In this column I share articles, books, research, and thoughts related to the science of self-help, along with experiments and random rabbit holes I’ve gone down across the previous month.

I spent most of this month involved with marketing the book that I co-authored on my city. You can check it out HERE.

In addition I spent a lot of time procrastinating on kicking off the Star Engine. While it sounds really good, putting into place is a real pain.

My procrastination tends to find an outlet on Reddit, where one of my posts went a tiny bit viral. It was shared on r/bestof where it rose to one of the top posts of the week, was upvoted thousands of times, and viewed about 350k times. Not bad for a post that I thought was not my best.

I also just completed a month of tally clicking mental states. This is my third experiment using this method after my mental health went down the drain last month. I hope to do a whole write up on this, and get around to writing about my second experiment, which lasted for 5 months and taught me a lot about the process of essentially dog training mindset.

INTERESTING STUFF

• Updated info on the 52:17 ideal work rest ratio. The initial analysis looked at all of the work apps users to find that the most efficient 10% of users tended to use this ratio. This has changed due to the pandemic. [Desktime blog]

SOCIAL

• Strategies to stay in the moment for mindfulness [Reddit]

• Memory shifting - a method to change the emotional content of memories [Instagram]

• How to stop feeling like you have to master your hobbies [Reddit]

• Using video games for meditation [Reddit]

• How to get good at writing [Reddit]

• The difference between mindfulness and deep focus, with a categorization of levels of focus [Reddit]

• How to advance your meditation practice [Reddit]

• How to actually practice writing [Reddit]

• How to develop will [Reddit]

• How to observe thoughts in meditation [Reddit]

• How much should I meditate? [Reddit]

• On art and meditation [Reddit]

• A list of habits to work on {Reddit]

• Using meditation to counter addiction [Reddit]

• Meditation and insomnia [Reddit]

• Why you shouldn’t smoke weed and meditate when starting the practice [Reddit]

• What I wished I had known when I first started meditating [Reddit]

• What is your favorite book on meditation? [Reddit]

• How to deepen meditation practice after establishing a solid habit [Reddit]

• My r/bestof post on a framework for building routines - sleep hygiene, productivity, and habits [Reddit]

MISCELLANEOUS & ESOTERIC

• How to develop intuition in cooking. Internet Shaquille on Youtube digs into what it means to leap beyond basic straight forward learning and develop a greater sense of the skill. This is one of those things like “falling in love with the process” that’s so vague and ephemeral, yet very much a thing. This is really one of the very few descriptions to explicitly describe the process.

• How to train listening to your body for food. Again, this is just one of those things that people bandy about without getting into HOW do actually do it. I like the thought that this might be a skill on its own with progressions and training options, some of which this article gets into.

• A raw data tracker. So many wearable trackers try to sell that they’re just observing bodily functions and reporting them, but that’s really not true. Most of them use some form of algorithm to project what the actual data would be, and that’s really problematic if you want to run self experimentation.

If you’ve got any interesting links, books, comments, or suggestions, shoot me an email at scienceofselfhelp (at) gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you!