Breath by James Nestor is one of the best books I’ve read this year, a fascinating look at something we’re doing every second of every day yet hardly ever consciously think about: breathing. It’s jam packed with interesting stories throughout history, of scientists and every day people experimenting with their breath as a way to change their own physiology and health. Many of the tips offered in this book are very simple, like this: Breathing through your nose is beneficial and healthy. Breathing your mouth is bad. Like, really bad if you do it consistently, as they showed in an experiment where they blocked their noses for 2 weeks (every significant biomarker worsened). There are tons of stories from the book I’d love to share (my highlighted notes from Kindle come out to 78 pages and are included at the end), but first I want to go over some of the basic breathing practices and then showcase two of the more out there stories. Whether complex or stupidly easy, what amazes me most about these stories and techniques are how wide ranging the positive effects of breathing properly can be, impacting nearly every area of your health, including sleep, energy, immune system, decreased anxiety and depression, improved focus and cardiovascular health, just to name a few.
Continue reading “Breath by James Nestor”Mobility Routine with Peter Attia & Jesse Schwartzman
Peter Attia is an interesting person. A doctor specializing in longevity, he is a wealth of information on health, exercise, sleep, nutrition, and much more. After a great appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and the recent start of his own brand new podcast, I was reminded of the video series he had done with Jesse Schwartzman that focused on a mobility routine that allows you to move and feel better, whether it’s before a workout or just for life in general.
I learned about these videos last year and have worked in a lot of the movements into my own daily stretching routine, but fell off practicing the whole regimen. I recently recommended the videos to a few friends who also listened to the podcasts and got great feedback. It made them more comfortable going into a workout, freer, looser, with a better range of motion. I always feel good after doing it, whether I’m going into a workout or not. I’m jumping back into the full practice myself now, and thought I’d share it here if anyone was interested. I recommend trying it out, seeing what you like, and at least building those ones into some sort of routine. I definitely recommend learning more about Peter too; he’s a fascinating individual with a lot of valuable information on health and life.
Thoughts and Feelings, Feelings and Thoughts
For as long as I can remember, this is how I thought it went down: I think about something and then feelings form in response to those thoughts. That’s how it always seemed. Usually the thoughts were made up of worries, and then I’d feel anxious, stressed or impatient. It always seemed to be at it’s worst when I woke up in the morning. I’d immediately begin thinking of all the things I had to do, the people and problems I had to face (I didn’t actually have that many problems). I’d keep on thinking about my worries, leading to a downward spiral that could set the tone for the rest of the day. I’d wake up, worry, feel anxious about my worries, repeat. I now think I had it wrong. Despite it being not quite right, it was still a functioning, misdirected loop that ended up just making me feel worse.
After another beautiful day of vacation, I was sitting down to eat dinner and watch an episode of the Office when I was struck by a feeling of anxiousness. I began to search my mind for the reason for this feeling and before I settled on the answer, I recognized what was happening. I felt a feeling, and then I looked for a thought to attach to that feeling, a thought that would justify why I felt anxious. It could have been anxiety over the eventual job search I’ll have to do, or anxiety over my lack of clear direction for the future. No matter what was going on though, I’m sure I could’ve come up with a reason. I’ve always been able to. But this time I recognized there was no thought, no reason, preceding this feeling. The feeling arose on its own, and now I was trying to support the unpleasant feeling by coming up with a justification for it.
I’ve been meditating for a few years now. I’ve read books and listened to podcasts that deal with meditation, mindfulness, presence, compassion, and gratitude. A lot of these sources are repetitive and ultimately say the same thing, but I continue to go back to them. It helps me remain in that mindset, to be present and grateful, interested in life around me, right in this moment. It’s frustratingly easy to lose this connection if you don’t keep it up. The other reason I continue to revisit these topics is because I’ve learned that all it takes is one subtle shift, the right metaphor, or one moment of clear recognition in real time, to drastically change my understanding of how the whole thing “works”. In this case, it clicked for me in a moment of awareness and then recognition, feeling something and then catching myself reaching out for a thought. In this moment I was able to see clearly something I’d read plenty of times: feelings and thoughts, for the most part, arise randomly and constantly. And you don’t need to prop them up. Most of the time you can just feel the feeling, or recognize the thought, and let it go. Of course that’s easier said than done.
