People with resilient personalities, marked by high conscientiousness and extraversion, tend to engage in longer sessions of both physical activity and sedentary periods. In contrast, those with a brittle personality, often associated with neuroticism, interrupt sedentary times more frequently, which may benefit health.

Resiliently Active And Resiliently Sedentary…?

This research highlights how personality can shape health behaviors and may impact long-term well-being. The findings suggest that resilient individuals are more inclined to structured activities, while brittle types prefer shorter, lighter tasks. Understanding these patterns may aid in designing personalized health interventions based on personality.

Health Interventions Based On Personality

A new study reveals that personality traits influence both physical activity and sedentary behavior patterns.

food

Food

health

Health

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

sports

Sports

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Personality Traits Linked to Physical Activity and Sedentary Patterns

You can do a lot of things with bayonets, except sit on them.

Weapons are only useful if you use them, but if you use them, well, now you have used them. You can sit on a weapon, and you can sit on a weapon.

Graeme Dobell looks at humanitarian intervention in theory and practice

philosophy

Philosophy

history

History

politics

Politics

humanresources

Human Resources

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The Bayonet Conundrum Or, The Pointy End

We often hear that we live in an attention economy, where tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook present us with an overwhelming amount of irresistible information that steals our attention.This is not wrong, but our understanding of how attention works is imprecise. In a new study, researchers from the University of Copenhagen show that our attention works surprisingly well. And that it enables us to achieve exactly what our brains most desire—rewards.

What Our Brains Most Desire Is Rewards

The study found that when presented with multiple tasks, participants consistently chose the option with the highest reward, even if it conflicted with a trained habit.This reward-driven attention helps explain why digital technology is so engaging; it taps into our natural preference for immediate, valuable rewards. Understanding how we choose actions in the moment could inform future studies on long-term planning, especially for actions tied to personal values. In essence, it’s not technology but our reward-seeking minds that drive attention shifts.

Reward-Seeking Minds = Reward-Driven Attention

The experiments showed that reward is a decisive factor in determining what we notice and remember to do when we are presented with multiple opportunities.It is, therefore, imprecise to talk about the digital world stealing or controlling our attention. It is almost the opposite. The technologies often exploit our ability to choose exactly the content that gives us the greatest reward when presented with a wide range of possibilities.In other words, what tech companies leverage are our subjective values by rewarding our attention shifts and actions.

The Digital World In Fact Exploits Our Ability, Not Our Weakness

Normally we think of habits as close to unbreakable, but here too the experiments tell us something important.They tell us something about our behavior in a situation where we have been trained for a certain action. The participants in our experiments spent a lot of time learning how to connect a single box with a shift of attention to a particular corner of the screen.Training the attention shifts should make them into habits. But when they were presented with four competing actions that they had a short time to decide on, participants chose the reward over the habitual behavior.

Habits Versus Rewards

In the experimental situation, the action with the highest subjective value is most likely to be selected, even though other actions have been trained extensively, conclude the study’s authors.This means that a person’s values compete with ingrained habits—a competition the habit often loses if another action is more important. This insight is also worth bringing into the discussion about attention economy.

Values Trump Habits

The next step for the researchers will be a project in which they will examine how we plan in the long term. The current experiment shows something about what activates our shift in attention in the short term, but what happens when we try to plan actions in the future?The researchers expect that here too we will focus our attention on the action to which we attach the highest value. But when we are in the real world as opposed to a laboratory, other factors come into play. Previous research has shown, for example, that our surroundings play an important role in how we remember things.

Short-Term & Long-term Planning; Real World & Laboratory

New research suggests our brains prioritize actions based on rewards, not habits, challenging the idea that tech simply “steals” attention.

New research suggests our brains prioritize actions based on rewards, not habits, challenging the idea that tech simply "steals" attention.

productivity

Productivity

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

habits

Habits

timemanagement

Time Management

Why Our Brains Prefer Rewards Over Habits

On most sunny days, the sight of bees buzzing around flowers brightens our day. They fly around with a certain zest, full of purpose.But what if these hardworking bees can feel the weight of the world like we do?Scientists at Newcastle University have discovered that bees, just like us humans, exhibit emotion-like responses to stressful events.What does this mean? Well, the research findings tell us that when stressed, bees lower their expectations of rewards, which eventually influences how they approach pollination.

