resting at the bottom of the river and the pebble does not have to do anything. While you are walking, you are resting. While you are sitting, you are resting. If you struggle during your sitting meditation or walking meditation, you are not doing it right. The Buddha said, “My practice is the practice of non-practice.” That means a lot. Give up all struggle. Allow yourself to be, to rest.

I sit on my meditation cushion. I consider it to be something very pleasant. I don’t struggle at all on my cushion. I allow myself to be, to rest. I don’t make any effort and that is why I do not get any trouble while sitting. While sitting I do not struggle and that is why all my muscles are relaxed. If you struggle during your sitting meditation, you will very soon have pain in your shoulders and back and things like that. But if you allow yourself to be rested on your cushion you can sit very long, and each minute is light, refreshing, nourishing and healing.

It is not sitting in order to struggle to get enlightenment. No. Sitting first of all is for the pleasure of sitting. Walking first of all is for the pleasure of walking. And eating is for the pleasure of eating. And the art is to be there one hundred per cent.

When I was a novice I learned how to light a stick of incense in mindfulness. You see, when you light incense you think that the purpose of lighting incense is to have the incense pervading the Buddha’s home. But lighting the incense is just for lighting the incense. You pick up a stick of incense mindfully and you enjoy that, because it is by itself an act of meditation. During the time you pick up the stick of incense you are mindful, you are concentrated, you are real, because your body and your mind are together. And the stick of incense is real. When you strike a match, you do the same thing. During the time you strike a match, you only strike a match. You don’t do anything else. You don’t think of other things. You are perfectly mindful of striking a match. You are concentrated on it, and you enjoy the act of lighting the incense.

When you hold a stick of incense, it is the same. When I stick it into the incense burner, I put my left hand on my right hand. That is the tradition. Everyone in the Buddhist tradition lights incense in that way. The stick of incense is very light; one hand is enough in order to hold it. Why do you have to put your left hand on your right hand? Because it means that you are doing it with one hundred per cent of your body and your mind.

Be there truly. Be there one hundred per cent of yourself. In every moment of your daily life. That is the essence of true Buddhist meditation. Each of us knows that we can do that, so let us train to live each moment of our daily life deeply. That is why I like to define mindfulness as the energy that helps us to be there one hundred per cent. The energy of your true presence.

Breathing in-in the here, in the here. Breathing out-in the now, in the now. Although these are different words they mean exactly the same thing. I have arrived in the here. I have arrived in the now. I am home in the here. I am home in the now.

When you practice like that, you practice stopping. Stopping is the basic Buddhist practice of meditation. You stop running. You stop struggling. You allow yourself to rest, to heal, to calm.

And after a few minutes of practice you might switch into doing the third line-I am solid, I am free. This is not auto-suggestion. Why? Because if you have succeeded in arriving in the here and in the now you are much freer. You are free from the past, from the future, from your worries, from your fear. And you become much more solid; your steps become more solid and you become more solid in your body and in your mind. Solidity becomes a reality after a few minutes of arriving, of being home.

Solidity and freedom are two characteristics of nirvana. Nirvana is not something abstract. The Buddha said we can touch nirvana with our own body. So while you practice walking meditation you can begin to touch nirvana already with your body and your spirit. When you feel you are a little bit more solid, a little bit more free, then you begin to touch nirvana with your body and spirit. Solidity and freedom are the true base for your happiness and well being. No happiness, no well being, is possible without solidity and freedom.

The last line of the poem is wonderful. In the ultimate I dwell. In the ultimate. In the ultimate. I dwell. I dwell. The ultimate here is the true foundation of your being.

Let us visualize the waves on the ocean, several waves appearing on the surface of the ocean. Some waves are big, there are those that are small, and each wave seems to have its own life. A wave may have ideas like, “I am a wave. I am only a wave among many waves. I am smaller than the other wave. I am less beautiful. I last less than the other wave.” Ideas like that. A wave can be caught in jealousy, in fear, in discrimination.

