Ten years later, on 1st February 2003, we got married – mainly so we could convince all of our friends to come together for a party. Our promises had already been made in 1993, and renewed two years after that when we decided to become parents.

1993 was an odd year. We flitted between squats, enduring cold-water bucket baths, feeding floorboards to the fire to keep ourselves warm. We rolled huge cannisters of Gaz in from the junk shop down the street. Every night HGVs hammered down Grove Green Road, rattling cracked glass in our window pane. When it rained, water dripped onto our bed from the end of the light-bulb.

That August, our first holiday together as a couple: Egypt. I went for two weeks, then returned to England to work; Gill stayed away for another two. I discovered the novels of Josef Skvorecky, which have haunted me ever since. Gill returned, and we shared the most intense three weeks of our lives before she left again, for India. We were apart three months; England got colder; the buildings on our street fell one-by-one, leaving living-rooms hanging in mid-air. On Christmas day I flew to India, carrying champagne and cheese. We were reunited in New Delhi, in a hotel room scarcely bigger than a double bed, where we spent the next two days. We began 1994 dodging packs of stray dogs down alleyways in Udaipur.

In the meantime, I had written Gill long letters, several sides of A4 per day. In between the mundanities of London life were strange dream riffs and, occasionally, poems. Below (slightly edited) is one that I wrote just after Gill left. In 1993, it talked of a distant future, but one that I could see perfectly clearly. In 2013 that future, still distant, is 20 years closer.

Happy anniversary Gill.

If, one day, I find myself
An old and wrinkled man
Sitting, starched,
Upright
In the white cell of a hospital

We
Will feel
The tingle of
Eternal
Love.

There is much evidence that we are “lazy” thinkers, with limited mental energy available to us, and if we can avoid using System 2 thinking then we will do so. As we get better at performing any task – for example riding a bike – the steps required to do so are packaged up in a way that makes them accessible to System 1 thinking, and we become able to perform that task “without thinking”, or at least without being conscious of thinking.

…and this got me thinking. On the back of the book is a quote from Richard Thaler: “Buy it fast. Read it slowly”. Well, that stuck in my mind, and I did make an effort to read the book slowly, to linger and let its revelations sink in. But, as with almost any book I read nowadays, from time-to-time I found myself reaching the end of a paragraph with scarcely any idea of what I had just read. So I had to go back and re-read it, forcing myself to slow down and pay attention. And this is when my learnings from the book imposed themselves on my experience of reading the book: I realised that I had slipped between System 2 reading (slow, methodical, effortful and attentive) and System 1 reading (speedily going through the motions of regognising each work, but without that same experience of the meaning sinking in). This happens to me so much recently that I often wonder what has happened to my reading ability: I’m sure reading never used to be this difficult or unproductive when I was younger. But Kahneman has made guess at what, perhaps, my problem is: that I have become too good at reading, it has become an automatic System 1 process, whereas reading and comprehending is something which always needs to be carried out by System 2. This is a somewhat counter-intuitive conclusion – that becoming better at reading makes us in some ways worse at reading – although since reading is a relatively recent invention and not something that we human organisms have evolved to do then there is little reason why this should not be so. And I do not have any easy solutions – I suppose that it would be possible to somehow introduce disruptions into one’s readings and so, by making it harder, force us back into using System 2. If anyone has any other suggestions on how to remain attentive while reading then I would welcome them.

This wasn’t down to any obsessive food-avoidance or anorexic/bulimic behaviour on my part. I could, and usually did, eat for England. Breakfast in those days would be one or two bowls of cereal, full to overflowing, ideally drenched with the cream off the top of the milk. For lunch, I would pop out of work and buy two packs of sandwiches, a large bag of crisps, a Belgian bun, and maybe an apple. And in the evening, whack a frozen pizza in the oven and, when it’s done, cover the top in a thick layer of mayonnaise and wolf the lot. And yet my weight never changed. Static. Skinny as a beanpole.

I don’t know entirely what happened when I hit 30, although I have some idea. I’m guessing that age and metabolism played some part in it, but also at that time my job changed radically, I started eating three course meals at restaurants every day, sometimes several times per day. I went from being happy with one or two glasses of wine per week, to drinking a bottle at lunch-time and another one or two in the evening. Yes, I think it was probably the wine that had the biggest effect; that, and the Jack Daniels and Cokes.

