March 2007

The Parts Of The Brain.

Yesterday I had one of those halting, heart breaking phone calls.

A good friend of mine has been fighting debilitating pain for months, and kept in good spirits - but last night, it was clearly taking its toll.

I’d never heard this fighter sound so defeated before. Ordinarily, he is a tireless champion for both himself, his family, and others, but this invisible pain with no obvious cause was bringing him to his knees. It was robbing him of the tools he ordinarily used to fight, and what tools the pain didn’t take away, the medication for the pain did. Without a clear diagnosis, healthcare, insurance, and employers were acting skeptical, further demoralizing him.

It wasn’t until after we hung up that I realized just how normal his depression was… and just how intertwined depression and pain likely are.

Pain is a heck of a monster to battle. It changes your brain chemistry, and clouds your mind. It robs you of your sleep, which further clouds your mind and weakens your brain and body. It can be debilitating and disabling — keeping you from doing the things you love, the things that you live for, the things you do to let off stress and help yourself cope.

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As I wrote yesterday’s post, I realized I’ve never applied the plate-spinning concept in my own life. Mind you, I don’t think the the friend who came up with the metaphor saw it as a method - it was just a description for what he did. Still… I think it could turn out to be a very interesting active techniques. So let’s start with which plates I currently have spinning:

• This Blog (Mind-Tweaks) It’s got momentum and balance. I’m applying a bit of extra spin with this post. Whirl!
• Personal Finances I’ve actually paid a lot of attention to this in the past few months. It’s spinning along nicely, if a bit wobbly in unneeded expenses. In the next few days, I should see what I can do about cutting some of them out, but for now, it’s fine.
• Housework judging by the mess in the kitchen, this one is definitely wobbling and about to fall.
• Fine & Graphic Art The art-related plates fell off of the poles a few months ago. There’s no pressing need to wind them up, but they should go back into play soon.
• Health Ok, this one sucks. I’ve been putting a bit of effort into it.. clearly not enough. What it needs is some serious momentum, and this is an area that momentum builds quickly.

Looking over my Beta-Testing list…. there’s one pre-alpha project there that I’d like to spin into action. It shouldn’t take much effort to get rolling. So we’ll add it into the mix too.

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Multi-tasking is generating a lot of blog chatter lately; recent studies suggest that trying to accomplish a lot of things at once does not make us more productive, rather, actually seems to make us less efficient. (well.. er.. yeah we knew that, we just like to deny it.) And now, there is evidence from MRI’s to show that the brain isn’t equiped to focus on more than one task at a time. If forced to multi-task, there’s a neural bottleneck, and everything takes just a little bit longer.

And yet, one of the uber-organized gurus I used to spend time with made multi-tasking work for him.

It was amazing to watch, really. He called it “keeping the plates spinning,” referring to the juggler’s act of balancing spinning plates on sticks, shown here:

His trick was to apply just enough energy to each task/ project/ client/ family member/ hobby that each of them would maintain momentum and stay balanced until he could get back and give them another spin. It was really beautiful to watch - especially when I got a birds-eye-view as one of the plates he kept in motion.

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Over on Elemental Truths, Reg has trotted out 10 TipsFor Utterly Destroying Your Blog And Credibility, and closed the post with the following Added Value Truth:

How fun is THAT?

So I thought I’d apply the method here… This is the disturbing result:
10 14 Sure-Fire Ways To De-optimize Your Mental Registry (ie: your brain)

1. Help yourself to the sugar bowl, preferably stirring it into a triple espresso, first thing in the morning. YeeeHAW!
2. Keep a cluttered desk - a messy environment is a messy mind!
3. Never meditate. Instead, compulsively Google “online meditation tools”. Blog obsessively about the results.
4. More sugar! Glucose rollercoaster = your new BFF
5. Surround yourself with negative, needy people. Lots of them. Make sure they have all of your phone numbers.
6. Don’t screen your calls. Always, always interrupt whatever you’re doing so your friends can call and ask if you’re busy. Say “No.” (Works best in conjunction with #5)
7. Lots of caffiene. Very little water. And while you’re at it.. toss out those vitamin capsules. Fill the empty jar with sugar cubes.
8. Be a productivity tool junkie: Try out a new productivity system every week for a year. If you keep your life in a constant state of reorganization, actual productivity will never be an issue.
9. ALCOHOL! (Preferably, alcohol with sugar in it.)
10. Be non-commital. Commitment = focus, and who needs focus? Start 20+ projects at once. Be scatter-brained, and convince yourself that it’s multitasking.
11. Find the TV remote. It’s your new BFF. (glucose is sooo yesteday) Flip through all 258 channels obsessively. Don’t actually watch anything that could catch your attention and cause you to focus.
12. NEVER keep to a schedule. Make one if you must, but never refer back to it. Wakeup whenever, eat whenever, and fall asleep only when you can’t stay up anymore.
13. Speaking of sleep…Minimize your sleeping hours. The less you sleep, the more time you’ll have to muck up your mental process!
14. Overachieve. Instead of writing 10 ways to fragment your mind, write 12. Then search for a 13th, find a 14th, and spend at least an hour rewriting and debating which ones to keep. In the end, keep all of them; a good list is never done!

And with that, I’m off to get some coffee (extra sugar, maybe a wee bit of whiskey), find my TV remote, and wait for someone to call and interrupt me!