Stressed Bees Lose Their Buzz

The study shows that bees are more pessimistic after stress as their behavior suggests that they do not expect to get rewards. Emotions are complex states and in humans involve a subjective understanding of what you are feeling. We might never know if bees feel something similar, however, what this research can say is that bees have similar responses when they are stressed and make pessimistic choices.The best explanation for their behavior is that they expect high rewards to be less likely and exhibit traits of pessimistic people.

Bees Exhibit Traits Of Pessimistic People

Why does stress in bees matter? Well, it matters a lot, especially for our ecosystem. Stress can impact how bees approach flowers and pollinate plants, and their ability to access high-quality rewards.So, this stress-induced shift in behavior can potentially affect the entire pollination process.On the brighter side, this research broadens our understanding of emotions, as we found similar traits in an organism as different as an insect.

The Implications Of Stressed Bees

Understanding the emotional states of bees offers profound insights not just on a theoretical level but also in practical applications affecting agriculture and ecology.Bees play a crucial role in pollinating approximately 80% of flowering plants and a staggering one-third of the human food supply is dependent on bee pollination.

Why Should We Be Bothered About The Emotional States Of Bees…?

Recognizing how stress influences their foraging patterns could lead to improved strategies for managing bee populations and mitigating the adverse effects of environmental stressors.Enhanced satellite monitoring of bee habitats, development of stress-reducing habitats, and focused conservation efforts could be devised to maintain vital bee populations, thereby ensuring the stability and sustainability of many ecosystems.

Stress-Free Bees Make For Stable And Sustainable Ecosystems

The findings from Newcastle University serve as a springboard for further studies, encouraging scientists to explore the emotional capacities of insects.The next phase of research could focus on the long-term effects of stress on bee populations and analyze whether similar emotional responses are evident in other arthropods.Additionally, interdisciplinary approaches involving neuroscience, ethology, and environmental science might uncover the neural pathways and physiological mechanisms driving these emotion-like states in bees.

The Emotional Capabilities Of Insects

Fascinating new research reveals that bees experience stress, and it drives them to make pessimistic choices, just like us.

Research from Newcastle University reveals that stress makes bees pessimistic. Stressed bees associate fewer rewards with ambiguous stimuli.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Stressed-Out Bees Get Depressed and Make Bad Decisions

If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it.

Becky Ripley and Sophie Ward take a cold hard look at the psychology behind each of the seven deadly sins, in the order established by Pope Gregory the Great: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and lazy old sloth. Why have we evolved these ugly emotions? What’s going on in the brain and the body when we feel them? And how best can we live alongside them - in ourselves and with others?Greed is in the spotlight today. And we're not talking food. (That’s gluttony, we come to that later in the series.) We're talking greed for money, for land, for material things – and ultimately for control, status, dominance, power. The kind of greed that separates the "haves" from the "have nots". On one hand, greed is a great motivator, driving us all forward in our pursuit to get more of whatever it is we want. But at its ugliest, greed can come at a huge cost to other people, and to the planet. When does self-interested behaviour become selfish? And can we be greedy for the good? To guide us through this mess is evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin from the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, psychologist and social scientist Professor Paul Piff from the Department of Psychological Science at the University of California, Executive Director of the New Economy Organisers Network, Ayeisha Thomas-Smith, and a few wise words from Sir David Attenborough.Producer: Becky Ripley

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

podcasts

Podcasts

Seriously is home to the world’s best audio documentaries and podcast recommendations. Introduced by Vanessa Kisuule. This feed is no longer being updated. Thanks for listening.

Seriously...

Seven Deadly Psychologies - 2. Greed

A recent study of the careers of scientists, film directors and artists, conducted by academics at Northwestern University, looked at hot streaks in people’s careers – intense periods of high achievement, lasting a decade or more. What conditions have to be present for a hot streak to occur? The study found that before the hot streak begins there is an exploration phase, when new ideas are gathered, which is followed by a period of exploitation, when those new ideas are turned into original and impactful work.

