— 15 minutes read —

Learning takes time

Mastering any topic of interest takes time. In fact author Malcom Gladwell popularized the idea that it takes 10 000 hours of deliberate practice to reach mastery of any given field. To get to that number, he picked up on a research done by Anders Ericsson among violin students. The guy found out that the most accomplished players among them had reached 10 000 thousand hours of practice time before they were 20. Gladwell pursued this analysis by examining figures such as the Beatles or Bill Gates. Turns out they all put in their 10 000 hours before they made the contributions they’re most well known for. Now, obviously ; 10 000 thousand hours is a bit of an arbitrary number. You might even say a gross over-simplification. Maybe we’re talking a bit over that figure, maybe somewhat under. Most likely that would depend on a variety of factors. But the point remains ; mastering a topic requires mobilizing vast amounts of time. Considering 6 hours seems to be the very upper-limit of truly focused time one can achieve in a day without burning oneself out ; it would theoretically require almost 5 years of full time studying to master a subject. Less than that and you easily go up to a decade or more. I might add than for those of us with more than one interest ; that number is multiplied by this much. It might be fair to say we’re in for a marathon rather than a sprint. And marathons need preparation. So let’s ask the question ; how to optimize learning ?

Access to information

On the question “what should you learn” ; you’re free to choose, but I would highly suggest learning English as soon as possible. Obviously that check-mark has already been crossed if you are reading this. You might even be a native English speaker. Yet I still want to discuss how much of a meta-skill that is. A meta-skill is essentially a higher-order skill that enables and empowers other skills to happen. Now, when it comes to learning ; as human beings we do most of that from culture. Sure, we’re born with some built-in function, such as the fear of heights or a bunch of other safety skills. But we’re mainly vastly handicapped when we first pop-in the world. We make up from that by picking up from people around us everything that we need to now ; and we quickly realize we need language for that purpose. Unfortunately the language we’re assigned as children is pretty random. For me, I inherited the French build. The thing is ; we live in the 21st century. We have access to a library of knowledge that is updated daily with an additional 2.5 quintillion bits of data. The important part is this : 60.4% of the content online is written in English. That’s huge. If I were to search only in french ; I would be limited to a mere 2.6% of the internet. I would have access to almost 25 times less information. And it’s not even that small a share compared to other languages. On that basis, Russian would be next in line as a language to learn and still, it only represents 8.5% of the internet. Spanish occupies the third spot with a 4% share. I hope I made clear why learning English will assure that all your needs are forever met when it comes to accessing pertinent and up to date information. Once it’s done, you’re ready to go down the rabbit hole of never-ending learning.

Fluid intelligence

The ability to learn new information and problem solve is called fluid intelligence. It stands in opposition to crystallized intelligence which refers to previously learned procedures and knowledge, essentially. In the field of psychology ; fluid intelligence is in large part encompassed through an IQ score. IQ research has been developed in the 1920’s and is a well established branch of psychology by now. It has good predictive validity when it comes to academic achievements, although the big five trait conscientiousness (which you could rebrand as “grit”) also accounts for a significant share of the variance ; the rest being accounted for by socioeconomic factors. The way the IQ tests are designed is as follow ; throw a large number of random test at people. They could be anything. Math problems, general knowledge, vocabulary, anything. See how well people respond. If there’s a correlation between respondents scores on one set of questions and some other set of questions ; then we might assume that there’s something that’s measured that is common across all sets. That something we call generalized intelligence or IQ. An other way to phrase it ; IQ is what is common across all possible sets of intelligence tests.
There’s a bunch of facts that are interesting to know regarding the evolution of your intelligence. For the youngest readers, you should know that you have not reached top speed yet. Your fluid intelligence is going to peak at roughly age 25. It will essentially remain fixed for a while before it will go down significantly as you age towards your sixties. Interestingly no amount of sudoku is going to fix that. The best factor to limit the affects of ageing on intelligence ; is physical activity. It’s all about pumping that blood through the veins and cleaning-up the mess that’s accumulating every day to ensure good O2 supply to the brain.
What’s more ; you should know that insufficient sleep absolutely lowers how well people perform on IQ tests. In fact a bunch of shorter nights in a row can easily translate to a loss of 15 points or more on the scale. Sleeps creates new synapses in your brain and also cleans existing synapses from toxins that accumulate all day every day. You really shouldn’t ever pass on sleep if you can avoid it.

