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Awaken the mad warrior within

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:36:15 +0000

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, so goeth legend. I wanted to tell you about some things that I have used for some time that I find jolly useful in pursuit of 'health.' The world has been going berserk with Ups and fitbits and goodness knows how many new websites promoting your health, so you probably are well set. But just in case not...

Withings

I think Withings is a pretty neat company. It's one thing building apps. It's a whole different ball of wax integrating separate hardware into the IoS ecosystem. Withings do it with alacrity. The product of theirs that I use is the Withings scale. There are several of things guys out there, but this just works. You can argue all day about the accuracy of the body fat measures by a scale, but I think you can accept that if you weigh yourself at the same time every day and you have eaten the same then the relative measure will tell you something? So, I step on my scale when I get up. And then I can't hide. It connects via wifi and then through a web app and an iPhone a record of my weight and body fat % is recorded. As I say, the body fat may not be very accurate, but it will be relative to the last measurement I took. They also have a blood pressure monitor and a baby monitor so if you’re a new parent you can measure the impact of your baby constantly waking up on your blood pressure. And other things too.

Zeo

Zeo is amazing. Now you need a supportive partner for Zeo, or sleep alone. You put on what Angela lovingly refers to as a Mad Warrior headband and it measures the quality of your sleep. Seriously. I have had a fitbit, which I broke whilst asleep and I have looked closely at the Up, but the Zeo is different altogether. It measures not just how long you were asleep, but the quality of that sleep too.

What does that mean? Well, here is a breakdown of last night’s sleep for me:

or

So, time in REM sleep and Deep sleep is what you are after. It has all sorts of coaching to get a better night sleep. And a better night’s sleep is a jolly good thing for you.

Daily Burn

I have been a user of daily burn for a fair while. A Boulder based company, daily burn is an innovative central platform for measuring your health. It integrates with Zeo and Withings so your weight and sleep is recorded automatically. You can then very effectively track your nutrition and your exercise. It requires effort, but the accompanying apps make that pretty manageable.

So, if you are seriously trying to manage your health and relating your core inputs to that: diet, exercise and sleep, then I commend these three things to you. Awaken the Mad Warrior within. And thank you to Tim Ferris and the amazing Four Hour Body for introducing me to most of this.

your call.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:33:46 +0000

Unbound is absolutely brilliant. Basically it’s a pitch site for authors. If a good idea is there in your opinion, you support it. By buying the book (usually there are loads of different options.) If the book publishes, you get it. If it doesn’t, you get your money back.

I have my first book ‘We can be Heroes.’ It is beautiful. Number 003 with my name printed in the back. It is beautiful. And I have ordered ‘Letters of Note’ too.

It is a brilliant idea, wonderfully executed. You should go and see. I wasn’t sure that I would buy another book through using my iPad and kindle. Unbound is just the sort of thing that means I will.

saving your brain part two

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:52:25 +0000

So, I trust that you are doing very well on Lumosity about which I blogged last Friday. I have had a very average week, but did have a bonzer personal best on Birdwatching yesterday that made me jolly happy. By the by. I have now made Friday ‘Brain Day.’ And now I want to tell you about something else pretty amazing.

Mindfulness is core to Buddhism. It is one of the seven factors of enlightenment.

‘The Buddha advocated that one should establish mindfulness in one's day-to-day life maintaining as much as possible a calm awareness of one's bodily functions, sensations (feelings), objects of consciousness (thoughts and perceptions), and consciousness itself.’

Which is all jolly well, but how the heck can you do that? Well, it’s simple. You meditate. Oh, not so simple? Well, no, it’s not really. You can watch or listen to or read Jon Kabat-Zinn and I encourage you so to do. But it’s still pretty hard. I have found that I can do guided meditations just fine, but when I go to do the same one over and over it doesn’t go so well.

Help is at hand. If you are sensible enough to read The Guardian then you will have seen the really great supplement on Saturday called ‘Think yourself fit’ guide and a CD in Sunday’s Observer called ‘Think yourself healthy.’ CD which includes 5 podcasts to help you with those New Year's resolutions. And let me tell you, they are jolly good. But if you don’t read The Guardian and still want to be mindful, then help is very close at hand in the form of the people who wrote the supplement and made the CD, get some Headspace. And let me tell you, it is absolutely fantastic. You meditate for 10 minutes a day under the guidance of Andy Puddicombe. And every day it’s different. Same core themes of meditation, natch, but each day builds on prior. And he has such a lovely style. And you can do it gratis for ten days to see if it’s for you. It will be. I know you.

I am telling you. I have tried an awful lot of different routes to mindfulness and read and listened to a lot of great stuff, but this is truly fantastic. I cannot commend it to you highly enough. There is masses of evidence that being present, being mindful is a great help in a hectic world. The way there is to meditate. Andy and get some Headspace is a really great way forward.

a path well travelled.

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:45:57 +0000

I like Path. ‘Path is the personal network. A place to be yourself and share life with close friends and family. The personal network doesn’t replace your existing social networks – it augments them.’

It’s not a natural instinct for me to just limit a social network. If I see someone I know I connect to them and if they ask me and I know them then I connect back. It’s a pretty powerful user who has that presence of mind to do otherwise. But, the incomparable @arrington wrote a particularly good post about this called ‘Nobody goes to facebook anymore, it’s too crowded.’ He notes in it that he is an investor in Path and just.me and mentions another ‘micronetwork’ called Ourspot.