Suddenly I realised that I’d grown fat. My trousers didn’t fit me any more. My waist measurement had crept up from 32″ past 34″ and was now a 36″. In the course of two years, I’d gone from somewhere south of 10 stone, to a verging-on-the-obese 15 stone. In 2001, I briefly fought this trend – I used a month’s paternity leave as an opportunity to detox completely, and during that month of healthy eating and endless exercise I shrank back almost to 13 stone (83kg). But within another 6 months or so, all of that work was undone, and for the next 10 years I remained somewhere between fat and obese (although my height did a good job of hiding that from others), until at some point I realised that I’d hit 16 stone and Something Must Be Done.

That point was in 2009. Since then, I have done various things to try and control my weight. I’ve never let it become an obsession, but I have tried to maintain a downwards trend. I started off slowly, getting a little over a stone off in my first year, before slipping backwards a bit, and then attacking the problem more scientifically. Little by little (and occasionally a lot by a lot) I slimmed down until now I’m back to around 13 stone, with a body-shape I’m happy with, and a healthy BMI.

In my next post, I’ll talk about cycling (and walking, and other forms of exercise), how it helped kick-start my return to good health, and what it can and can’t do for fat bastards like the former me.

What practical lessons can we draw from this? Well, one is that we should conserve willpower for the times when we really need it. Choose your battles. But additionally, recognise scenarios which require mental strength and try to make them less challenging (mindfulness is a very useful tool for helping you to recognise which scenarios require more mental strength). I’m not just talking about epic battles of the will (although the book includes some interesting examples of these, including David Blaine, who can successfully will himself to go without food for 44 days when he chooses); as with mindfulness, drip drip drip, small changes can build into a mighty force, and if you can conserve a little willpower by simplifying small decisions then this may leave you with more oomph to handle the big stuff.

To give one example, summoning the mental strength to decide what to do in a given situation can be stressful; if you are able to plan that situation in advance, you remove the need to think about it at the time, and thus conserve a little willpower for other tasks. I’ll demonstrate how I’ve been using this in my own life: I have always resisted routine (and, as a result, am forever forgetting to brush my teeth – yeah, I know), but I have recently enforced a morning drill on myself. Get up. Go to the loo. Take my tablets & inhaler. Brush teeth (with my left hand – more about this below), shave (again, left hand), shower, weigh myself, get dressed, breakfast and a nice cup of tea, pack my bag and go out to work. All of these things. In that order. Every day. (Well, at weekends perhaps skip the work in favour of walking the dog). So far, so mundane. But the weird thing I’ve found is that following this regimented process leaves my brain so much freer to think about other things. I’m no longer worrying “did I forget to brush my teeth?”, and by the time I leave the house I feel completely set up for the day.

This also has big implications for dieting (of which, more in my next blog post). Well, firstly the book says that you shouldn’t diet, because the thing which (allegedly) gives you the energy required for willpower is glucose, blood sugar, and if you restrict your intake of food then you are apparently weakening your ability to say no. This makes it more likely that your diet will fail. But one strategy which proved successful in experiments was to lay out clear ground-rules for any troublesome situation before you encounter it. Don’t be unrealistic (in fact, you’re advised not to alter your normal habits by more than 20% if you want to be successful), so for example if you are going to a party don’t say “I won’t eat any of the food there”, but say “I will allow myself to eat one plateful of food, but no seconds”. Don’t say “I’m not going to drink”, but do say “for every two alcoholic drinks I will have a glass of water”. Ration your willpower and plan tricky decisions in advance, and you stand a better chance of success in the long run.

Finally, it is important that you learn to spot signs which indicate that your willpower is waning (again: mindfulness helps here). It turns out that one key sign is an increase in emotions – whether they be happy or sad; if you find yourself more tearful or ecstatic than usual, it could be that your blood sugar is running low (this got me onto thinking about bipolar disorder…). In fact, the book suggests that low blood-sugar is the cause of PMT: when much of a woman’s energy is devoted to her reproductive cycle and she may not have as much to spare for conscious decision making, and may crave quick energy-givers such as chocolate. And sleep is as important a component of willpower as glucose: if you feel tired, well then… you need more sleep. This sounds trite, but how many people these days actually bother paying attention to the signals that their bodies send out, rather than knock back another coffee or Red Bull. (It turns out that stimulants are not a great aid to willpower although, at least in the short term, sugary snacks are – inasmuch as they boost blood sugar levels and get more energy to the brain).