The role of dopamine

If you are going to learn anything, you are going to need some fresh dopamine. Dopamine is a neurochemical that’s involved in motivation regulation. If you can’t get yourself to focus on your learning ; there’s a good chance your brain isn’t releasing associated dopamine ; or to say it at the experience level ; you simply find the subject quite boring and you can’t for the life of you get yourself to enjoy the thing. Turns out dopamine is produced when we do things we enjoy and so enjoying the subject at hand greatly facilitates learning and retention.
Stimulant drugs such as methamphetamine or cocaine have a direct effect on the production of dopamine in the brain. In fact methamphetamine releases up to 1500 units of dopamine in the brain. To compare that to something you might be familiar with : sex increases dopamine up to 200 units. It ensues that methamphetamine is by far the most pleasant experience one can have, although I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone since 19 out of 20 people get addicted to it. One thing it does ; is make the user really interested in mundane shit. Math dunces would suddenly become weirdly passionate about math ; “I would want to be the calculus master and I would study this shit for eight days and eight nights and not even be a little bored of it”. In fact dopamine is such a key element in the equation for what makes a good learner that medication for ADHD people who have trouble staying focused are all essentially stimulant drugs such as metylphenidates and amphetamines ; the most well known among them being Ritalin and Adderall respectively.

The fun in learning

Now ; I need to point out ; distractability is common among intelligent people. In fact it might even be a necessary part of being smart. Being uninterested in a task at hand is one way to see the problem ; an other might be that the dude is more interested in other things crossing his or her attention all the time. If you’re going to have something called generalized intelligence, you’re going to need a mechanism to push you to explore the width of available learning, not just to hammer the same subject in depth (although ADHD also make people hyper-focused when they actually enjoy the topic at hand). When under control, they make for T-shaped learning profiles ; where one is highly competent on a topic or two and also has breadth of knowledge reaching out far from main land.

If you want to maximize for learning ; you will have to go for what you find interesting. This is were the overused “follow your passion” comes into play. What if that part keeps changing however and you lack follow through on anything ? The other, sometimes more practical road to travel would be to learn how to make your learning more enjoyable ; and I mean that without relying on drugs. In fact if you’re going to try and focus on the same thing for years ; it’s going to be downright necessary to do so in some measure. Modern culture is phenomenal at grabbing people’s attention and so I bet we can learn a thing or two from what they do to achieve that result. This is were things such as gamification come into play. Video-games are really good at keeping you aroused and focused for extended periods of time. One reason why is because they keep offering a challenge that’s level with your current skills. It’s not so easy that you get bored, and not so hard that you get anxious and rage quit. This is also -ideally- the role of a good teacher to present the subject in a way that is as interesting as can possibly be ; adapting the material to its student so that he stays engaged. In fact hands-on learning always wins over reading books, especially at that debut phase where one needs to find the curiosity first. On the internet, the video format is the winner when it comes to grabbing people attention ; far out-pacing the written word. The more sensory organs involved, the better.

First principles, learning trees.