Exploration - Exploitation - Hot Streak

This is similar to the explore/exploit dynamic, an idea from computer science, which says that to make the best decisions we should find the correct balance between gathering information (exploring our options) and making the most of what we know (exploiting that information). To make the best decisions, we need to balance exploration and exploitation.

The Explore/Exploit Dynamic (or Tradeoff)

What the research found was that neither exploration nor exploitation alone was critical to a hot streak: it was the transition from explore to exploit that mattered. Exploring before exploiting means you can discover the most productive ideas and expand your creative possibilities. What matters is the switch.Too much exploration can be risky: you end up as a dabbler, a dilettante. Too much exploitation can be boring: you don’t discover enough new information to do interesting, original work. To have a hot streak, a burst of your best work, we need to switch from explore to exploit.

What Matters Is The Switch

Importantly, the study’s findings were robust whether the hot streak came early in a career or late. We can make the switch later in our career and still see the same effect.This broad pattern, of shifting from exploring to exploiting, can be observed in the lives of late bloomers.

The Switch And The Late Bloomers

Most late bloomers go through these two stages. First, they take a long and winding road, an essentially unplanned career path. Then, they get the opportunity for success through some combination of the right people, the right place and the right time. Their network, the culture they move to, a personal transformation – or some combination of these – take the disparate experiences of the first stage and turn them into the focused output of the second stage. They make the switch from explore to exploit and enter a hot streak. They just happen to do it later than their peers.

From Disparate Experiences To Focused Output

Late bloomers rarely take conventional career paths to success; if they did, perhaps they would not be late. Their progress is punctuated and disrupted, not smooth and steady. In this stage, their careers are often either dormant or patchwork, made of seemingly disparate parts. This might look listless, directionless or inefficient: rather than working towards a specific goal, late bloomers prepare for the unknown, the unexpected, the unstated.

Late Bloomers Prepare For The Unknown & The Unexpected

Second, late bloomers find their niche or opportunity – some turn in their luck, some discovery, some change in their circumstances comes along and makes them a channel for their talents. They get direction, focus, challenge, resources, support, opportunity. This is when they exploit the capabilities and preparation from the first stage. We shall see, again and again, the importance of preparing for your luck – chance really does favor the prepared mind.

And Then A Channel Comes Along

This second stage has three conditions, which are not all present in all cases, but which are reasonably consistent: right people, right place, right time. To understand how late bloomers leave the long and winding road and arrive at the place where they achieve so much, how they switch from explore to exploit, we need to look at their networks, the culture they live and work in, and the transformational moments in their lives, or their crisis points.

3 Conditions: Right People, Right Place, Right Time (or Crisis)

What we will see is that weak ties – the phrase sociologists use to describe people we are only slightly acquainted with – are the people who can change our prospects, but only if they are influential. Good networking is not about knowing all the best people, but the few who can be credible and persuasive to the people we need to reach.

Right People (The Bridges)

Personal transformation happens through cultural immersion, sampling the world and changing our surroundings. In new circumstances, gradually sampling our way into a new mode of thinking, living or working, we can change our opportunities, perhaps even change ourselves.

Right Place (The Waters)

Moments of crisis have to be taken advantage of, not ignored or suffered through, whether that’s a personal tragedy, a moment of inspiration, or a gradual attrition of your will, causing dissatisfaction that culminates in desperation to change. Sometimes there are good reasons to have a midlife crisis, not to accept a slump but to use it as a pivot point.

Right Time (The Dive)

Persistence: Though they often don’t work towards a specific goal, neither do late bloomers “lavish their life away on useless trifles”, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase. They persist in following their interests and ambitions; they are unable to let it go, but, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice, they have to be flexible about how and when this persistence accrues into a tangible achievement or accomplishment.

3 Traits: Persistence, Earnestness, Quiet Ambition

Earnestness:Late bloomers are serious, perhaps intense, obsessive, occasionally eccentric, volatile, or weird. Not infrequently, the people around them don’t quite understand who they are capable of being. Their earnestness can make them seem strange, off-putting, and makes it difficult to see how and where their talent could flourish: their capability often hides in plain sight.

Quiet Ambition: Late Bloomers’ ambitions are usually secret, or unknown to themselves for a long time. They pursue their interests quietly. Their ability and confidence grow with experience. It might be quite late in the day when they realize that their capabilities actually make them fit for some exceptional enterprise.

