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No Action Without Emotion

stuff On emotion as operating system

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Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.

Stress is Good

audio

Everyone’s convinced stress is this outdated evolutionary technology—poorly calibrated to modern life, something to avoid at all costs. The story goes that it evolved to help us run from tigers, but now it’s just triggered by email notifications. This is nonsense. Stress is the only thing that gets us to perform at all. It’s the most valuable biological technology we have. This lecture walks through the Yerkes-Dodson Law—a simple, 100-year-old model that explains how stress actually works, why we need it, and how to use it well.
Stress isn’t poorly calibrated to modern life. It’s the energising force that allows us to perform. Optimal performance requires optimal stress. The difference between eustress and distress isn’t biological—it’s psychological. Controllability matters more than the stressor itself.
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gratification betterment somatic-architecture on-(un)happiness on-thinking-and-reasoning on-being-fruitful

article

Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.

Stress and Creativity

article

Bias is just you using your expectations and assumptions to ignore the noise, and see the picture more clearly. The trade-off is that, sometimes, the noise is useful or your expectations are off. The human stress response is perhaps the most fundamental example of this in behaviour, and a very valuable tool.
Stress promotes bias—stereotypical thinking and behaving. Less stress promotes cognitive flexibility—an openness to new ways of thinking and behaving. Neither is better than the other. It’s about the situation you deploy them in.
Check it out

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betterment somatic-architecture on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership

article

Glossolalia has a unique pattern of neural activity, distinct from psychopathologies and even other trance-like states. So, the feeling underneath is special, but the actual speaking itself seems learned. It makes you wonder where that feeling comes from.

Speaking in tongues

article

‘Speaking in Tongues’, or glossolalia, is one of those fascinating things that first got me interested in the brain. At church, as a kid, you’d see people close their eyes, raise their hands in the air, and start murmuring in languages unknown, filled with some force they couldn’t explain. But a phenomenon so widespread, found in many religions and many cultures, across time and place, should surely be found in the brain activity of other activities? The answer is, maybe not, and maybe what the brain does tell is leaves us with a more interesting question.
Glossolalia has a unique pattern of neural activity, distinct from psychopathologies and even other trance-like states. So, the feeling underneath is special, but the actual speaking itself seems learned. It makes you wonder where that feeling comes from.
Check it out

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gratification spiritual-architecture on-leadership on-culture on-the-nature-of-things on-politics-and-power

article

Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.

Why do people kill themselves?

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We’ve always had a troubled relationship with suicide. In any given period of history, you can see roughly two perspectives living in tension with one another. The first, that suicide is an affront of some kind, and the second, that suicide is something somehow righteous or noble. What’s interesting about these two competing attitudes around the act of suicide is that they more-or-less capture the reasons people kill themselves, and that those reasons help us understand the rise in rates today. In all cases, it’s very clear that there is a point of failure that seems so, so easy to do something about.
Suicide is the interaction between personal despair and the failure of communities to provide reasons to live. We can’t answer Camus’ “one truly serious philosophical problem” for people, only they can. But we can provide an argument to live, by showing people where they fit.
Check it out

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connection somatic-architecture on-(un)happiness on-culture

article

Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.

Active listening is misleading

article

LinkedIn invited me to contribute to a bunch of articles on active listening recently, and while I was thinking about whether I should bother answering, it actually is kind of an interesting topic. My point is not that it isn’t reasonable. My point isn’t even that people should be able to intuit this sort of thing, because although the principles are simple, it’s not always easy to take an empathetic stance during a fundamentally individualistic life. My point is that having a model for active listening almost defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Active listening isn’t about ticking boxes in conversation; it’s about diving into emotions to transform surface-level chit-chat into deep, collaborative dialogue. Forget models, focus on feelings.
Check it out

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betterment connection somatic-architecture collective-architecture wealth-architecture on-(un)happiness on-being-fruitful on-leadership
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