I’d heard and read this time and again, in scientific and spiritual terms, that thoughts and feelings are, for the most part, out of our control. They arise from our unconscious. But it took all that repetition, all the different ways of hearing the same thing, before I was able to fully grasp it. I read Tara Brach’s Radical Acceptance before I left, and I listened to an incredible podcast with Jack Kornfield while here, and both talk a lot about this. Strangers to Ourselves is a book all about the unconscious mind. I touched on some of these ideas in a recent piece. But even when I thought I knew it, there was a deeper moment of understanding to come (and I’m sure many more still to come).
Strangers to Ourselves really hammered home some uncomfortable but mind-blowing facts about our brains, of our lack of awareness and control. Feelings can come from our environment, or or our own thoughts, but just as easily they appear randomly. We’re just used to supplying a reason for it, something that makes sense to us, because we like to feel in control. Scientific studies show that our brain unconsciously makes a decision, and milliseconds later, our conscious self feels as if it has come up with it on it’s own, with some reason to point to, even though the decision was already made.
So I had an understanding that our feelings don’t always need to be thought more of, to be analyzed and processed. But even after all that, it took a moment of anxiety washing over me to finally catch the actual process unfolding. The process that I had become so used to that I was now blind to it. It seemed to me that constantly thinking about future events made me worry, and I’d ruminate on that worry, increasing it the more I thought about it. And that is certainly a part of it. But the more I learned and reflected, even just after this most recent realization, I recognize how I could have gotten the cause and effect wrong. I thought I woke up, thought about problems, and then felt anxious. But more likely, I woke up, felt anxious, and latched onto minor stressors or even just bits of routine life, and made them the reason I felt worried. In hindsight it makes much more sense that drinking every weekend and having a poor diet predisposed me to feeling anxious upon waking. Through that one moment of recognition the other day, I’ve been able to connect these dots, from the past, present, and hopefully future, and better understand part of the deeper processes going on inside myself.
I love when interests of mine collide from unexpected places. After beginning this piece, I watched a video of Chris Evans (aka Captain America) talking about how he deals with his own anxiety. His process rests on the same principles. When anxiety and overthinking come, he says to his mind ‘Shhhh’.
“It’s been a big thing for me, ‘Shhhh.’ It’s so funny how noisy my brain is. Everyone’s brain is noisy, it makes thoughts. The problem is, in most of our lives, the root of suffering is following that brain noise and listening to that brain noise and actually identifying with it as if it’s who you are. That’s just the noise your brain makes, and more often than not, it probably doesn’t have much to say…The moments I’ve felt my best is when I can pull that plug and say Chris, shhh. It’s rising above the thought, operating on a separate plane.”
Feelings and thoughts are fleeting; we can feel happy and then sad and we can usually point to some series of events that prompt this. Our natural inclination is to provide a thought that justifies how we feel. Finally internalizing this, and recognizing it in the moment, produced a complete paradigm shift. In that moment of recognition, I stopped myself from searching for a thought to attach to the feeling. Instead, I just felt the feeling. And then it was gone, as quickly as it came, and I got to enjoy my dinner and laugh at Michael Scott. A few days later, I woke up and felt those familiar feelings of morning anxiety. But instead of searching for a reason, I just took some deep breaths and cleared my mind before it could gain that usual momentum. And then, again, the feelings dissipated. I realized I had been the one fueling it in the first place.
It’s such a slight shift and hard to notice in the first place, but when I did, it felt like a massive change in perspective. And that’s how most of what I’ve learned from the books and podcasts and the practice itself has been: it comes slowly, subtly, and then upon realizing it, and feeling it, it’s there all at once and clicks into place, as if I solved a complex math equation (I wouldn’t know for sure, I stink at math).
It’s a small, simple yet powerful tweak in how I see things. Inherent in it is recognizing that this doesn’t banish unpleasant feelings. On the contrary, it’s accepting of them, recognizing them when they come, and feeling them fully, in part so they can go through you and out the other side that much quicker.
Part of this hard work is recognizing which thoughts have merit and should be explored, which should be outright ignored, and maybe the toughest of all, which need to be looked at as a loving witness, with compassion. Jack Kornfield explains that many of these negative thoughts, reactions or habits we seem to be plagued by once served a purpose. They were once necessary to get us through a tough experience. We needed to think or behave in this way, to escape suffering as a kid, to survive abuse, to survive the thoughts in our own head. But now, we recognize we no longer need them. Being a loving witness, we thank it for helping us get through that tough time, and then we tell it we no longer need it in our lives. That might sound simple or childish, but I think it’s supremely powerful and beneficial.