Getting into the heart of the matter ; when tackling any subject ; you should consider that field of knowledge as a tree branching out in all kind of directions with a bunch of leafs on the outer periphery. As a learner, your goal should be to unlock the trunk and big branches as fast as possible. They are your fundamental principles on which every little facts and details rest. You need them before you can even properly digest the specifics ; otherwise they won’t have anything to hand onto. You risk collecting a bunch of disjointed knowledge and being unable to make sense of them. As a example you’re likely to have encountered ; think of the branch of mathematics. It is a highly sequential, tree-like field. You might have notice that if you miss a level ; it becomes next to impossible to make sense of the next floor and everything falls flat. You can try to rote learn a solution or two for specific problems but you won’t be able to adapt to even slightly different problem statement. That’s the difference between knowing and understanding. The one who understand can pivot and generate new solutions.
The thing is ; it can take a little while to get those core principles down. In fact the reason recipes are popular is because they are extremely efficient. Staggeringly efficient. Just follow through step one to ten and you’ve got yourself a cake. Easy-peasy. The thing is ; if you develop a sense of the underlying chemistry and some of the fundamentals of cooking ; you start being able to produce not only this cake but any cake really ; new cakes even. You’re no longer a cook but a chef. The one collecting recipes would have acquired a dozen or so different cakes recipes while you would now have a quasi limitless possible cakes list from which to draw at any time ; creativity is unlocked. In exchange for understanding you get exponential growth once all the pieces are in place even though it might take a while to take off the ground.
When considering language acquisition ; the trunk might be grammar while the leaves might be vocabulary. In painting ; the trunk might be things like perspective, color theory, values, form, brushwork or composition. The leafs would be any particular object, any particular lighting scenario. In music your fundamentals would be things like intervals, chord relationships, modulations, or maybe rhythm and timing ; while the leaves would be specific songs or licks. You get the point ; time is better spent on those big fat branches. The Pareto principle states that 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs. Don’t get me wrong ; the specifics are important as they are ultimately what is seen from afar ; but you sure as heck will have a much easier time grabbing and remembering them once you can connect everything back to your core anyway. Grammar is your 20-80 input. Master the trunk.

Teaching as a learning tool

Here is a great way to test one’s understanding of any topic : teach it to someone else. Write it down. Talk it out.
Turns out we ourselves are the easiest person to fool. It’s really easy to believe we have it all figured out until we try to get it out to people and can’t help but notice how shaky the ground seem to be at the moment, how full of contradictions we are, how many gaps are still left to be filled. Richard Feynmann was an american physicist who got known as “the great explainer”. His method of learning essentially consisted in formulating stuff as if you were to teach it to a child and then going back to the material each time a gap was identified until full understanding is achieved. It’s about finding the simplicity in the most complex subject matters. In fact, you’ll find teaching as a learning method has a long history to back it up. The Master-apprentice model for painters that was in use during the Renaissance used to divide to time as follow ; about a third would be used learning from one’s master ; an other third would be used practicing on your own ; and the last third would be spent teaching.

Understanding is insufficient. Chunking.

In order to truly master a topic understanding is insufficient though. I need to point out in case it’s not self-evident that no-one has ever mastered dancing by reading books about dance alone. Knowing stuff is not enough ; it has to become automatic. It has to become so ingrained that one does not need to even think about it to put the knowledge into practice. The way that is achieved is through chunking.
The basic idea is that neurons that fire together wire together. Meaning ; as you repeat the same movements, pieces of logic, whatever ; you are in effect reinforcing neural pathways within your brain. They become well practiced neural chunk that can be conceptualized as very compact packages of information that your mind can easily access. As an example ; you can picture what happens when you talk. You are not thinking about how to move your lips or tongue ; you are not overly aware of any of the mechanics that goes into it. Your mind thinks a word and then the entire sequence of actions needed to produce the word just happen. It’s remarkable isn’t it. Yet ; it once was incredibly difficult to do so. In fact if you are currently learning a new language you might have noticed how painfully conscious you need to be in order to produce some of those foreign sounds. Yet if you keep practicing, this is going to get easier and easier until you can do it like you breath. Chunking is compression. A compressed thought require incredibly less storage space in working memory.
It ensues that although practicing is a focus intensive sport ; the master is doing most of the work out of his own awareness. It’s all happening at the subconscious level. The improviser musician just think notes ; the fingers seemingly move on their own. The painter is watching himself paint, thinking the gods must be doing the work. At this point, knowledge becomes intuition. You no longer know how you’re even doing what you are doing. Yet you’re doing it.

