Monthly Archives: January 2016

Anxiety, heart attack, or stroke?

One of my friends who has regular anxiety attacks asked me to help her disambiguate between anxiety attacks and strokes. I wrote up a brief email, and then figured it might be worth sharing with the broader world. I’m not an expert on this, this is just the result of a little searching, so anything you hear from a genuine trusted expert who knows your particular situation should probably override this, but I expect it’s better than no info at all. I answered the question for her particular situation but it should be easy to modify as needed. Continue reading

Soma: my best friends have bodies

I recently attended the Integral Center’s Aletheia workshop, and one of the things we did was Holotropic breathwork. Basically you breathe very deeply, very fast, over an extended period of time. We were told that at some point it would become uncomfortable, but that if we breathed through it, we’d likely have some interesting experiences. Continue reading

Model-building about desire - a worked example

A few weeks ago, I spent a few days doing little other work than sitting and thinking about my problems. In 2012, I wouldn’t have dared do that. It would have felt like spinning my wheels. It would have felt lazy and self-indulgent. I would have expected to fail - and I would have been right. But now I can do it.

The difference is that I’ve practiced structured thinking, or model-building. Rather than talk a lot about what that is, I’m going to work through an example. Continue reading

Social trade

Social mercantilism

Recently I noticed that my model of social capital is fundamentally mercantilist, and that's pretty dumb. I seem to be trying to maintain a favorable balance of trade, trying to earn social capital through meeting others' needs, and trying to minimize the extent to which I "spend down" this capital. I have a tendency to spend down my real capital to accumulate social credit. This may often be counterproductive because most social currencies depreciate rapidly, and if instead I asked for help in ways that built up personal real capital (e.g. skills growth, introductions, etc.), I'd be in a better future position to trade for what I need. The obvious next move here is to figure out where I should be investing in myself instead of piling up social credit. Continue reading