But if the wave is able to bend down and touch the water within herself, it will realize that while it is a wave, it is at the same time water. Water is the foundation of the wave. While waves can be high and low, more and less beautiful, the water is free from all these notions. That is why if we are able to touch the foundation of our being, we can release our fear and our suffering.

Touching the foundation of our being means touching nirvana. Our foundation is not subjected to birth and death, being and non-being. A wave can live the life of a wave, but a wave can do much better than that. While living the life of a wave, a wave can live a life of the water. The more our solidity and our freedom grows, the deeper we touch the ground of our own being. That is the door for emancipation, for the greatest relief.

The Beet Goes On

When it comes to beverages, beet juice may not be at the top your list—maybe it should be, studies suggest. 

Researchers have discovered an array of compounds in beet juice that may lower blood pressure and have other health benefits.

Beet juice is a source of nitrates. Though nitrates in cured and processed meat have been associated with cancer, growing evidence suggests that foods naturally rich in nitrates are actually good for you. By converting to nitric oxide in the body, nitrates in vegetables, including beets, have been shown to dilate blood vessels, increase blood flow to tissue, reduce demand of muscles for oxygen, and inhibit blood clots.

The juice is also rich in red-yellow pigments called betalains, which have potent antioxidant activity. They may, for example, help keep LDL (“bad”) cholesterol from turning into the more harmful oxidized form.

Here’s a sampling of recent findings about beet juice. Keep in mind, the studies were all small and the results preliminary.

Exercise. Beet juice may also enhance athletic performance. Young men who consumed beet juice used less oxygen when walking and running, in a study in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 2010, which suggests they were exercising more efficiently. Another study by the same researchers found that men who consumed beet juice were able to bicycle longer, compared to those drinking a placebo beverage. Again, the effects were attributed to the nitrates in beets.

Blood pressure. In a study in Hypertension in 2008, healthy volunteers who drank beet juice showed a drop in systolic (top number) and diastolic (bottom number) blood pressure of 10 and 8 points, respectively, after three hours—an effect attributed to the nitrates in beets. Other research has found that drinking beet juice for two weeks has both immediate and longer-term effects on blood pressure. The results sound impressive, but larger studies are needed, particularly in people with hypertension.

Brain health. In a study in 2011 from Wake Forest University, older people who drank 16 ounces of beet juice a day for two days showed greater blood flow to the frontal lobe of the brain, an area involved in skills such as planning and problem solving. Beet juice won’t prevent or cure dementia, but perhaps future studies will determine whether beets can help improve mental function. 

Bottom line: Watch out for overpriced beet juice products and overhyped claims—that they prevent cancer, for example. You can make your own beet juice in a blender and mix it with other juices. If you don’t care for beet juice, another option is borscht (beet soup), served hot or cold, though cooking reduces some of the beneficial compounds.

Be aware that consuming a lot of beets can turn urine and stool a harmless red-purple color. Also, beets contain oxalates, so people who form oxalate-containing kidney stones should avoid them.

(Source: berkeleywellnessalerts.com)

Take a More Realistic Approach to Your To-Do List with the 3 + 2 Rule

From Life HackeR:

Developer Jakub Stastny had a problem with organizing his day for ages. Never-ending to-do lists led to frustration and consequently to procrastination; exhaustion from context switching; the feeling that he wasn’t accomplishing anything. A few weeks ago he had a breakthrough, and he calls it the 3 + 2 rule.

Frustration From Never Ending Task Lists

Nowadays everyone is overwhelmed with seemingly endless task lists. You wake up at the morning, start working, you work and work and at the end of the day you realize that you have no idea what you have done. You know you’ve been working, but it feels like you have achieved nothing. So very frustrating!

With never ending task lists you tend to procrastinate. Why bother when you can’t see the progress? Why bother why you will be working the whole day anyway? You need to see what have you achieved today and there has to be light on the end of the tunnel, you need to know that you’ll have time for yourself as well. Sounds familiar? I’ve been struggling with this for years.