So, despite the fact that late bloomers are often overlooked, they are often quietly, persistently developing the qualities, on the long and winding road that will eventually lead them to success, when the right opportunity comes along. Importantly, the more active they are in this process, the more likely they are to find that opportunity and turn it to their advantage.

“Do Your York And I Shall Know You”

Do your work and I shall know you. Do your work and you shall reinforce yourself.

Excerpted from “Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success And Reinventing Your Life”, by Henry Oliver.

Late bloomers tend to follow unconventional paths, quietly developing key qualities and skills while being overlooked.

career

Career

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

startup

Startups

books

Books

3 Subtle Traits Of Successful Late Bloomers

CW: In your most recent newsletter you said: “Reality doesn’t need you to operate it”.OB: I’m quoting Michael Singer. I want to pop in there and say this is not my sort of phrase, but yeah. And somebody else sent me in response to that, another way of expressing the same idea, which was something like “let go or be dragged” basically, right? Like, those are your options.

Oliver Burkeman is a journalist, a writer for The Guardian and an author.Does trying harder to be extra productive actually work? Does it net more success or just more misery? For the Type-A people in the world, how can we learn to be less tough on ourselves and learn to have more fun in the process?Expect to learn what imperfectionism is, how to overcome decision paralysis & dealing with distractions better, whether or not there is an easy solution to imposter syndrome, the unexpected solution to fixing procrastination, the most effective ways to curb self-criticism, and much more…Sponsors:See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/dealsGet a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout)Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout)Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MW10)Extra Stuff:Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/booksTry my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdomEpisodes You Might Enjoy:#577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59#712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf#700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp-Get In Touch:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillxTwitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillxYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcastEmail: https://chriswillx.com/contact- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Life lessons from the greatest thinkers on the planet with Chris Williamson. Including guests like David Goggins, Dr Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, Dr Andrew Huberman, Dr Julie Smith, Steven Bartlett, Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Robert Greene, Balaji Srinivasan, Steven Pinker, Alex Hormozi, Douglas Murray, Chris Bumstead, James Smith, Dr David Sinclair, Mark Manson and more. Understanding the world is hard. This podcast will help.

Modern Wisdom

#840 - Oliver Burkeman - 8 Unexpected Lessons To Be Less Hard On Yourself

Do not try to predict precise Black Swans - it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict […]Invest in preparedness, not in prediction. Remember that infinite vigilance is just not possible.

A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.

The Black Swan is a standalone book in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s landmark Incerto series, an investigation of opacity, luck, uncertainty, probability, human error, risk, and decision-making in a world we don’t understand. The other books in the series are Fooled by Randomness, Antifragile, and The Bed of Procrustes. A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. For Nassim Nicholas Taleb, black swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.   Why do we not acknowledge the phenomenon of black swans until after they occur? Part of the answer, according to Taleb, is that humans are hardwired to learn specifics when they should be focused on generalities. We concentrate on things we already know and time and time again fail to take into consideration what we don’t know. We are, therefore, unable to truly estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize, and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the “impossible.”   For years, Taleb has studied how we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we actually do. We restrict our thinking to the irrelevant and inconsequential, while large events continue to surprise us and shape our world. In this revelatory book, Taleb explains everything we know about what we don’t know, and this second edition features a new philosophical and empirical essay, “On Robustness and Fragility,” which offers tools to navigate and exploit a Black Swan world.   Elegant, startling, and universal in its applications, The Black Swan will change the way you look at the world. Taleb is a vastly entertaining writer, with wit, irreverence, and unusual stories to tell. He has a polymathic command of subjects ranging from cognitive science to business to probability theory. The Black Swan is a landmark book—itself a black swan.   Praise for Nassim Nicholas Taleb   “The most prophetic voice of all.”—GQ   Praise for The Black Swan   “[A book] that altered modern thinking.”—The Times (London)   “A masterpiece.”—Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, author of The Long Tail   “Idiosyncratically brilliant.”—Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times   “The Black Swan changed my view of how the world works.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate   “[Taleb writes] in a style that owes as much to Stephen Colbert as it does to Michel de Montaigne. . . . We eagerly romp with him through the follies of confirmation bias [and] narrative fallacy.”—The Wall Street Journal   “Hugely enjoyable—compelling . . . easy to dip into.”—Financial Times   “Engaging . . . The Black Swan has appealing cheek and admirable ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review From the Hardcover edition.

