The Whippet #185: Shielded and flower-like

Good morning!

Sometimes my friends/loved ones say funny things in group chats and I want to share them, and it feels naff to attribute them to "my husband", but weird to link to their bluesky account as though you don't know them.

Anyway, re: dawning realisations:

"A dusking realisation is when you slowly forget what your point was as you're speaking" – @mcccclean

Anaesthetic works on plants

Look, that's the whole fact, okay? It surprised me. You dose a Venus Flytrap with ether, and it won't react to flies landing in its mouths. [Source] Plants send electrical signals similar enough to nerve impulses that they can be disrupted by anaesthetic.

Incidentally, I was always told as a kid not to poke Venus Fly-Traps, because it closes its mouth and now that mouth can't eat again. Apparently not true! They can tell the difference between something dead and something running about by the little trigger hairs you can see inside the mouth on the right. So it still costs them something to close up, but they don't run through the whole digestion process.

I don't know why I'm telling you this. Don't tease Venus Fly-Traps.

A broader overview: Anaesthetics and plants: from sensory systems to cognition-based adaptive behaviour

Why don't we use ether anymore?

Just something I was wondering.

1. It's unpleasant. Causes nausea, lingering headaches, etc.
2. It's extremely flammable
   
   Wikipedia:

• "Since ether is heavier than air it can collect low to the ground and the vapour may travel considerable distances to ignition sources."
• "Ether will ignite if exposed to an open flame, though due to its high flammability, an open flame is not required for ignition"
• "Other possible ignition sources include – but are not limited to – hot plates, steam pipes, heaters, and electrical arcs created by switches or outlets"
• This is very funny to me

WFH 3-minute exercise breaks

There's these "run on the spot" videos with video-game style imagery. Sometimes it tells you to jump or duck or dodge left/right. If you feel like you would benefit from stopping and doing a lil bit of body movement during the workday it's good!

This youtube channel, or search for "brain breaks" more generally, there's heaps. Warning that it's very much for kids though, you have to be able to stomach the voice-over.

For longer, treadmill/elliptical workouts, there's Video Game Run Club, which is recordings of running through pretty environments in Skyrim or Assassin's Creed or whatever. (If you're a gamer: make more of these! Esp with urban environments if possible. Can't believe there's only one channel doing this.)

And you can search for "virtual run" if you're happy with regular earth landscapes.

Just a review I found funny

Certainty: ★★★★★
Uncertainty: ★☆☆☆☆

Delightfully brief abstract

(the abstract is the summary at the start of an academic paper)

Authors: M. V. Berry, N. Brunner, S. Popescu, P. Shukla

Title: Can apparent superluminal neutrino speeds be explained as a quantum weak measurement?

Abstract: Probably not.

Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2832

Shortest peer-reviewed paper

is 'The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of "Writer's Block"' in the Journal of Applied Behaviour Analysis (1974).

It contains no words in the body of the text, but one footnote ("'Portions of this paper were not presented at the 81st Annual American Psychological Association Convention, Montreal, Canada, August 30, 1973. Reprints may be obtained from Dennis Upper, Behavior Therapy Unit, Veterans Administration Hospital, Brockton, Massachusetts 02401.")

Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1311997/ (includes commentary from a reviewer)

The study has been replicated multiple times, with a meta-analysis performed in 2014.

Lil crenellation fact

You probably know that this is called crenellation; it's one of those facts kids love to know, like dinosaur meaning 'terrible lizard'.*

[* you never see any other words with 'dino' in it though! We say 'mal' for bad – maladjusted, malice, malaria, malady – but the only English word I can find with the dino/terrible root is 'dire'. What if someone commits really bad malfeasance? Surely that would be dinofeasance.]

Anyway, it's called that (crenellation, not dinofeasance) because the notches in the wall are crenels. The wall has been crenel-ated.

The solid bits are called merlons. I tried to find out why, but that way madness lies.

(not pictured: the part where they can't decide if the word 'merlon' comes from the French for 'pitchfork' or for 'blackbird')

What is a morning/evening routine actually FOR?

I figured something out (when watching a bunch of youtube videos on becoming a more organised person – the dream lives on).

There's two different main purposes for routines, and advice-givers mix them up.

They lump these two quite different things under "morning routine" and it causes trouble when you try to design your own.

Purpose 1: Locking in good habits (Medicine)

There are actions you think would be good for you, and the way to make sure you get them done is to build them into a non-negotiable part of the day (it's much, much easier to have a morning routine than it is to have a 2pm routine). Then, whatever else you have to do today, however much it gets out of control, you can still go "at least I got some exercise in", "at least I practised guitar" – whatever matters to you.

Purpose 2: Creating a specific emotion state (Sugar)

So a wind-down evening routine might be designed to make you feel calm and cosy in the late evening, so you can get to sleep. A morning routine could be designed to make you feel clear and focused.

Why these two purposes get mixed up, and the trouble it causes

A lot of the actions are the same! But they are done for different reasons.