The 3 + 2 Rule

At the morning you think you can do a, b, c, d, e. But then something goes wrong with b and you spend much more time on it than you anticipated. Subsequently you can’t finish c and d and you feel like you haven’t done enough. Let it be. Instead of having unrealistic expectations, just acknowledge that you can do only 3 big things and 2 small things. Do them and call it a day!

So then I’m happy that I finished my 3 + 2 tasks rather than being unhappy that I couldn’t finish 7 of them. Easy. I use index cards for it. Every morning I sit down and write 3 main things I want to solve and 2 small ones. The main items should take from 2 to 3 hours, the minor ones no more than 20 minutes. And the results?

• I accomplish more because I don’t procrastinate as far as much as I used to.
• I’m much more focused on whatever I do.
• Context switching is ridiculously easy because this way you don’t switch just very few times per day!
• The 3 + 2 rule prevents burn-outs.
• Work life vs. personal life balance.

• Context Switching Solved

  Dealing with context switching was always a real hassle for me. I’ve been switching backward and forward and the result was complete lack of focus and not achieving much in either of these projects. Or sometimes I haven’t been switching for a longer time and then I completely loose track about the project and it took me hours to get on the track again.

  The 3 + 2 rule is all about focus. You don’t have to worry about all your task list, you just have to deal with 5 things. You work on the first task, you are fully focused and you don’t worry about other tasks. You don’t have to worry what else did I forget in project X, because project X isn’t on your index card for today. So you finish the task, then you switch. With 5 tasks, you can’t switch more than 4 times.

  Sounds good? Well, that was just the beginning … considering how easy is to switch between (small number of) projects, just do switch! If every day you have 2 big tasks from your contract, 1 big task from your start-up, then you won’t loose track on any of these projects and you will distribute your time efficiently.

  Being able to achieve more and yet enjoy my personal life is making me very happy. I hope it will work for you too! Please do let me know what do you think, I’d really appreciate any feedback, I’d especially like to know if you have the problems I used to have and in case you decided to give the 3 + 2 rule a go, then what’s your opinion or problems you encountered.

Cultivate the Perfect Evening Routine to Avoid Insomnia and Fall Asleep Easier

From Lifehacker:

I’ve never had trouble waking up in the morning. When the alarm goes off, I’m up and ready to work—but falling asleep was always another matter. If it feels like it’s taking you hours of tossing and turning before you actually fall asleep, there are a few things you can do to help the process along.

Image remixed from an original by Brad Collett.

We’ve talked a lot about perfecting your morning routine to start the day off right, but having a good evening routine is just as important. If you find that you don’t fall asleep as easily as you’d like, the text below lays out what you can do during the day, followed by how to craft a better evening routine that’ll get you off to sleep in no time at all.

What You Can Do During the Day

It may seem silly to think about falling asleep during the day, but if you’re as annoyed by insomnia as I am—not to mention the exhaustion it can cause the next day—it’s worth giving a bit of thought. Here’s what you’ll want to keep in mind during the day for better sleep at night.

Eat Meals Earlier Rather than Later: Plan your day so that dinner time falls earlier in the evening. Health web site Helpguide.org notes that fatty foods can take a lot of work for your stomach to digest, which might make it harder to sleep. So don’t eat any heavy foods within two hours of bed time (and stay away from spicy and junk food if you want to keep the nightmares away). If you get too hungry as bed time creeps around, there are a few foods that are okay to eat before bed, and can even help you sleep—like bananas, oatmeal, and whole wheat bread, to name a few.

Get Up and Do Something After You Eat: The desire to nap after a meal can be overwhelming, especially during a tiring day, but you want to avoid this, since it’ll make it harder to fall asleep that night. After you eat, get up and do something a bit more active—even if it’s just washing dishes or taking out the trash. It’ll avoid that post-meal drowsiness, and it’s a great time to have a 10-minute cleaning burst to keep your house looking nice.