I think he is really onto something. I have 1,292 Linked in connections. I like it, but I don’t pay any attention to status updates or any of those things. I find it useful to find out about people and hire people too. But it’s static to me. I have 505 facebook friends. The stories all come off in a peculiar direction and they’re not in date order anymore. Which is annoying. I pop by from time to time and it’s fine. But it’s unmanageable and with no real immediacy or intimacy. And, for me, it’s static too. Occasionally you’ll converse, but occasionally. On my old Twitter I had lots of connections but it was unmanageable for me too. Now, it works just great. I follow about 100 people. Locals, tech people, golfers, Ipswich, family and a few friends. It is immediate and it is intimate. But I think I like Path the best at the moment. We’ll see. I liked foursquare and pushed it pretty hard and I ended just shutting it down. I checked in 178 times to the same Starbucks and nothing happened. I didn’t even get a free coffee. And someone else just set up another Starbucks at the same place and became the Mayor of that one. And then I would walk through Raffles Place in Singapore and there would 200 Mayor specials nearby. I just stopped doing it. But my early impressions of Path are pretty favourable. I do have one idea though: it would be amazing if you could print a month or a quarter or year of your Path. With all the pictures and all the moments on the path. As a poster or a book or something. Something smart out there should do that. I think that would be the timeline.

I need to tell you about this.

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 13:09:49 +0000

The most extraordinary thing. You probably already all knew this and didn’t tell me. Ed Sheeran. Folk singer. From Suffolk. Looks like Ron Weasley from Harry Potter. ‘Lego House’ and ‘The A Team.’

And then there is Grime.

‘Grime is a style of music that emerged from Bow, East London, England in the early 2000s, primarily as a development of UK garage, dancehall, and hip hop. Pioneers of the style include Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Roll Deep and, of course, jme.’

So, why would we mention those things together? Well, you know Jamal Edwards and SB.TV? He’s the guy in the Google Chrome advert (below.) And Ed Sheeran appeared on the SB.TV. Like so.

And that got 500,000 views and then all the top Grime artists contacted him and he made them all their own song. Ghetts, P Money, Dot Rotten, Devlin, Mikill Pane, Random Impulse, Sway, Wretch 32, jme and Wiley. And that made ‘No.5 Collaborations Project.’ Anyway, it’s been out for a year, but it is truly extraordinary. It’s very very sweary. But amazing.

Your brain is so falling to pieces! Save it!

Fri, 6 Jan 2012 08:32:50 +0000

I know it’s been a long time since I wrote anything at all, but you’ve been busy and I just didn’t want to distract you. But there is something afoot of which I need to warn you as a matter of some urgency. Frankly I am a wee bit surprised Benedict Cumberbatch hasn’t mentioned it. He is clearly has now replaced Stephen Hawking as the world’s most very smartest man and it’s not like he isn’t on telly a lot...

Anyway, shocking News from this morning’s Guardian:

“As all those of middle age who have ever fumbled for a name to fit a face will believe, the brain begins to lose sharpness of memory and powers of reasoning and understanding not from 60 as previously thought, but from as early as 45, scientists say.

[...]

Over the decade, there was a 3.6% decline in the mental reasoning of men and of women aged 45 to 49. The process appeared to have speeded up in the older age groups. Men aged 65 to 70 have a decline of 9.6% while women fared a little better, at 7.4%.”

The article goes on to make wild claims about having a healthy heart to save you, but in my scientific opinion, these claims are wide of the mark. This opinion is only slightly influenced by the fact I wanted to tell you about all sorts of great stuff and particularly about something called Lumosity. It is completely excellent.

First things first. I was reading a load of stuff. Specifically because I had become fascinated by a thing called Neuroplasticity, or Brain plasticity. Honestly, I am. I wrote about the brain years and years ago. Anyway, Dr Karl Morris quotes Dr Richard Restak from his book ‘The New Brain’

“As recently as only a few years ago, most neuroscientists believed that brain plasticity largely ceased by adolescence or by early adulthood at the latest. At this point the brain became fixed in its structure and function. This assumption has turned out to be wrong. We now recognise that our brain isn’t limited by considerations that are applicable to machines. Thoughts, feeling and actions rather than mechanical laws, determine the health of our brain.”

So, anyway, I was reading two books in particular, both of which are really great reads I think: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Success and Failure at Work and at Play by Sian Beilock. And as a result I stumbled across Lumosity. And it is absolutely addictively fabulous. Basically Lumosity is a website with loads of excellent brain games organised into structured programmes that measure and train memory, problem solving, speed, flexibility and attention. And I am telling you it is just the best. And I think it really works. They say:

“Research shows that certain types of mental exercise can enhance the health and function of the brain. Our scientists have engineered dozens of engaging games with this discovery in mind, and studies have confirmed that Lumosity training can improve memory, attention, and other cognitive areas. Our users, in turn, have reported positive and often remarkable results that include better face-name recall, faster problem-solving skills, and a quicker memory. Their success stories reveal the confidence that comes from performing better at work, home and school.”

I say:

“It’s fun, it’s engaging and I am getting better at it. Which must mean the brain plasticine is working.”

Seriously. Try it. You can try it for free. But I bet you buy a year’s subscription within a week. I have done it every day for 30 days. It takes 10 minutes and you get better at it, and well, just do it, yeh?

Regarding my point earlier about suggesting that wild claims were made about having a healthy heart, well, that may have been hasty. Look after your heart too. But looking after your brain is way more fun.