Attention natural rhythm

When your focusing on your learning ; the relevant neural chunks get loaded into your working memory. Working memory can be conceptualized as the RAM in your computer. It’s a temporary storage space that is used to connect ideas in the moment. Each time concepts are loaded into working memory ; their pathway gets reinforced and they end up sliding into long term memory. Focusing endlessly on the same stuff for hours does not do much more to engrave it ; it’s much more about that initial recalling. So, when you learn something you should do your best to forget it as fast as possible. Stop thinking about it. And then recall it. Go through that cycle again and again.
From there we get to the concept of spaced repetition. It is the exact opposite of the idea of cramming. Whereas student typically binge their lessons the day before an exam all in one sitting ; it would be much more efficient to rather study a little bit each day (that is, assuming the goal is to develop a long term relationship with the information).

At the local level ; the mind in fact naturally does something like that all the time. There’s two distinct mode of operation it uses. One is called the default mode network ; and corresponds to your experience of a wandering mind. When the brain is operating this way ; it jumps from topic to topic seemingly randomly. It makes long range connections between disparate chunks.
The second is the focus mode. It’s when your attention is devoted to a particular topic. Connections made in this mode are short range ; localized. It happens when you are trying to solve a problem.
The brain naturally oscillate between those two modes of functioning. Although it really likes to be focused, it cannot do so endlessly. It needs to grab some fresh air every once in a while ; just forget everything at hand ; make those distant-range connections, and get itself ready to get back at it. The pomodoro technique really makes use of that natural oscillation. 25 minutes of focus time followed by 5 minutes of guilt-free wandering mind. Turns out the average mind wanders between 15 to 20% of the time ; fitting the pomodoro rhythm. Keep in mind, regardless of whether you can hold your attention for shorter or longer time-frames, some wandering time is a necessary part of learning so don’t skip the breaks. There is a reason eureka moments often occur after showers or walks in nature ; you need those distant connections in order to get unstuck and move forward.

The role of confidence

Finally I want to talk a little about the role of self-esteem and confidence in learning. What kind of mindset favors learning ? The thing is ; those two are not the same. In fact you’d find the motivation to learn more in the first place often stems from low self-esteem rather than high self-esteem. Self-esteem is, literally, how favorably a person regards him or herself. That in and of itself is not correlated with any form of academic performance. You might argue if someone thinks himself perfect already ; he or she might not even have sufficient reason to move further on the path of learning. Inflated self-esteem can instead be a recipe for arrogance or narcissism.
Confidence on the other hand has been shown to affect academic performance. It can affect performance by as much as 12%. Confidence is a measure of one’s belief in one’s own abilities. It’s also often coined self-efficacy.
Turns out students with more self-efficacy keep searching for new solutions longer and are generally more persistent while people with low-efficacy give up more easily and have a hard time concentrating on tasks as well. An other way to phrase it ; the belief that you can tackle maths makes you good at maths over time. It’s one of those positive loops ; that can easily become a negative loop if you let it flip the script.
People routinely under-predict their own rate of learning. Learning curves are steep initially and are associated with some levels of pain. But we should fight our tendency to give up at the first sign of ineptitude. All the conscious effort exerted to learn something will soon enough turn all those complex processes into automatons running in the back-burner. Everything that is easy was once hard.
You’re not there yet ; but you’ll get there. That’s the spirit.

— 15 minutes read —

The dark playground

There are times when one can’t muster the bravado required to simply do the work. In those instances, it just gets pushed aside and some mindless activity takes place instead. It could be anything ranging from doing the dishes to Youtube numbing. In other circumstances those activities would have been fun and enjoyable. But not at this point in time. In fact author Tim Urban goes as far as calling this state of joyless distraction “the Dark Playground”. All there is to be found here is guilt and suffering.

