Eat, Sleep and Hunt.

Who would have thought that if we didn't do these three things well enough we are more susceptible to stress. Apparently it all comes from early times (like most things about our body and brain). We ate pure unprocessed food, we slept a lot, and we would hunt all day. Don't worry, you don't actually have to go hunting, replace hunting with exercise.

There is plenty written about the importance of sleep so I am not going to add to the plethora of information on it, Google is full of helpful information for you. Just know that you need sleep for your brain to process the day's activities. When you sleep your brain defrags the thousands of thoughts and activities accumulated through the day just like when you run a defrag maintenance tool on your computer.

Dreams occur when your brain is defragging (is that such a word). We go through three REM cycles a night, at least we should, each one lasting about 120 minutes. Rapid eye movement is the last stage of each cycle and is when dreams occur. If you don’t go into this dream phase then you may feel tired the next day.

Exercise is what you need to do to ensure that blood is circulated through your plumbing and filters (kidney, liver, lungs, etc) so that clean oxygenated blood flows into your brain and 'cleans it out' properly. 30 minutes of continuous medium-to-fast paced walking is enough to ensure your filters are working hard enough. Plus, exercise can assist in growing new neurons in your brain, those little things that send messages around the brain. Know that this is a good thing.

Food is something that I never really thought too much about before. We all know that if we eat badly we will feel bad and probably not be at our best. What I have only recently found out was that if we don't eat the right food then there is a high likelihood that our brain will react adversely as if we are under stress. 

It all has to do with our insulin levels. When insulin (blood sugar) drops our body produces Adrenalin and cortisol, both of which occur when we are under stress. Additionally, these two chemicals are like a poison to our body. Adrenalin and cortisol are produced so that we can run away from danger, if there is no danger and we don't run then the poison sits in our system. Hence another reason to exercise by the way.

I am going to take a closer look at this eating factor, I'll tell you how you can eat better to reduce stress. That's for next week.

I Have Lost My Lifeline!

In my rush to get to the airport this morning I left my mobile phone behind. No problems, who needs one anyway, it's just for making phone calls after all.

I got to the airport and went through screening, too easy. I went to the lounge and realised that I couldn't get in without a ticket, I use my phone for this usually as it has the Air NZ App on it. The friendly service assistant printed my tickets and allowed me to enter. Easy as, who needs phones.

I had to walk to the barista and place my order manually, my phone sends an automatic order to the barista when I walk into the lounge. I needed the exercise anyway.

Sitting having breakfast I was pondering the busy day ahead, two important meetings with prospective clients and a workshop in the afternoon. Where are the meeting and at what time? These are in my phone....

I know, I will call my wife and ask her to look in my phone for me. We don't have a landline at home, all mobile phones. Where is her phone number, in my phone. Panic. I know, I have my laptop, I'll message my daughter on FaceBook and get her to call my wife. Smart thinking Lance. Daughter calms wife, wife's phone is turned off. Argh!

Don't panic Lance, you teach this stuff. Take a deep breath, slow yourself down. Remember the mantra, 'slow is smooth, smooth is fast'. Luckily I have my e-Diary saved on Google, a quick print off the calendar and I am away.

So how do I find the venues for these meetings? Usually on my phone using the GPS thingy. Time to print out the maps at the airport and maybe pick up one of those ancient paper maps at the Wellington airport when I arrive. Sorted.

I could go on but you get the picture. Technology is fantastic until something goes wrong. And it is usually just a little thing. You leave your phone somewhere, the battery goes flat, someone trips over a cable and takes out the national grid.

My mobile phone is my lifeline these days as they are for most people. But sometimes you just have to go back to the old fashioned ways. I wonder if the younger generation coming through will know how to do that? 

Am I A Slacker?

Yes I am, a slacker. Someone who for the last umpteen months has written a post/blog every workday morning. Lately I have been getting slack, I have been posting later and later each day, sometimes not bothering to post at all. What a disappointment I have turned out to be!

What does this slackness say about me? That I cannot be trusted, that I have let people down, that I have failed, that I am hopeless, that I am a slacker? No, it says that something is going on.

Some of you who follow my posts might have been thinking that I was on holiday, that I was ill, or that I am struggling. Maybe you even thought that I wasn't writing any further posts, that I couldn’t be bothered. That's just your brain always thinking negatively, always biased, and always exaggerated. It is doing this so that you are prepared for the worst.

Worry, fear, anxiety, and stress all come from your brain. If you worry about one thing and don’t control that thought then your brain will add more worry to try and help you by offering more suggestions. “Is this what you are worried about” your brain will ask you. “No”, you will say (in your head) so your brain will give you something different to worry about and ask you the same question again. “How about this one?”