If it feels like I’m writing about the same things over and over again, it might be because I am. I feel like I’m learning the same things over and over again, except one subtle level deeper each time. That’s what the whole process of meditation and mindfulness is. It’s what learning is in general, but with even more subtlety and repetition. It is a practice, something you need to repeat and repeat, even when it doesn’t feel like you’re making any headway. Because eventually, seemingly out of nowhere, it connects and you truly feel the change.
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Here’s a list of resources that I’ve learned from:
Jack Kornfield on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Tara Brach on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Sharon Salzberg on the Tim Ferriss Podcast
Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson
Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong by Norman Fischer
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
Status Report: CHANGE
I’m entering a period rife with change and uncertainty, mostly by my own choice. I just left my wonderful job (on great terms) with no real ‘career’ plan. We recently had to put our dog, Mojo, a beloved member of our family for the last 15 years, to sleep. I’m writing this on the opposite coast from where I’ve spent most of my 27 years, and I’ll be here for the next 2 months. My change is something I’m very excited for. A vacation in San Diego for three weeks with my family. Then a month of road tripping with my brother, zig zagging up the West Coast, a dream trip of mine. I’m sure this change will get harder once the adventure is over, but right now it’s exciting and care-free.
In the past, I’d be freaking out internally about all of this, worrying what my next step was going to be. I’ve always been prone to worry. But right now I’m not that worried. Occasionally panic flares up, and I just take a deep breath, recognize it, but I don’t engage it in thought. I just feel it. And then it passes. I believe I’m better able to do this now because of changes I’ve already faced and endured.
I don’t think I fully comprehended change, or life in general, until my Dad passed away suddenly at 54. It gutted me and my family. I learned for the first time, viscerally, that change is absolute. There’s no value system to it and it can come at any time. Change is guaranteed. That has informed how I live and a lot of the decisions I’ve made since.
It prompted me to change myself. Eventually, I scaled back my drinking to now nearly non-existent levels and I quit porn. These two habits were recurring activities in my life for years as an adolescent and into early adulthood. I replaced it with meditation, writing, journaling, exercise, marijuana, great food, books, TV, movies, deep conversations, diving into interests and learning about them, and adventure. These changes and the work that went into them have allowed me to feel kinder, gentler, more vulnerable, braver, and happier than, well, maybe ever before. That took a lot of hard work, practice, struggle, and repeated failure. It took a lot of active change to eventually see fuller aspects of the change cement itself.
Change has been on my mind and I want to share some of what I’ve learned about it, and how I’m trying to experience this change now and going forward.
The Paradox
Change is the only constant in life, yet our reflex is to try our damndest to make sure things stay the same. On a basic level, change is uncomfortable. Change, even when begun in the pursuit of bettering ourselves, will bring up stressful feelings in the process like doubt, worry, anxiousness, fear and panic.
This pull to remain the same despite our constantly changing world is also an innate impulse inside of us, defined by natural laws such as homeostasis. Homeostasis is the tendency to maintain equilibrium, within ourselves and the world as a whole. It “characterizes all self-regulating systems, from a bacterium to a frog to a human individual to a family to an organization to an entire culture—and it applies to psychological states and behavior as well as to physical functioning”. Homeostasis is the reason why when we attempt to change a habit we so often backslide into our old behaviors. “Our body, brain, and behavior have a built-in tendency to stay the same within rather narrow limits, and to snap back when changed”. And for good reason: “if your body temperature moved up or down by 10 percent, you’d be in big trouble. The same thing applies to your blood-sugar level and to any number of other functions of your body.” Without homeostasis, we would die very quickly. But, homeostasis, “like natural selection and like life itself, is undirected and does not have a “value system” — it doesn’t keep what’s good and reject what’s bad.” This is a crucial distinction. Homeostasis resists all change. “After twenty years without exercise, your body regards a sedentary style of life as “normal”; the beginning of a change for the better is interpreted as a threat.”