Oh, and that left-handed tooth-brushing and shaving? Well, one study demonstrated this was a way of increasing the “stamina” of our willpower. I took that with a pinch of salt but, what the hell, it’s got to be worth a try, right?

I first came into contact with mindfulness way back in 1989, when I was studying Psychology at university. Some of my fellow students got incredibly nervous about the coming exams, and as a result, one of the lecturers organised regular lunch-time workshops on relaxation and other coping techniques. I learned here that breathing deeply doesn’t mean breathing sharply, it means drawing the air all the way into your body; I learned how focusing on the breathing, and reciting simple mantras, can bring one’s mind back to rest from the hubbub of the everyday; and I learned that my own brain has the power to alter the temperature shown on a thermometer held in my fingers. Over the years I’ve drawn on these techniques to try and calm myself in times of stress, and to put the world in better perspective. More recently, the Sheffield Buddhist Centre (disclaimer: I am not a Buddhist) introduced me to the “mindfulness of breathing” meditation (and also the excellent “cultivation of loving kindness” meditation), and I realised that this practice was connected to the deep breathing I had learned years before in Bristol.

Since then, I have tried to find some time in my daily life for meditation; almost invariably I’ve failed. More recently still, Amazon sent me a book to review: The Mindful Manifesto, and it convinced me that, even if mindfulness is not the answer to every problem in the world, it’s a damn good alleviator of almost all of those problems (and, yes, there is scientific evidence backing this claim up in many fields – for example in one study, when people who had suffered three or more previous episodes of depression were given regular mindfulness exercises to carry out, their relapse rate was slashed from 66% to 37%).

But, finding a spare 20 minutes (which usually seems to be about the recommended length for a meditation) in my daily routine has proved impossible. 20 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but mornings are usually a more-or-less frantic dash to get to work in good time, lunch times are unpredictable, often brief (and anyway there is no suitable space at my work where I’d feel comfortable meditating). And evenings are already far too brief to fit in the bits of personal admin, book reading and socialising that I aim to do. So for months I was left high and dry with no meditatory outlets.

…until I decided to ignore the 20 minutes rule (which was never really a rule in the first place). At some point, I decided to give myself a goal of noticing my breathing at least once per day. Oh, and also of smiling and meaning it once per day. It seems like such a nothing of a goal that it oughtn’t to have any effect on life, but like the water dripping that eventually hollows out a cave or builds up a stalagmite, it has. I started by just pausing for a couple of slow, deep breaths while I was in bed in the morning. Then I started slotting additional breaths and smiles into the minute moments of downtime throughout my day: when stuck at traffic lights, waiting for a bus, or just standing for a moment to admire the scenery. And after just a few weeks, I can feel them solidifying into habits. In the meantime, I have also discovered the excellent Headspace website, which offers free 10 minute introductory guided meditations which you can listen to through your computer or phone, at your desk or on a bus. These have built powerfully on my little habit, and turned it into something which occasionally even makes me feel ecstatic, marvellously unburdened.

It’s still early days, but my meditation habit is growing step by tiny step, and daily I feel that my mood and my outlook on the world gets brighter and brighter. Meanwhile, I am working mindfulness into more and more areas of life – using it to keep me focused on my work, to prevent over-eating and drinking, and to be more present and empathic in my relationships with family and friends. I hope that you can find a spare two breaths in your every day to join me and be happy.

A few people accused me of “trolling for riots” – most did it humorously, one or two seemed genuinely confused about what I was doing. So I’ll try to account for myself here…

First and foremost, I was going for a bike ride. It’s something I’ve done a lot recently (especially since getting my new bike), generally heading West from our house into the Peak District, the hills and moors around Strines and Bradfield. I’d already been considering taking a more urban ride, exploring some of the parts of Sheffield I hardly know, and I was running out of country lanes within easy cycling distance.

But I think what really galvanised me was the steady stream of rumours I’d been reading about incipient riots in Sheffield. As I follow a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook, and a majority of them are in Sheffield, I’d seen endless rumour and counter-rumour – in particular about civil disorder starting up on London Road. The excellent South Yorkshire Police twitter feed had been quashing these rumours all day, but I felt that some people would feel more reassured if they heard that someone they know had been there and reported back that all was peaceful.