Whenever you have a negative thought about a situation, (or about yourself), just know that it is your brain telling you stuff that you may just need to ignore. Here’s an example – when was the last time that you achieved something great and your brain said to you "But you could have done much better?" "If you had done this differently then you would have had a better outcome." Rubbish. Ignore your brain, you are great and you are doing great things.

If you are someone who has lots of these negative thoughts, change the pattern by wearing a rubber band on your wrist and flick it every time you have a negative thought. The pain will soon tell your brain to stop thinking negatively.

How do I feel about not posting each morning? Really bad. And I know that it is just my brain telling me that I am useless, that I am letting people down, that I can't be trusted. My brain is viewing the world through dark tinted glasses just like yours is.

So what have I been doing not putting out posts each morning? I have been doing lots of other things and have had to prioritise what I do first thing in the mornings. It's a nice place to be, being busy, and I am very lucky. Even more so for having an understanding reader of my posts such as yourself.

Men Can't Talk - Apparently

I read an article recently that said the men can't talk. Thinking it was something to do with the way that we behave, I read on. Instead it was about the fact that men aren't all that great at holding a conversation. Really!

I read on with interest. As we know, girls start talking earlier than boys. By the age of 3 girls have twice the vocabulary as boys. I just thought it was that boys didn't talk unless they had something important to say. Rather, it has to do with the fact that speech and language are not critical brain skills for us males. (We’ve got better things to do such as hunting, eating and sleeping).

Scientifically you would think that men had access to lots of words, MRI scans reveal that a male accesses the entire left hemisphere of their brain as they search for words. Turns out that there aren’t so many words rattling around inside our brain for us to use.

Another related yet useless fact is that men will pick out a Valentine’s Day card that has lots of words on it so that we have limited room in which to write. I think it is more that we like someone else to say in writing what we can’t say in person, maybe I am just a romantic at heart.

Back to words. When a women talks, she uses the front left hemisphere of her brain and another smaller area in the right hemisphere. By using both sides of their brain, women make great conversationalists. Observe conversations at your next social event, women do most of the talking and men just nod their heads a lot.

Men are comfortable talking quietly to themselves. We like to ponder over things without talking so that we can come to the right conclusion. Why speak when you have nothing important to say is our mantra. When we say that we are going for a quiet beer, that’s what it is, quiet. We can stand at a bar table for long periods without talking. By the way ladies, if we are thinking please leave us alone to ponder, we hate interruptions. Just know that we are working on something.

Women on the other had like to think aloud, that's how they work out their problems. They will talk amongst their friends, (often at the same time), without wanting to necessarily reach a conclusion. This frustrates us men, we want to go straight to problem solving. We fix things fast.

So what is today's lesson? Women are better conversationalists and love to talk, they think aloud, and they just want to talk. Men don't often say too much unless we have something important to say and we just want to be left alone to work it out in our heads. 

And as we know, marriages have been ruined because men don't want to talk. Sorry guys, this has to change. If you want to save your marriage, and your sanity in some situations, we have to learn to talk more.

Men, Women and Maps

For the next couple of days I am going to talk about the difference between men and women. The differences in our brains that is. The way in which the genders view and perceive things are very different which can often lead to great discourse when we don't understand the differences.

Let's start with map reading. Often the start of many arguments when couples of different genders are driving together. It's all related to our spatial ability. Spatial ability is being able to picture in your mind the shape and size of something and to rotate the object and view it from three dimensions.

Brain scans show us that spatial ability in men is mostly on the right side of the brain. It is one of male's strongest abilities. (We do have a few I am told). Like most things that are intuitive, a man's ability to read maps the right way up stems from evolution. When hunting, men had to calculate speed, distance, and movement of their prey. Most men can always point to north no matter where in the world they are, they had to find their way home after hunting.

Unlike men, the spatial ability in women is located in both brain hemispheres. Women didn't need to be as specific about dimensions as men did. Women navigate from images, what they see along the way. Most maps these days will have upright images to provide women with a three dimensional view. That is also why GPS systems have both a 2D & 3D image, the first for men and the second for women.

If a woman is reading a map, she will often turn it around so that she is viewing the map in the direction of travel. Men don't like handing over the navigation to women so the man will tell her to leave the map facing north because he is looking over her shoulder while driving. When she doesn't do so he becomes annoyed.

What is often the failing of men is when they get lost. It is not in our psyche to comprehend that we are lost and when we do we are not going to ask for directions. Doing so would reveal a flaw in our ability to protect our family and men don't have any of those. Women will always ask for help when lost. So the woman will say to the man "Why don't you stop and ask someone." He says "NO" and she becomes annoyed.

The moral of the story - man should let woman turn the map in whichever direction she wants to if he has asked her to navigate. Man should also stop and ask for directions as soon as they are lost. A woman likes a man to take charge but not when they are supposed to be working together.