I encountered this while cutting out alcohol and porn. Alcohol was easier because of hangovers, or the lack thereof. Porn was a lot harder. Even though you know it’s bad for you, it feels good in the moment, and being the most biologically rewarding function, the pull is much stronger. I backslid and relapsed a ton. Eventually I carved out a new normal where I wasn’t craving it.
But then came the change of living without it. And that’s where I started to recognize the underlying root addiction or tendency more clearly for what it was, and how it so easily and imperceptibly affects so many of us today. The root lies in comfort itself; or put another way, the urge to avoid or numb any and all discomfort.
When I stopped drinking and porn, I replaced it with marijuana. Habit change is also indifferent to value systems and nearly any habit can replace another if it’s strong enough, good or bad. In this case it seemed like a perfect trade off, one that I’d still make. But eventually I realized I replaced one habit of comfort with another. In my opinion, a much less harmful one, but still a pull to comfort that takes a level of control and feeling out of my life. Instead of working on something I’m passionate about, or seeing friends, or experiencing new things, or just being bored by myself, lonely or sad or worried, I was blocking all of it out by getting high, and then usually eating and watching TV. That’s not the worst thing in the world, especially compared to darker vices, but I think that’s also what makes it harder to break out of, because it seems so harmless. Life is change and this habit keeps me comfortable but stagnant. Now I know working to change this pattern will bring its own challenges and uncomfortable feelings. But awareness of the problem and the road ahead is the first step. The awareness of comfort as the root of it all will hopefully help get me through it.
The Root
We cling to what feels good and we try to avoid what feels bad. It’s our nature and just seems like common sense. We try to avoid, at all costs, a void. With smart phones, social media, entertainment, drugs, and all of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, we no longer need to feel something as mundane and previously common as boredom, let alone deeper and scarier feelings like existential dread or our own mortality and ultimate death.
Comfort blocks these scary things out. But according to ancient wisdom and cutting edge science, the most important thing to do is to FEEL IT. The Buddha to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius to Garry Shandling, Viktor Frankl, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron and many more, all agree: Trying to avoid our feelings created by the change and reality around us only digs ourselves deeper into a hole and increases our reliance on the thing that makes us not feel discomfort, even if it ultimately makes us feel worse in the long-term.
It’s uncomfortable to realize how little power we have in the world. It’s uncomfortable to recognize how much power we have over ourselves. It’s uncomfortable to feel embarrassed or awkward, sad or lonely, stupid or angry or jealous or ashamed. But by simply paying attention to the feelings rather than reacting to them, they actually lose their control over us. As Tara Brach says, “When you see and feel the sensations your are experiencing as sensations, pure and simple, you may see that these thoughts about the sensations are useless to you at that moment and that they can actually make things worse than they need to be.”
I’m not quitting all of the things that bring me joy in life, like movies and books, great food or some marijuana. But I would like to change my relationship with them, towards a more balanced, healthier approach. I want more time to experience new things, meet new people, nourish relationships I already have, and feel what I’m feeling, whatever it is, in the moment.
But right now, in this time of change, I’m just going to plant myself in the here and now, and enjoy myself and time with my family. There are much harder places to do that than San Diego. Pema Chödron says to “relax into the groundlessness of our situation”. Any time I feel worried about the present or future, I try to remember this quote and take a breath. By embracing the fact that we are insecure and vulnerable, that we don’t know what tomorrow will bring, we are freed to truly feel and live, in this moment now.
I don’t know what my next job will be and I’m not sure where I’ll live 6 or 12 months from now. I’m not sure what my next attempted habit change will be but I have some ideas. I do know I feel best when I’m living in the present, embracing the change, learning new things, struggling, and trying to become better. I am 27. In 27 years I will be 54. I hope to make it there and live on well past it, but the evenness of it both weighs on me and propels me, to live these next 27 years to the absolute fullest.
Post-Script
Going forward, beyond personal self-improvement and this west coast adventure, I’m going to focus on writing. I’m finishing a screenplay I’ve been working on for a while and submitting it to competitions in May. I aim to be more active on this blog too. It still isn’t quite what I thought it would be. I think I had the wrong preconception. I imagined I’d post something each week with original, breathtaking thoughts. But more and more I’m thinking of this blog as an archive, and my role on it as more of a curator, for what I’m into, what I’m learning, and what I’d like to share with you. Nothing is original, and the internet and the world it’s created is so gigantic, I might as well just share what I find interesting, helpful, or joyful. More practically, it can be a personal archive untethered from the social media conglomerates that rule today and could be gone tomorrow. As Austin Kleon advocates, I’m owning my own turf with this blog. And it can be whatever the hell I want it to be.