strategy

Strategy

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Nassim Nicholas Taleb has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Black Swan

Our study found that restricting eating to a window of 8 hours per day significantly improved the daily time spent in the normal blood glucose range and reduced fluctuations in blood glucose levels. However, altering the 8-hour restricted eating period to earlier or later in the day did not appear to offer additional benefits.

Our findings, which can be attributed to the 16-hour fasting window rather than the time of eating or changes in energy intake, also highlight that the benefit of time-restricted eating can be seen within just three days. Although time-restricted eating is becoming increasingly popular, no other studies have examined tightly controlled diet and altered the clock time of an eight-hour eating window on glycaemic control in people at risk of type 2 diabetes.

Previous studies indicate that TRE (which limits when, but not what, individuals eat) can improve insulin sensitivity (the body’s ability to respond to insulin) and glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c; average blood sugar levels over a period of weeks and months) in people at risk of type 2 diabetes.However, the effect on glycaemic variability (fluctuations in blood glucose levels) is not clear and previous studies have attributed the positive effects of TRE to reduced energy intake.

Is TRE’s Effect On Type 2 Diabetes Just Due To Less Calories?

This study sought to understand alterations in meal timing when participants were in energy balance (energy intake was matched with energy expenditure).To find out more, researchers investigated the impact of TRE in a eucaloric manner—with diets provided to match energy requirements (taking into account sex, age, weight, height, activity level—comparing an early (Early TRE; between 8:00 and 16:00 hours) versus a late (Late TRE; between 12:00 and 20:00 hours) eating window on glycaemic control in overweight sedentary adults.

TRE’s Effect On Type 2 Diabetes In Energy Balance

Researchers compared the Early TRE regimen (eating only between 8:00 am and 4:00 pm) and Late TRE regimen (eating only between midday and 8:00 pm) periods, and the habitual eating regimen (more than 14 hours/day). A eucaloric standardized diet [50% carbohydrates, 30% fat, and 20% protein] was provided during the TRE periods but participants consumed their own diets during habitual (free) living conditions.

Study Design

Continuous glucose monitoring was used to assess daily time spent in euglycemia (with a normal concentration of blood glucose of 3.9-7.8 mmol/l) and markers of glycaemic variability, including mean absolute glucose (MAG), coefficient of variation (CV), and mean amplitude of glucose excursions (MAGE).

The analyses found that in comparison to habitual eating (more than 14 h/day), TRE (8 h/day) significantly increased time spent within the normal blood glucose range by on average 3.3%, and also reduced markers of glycaemic variability—MAG by 0.6 mmol/l, CV by 2.6%, and MAGE by 0.4 mmol/l.However, no significant differences in glycaemic control were found between the Early TRE and Late TRE regimens.

Study Findings

Many people find counting calories hard to stick to in the long term, but our study suggests that watching the clock may offer a simple way to improve blood sugar control in people at risk of type 2 diabetes, irrespective of when they have their 8-hour eating window, which warrants investigation in larger studies and over the longer term.

Restricting the eating window to 8 hours a day significantly improved blood glucose control in adults at risk of type 2 diabetes irrespective of whether it was earlier or later in the day and within just 3 days.

longevity

Longevity

Scientists Discover Simple Way To Improve Blood Sugar Stability Without Cutting Calories

Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy…the FEAR to attack.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (known simply and more commonly as Dr. Strangelove) is a 1964 political satire black comedy film co-written, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers in three roles, including the title character.

This clip is from "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1964. 

I wish to use this video under the doctrine of fair use; I will be embedding and commenting on it in my scholarly research blog.

Personality Traits Linked to Physical Activity and Sedentary Patterns

The Bayonet Conundrum Or, The Pointy End

Why Our Brains Prefer Rewards Over Habits

Stressed-Out Bees Get Depressed and Make Bad Decisions

Seven Deadly Psychologies - 2. Greed

Xarikleia