You’ll find a voice screaming at you as if there was no tomorrow ; begging for you to get back on task. And maybe you will even drag yourself back to the work table in front of the work computer, equipped with some sort of work intent. Yet that’s not what would happen. You might find yourself not even doing anything but witnessing the existence of a second voice ; arguing back a million reasons why the work is stupid anyway.

In fact your head might literally get hot from all the back and forth nuking incessantly going on inside. You’ll feel hopeless, on the verge of crying. Yet in the concrete world, you’re just staring at a screen, unable to align a mere 5 minutes of focus-time. How can doing nothing be such an all-consuming, agonizing even, activity ?

It’s not laziness

What’s going-on ? Are we just being lazy ? “Procrastination” is derived from the Latin verb procrastinare meaning ; to put off until tomorrow. However, the word is also derived from the ancient Greek akrasia ; doing something against our better judgment. It would be so much easier wouldn’t it if we weren’t even aware of the harm we were inflicting upon ourselves by delaying the task. Blissful ignorance has been denied however, and yet we’re still putting it off until it’s basically too late. That surely must mean you’re broken in some crucial and very definitive way.

But wait a minute. It’s confusing to think that this person you have became that’s unable to work to save its own life, is the same person that have once proven capable of focusing for hours on end. Maybe your preferred procrastination method has to do with cleaning up the whole place until doctors are comfortable performing surgery in your kitchen ? How is that lazy ? If you’re a gamer, how diligently have you been farming those mobs to prep’ that epic boss fight that’s waiting around the corner ? Maybe you’re out running all around the city seeking some sun the minute you’re supposed to be slashing that task. Whatever it is ; you’re not unwilling to expend energy. Far from it. In fact you’d be thrilled to be able to do so on task rather than pouring it in random directions. Yet, what is it about a deadline that makes it so hard to channel all that burning energy into the work ?

Well it’s turmoil. Bad mood. Anxiety. Feelings for you. All that good stuff.
Time-management should really be rebranded as emotion regulation. We have to get clear on the goal here otherwise we won’t go far in our attempts to tackle it. Making a better schedule won’t save you. Smarter to-do lists ; that’s not it. I mean those things can help, but it does not seem to me like you’re suffering from planning malfunction. You know exactly what you should be doing. Yet you’re not doing it. At some point this fact becomes so certain you might even start wondering what’s the point in planning at all. How does it matter if there’s no follow-up on your part ? Yeah, well that’s despair. That’s dark, bro.

What is anxiety anyway ?

Anxiety is actually a pretty useful function of the brain all things considered.

All vertebrates attach to sources of energy better known as food, and sexual objects. That’s self-preservation and reproduction for you. Mammals (and some birds) also attach to parental and social objects. But there is one uniquely human feature ; we attach to the future.
See, fear arises when a danger towards any of the previous items is perceived. Gets you motivated real quick to run for your life when a Lion starts to manifest interest in ripping your insides out. You can see this even in rats ; turns out rats run much faster towards a food reward than they would otherwise if you scare them with cat scent.

What we do better than other mammals is the prediction part of what constitutes danger. That we would call “Doubt”, or Anxiety.It’s all about the future. We manifest fear responses when something could, potentially, maybe, do us harm, in some sort of imaginary uncertain time ahead. And you might think ; “sometimes we experience anxiety about past events” but if you play close attention, you’ll notice that what’s stressing you out in those instances is the anticipation of bad outcomes resulting from past events, not the past events in and of themselves.
Anxiety’s superpower is the capacity to motivate action in the present to prevent disasters 5 years from now. This certainly has some evolutionary advantages.

In fact anxiety is extremely common. Sometimes though, the mechanism spins out of control. The anxious mind overestimates the risk of threat, underestimate its ability to cope, narrows attention onto it to the point where it can’t disengage from the thoughts and jumps to the most negative of conclusions. Anxiety disorder are so prevalent that 12 to 15% of the population is anxious enough at any given time to justify a visit to the psychologist. Unfortunately that number has been steadily rising in the developed nations ; for we have not evolved our brains for the lifestyles that are currently the norm. Also I need to mention anxiety disorder is two times more prevalent in girls than it is in males.