I saw a retweet from Kleon by Paul Boag that inspires my fresh outlook on this site: “I know it sounds kind of arrogant but I am bloody proud of my blog. Everything I have learned over 13 years all nicely organised and documented. I find myself referring to it everyday. It is an invaluable tool. More people should blog.”
I think that’s a lovely idea.
The Horrifying Wonders of the Human Mind & Body: Hangovers
I suffered from my first hangover in quite some time at the end of 2017. I spent the next morning moaning in bed. As I lay in bed agonizing, I decided to follow my curiosity and try to learn about the science of a hangover, what’s happening in the body, etc. Two things struck me.
The first seems obvious: when we drink, we get dehydrated. Alcohol is a diuretic. This is the overarching reason for hangovers. But the process itself that causes us to become dehydrated is pretty crazy. “Alcohol…reduces the production of a hormone called vasopressin, which tells your kidneys to reabsorb water rather than flush it out through the bladder” (1), and, “according to studies, drinking about 250 milliliters of an alcoholic beverage causes the body to expel 800 to 1,000 milliliters of water; that’s four times as much liquid lost as gained” (2). So, drinking a single beer can cause four times the amount of water in your system to just be dumped out, rather than used as it should be. This is why you pee so often while drinking. You’re jettisoning water, and along with it, lots of important vitamins and minerals.
The second, and even more horrifying fact involves the headache the next day. The cause is dehydration again of course, but the reality of what’s happening is…pretty disturbing. You’re so dehydrated that “the body’s organs try to make up for their own water loss by stealing water from the brain, causing the brain to decrease in size and pull on the membranes that connect the brain to the skull, resulting in pain.” Holy shit! You’re brain is rung like a sponge in order to feed water to the rest of your body, and it literally shrinks, resulting in that awful headache you’re stuck with. That’s gnarly.
While learning about this process, most of the search results dealt with hangover cures. There is no real, instantaneous ‘cure’. You need to re-hydrate with lots of water and replenish those minerals you lost, like potassium and magnesium. There is of course the trick we’ve all been told, but rarely follow: drink a glass of water between each drink. This way you’re not running such an extreme loss of water, compounding your own hangover the next day.
As for me, if the hangover wasn’t enough to keep me from drinking for another long stretch, the knowledge that I’m shrinking my brain each time certainly will.
The Horrifying Wonders of the Human Mind & Body: The Unconscious Mind
All the ways in which the human body actually functions are astonishing, and for the most part, completely overlooked by all of us. The brain is where my interest first started, and since learning about it, whenever I’m curious about a part or process of the body, I do a quick Google search to try to figure out what the hell is going on. I wanted to start sharing what I learned to shed light on how mind blowing these processes and functions are, and how completely oblivious we are of them. Today we’ll start where I started, with the brain, and I hope to explore more aspects of the human body and mind in the future.
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The brain is incredibly complex and there’s so much interesting, crazy stuff going on in it, that it’s hard to know where to start. Neuroplasticity and cognitive biases are two of my favorite areas, but there’s something else that’s seemingly straightforward, yet baffling, that I want to highlight here. I learned about this probably a year ago and it’s only really hitting home now.
This seemingly simple, scientifically proven fact is:
The brain decides before “I” decide.
That seems obvious. Of course decisions arise from our brain, that’s where all thought processes come from. More specifically put, the unconscious mind decides, then the conscious mind, or “I”, decides. The distinction is important, as we’ll see. Your brain decides, then you decide. The more you think about it, the more questions arise.
Before we go on, a quick distinction between the unconscious and conscious mind. The unconscious mind does things automatically, without the need to even be aware of it happening. Our breathing and our digestive system are two examples of this unconscious process. We don’t need to focus on or even think about these things for them to run properly. The unconscious mind also contains desires and fears that we may not be consciously aware of, but nonetheless direct us. The unconscious mind is completely inaccessible to our conscious mind. The conscious mind is actively thinks or acts. It plans our dinner later that night and what ingredients we want to use, it chooses between two movies, it lifts the barbell for another rep. Our conscious mind makes decisions. Or so we think.
