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Advice that worked for me

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Re: Advice that worked for me

#51

Post by kubami »

groby_b wrote: post #47
sometimeshuman wrote: post #6

"Tell the right stories about yourself." I wake up feeling stiff and every morning repeat the "story" that I'm starting to feel old. However, I often ask my 83 year old dad if he experiences the same and he always says no. Then last week my dad said, "you know I might, but I don't think about it". So this past week I just wake up and start moving and try not be aware of the minor pain from stiffness. It goes away qui…

> Why focus on something that doesn't serve you if you can tune it out. Because you don't necessarily know if it serves you. You could wake up stiff because you overdid your workout. That's a pretty valuable signal telling you to take it easy with those particular muscle groups. You could wake up stiff because you have an injury. (E.g. a torn meniscus). That's a great signal to go see a doctor. You could wake up stif…

I don't think OP meant in general not thinking about a stiff back. OP was talking about telling yourself the story that you have a stiff back because you're getting older.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#52

Post by BlargMcLarg »

thot_experiment wrote: post #31
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment makes no sense unless you're trying to say you wasted hours in the morning and couldn't shift your schedule to wake up later in a fancy way.

Naw, many night people are night people because you can always stay up another hour but you can't have woken up an hour earlier in response to things happening during a day. I think that's what gp is getting at.

Those aren't really night people as much as they are slackers, which loops around to the point it isn't about morning/night at all as much as personal attitude towards not wasting your finite amount of time.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#53

Post by pantulis »

"Tell the right stories about yourself."

There is more power to this than meets the eye. Also, don't tell stories to yourself that you would not be telling a friend. We are usually too hard with ourselves, hence a lot of "should bes" and "should have nots".

Re: Advice that worked for me

#54

Post by notacoward »

Great article. If I may presume to add something, I think point 6 (strongest possible counterargument) is a special case of a more general idea: thinking strategically. I also learned that from chess BTW. Whether you're talking about arguments or fixing a bug or planning a career, there's often a huge branching tree of possibilities - things you might do, things others might do, things that might happen because that's how the environment works. Learning to look ahead, apply pruning, etc. to find the best "move" at each point in time can be very valuable. So can prioritization, responding to a setback, and so on - which you can also learn from chess or other games. Not everything is a game, of course, but the strategic thinking that they encourage is very broadly applicable.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#55

Post by dsugarman »

it's hard for me to get past the sleep advice, it sounds misguided at best. Sure there are studies if you google oversleeping, they define it as sleeping over 9 hours a night and it sounds it usually is associated with low quality sleep. The core issue is what is causing low quality sleep, oversleeping is a symptom to compensate, and it doesn't sound like 7 to 7 and a half hours is the sweet spot, it's 7 to 9 according to the National Sleep Foundation Guidelines[1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29073412/

Re: Advice that worked for me

#56

Post by criddell »

sometimeshuman wrote: post #6

"Tell the right stories about yourself." I wake up feeling stiff and every morning repeat the "story" that I'm starting to feel old. However, I often ask my 83 year old dad if he experiences the same and he always says no. Then last week my dad said, "you know I might, but I don't think about it". So this past week I just wake up and start moving and try not be aware of the minor pain from stiffness. It goes away qui…

When I was 8 or 9, I would never simply step on or off a curb. That was less fun than hopping or jumping or sliding. I would watch how the people of my neighborhood moved and wondered why so few people over the age of 14 tried to never step on a crack or only step on cracks. Why are there so few 30 year olds doing wheelies on their bike? I couldn't imagine that I would ever want to stop moving through my day in a maximally fun way.

Today I'm 52 and I still watch and think about how people move around. I understand that a 70 year old falling is different than a 10 year old, but I find myself seeing if I can go up or down the stairs four at a time. I have noticed that my flexibility and balance isn't what it used to be and I'm trying to work on that. I know I can only slow my physical decline, but it's worth doing.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#57

Post by tn890 »

dsugarman wrote: post #55

it's hard for me to get past the sleep advice, it sounds misguided at best. Sure there are studies if you google oversleeping, they define it as sleeping over 9 hours a night and it sounds it usually is associated with low quality sleep. The core issue is what is causing low quality sleep, oversleeping is a symptom to compensate, and it doesn't sound like 7 to 7 and a half hours is the sweet spot, it's 7 to 9 accordi…

I concur. The vast majority of people have the exact opposite problem and sleep too little, therefore the general advice would be to get at least 8h of quality sleep per night.

It threw me off the whole article as well, it's hard to take it seriously when it hits me with "don't sleep too much" in the beginning, especially since I've always been somewhat of an insomniac and I'm intimately familiar with the impact of sleep deprivation across all aspects of one's life.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#58

Post by aronhegedus »

Nice article, I also liked that it specified "worked for me", rather than trying to sell some ultimate rules for life:)

The one that I would disagree with is the sleeping one. I think sleep is SO important, and people don't do enough to optimise for it. For example eating/looking at screens before bed. Sleep is extremely important, there's so many studies to back this up, and I don't think that it's ever wasted time.

Re: Advice that worked for me

#59

Post by julian_t »

bruce511 wrote: post #7

I like that your title explicitly calls out "worked for me." Generally speaking, when it comes to advice, context is ever important. In one context advice may be spot on, but your context may not be my context and that can matter. For example I often hear good advice about useing SQL. A lot of it is contradictory, which can be confusing. But it turns out that the "right thing to do" is enormously affected by context…

This is what I think about a lot of the "agile development" advice I see on the web.

Projects are different, clients are different, teams are different. What works for you may not work for me. Heck, what worked in my last project may not work in this one!

Re: Advice that worked for me

#60

Post by throwaway4aday »

tn890 wrote: post #57
dsugarman wrote: post #55

it's hard for me to get past the sleep advice, it sounds misguided at best. Sure there are studies if you google oversleeping, they define it as sleeping over 9 hours a night and it sounds it usually is associated with low quality sleep. The core issue is what is causing low quality sleep, oversleeping is a symptom to compensate, and it doesn't sound like 7 to 7 and a half hours is the sweet spot, it's 7 to 9 accordi…

I concur. The vast majority of people have the exact opposite problem and sleep too little, therefore the general advice would be to get at least 8h of quality sleep per night. It threw me off the whole article as well, it's hard to take it seriously when it hits me with "don't sleep too much" in the beginning, especially since I've always been somewhat of an insomniac and I'm intimately familiar with the impact of s…

They do mention that sleeping too little is also a problem. Sleep varies so much from person to person that it is often controversial. It might be better to think of that point as advising you to try to optimize the amount of sleep you get. That's more of an experimental process where you find out how much sleep you need and how to get it i.e. what do you need to change in your life in order to sleep better.
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