Category: Reading

• All information processing goes bottom up
• Brains develop from the bottom up
• The younger you are, the more impressionable you are, even if you do not understand what is going on
• Trauma is more severe when we do not have the language to describe it
• Rhythm calms and leads to regulation
• Infants cannot self-regulate
• We have three neural systems: regulation, relationship, and rewards
• Fight, flight, freeze, or disengage
  • We tend to disengage when we cannot otherwise fight or flee (we are too young or small)
• Intense self-medication is often an attempt to soothe trauma
• Experience is important to changing how the brain works
• For infants, care is love
• Controllability of stress is what is important
• Flock (check to see what everyone else is doing), freeze (to assess what is going on), fight, or flee
• There is a difference between believing you deserve happiness and knowing you are worthy of it
• Trauma has three key aspects: event, experience, and effects
• Timing makes a huge difference
  • The younger the trauma, the worse the effects
• Early on, we can only take small doses of therapeutic revisiting
• “What happened to us?” Is also important to ask
• We inherit through genes, gene expression, behavior, and traditions
• Infants need a few deep, consistent relationships
• We are most comfortable when our experience lines up with our world view
  • This is why we sabotage relationships
  • (We are taught how to be treated then we teach people how to treat us)
• “We feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty.”
• Children are malleable not resilient
  • (Children are anti-fragile)
• Regulate, relate, and then reason

• “The less you know, the more you say”
• There is a spectrum between insufficient and excessive
• Anxiety is born from overactive fear
• Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC) predicts the future based on information
• When information is lacking PFC runs scenarios
• Reflexes are immediate, learning is seconds to minutes, anxiety is months to years
• Post adrenaline energy discharge is important to avoid PTSD
• Break the cycle by
  • Recognize the onset of anxiety
  • Identify what it leads to
  • Reflect on how you felt (without judgement or editorial)
• The more you wear glasses, the more they alter your perspective and the more comfortable they are
• All experiences can move us forward if we learn from them
• We only service pleasure when paying attention
• Habits without immediate rewards are difficult to make
• Beating yourself up about the past is not learning
• “Forgiveness is giving up on having a better past”
• There is Interest and Depravation Curiosity
  • Depravation is the stress of not knowing
  • Interest is when you explore something new
• Rewards Based Learning triggers the same brain parts as meeting bodily needs
• “If someone dies, first take your own pulse.”
• Lean into oncoming anxiety. There is no way to avoid it, so make the most of it. This is your experience, experience it.
• Recognize, accept, investigate, note.
• Focus on what triggered you not why you are triggered
• Focus on “one day at a time”, it is less scary than next year

• Search your feelings
  • Excited, for or against, can be a sign of bad data
• Ponder your personal experience
  • “Naïve reality” is when we think our perceptions are more accurate than they really are (most often because the news weights our perceptions to the novel)
  • We often substitute a hard question for an easier one, without knowing it
  • (Instead of “how many pregnant teenagers are there?” we ask “have I recently experienced a news story about pregnant teenagers”)
  • Be careful of how metrics are being leveraged
• Avoid premature enumeration
  • Definitions can skew enumerations
  • Start by understanding what was meant
  • Once you learn something, it is difficult to remember that everyone else is not familiar
  • Inference is an easy way
• Step back and enjoy the view
  • Carrying around reference numbers can help context
  • Good news tends to unfold slowly while bad news happens radiply
  • Reporting cadence can have a powerful effect on context
• Get the backstory
  • Survivorship bias pervades… No one is interested is the expected
  • This is especially true with replication studies
  • Be wary of hypothesis made after the study is started
• Ask who is missing
  • Females are almost always missing from studies
  • Almost every audience (especially “found” data) has response bias
  • “n=all” usually really means “n=all the people who do or have a thing“
• Demand transparency when the computer says “No”
  • Look for algorithm’s explanatory power or else they may be associating “winter trends” with flu cases
  • Algorithms are built by human and so can easily have bias built-in (hiring algorithms trained to hire men)
  • Transparency is what killed alchemy and brought science
  • We should question which algorithms we can trust
• Don’t take statistical bedrock for granted
  • Basic understandings are important for building senses of the world
• Remember that misinformation can be beautiful, too
  • Graphics lend authenticity, the more beautiful the more believable
  • Florence Nightingale was a statistician
• Keep an open mind
  • We naturally fill in data blanks
  • “Things are going badly, so do something different”
  • Making public commitments makes it harder to take back
  • When information changes, change your conclusions
• Be curious
  • Confirmation bias is real and powerful
  • Scientific curiosity is key (not scientific literacy)
  • Asking people to rate their knowledge, then explain how something works, can reduce stubbornness
  • “Please explain that” can do a lot to soften extreme stances

• “Ask yourself the question”
• For some, introspection is detrimental
• Our default state is non-present (future looking or past remembering; 30%-50% of our waking hours)
• Linguistic skills co-develop with self-control skills
• “Zooming out” helps calm out inner voices
• Time can be a natural way to zoom out
• “Invisible help” perseveres self-esteem
• Touch helps other’s manage their chatter
• Nature experiences (real or virtual, visual or auditory) create calm
  • The point is to create “awe”
• Voluntary attention exhausts quickly and needs to be recharged
• Imposing physical order creates calm
• Placebos, “good luck charms”, and rituals have a real affect on the brain
• Beliefs shape expectations which can hush the chatter