So what are you anxious about ? Well that deadline, duh. What if you can’t make it in time ? What if you’re unable to produce great work ? What if it’s too much for you ? Maybe you’re not cut for it and then what ? An interesting thing to note is that there’s a correlation between intelligence, and the severity of the anxiety. That’s right, more brain power means more predictive capabilities. The stronger the analytical capabilities, the stronger at knocking all sorts of reassurances away. Anxiety can come up with all sorts of arguments to justify its own existence. And art people ; they’re pretty smart on average. There’s indeed some correlation between creativity and the IQ thing. And so it follows that it’s not uncommon to witness crippling anxiety in such people.

Avoidant type

When anxiety becomes too much to bear, that’s when we start to procrastinate to forget it’s even there. If anxiety is literally the mind thinking about the future, it ensues that a way to reduce anxiety when it becomes overwhelming is to get back to the present.
Well, whatever you are doing when you are procrastinating ; understand that you are doing it for exactly that reason. Binging a TV show grabs your attention and puts it back where it belongs ; in present tense. A bath ? Same thing. Alcohol or marijuana, same thing. Anything really to prevent you from wandering in hypothetical futures. When anxiety has reached debilitating intensity ; it needs to go down. We make it go down with distraction (that is, until it can no longer be contained).

We can easily see how that’s maladaptive. Remember Anxiety is there to motivate action in the present to prevent negative outcomes in the future. Those negative outcomes aren’t going away just because you managed to ignore the anxiety for a while. The moment you drop the numbing is also the moment you’re back face to face with your problems and with the panicking, essentially.

And maybe you know that already. Maybe you’ve been confronted with the problem so much that you developed some sort of PTSD. Then you might have gone the other way as there is a second possible response to anxiety.

Control-freak type

The thing is, if you’re not going to run then you’re going to fight. And that means reducing all forms of uncertainty as much as humanly possible. You won’t stop until the only thing your mind is able to see in the future is the outcome you desire. That’s perfectionism for you. We’re talking high achieving, hyper organized people. You think up solutions, you implement them religiously. You get some feedback that things are moving in the desired direction. Anxiety goes down. You get a release. In a nutshell ; if you want to reduce anxiety, fix your life, essentially.

Problems start to arise when life remains chaotic despite all our best efforts to keep it in check. This is where obsessive behaviors start to appear.
Maybe it’s working more and more in order to reduce the likelihood of failing, to the point where there’s no time left for anything else, maybe including sleeping. Typical workaholism ; the kind that wears on relationships.
Maybe it’s spending less and less money in order to reduce the likelihood of catastrophe on that front in some far-fetched future ; to the point where even the food budget shrinks to near oblivion. Turns out anxious people make good money managers.
But at what price ?

Sometimes no amount of acting is sufficient to bring certainty into the picture. We can never fully control the outcomes and therefore it’s entirely possible that one would take lots of meaningful steps to reduce uncertainty and still be faced with this much left. There’s a limit to how much effort one can expand. It is entirely possible that all that stress might exceed one’s resilience. It probably will in fact if the streak is long enough.

Crossing that line would be burn-out. Ironically, the people most culprit of overdoing it are very similar if not the same people that used to avoid their anxiety through procrastination : high stress, low self-compassion type people.

Burnout

I want to point out ; burnout is truly not something you wish for yourself. This is a strategy that takes place when all else fails. An avoidant one, just like procrastination, except that one can be permanent. If you keep pushing and pushing and uncertainty remains sky high, and your mind can’t find a path through, what happens is it starts to distance itself. You no longer care. This is defensive detachment. And it’s a sad thing to experience.
Maybe you had a goal that you poured all your energy into ; the kind that gets you up in the morning and keep you busy until bed time. It started out of deep love for the thing and so you grew it and grew it to the point where it became all consuming. Now the anxiety that arose from pushing this particular outcome has stolen all the life that once was there. A pain threshold has been crossed. And so you detach. You simply do not care anymore. Not caring means no motivation of any kind to pursue further.
You wake up some day and all you feel is indifference toward what was once a passion. It’s confusing. The part of your identity that’s tied into that takes its toll. You’re left unsure what happened ; burned-out. And that sucks.