“Even just a little bit of a power nap reduces your nighttime sleep drive,” says Ralph Downey III, PhD, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Loma Linda University Medical Center in California. “The nap becomes nothing more than another episode of fragmented sleep.”

If, after you’ve thoroughly tested your evening routine and gotten better sleep, you still feel drowsy, you can try adding a power nap to your day, preferably during the early afternoon. But as you start out, try to avoid this, as it has the potential to do more harm than good. Photo byMatt MacGillivray.

Exercise Regularly: Getting in a regular workout can help you sleep better at night, even if your workout takes place in the morning. CNN explains:

An active lifestyle might also mean a more restful sleep. The National Sleep Foundation reports that exercise in the afternoon can help deepen shut-eye and cut the time it takes for you to fall into dreamland. But, they caution, vigorous exercise leading up to bedtime can actually have the reverse effects.

A 2003 study, however, found that a morning fitness regime was key to a better snooze. Researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center concluded that postmenopausal women who exercised 30 minutes every morning had less trouble falling asleep than those who were less active. The women who worked out in the evening hours saw little or no improvement in their sleep patterns.

So find some time in your day, as long as it isn’t in the evening, when you can sneak in some activity. If you aren’t sure where to start, the Lifehacker Workout is a simple regimen that won’t take too long and doesn’t require any equipment.

What Your Evening Routine Should Include

Once night rolls around, it’s time to start thinking about your pre-bed routine and what it should contain. Any pre-bed routine is a good thing—it tells your body that sleep time is coming, in traditional Pavlovian fashion—but these particular things will make your evening routine even more effective.

Leave Your Work at Work: As you wind down the work day, take some time to prepare your first task for the next morning. It can be hard not to think about work during the night—especially if you have a big meeting or presentation the next day—but the more prepared you are the day before, the more you’ll be able to relax and fall asleep that night.

Find the Perfect Bed Time: You want to go to bed at the same time every night, and wake up at the same time every morning—even on weekends. To find the perfect time to go to sleep, count back 7 and a half hours from the time you usually wake up. This ensures you wake up at the optimal moment during your sleep cycle. You generally want to wake up 10 minutes before your alarm goes off. You can adjust this by 15 minute intervals to find the perfect bed time for you. If you have trouble sticking to this schedule, put it on your calendar or create an alarm to make sure you get to bed on time. Photo by Chelsea Oakes.

Don’t Drink Any Caffeine or Alcohol: We already know what caffeine and alcohol do to your brain, and neither of them are good sleep aids. Caffeine is obvious; you want to stay away from it as much as possible in the hours before sleep—or even in the afternoon if you can help it. And, while alcohol may seem like it helps you fall asleep, it won’t give you the kind of deep sleep your body needs. If you drink, do it a few hours before you go to bed for a better night’s rest.

Lower Your Body Temperature: You may have noticed it’s much easier to sleep when it’s cool out, and that’s because your body temperature naturally goes down at night when it’s time to sleep. Lowering your body temperature is easy when it’s cold outside, but if opening the window won’t cut it, Health.com notes that a hot bath can do wonders:

Two hours before bed, soak in the tub for 20 or 30 minutes, recommends Joyce Walsleben, PhD, associate professor at New York University School of Medicine. “If you raise your temperature a degree or two with a bath, the steeper drop at bedtime is more likely to put you in a deep sleep,” she says. A shower is less effective but can work, as well.

You could even do the aforementioned reading in the bath and kill two birds with one stone. We’ve also mentioned a number of ways to cool your body and your brain at night, as well as a few DIY air conditioners that should help keep your room a little cooler.

Don’t Lie Awake in Bed: If you find that you’ve been in bed for15 minutes and you aren’t feeling tired at all, get up and do something else. Go back to reading that book, or doing something else low-key that won’t make your body think it’s time to wake up. You want your body to associate your bed with sleep and nothing else (except perhaps sex), once again working our Pavlovian tendencies to get us sleeping as soon as our head hits that pillow.