In Sam Harris’s book Free Will, he makes the case that we do not truly have free will. One of his main arguments for this point is that through scientific lab studies, “fMRI techniques show that our brains indicate the choice we are going to make 700 milliseconds before we are aware that we are going to make the choice.” These conscious decisions that we feel we came up with, that we’ve decided on, were actually made by our brain, milliseconds before, unbeknownst to us.
700 milliseconds might not seem like a lot of time, but the fact remains that the brain makes a decision that is completely unconscious to us, THEN, milliseconds later, we consciously seem to “come up with it”. But “I” didn’t actually “make” the decision. As Harris lays out, “the intention to do one thing and not another does not originate in consciousness. Rather it appears in consciousness. As does any thought or impulse that might impose it.”
All sorts of thoughts and questions sprout from this one clear fact. Our idea of free will is certainly different than how we think of it, if it exists at all. It distinctly shows the power of the unconscious mind over the conscious mind; the unconscious mind decides, then makes it appear that the conscious mind has chosen. We have all of these unconscious thoughts, feelings and desires, which we are completely unaware of, until the unconscious decides to almost plant them in our conscious mind, making us feel that we determined it. It helps explain why it’s so hard to change a habit or escape from an addiction that we so clearly, consciously want to change, because they are rooted deeper, not in the conscious, but in our unconscious. It casts questions over the nature of consciousness itself and the power and control we assume we have over our lives.
This is a tricky one to wrap our heads around. Like I said, I learned about this a year ago, but only after recently reviewing a summary of the book, did the subject sort of click it in my mind. Sure, “I”, this human body that is Sam Post, is still making the decisions, but it’s not necessarily coming from the “I” I imagined it was, that conscious self I identify as. It’s coming from another layer in, the unconscious part of my mind that I, nor anyone else, has access to. So who the hell is running the show that is ourselves? The better question might be, what shapes the unconscious mind and what determines it’s desires and feelings that prompt our actions and behavior?
The genes we are born with determines a lot, anywhere from 20-50%. But once born, our environment, our conditioning, how and where we were raised, and much more, all form and shape our unconscious mind. And the really interesting part, and the hopeful part, I think, is that it is possible to change our unconscious mind, even if we can’t access it directly. It can’t done by our conscious thinking. It can only done by taking action and by changing our behavior in the real world first.
This is where I think Sam Harris’ argument against free will starts to show it’s cracks. While thinking about change and consciously desiring it does very little to impact our unconscious mind, directly changing our behavior in the real world has a much more powerful effect. This is where the principles of habit change, or the concept of “fake it till you make it”, comes in. By forcing yourself to do something enough times, even if it’s at first uncomfortable or challenging, you’ll eventually form a habit, or put another way, a behavior that doesn’t need to be directed by your conscious mind. The behavior becomes automatic. It has become a part of your routine and can be done without even thinking about it. One example would be learning how to drive a car. At first it seems very complicated and hard, but after enough experience, it seems to take very little conscious will power to get where you’re going.
Harris’ argument to this would be, well, this person that eventually changed, had whatever factors already set in place that allowed them to change in the first place. His genes or his brain had the capability to do so, and it finally did. That seems a bit to deterministic to me, and for an atheist like Sam Harris, it just seems to run too close to what others might call “fate”. But he is much smarter than me. That’s just the way I choose to look at it now, maybe because it’s more comforting and encouraging.
All of this has gotten me much more interested in the unconscious part of our mind, that we all basically ignore, understandably so, because we aren’t even aware of it in the first place. We literally can’t be aware of it, until we start to pay closer attention to and examine our thoughts, actions and behavior. The unconscious mind and it’s importance has appeared countless times throughout my reading, from great thinkers like Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell and beyond, and I’m only now feeling like I’m able to grasp what it actually means. After reviewing Free Will’s book notes, I found another book James Clear summarized titled Strangers to Ourselves, and it helped clear up some of the confusion I had. I ordered that book and can’t wait to dive in. Maybe I’ll return to this topic after I learn more. But for now, I think this simple fact, that there’s a lag between the unconscious brain deciding, and then ourselves feeling the conscious decision, is more than enough to ponder. At the very least, maybe it can make us a little more thoughtful, or questioning, or simply awed, the next time we’re making a decision, whether it’s what we’re having for dinner, or what we want to do with our lives.