Ok at this point you might say well if I can’t deal with the excess anxiety by avoiding it and I can’t deal with it by trying to come in and control everything, then what ? What’s the game plan ?

Physiology of a calm mind

One might wonder at this point what life even looks like without anxiety ? And sure, we will answer that.

CBT therapy states that you could intervene on any of those three entries on a circle : the thoughts, the feelings, the behaviors. Improvement in any of those dimensions tend to snowball and improve the other parts as well. That feelings part though is just an interpretation the brain does based off the signals it receives from the body’s physiology.

On that note ; the first thing to notice when you are in a calm state, at that level, is that your heart beats in a metronome-like fashion. We can measure what is called Heart Rate Variability or HRV. It really doesn’t matter how fast or slow it is beating overall ; as in the average doesn’t matter ; it is the variance that truly counts. In fact HRV directly translate into positive or negative emotions.

To be clear ; as long as it has a steady pulse ; a fast heart rate would translate into passion and excitation rather than anxiety or anger and a slow heart rate would translate into calmness or curiosity rather than apathy, boredom or indifference. When HRV becomes chaotic, it shuts off the frontal lobe and lets the other parts of the brain play out their drama. When instead HRV reaches a state called “coherence”, where the heart beat is stable ; positive emotions arise and focus ensue. That, we would call a flow state. In a nutshell ; regular heart beat ; positive emotions. Erratic heart beat ; negative emotions.

So how to reduce heart rate variability ? Controlling your breathing is a potent method to reach that result. In particular ; the rhythm of the breathing would be of the highest priority. It doesn’t matter the pattern as long as it is regular. You want to maintain a very smooth breathing cycle. If you’re curious, you can check an entertaining presentation by Dr Alan Watkins demonstrating the impact of Heart Rate Variability using a live guinea pig picked from the audience. The talk goes back to 2012, however that part has been discovered and rediscovered many times around in human history. In India, one such method is called Dhyai ; which is a sanskrit word for “to contemplate” ; also called meditation.

Thought patterns of a calm mind

The practice of meditation really just ask you to pick a thing ; anything really, and then focus on it for like 20 minutes or more. Most often it is your breathing pattern. Sometimes it is a mantra. Some people just count in their heads. Some people focus on their “third eye”. Whatever it is, just focus on it as long as you can. And whenever your internal chatter comes back to forefront, just observe the thoughts as you were doing with your object of attention, and then simply let it pass. Come back to were you left. That’s it really, nothing more. It is literally the practice of focusing the mind, again and again and again. And what you will notice happen is that during a meditation practice, you are in effect entirely anchored in the present. You’re not thinking about what could happen in future tense and even when you are, you distance yourself from the thought and place yourself as an observer of the thought as it arises and fades away ; which gets you back into present tense again.

Remember that CBT thing ? Take care of the thoughts and what you’ll find is that the physiology will naturally take care of itself. Anchor your thoughts in the present and the breathing will start to regulate itself. HRV will go down, you’ll feel content, relaxed, focused. Anxiety literally cannot exist in the present. Meditation has received a lot of attention lately from the scientific community. Turns out you can see different parts of the brain light up when monitoring meditators. The prefrontal cortex gets activated while what is called the default mode network, that is the neural signature of the wandering mind, shuts off. In long term meditators, the prefrontal cortex (the brain region associated with learning and emotion regulation) actually grows new neurons while the amygdala (the brain region associated with stress and fear responses) starts to shrink.