And so I set off in the direction of London Road. My initial plan had just been to go there, check out the area, and then return home, but as I got closer my head started whirling with memories of other “riot-prone” areas people had been tweeting earlier, and as I felt like I could handle a much longer cycle ride, I decided to roam further afield. The idea for “#noRiotHere” literally came to me as I was cycling along (as is true of so many good ideas). I didn’t just want to give people the bare fact of “no riot here”, I wanted to emphasise the fact that normal things were going on, that people could and ought to make an evening of it, walk in the evening sunshine, go to the pub, treat it as a normal evening and not hide behind closed curtains. And so I started to tweet one mundane but beautiful thing that I saw in each suburb I passed through (admittedly I eventually started to tire of the mundane but beautiful, and resorted to the slightly comical instead).

I realised, of course, that to anyone outside Sheffield reading my updates, I could come across as insufferably smug; I thought (with apologies to all in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and elsewhere) that this was a price worth paying. Civic pride breeds more civic pride, and I thought it better to try instilling some of this before riots started. Last night’s #steelcitynotstealcity/#steelnotsteal hashtags did the same thing. To be honest, I thought there was already enough pride in this wonderful city to prevent people from smashing it up (particularly while the city’s youth are still basking in the memory of the incredible and inclusive Tramlines festival). But how to know what other people think? This week I’ve heard, via Twitter and Radio 5 Live, many cries of confusion and disbelief from residents of the riot-hit cities; how are we to know until something kicks off whether our civic pride that “Sheffield is different” is justified or just hubris?

And finally, I wasn’t trolling for riots, and was 95% certain I wouldn’t find any, but I was prepared – at least inasmuch as I had a fast bike, a mobile phone, and my wits about me. If I had stumbled on some disorder, I would have informed the police if necessary, informed Twitter whether necessary or not (it’d be stupid to deny that I’d feel the slightest bit smug for sharing the news before anyone else, massively outweighed of course by sadness at unrest in my home city), and a small part of me hopes that I might have been able to mobilise a public tut-mob early enough to shame potential rioters into going home. A stupidly vain fantasy, of course, but I think we should all be defined by our stupidly vein fantasies.

As it turned out, I had a lovely cycle ride, got to see parts of this beautiful city which are normally hidden to me (including the most amazing view from Gleadless), had a bit of fun along the way, and spawned an idea which was proudly reported on Radio Sheffield this morning. Sorry to be smug (and fingers crossed that this isn’t hubris), but it was a good night for Sheffield.

]]> http://www.sumption.org/2011/08/10/no-riot-here/feed/ 0 http://www.sumption.org/2011/07/09/happier/ http://www.sumption.org/2011/07/09/happier/#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 09:07:11 +0000 Dan Sumption http://www.sumption.org/?p=1690 Last year, I read the book 59 Seconds, by Professor Richard Wiseman. It’s wonderful – ostensibly the first “self-help” book underpinned by science. It’s packed full of tips on all sorts of topics – improving your self-confidence sorting out your love life, reducing stress, getting things done… in fact, it’s so full of handy hints that I did what I usually do: read them all with glee and then promptly forgot about all but a few.

One which sticks in my mind is the art of giving gratitude. This is a little like the “positive affirmations” beloved of other self-help books, but unlike vague and even counterproductive affirmations (“every day in every way, you are getting better and better and better”) it’s a specific and proven way of making oneself happier. The trick (established via a study by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCulloch) is to regularly list things that you are grateful for. Not necessarily big things, just… anything: a beautiful sunset, the taste of pale ale, the love of a partner or parent. The reasoning is that we become habituated to the constants in our life (in the same way that, if you work in a bakery, you will come to blank out the smell of freshly-baked bread). By bringing these small positives to the front of mind, we see them afresh and learn to appreciate them more.

Similarly, bringing to mind recent positive experiences (even if they’re as small as finding a parking space or managing to drag oneself out of bed on time) has the effect of reinforcing those experiences. (Other writing exercises which lead to significantly improved mood include writing out your perfect future – something realistic, but in which all of your choices produce a successful outcome – and writing affectionately about somebody you love or care about)

So, for a short while after reading the book I practiced writing things down, but, as already mentioned, I rarely manage to keep something like this going. It slipped back onto the list of “things I really ought to do if I had the time”. Then, just recently, I had a revelation. And here’s how it came about…

I had started using the web service OhLife to keep a diary (OhLife is a little like a standard blog, but entirely private; it emails you once per day to ask “How did your day go?”; you reply with an email saying what you’ve been up to; a building archive of your responses is kept on the web for you to read back through whenever you feel like it). OhLife has got me keeping a diary for the first time in years. But sometimes I can’t be bothered to write anything, or don’t feel like it, or there aren’t enough hours in a day. It was on one such occasion that I was reminded of the diary schedule recommended in 59Seconds. And while I didn’t have time to write, in any kind of detail, how my day had been, plucking out three vaguely positive things from the previous day and sticking them in bullet-points hardly seemed like a chore.