So, maybe one person goes for a jog in the morning because it energises them and sets them up for the day.

You see their morning routine and you think, "jogging is good for you, I should do that too." But YOU hate jogging, especially when it's cold out. So you are actually not following their routine at all – their routine energises them and yours makes you miserable.

And Morning/Evening Routine content creators don't communicate clearly what purpose a given step is serving for that individual.

One person might do a braindump of all their random thoughts before they go to bed, because they want to build the habit of journalling. Another person doesn't care about journalling, but getting your their thoughts out helps them sleep better.

One person meditates because they feel great immediately afterwards; another person meditates even though they dislike it, because they want to train their ability to focus.

How do you want to feel, in the morning and the evening?

This all clicked for me because a lot of morning routines are designed to be very gentle and cosy. Some Type A person works hard all day and needs to snatch their moments of calm when they can. Or they start the day very anxious and need to pacify their nervous system before they can get anything else done.

But cosy morning routines are terrible for me! If I curl up with a book and a coffee, I will find it really hard to wrench myself away to start work.

The way I need to feel in the morning is energised and mobile, not cosy and ensconced. Doing a little bit of tidying works quite well for me because it's physical movement, it's got nothing to do with "I should clean".

Do you want to feel the same every day? Are you starting from the same place every day?

Most mornings, I need a routine that gets me from being a slug to taking actions. But some mornings I CAN be cosy and read a book till 11. I want to take advantage of that when I can! And some mornings I wake up stressed and anxious for no reason, and I need steps that will bring me back to equilibrium.

Okay, so, process for the mood-management style routine:

1. Choose a time (morning, after work, evening)
2. Decide how you want or need to feel at that time of day. Write it down.
3. List things you have always considered you might want to put on your routine. Do any of them contribute to the mood state you want to create? Or are there things you haven't tried that you think MIGHT create that mood state?
4. Brainstorm other things that might create that mood state, thinking outside the usual 'healthy routines' box.
5. You probably have too many things now. Choose a small number of them that are kind of different from each other (ie not three different kinds of reading). It's an experiment, so just choose at random, you can try different things later. You can also try a flexible, menu-style routine, if you're not prone to choice paralysis.
6. List things that detract from the target mood state. Probably this means 'no phone' or at least no social media, news or email. If it's something you have to do, try and limit it. (Like, maybe you have to check email first thing in case of emergencies, but you could set a 2-minute timer to make sure you only check for emergencies, rather than getting sucked into the rest of it.)
7. Test routine. Remember that the goal is not to do whatever noble activity is on your list, but to create a mood state. So if you put 'Morning Pages' in your routine, and you hate doing them and they just make you ruminate on the negative stuff (hi!), this doesn't mean you failed at Morning Pages. It means Morning Pages don't create the mood state you're going for, and should be replaced with a new experiment.

As an aside:

• In praise of Morning Pages (and how to do them)
• Why I don’t write Morning Pages (and what I do instead)

'Figure out' goals

A Figure Out Goal is where, instead of setting a goal like "eat 5 serves of vegetables", you set a goal like "figure out ways of cooking vegetables that taste good".

Figure out what morning routine would make me feel [energised/calm/etc]

Clean kitchen daily --> figure out what part of cleaning the kitchen I'm so resistant to, and brainstorm workarounds

etc.

If you set a New Year's Goal that you're now struggling with, try turning it into a Figure Out goal. And then think of some steps towards figuring it out.

Mood management vs doing stuff that's good for you

Lots of people have pretty stable moods (and/or their productivity isn't as sensitive to mood changes as someone with ADHD) so they can afford to have pure 'take your medicine' routines.

Some people are drowning and cannot be thinking about chipping away at their long-term side-hustle or whatever, they just need to get themselves to passably functional.

For me, I'm trying to negotiate trade-offs. I have started running 15 minutes on the elliptical every morning, not because that's a pleasant way to start the day (it's not!) but because if I try and schedule it later, I don't get around to it.

Whereas stretching in the evening is a double-win: it gets me away from my screens, it's pleasant, AND regular stretching is a habit that I want.

It's complicated though: working on your own projects in the morning creates an emotion state! It makes you feel like the day belongs to you, not just your boss.

I think it actually takes a lot of work to figure out how things make you feel. (Or maybe that is just me, I'm mostly not a Big Feelings person.)

This Unsolicited Advice is published as a stand-alone article if you want to share it. In an ideal world I'd have restructured it a bit better, but alas! Here we are in this one.

I figured out what’s missing from the advice on morning routines

What is a morning/evening routine actually FOR? There’s two different main purposes and advice-givers mix them up

The WhippetMcKinley Valentine

I am interested if you have any part of your morning/evening etc routine that is not the same things you read on all the lists – maybe you don't, maybe they've covered everything! But I've read a lot of self-help materials, and I'm increasingly more interested in the "here's this weird thing I do that probably seems crazy"

Or what you've found that works to create what mood, generally speaking.