Charging/discharging batteries

One assumption that you may or may not make is that in order to reduce the likelihood of experiencing burnout, the b best course of action would simply be to pace oneself. Work less and you should be good. Well, its not that simple isn’t it ? You might have noticed that it feels very different working on an assignment or some client work when comparing that to free-form personal work. When doing the later, there’s sometimes no difficulty what so ever staying in focus mode from early morning to late at night with close to no interruption. When tackling the former however, it might feel instead like everything is straining. What is the difference ?
I will adventure and guess that expectations that are the culprit.

That client work starts with a brief. There’s a clear goal that’s stated in words. And then you build a mental image of said goal in your mind. You’re collecting references, doing construction drawing, you’re envisioning a final in your mind with such clarity. And then you execute on your plan ; you start painting. At every single detour you’re comparing what you just put on the page to what’s on your mind. And there’s a difference. There will always be a difference. You end up feeling down because you didn’t manage to paint a picture on par with your expectation of what that picture should be. And that statement is true irrelevant of how good your final picture is. It might be a perfectly fine piece of art ; but to you it still falls short compared to the goal you set up in advance. You are taking damage on the moral department. You’re discharging your batteries.

Now compare that with personal work. This is something you do on your own time. You just start drawing. There’s no plan, at best a vague direction and that’s it ; you’re doing it on autopilot. Very little to no expectation. In that scenario, each time you deviates you are creating positive surprises for yourself ; “wow, it turned out not that bad”, “it’s better than I expected”. Think about it, if you start drawing with the expectation that all you’re going to produce on that sitting session will essentially be scribbles ; each time you end up drawing something half-decent creates a spike in positive emotions. This is probably what got you hooked to the art practice in the first place. It used to be a worry-free space where you essentially surprised yourself by outdoing what you thought you were capable of times and times again. That’s play, essentially. You’ll find most healthy artists that work a lot have maintained a personal practice time ; this is how they balance out the strains of assignments. You’d find those same artists are unable to maintain the volume when all they are doing is assignments. It’s not the hours. It’s about charging vs discharging batteries. It’s about expectations.

Bringing meditation to the art practice

So I have this quick fix for fellow procrastinators out there. You have this assignment that’s due and you typically can’t get yourself to work on it before the last minute, if at all. How about a subtle change in thinking. What happens if instead of telling yourself “I have to work to do that thing and meet that deadline”, you switch to something akin to “I’m just going to work for this set amount of time tonight” “I’ll make myself available, and try to focus during that time. If I can do that I will have done my job, regardless of whether the project gets completed or not”. By doing so you remove the expectation that you have to slash down that gigantic project. You’re not thinking about the potential for failure, or the potential for sub-par work. You’re not thinking about any of that. That part is not in your hands anyway. It never was. Your job is just to be present. Ancient cultures often thought that inspiration came from the gods, and that the artist was only providing the hands to be borrowed for the job. There’s real psychological benefits to that sort of reasoning.

The next level would be to incorporate the teachings of meditation directly into the art practice. It all starts with awareness. Artist Steven Zapata talks about that topic a lot on his YouTube channel and I would gladly recommend taking hints from his philosophy. It’s all about putting oneself in the same position that we had when we were contemplating our breath or coming back and back again to our mantra. Catch yourself whenever you are getting frustrated ; whenever the chatter comes back. Maybe there is this tree in the painting ; you need to change its scale. But doing so means repainting a lot of the background. “What a drag” you think, in anticipation of the pain that you will experience when attempting to fix the problem. Catch yourself in that moment. You’re doing it again. You’re thinking beyond the present even if not by much. You’re getting out of flow at that precise moment. Just observe your frustration arise and let it go ; do not entertain the thought. Pay attention to your feelings moment to moment ; do not fight them. Now you are free to take a back-seat and watch yourself fix that tree and that background where you would have otherwise delayed it by an other couple of hours I’m sure. It doesn’t even feel like you’re the one doing it. How strange, isn’t it ?

Remember ; anxiety cannot exist in the present.