While you can tweak your schedule to fit your specific tastes or needs, these tricks should get you started into overhauling your evening into a much more sleep-conducive routine. Got any sleep aids that we didn’t mention here? Share them with us in the comments.

How to Be Your Own Therapist and Solve the More Manageable Problems in Your Life

From Lifehacker:

Therapy is no doubt a helpful tool when you have problems to overcome, and one of the primary strategies therapists use to uncover and solve your issues involves identifying common behavioral patterns. But you don’t always need a therapist to recognize and correct an unhealthy pattern in your life. Here’s a primer for how you can solve the problems that don’t require professional help.

The world is good at creating patterns and we have an innate ability for picking them up. As we grow, our experience becomes a giant database of information and we make associations between similar events and occurrences as a way of understanding the world. While recognizing these patterns can be an incredibly helpful tool for solving our own issues, we’re much better at recognizing them in others than we are in ourselves. We also have a tendency to see patterns where we want to see them, even when they aren’t really there. We enlist the help of therapists because they’re trained to connect the behavioral dots, but with a little work we can hone our pattern recognition skills and solve many of our own problems. In this post we’ll give you a basic introduction to how pattern recognition works, how you can use it to investigate your issues, and what you need to watch our for so you don’t identify any patterns incorrectly.

The Basics of Pattern Recognition

When we learn to read, we are essentially learning to recognize patterns. At first, we look at the set of lines drawn on the paper and eventually build a template that says “that pattern of lines on the paper represents a character/letter”. Once we’ve scene that pattern (i.e. character/letter) enough times, we can begin to focus on using those templates to recognize a new type of pattern: words. When we first learn a word, we often try to read it phonetically by calling upon the existing pattern templates in our memory for the letters. If we are able to sound out the word, and if it represents a word we already have in our spoken vocabulary, then we have now built a template for letters arranged in that particular order. In time, we build up a database of thousands of templates/words that we can call upon whenever our eyes come across a word we’ve already seen, rather than trying to process the word as an unfamiliar grouping of letters every time it’s shown to us. This frees our brain up to do other things like processing the idea represented by the words on the page.

This same phenomenon works in virtually the same way with many other things, including the big and small events in our lives. We learn the meaning of a particular occurrence, then how context can adjust its meaning, and finally what a repeat of that occurrence dictates about the action we should take when it presents itself.

Find Your Patterns to Solve Your Problems

When you go to a therapist, they’re often on the lookout for patterns in your life that you’re not necessarily seeing. You might seek help to solve your anxiety issues, for example, but being anxious is just a symptom. While generic methods can be used to help, you need to actually get to the root of the problem to solve it. That’s where patterns can be of great assistance. I asked doctoral clinical psychology student Brian Newton how therapists generally solve the mystery of why a patient is having a particular issue. He suggested answering a few questions (and we’ll continue using anxiety as the example):

• What makes you feel anxious?
• Where do you feel anxious?
• When do you feel anxious?
• Who makes you feel anxious?

Answering these questions can help you reveal the pattern. Continuing with the example, if large groups make you anxious, parties make you feel uncomfortable, you feel awkward when you’re out to dinner with a large group, and loud personalities make you feel especially uncomfortable, you have an obvious pattern of having anxiety around outgoing people.

This is a straightforward issue, but the same questions work well with something lacking clarity. Let’s say that your specific problem is that you can’t stop biting your nails. You don’t like biting your nails, but you feel compelled to do it. Here’s how answering these questions can point to a pattern:

• What makes you feel like biting your nails? When I’m bored, hungry, or feel like they’re uneven and I want to even them out.
• Where do you feel like biting your nails? Anywhere. The location doesn’t matter. I’d prefer to do it where no one can see, but I’ll still do it in front of people.
• When do you feel like biting your nails? Early in the morning and towards/during the evening.
• Who makes you feel like biting your nails? Nobody.

