How good sleepers sleep
🎈Plus: Reese Witherspoon wisdom, a Navy Seal breathing technique and the life-saving power of laughter.
Welcome to the 161st consecutive edition of the newsletter.
It is my belief that the greatest skill we could ever learn — and one we have never been taught how to do — is how to change ourself.
It’s the ultimate superpower and the secret to happiness.
With that said, here are 5 ideas I stumbled upon this week that contain wisdom you can use to change yourself — and your life.
Enjoy.
1/ Be like Reese.
I first read this article when it came out in December 2019. I’ve come back to it a few times over the last few years, most recently, this past week.
It has a beautiful underlying message.
In a nutshell, Witherspoon was frustrated with Hollywood and the fact there were no good scripts for strong female leads.
So she started her own company and started telling the stories she wanted to see onscreen.
Here is my favourite quote.
Rather than try to work within the confines of a studio that wasn’t built for her or her stories, she self-funded her own company, then called Pacific Standard, and began devouring book galleys. Immediately, two stood out: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, both centering on the kind of messy, unconventional female protagonists she wasn’t seeing onscreen. She quickly acquired the rights, promising the authors that, with her, their stories wouldn’t be sanitized.
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🦋Transformation Tip…
Rather than create a summary that I know I won’t remember, I turned the lesson from Reese’s story into a Law.
The law of options → When the options that exist suck, create your own.
2/ A beautiful quote.
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
~Antonine de Saint-•••••
🦋Transformation Tip…
Subtraction is not intuitive to our problem solving approach so it is generally ignored. But it’s often what we take away or choose not to do that has the most profound impact on our success.
The next time you are looking to solve a problem, make a list of all the things to add to solve it. But also make a list of things you could subtract. Success will come from your combination of the two.
3/ Box Breathing.
I got this from Andrew Huberman’s latest newsletter about breath work protocols for health, focus and stress.
Box breathing appeals to me because Navy Seals and police officers use it to calm themselves and think clearly when in combat situations.
The Navy SEALs began using box breathing as a way to improve mental focus and calmness in high-pressure situations. They also found that it could help prevent panic attacks and reduce anxiety in combat situations.
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🦋Transformation Tip…
There is power in studying extreme cases and looking for simple tools and strategies that we can apply to our everyday lives. Box breathing is free, simple and can be done anywhere anytime. Try the 1-minute video above and see how you feel.
4/ Sleep better with this cognitive trick.
The strategy they introduce in this article is Cognitive Refocusing. It’s based on the insight that good sleepers tend to focus on pleasing sensory imagery, while bad sleepers focus on unpleasant things like planning and problem solving.
Cognitive refocusing builds off these insights from good sleepers. Before bed we devise a plan to distract ourself with pleasant visual imagery.
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🦋Transformation Tip…
If you are a “problem solving” sleeper — like I am — give cognitive refocusing a try because when we sleep better, we live better. The opposite is also true.
5/ This made me laugh out loud.
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🦋Transformation Tip…
Back in my 20s, I read a book by Dr. Norman Cousins called Anatomy of an Illness. In it he claimed he healed himself from a terminal illness. There were a number of things he did, but the one I never forgot is that he watched comedies everyday so he could laugh.
There is magic in laughter — maybe even life saving magic.
That’s it for today. 🙏 Thanks for reading.
Keep being awesome my friend.
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