Since then, I have continued using OhLife, sometimes as a diary, other times just as a brief list of positives, however small (“smiled at the postman; heard a bird singing; enjoyed a TV programme”). And it’s early days yet but it seems to be working: I haven’t had any real black moods since I started doing it, and it seems as though my up-times are swinging even higher up. It takes up so little of my time (perhaps two minutes per day) that even the most time-poor person could easily squeeze it in. And I even get some little joy from knowing that, five years hence, I will be able to look back and know on which day the postman’s smile made a difference to my mood.

Buy 59 Seconds from Amazon UK

My job then was to delete these files. Macs then (OS5 or 6 – or was it 4?) were a lot simpler than they are now, and I myself was no Apple genius. So I had to drag all 9-gazillion of the files into the Trash. Which was a problem. Because the Trash (and, indeed, the hard drive) was an icon on the desktop. And the Desktop was geological-layers-deep in icons. (And, because the Mac wasn’t totally locked down, the Trash icon itself could be anywhere on the Desktop).

And so I began an elaborate game of Towers of Hanoi. Before I could delete the files, I had to find the Trash. So I would painfully drag the files, one at a time, until I unearthed that little waste mpeg basket. After an hour or so of this, I would unearth the Trash icon. And then the work would begin all over again, dragging the files into the Trash and, finally, emptying it.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that this may be what first triggered my RSI; and my hatred of drag-and-drop as an interaction mechanism; and, quite possibly, a lasting suspicion of all Apple products.

Ever since the launch of Playlist Club, I’ve been dead excited about getting my weekly hit of curated sounds, and even more excited at the prospect of contributing a playlist myself. So much so, in fact, that ever since the club launched I’ve been filing away ideas for submission (currently 12 playlists-in-waiting, and growing).

Most of these will never see the light of day, and it could be months yet before I’m assigned a slot, so in the meantime I thought I’d toss something out for shits & giggles. You Shouldn’t Do That [Spotify] follows the rules of the club; almost. Admittedly, there are 30 minute tracks, but they were not sneaked in so much as paraded slowly in on a juggernaut covered with bells. Thing is, this playlist is so irredeemably self-indulgent that I wouldn’t have the balls to unleash it under anyone else’s banner, much less expect someone to bother listening to it the whole way through.

I love proggy, choppy, changey, lenthy, self-indulgent twaddle. I spent way too much time listening to this sort of stuff in my teens, then became a bit too self-conscious and swept-it all under the carpet; but in the comfort of middle-age, I’m ready to out myself as a fan of excess. I think the turning point came when Karlheinz Stockhausen died, and I played 25 minutes of his “Sirius” on my Sheffield Live radio show. I cringed a bit while doing it; I fully expected to be shot down in flames. But something surprising happened: I started getting emails & messages of thanks, in fact I got more positive feedback about that one track than anything else I ever played on the show. And it made me realise: sometimes I self-censor far too much for the benefit of an imagined everyman. There’s nothing wrong with following one’s own peculiar urges once in a while, in fact, it’s healthy. And so I produced a laughably decadent, egotistically baroque Spotify playlist, and am putting it out there for the world to hear ignore. Enjoy it. I, at least, will.

Postscript: there is a big hole at the centre of this playlist where some Cardiacs ought to be. Sadly, none of their tracks are on Spotify (there’s some amazing videos on Youtube though). Originally, I made a nod towards this by including William D Drake’s Stone Carnation [Spotify] as the first track, but last night I heard Proper Rock by The Chap and — although it’s a bit, you know, poppy — it’s a gorgeous tune, with a slight Cardiacs feel to it, and the lyrics make a wry commentary on the rest of the playlist.

Listen to You Shouldn’t Do That on Spotify

Proper Rock – The Chap

My Favourite Things – John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones

Elders – Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society

You Shouldn’t Do That – Hawkwind

Yours Is No Disgrace – Yes

Down In The Sewer – The Stranglers

Spillane – John Zorn

You Never Blow Your Trip Forever – Gong