When your situations are more specific, you often have to ask why in relation to your answers. You also have to look for correlations between things that don’t seem a like. In the answer to the first question, the subject is biting his or her nails for three distinct reasons. When things don’t seem similar, you want to figure out why they are. Here, you could ask yourself if hunger is ever paired with the other two circumstances, or if boredom tends to bring on other obsessive-compulsive behavior. In this case, we know the nail biting problem isn’t anxiety-related and no other person is causing it. That’s not a pattern. What may be, however, is the timing. This person bites his or her nails more in the morning and the evening, which are generally the times of day when we’re the hungriest. This suggests a path to explore. Is this person’s diet creating unwanted behavior and bad habits? We don’t know for certain, but answering those questions provides us with a starting point and an actual solution to try: substitute nail biting with food or chewing gum to see if it provides the same effect.

1. Interrogate yourself like you’re a journalist. Ask the who, what, where, when, and why questions about your problem.
2. Cross-reference your answer to each question to look for similarities. If you’re having trouble seeing them, start comparing the seemingly different answers and ask yourself how they might relate to each other.
3. When you find relationships and patterns in your answers, consider ways to replace your unwanted behavior with a better one or work your way up to becoming more content with the things that make you uncomfortable.
4. Be patient. Figuring out the problem is a lot easier than implementing a solution. Changing behavior takes time and perserverance. Figuring out the problem and deciding to fix it are both important steps, but they’re only useful if you put them to good use.

You should also recognize that you’re going to be less-inclined to point out an issue when that issue is you. We don’t love being wrong or making poor choices, but we all do it from time to time (if not often). If you can’t find a pattern in your behavior, sometimes it can help to show it to a friend who can look at the situation without your own, personal bias. If you have more severe issues, however, you’ll want to see a professional for help. While it’s often good to solve problems on your own, there’s nothing wrong with getting help when you need it.

Photo by marekuliasz and Elena Stepanova

Ignore Vague Patterns to Avoid Unwanted Problems

The primary downside to our pattern recognition abilities is that we can often see patterns where none really exist at all. This is often the root of unwarranted phobias, conspiracy theories, undeserved blame, and plenty of other awful issues. Because are brains are so adept at pointing out similarities, and it’s exciting to feel like we’ve suddenly solved a puzzle, we often deceive ourselves into believing a pattern exists. Furthermore, we tend to prescribe meaning to these patterns just as if it were as clear as the common patterns in language. We often see these patterns as some sort of divine intervention, but they’re not. They’re either random or they’re perfectly logical. You’re leading yourself towards a problem when you believe otherwise.

For example, when I meet another person named Adam they usually think it’s neat that we have the same name. If we’re the same age, it’s no longer just neat but some kind of amazing coincidence. If we have an interest in common, the forces of nature intended us to meet. Clearly this was destiny. Except that between 1983 and 1984, there was no other time in recorded US history when Adam was a more popular name. Basically, if you’re 27 years old at the time of this writing and your name is Adam, you’re not that unique. The problem is, once we start to see a few patterns we like to believe something incredible is happening. It’s not, and this is the sort of mistake that leads to bad decisions and ignore the many more differences that likely exist.

Just like there is no magic to the false patterns we pull out of everyday life, there’s no simple solution to preventing our brains from causing this problem. We’ll always want to see the little miracles of life, even if they aren’t there. In the moment, doing so makes us happy. In the long run, however, it can cause problems so it is important to keep a critical eye when the elation of common circumstance overcomes you. All you need to do is a little research on your circumstances to figure out if you’re ignoring difference or if you’ve started to detect a real pattern. Sometimes exciting patterns do exist, but if you keep recognizing them incorrectly you might grow too cynical and miss a real one when it comes along. For these reasons, it’s important to recognize patterns accurately and use them to help you, rather than cling to them during the times when they point out primarily what you want to see.

Title photo remixed from an original by Shpilko Dimitriy (Shutterstock) and IZO (Shutterstock)