Tools

• Self-talk
  • User your name and 2nd person “you”
  • Ask what you would say to a friend in the same situation
  • Reframe the challenge is terms of situations you have handled before
  • Remind yourself that your body’s response to stress is there to help you
  • Normalize your situation
  • Think about future-you
  • Visualize the problem and zoom out
  • Write about your thoughts
  • Perform a ritual or hand a charm
• Tools that use other people
  • Address cognitive and emotional needs (validate their experiences and provide suggestions)
  • Invisibly support
  • Touch affectionately
  • Be someone else’s placebo
• Environment
  • Create order
  • Expose yourself to green space
  • Seek out awe-inspiring experiencing

1. “Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement”
   • Most of us think by talking, few ever do
   • Social interactions help keep us sane by providing interaction bumpers
   • Individuals have to balance what is good for themselves and what is good for the whole
   • Games have to be iterable to be durable (things can change and adapt over time)
   • It is important that we play the game fairly
   • When an authority, it is important to let the lessors control play and win often (1/3 or more)
   • Authority comes from competence while power compels
   • Liberal and conservative views are both important and need constraint
   • Understand the rules well enough to know when to change or break them
2. “Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that”
   • Humans are really good at imitating
   • We need experience before we can recognize a pattern and progress it
   • When ignorance demolishes culture, monsters emerge
   • We love a good hero story
   • “What we need most to find is in the place we least wish to look.”
   • We can imitate more than we can explain
3. “Do not hide unwanted things in the fog”
   • Do not pretend to be happy with something you are not
   • “Have the damn fight”
   • Life is what repeats and it is worth repeating it right
   • Leaning one way causes something else to balance the other side
   • The thing said is translated through a lens of all things that have ever been said in the relationship
   • “When ignorance is blessed to be wise as folly”
   • Is it scary or am I afraid?
4. “Notice that oppurtunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated”
   • Do the useful things that no one else is doing
   • Slay the right sized dragons… They have enough gold to make it worth while
   • Games only work if we accept the constraints of the rules
   • “Sin” is often better translated as “missed the target”
   • It is not cool to be the oldest person at the great party
   • Peter Pan, the youthful wild, refused to grow up, thus missing out of life itself
   • The hero is often sent to rescue his father
   • Voluntarily addressing of challenges is clinically curative
   • I, myself, are a community when considered across time
   • Happiness is inherently present-time focused and thus the pursuit of happiness does not produce sustained, long-term outcomes
5. “Do not do what you hate”
   • Stupid things drain us
   • Hearken to your still small voice
6. “Abandon ideology”
   • Ideologs reduce and oversimplify the world to reduce opposition
   • No group guilt should be assumed, especially multi-generational
7. “Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens”
   • The conflicted person cannot negotiate with anything, including themselves
   • You need to aim at something to keep you moving
   • Enduring something of value fortifies the self
   • Potential, never applied, is worth less than the potential applied suboptimaly
   • Child need to be self-organized and integratable by 4 years-old
   • Without a playable game, only chaos can persist
   • Growth is learning to integrate our different selves into a single being
8. “Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible”
   • This establishes a relationship with the divine
   • This beauty can then pervade your life
   • Without art, we stop seeing the world and start only seeing pieces
   • Artistry is to contend with something you cannot express at a higher level
   • Lions attack the wildebeest they can identify
   • Art is not a decoration but an exploration
9. “If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely”
   • When trauma revisits us, it is because we refuse to actively and completely process them
   • Bad memories often do not mature as we do
   • We relive our traumas until we review them thoroughly
   • Worry is a consequence and investigation of future possibilities
   • We are all plagued by the memories of what we did wrong or failed to do right
   • Power comes when we realize that we each create our future from the raw time and space given us
   • God leverages “The Word” in crafting reality
10. “Plan and work diligently to maintain that romance in your relationship”
    • Decide to not lie to your partner
    • Devote some time to maintaining the romance
    • Each should be subordinate to a single, higher power
    • “You do not find so much as make”
    • If there is an escape, there is not likely to be enough heat to burn through the dross
    • “I am going to kill you… It is just going to take a lifetime”
    • Tyranny is not good for anyone
    • If you’re not negotiating then you’re tyrannical or enslaved
    • If you do not know, then you should at least guess
    • Push through the dismissals
    • Red faced tears are often anger and not sadness
    • Nice is not the same as good
    • “Sins of the fathers” will echo through the generations
    • We need to tell our story to know it
    • It is easy to get vacations and special events right but harder to get the daily chores satisfactory every time
    • What matters is not the fight, but making peace
    • Never punish your partner for doing something you want them to continue doing
11. “Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant”
    • Why waste time perceiving when you can just remember?
    • Conceptualize life through stories
    • There are always monsters in the dark… until we are big enough to defend ourselves
    • Invite the evil queen because she will arrive either way
    • Lying is an attempt to alter the realities
12. “Be grateful in spite of your suffering”
    • Have an informed optimism