In Bits & Pieces, I share some brief insights, sparks of creativity and interesting lessons that may or may not constitute further, more elaborate work. Below you can read the most recent ones!
The best CO2-removal plant
There are many studies investigating the positive health benefits of indoor plants. The effect that always interested me most was the ability of plants to remove CO2.
Below I’ve listed the results of a study1 I came across today, that closely measures eight plants’ ability to absorb CO2 in high- and low light conditions. Before testing, the plants were also acclimatised to a high- or low light environment.
Carbon dioxide removal potential of common indoor plants, from F.R. Torpy et al. (2014).
When we look at the relative absorption rate (per leaf area), we find that the following two plants perform best in the low- and high- light conditions:
Low light: H. forsteriana
5.21 mgCO2 removed/m2 leaf area/h
Bright light: D. lutescens
657 mgCO2 removed/m2 leaf area/h
Footnotes
- Torpy, F. R., Irga, P. J., & Burchett, M. D. (2014). Profiling indoor plants for the amelioration of high CO2 concentrations. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 13(2), 227–233. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2013.12.004
A perspective on awareness in modern meditations
In a previous article, I steelmanned a case to avoid ‘body-notions’ in guided meditation. My point there was that in most guided mediations, the instructor asks you to focus on a particular place in your body. Doing this prerequires that you conceive of your sensations as constrained to your physical form.
In body scans, for example, it is very easy to imagine your feet and their position, before investigating what you experience. These experiences become tied to your body, which is not what meditation seeks to achieve. In meditation, the goal is to ‘become aware of experience.’ Not to place that experience somewhere in space-time.
In this post I would like to elaborate on this idea with a simple drawing. Below, I schematically depict how I approached mediation when I started doing it.
You realise you have an awareness and then direct the attention of that awareness to a particular experience. Awareness, in this model, is a central point from which to perceive.
This is fundamentally contradictory to the whole idea of mindfulness. There, awareness is not something you can be aware of, but in this diagram, it is a point in space! A point from which to perceive the thing we are perceiving.
Sam Harris, of whom I did many 10-minute mediations in the Waking Up app tries to make you aware of this. In some meditations, he would suggest to “look for who is looking” or to “turn attention onto itself.”
While these instructions try to help the meditator ‘do it right,’ I think they are large counterproductive. When I’m trying to “look for who is looking” or to “turn attention onto itself,” this is what I try to do (yellow arrow):
I try to become aware of this point of awareness.
In Harris’s meditation, the expectation is that there will be ‘nothing to find’ and that from that, you will learn to simply be aware. I find this cumbersome and confusing, and I think there are more effective ways to achieve it.
One way is to better understand what awareness is by drawing it out. Contrasting the first image with the one below, for example, illustrates my case.
Awareness is the boundless space in which perception occurs. Sounds, thoughts, sights… they all appear within that space, but not in one paricular point.
When we direct our attention to any of these thoughts or sensation, we do not ‘narrow our attention’ toward them. Rather, we illuminate whichever space in awareness that they occupy.
Taking this understanding with us when we meditate enhances its foundation. I’m looking forward to sharing how this can also be engrained in our practice.
Awareness of the mind
In this fourth phase of the book life with full attention, we will start to explore the mind (citta).
Our mind shapes our day-to day experience. What we perceive to be real is actually shaped by our mind through several channels.
Expectations: When we experience something in the world, we do so by relating them to our pre-existing theories. We look at life from those theories as we experience it. When our experience and the expectations we have about them do not match, we can become frustrated or irritated.
Assumptions: Similarly, we assume things about the people around us, but more importantly about ourselves. Because we behave in accordance to these assumptions, they often end up becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, by assuming you are an unlikable person, you mistrust others, who will pick up on this behaviour and become weary as a result. The tricky thing with assumptions is that we are largely unaware of them, even when they concern ourselves.
Predictions: Predictions can become self-fulfilling prophecies as well, the most clearly captured by the placebo effect. Our thoughts have a vedana (feeling) dimension. When we think we are stressed, we feel stressed, and actually become stressed. We are continuously predicting what could, should, might or will happen next, and are unconsciously turning this into reality as we go.
Pattern-matching: Our minds are ‘patterned’ by our history and conditioning. So, whatever we engage with (friendship, workplace, party, love affair), we understand it by fitting it into the pattern of what we have been and known. We do this to understand what it is we perceive, how we should feel about it, and what we should do. While we pattern-match continuously, it isn’t always appropriate to do so.
With these mechanisms, we cast a spell on reality and then wrongly perceive it as such. Mind creates world: the state of our mind dictates the state of the world.
The type of mind we have and world we create is a consequence of our environment. They come from our parents, what we see online, what the people around us value, our culture, which newspaper we read… The world creates us, and then we create the world. 🌍
Self-talk is self-creation, but the stories we tell ourselves are often incomplete. Like how the stories of two fighting friends don’t add up, so too does our own narrative only cover a fraction of what’s true. This story is the story of who we think we are.
Cultivating awareness of the mind
It’s hard to become aware of the mind (citta) because it is our point of view.
Cultivating mind-awareness requires a solid basis of awareness of the body and vedana. This allows us to take a step back from when we’re caught in a thought spiral and then observe the mind from there. To become aware of citta, our mindfulness needs to be stronger than the citta we are mindful of.
We are then able to notice the monologues in our mind, and realise that they are our stories, and our responsibility. We can start to analyse them, find out where they come from, what they are based on, and whether we can be sure they are true. 💬
When we don’t have this basis, trying to become aware of our thoughts will only add more thoughts. When mind-awareness makes citta appear worse, our mindfulness basis is still inadequate.
When you go for your mindfulness walk, try to observe what’s on your mind. What do you think about? How does it make you feel? Where do you feel it?
After establishing this mindful state, examine the thought itself. The following questions may be more or less appropriate, depending on the thought you have.
For ruminating thoughts (thoughts about something that happened, often involving other people):
- Are these thoughts true, what are the actual facts?
- Why could they not be true?
- Where does these thought usually lead me?
- What do these thoughts do for me? Do they confirm a self-image I have?
For sticky thoughts (thoughts that are hard to shake, not particularly involving others):
- What makes this thought sticky?
- What would happen if I let this thought go?
- Is this thought helpful or productive right now?
- Do these thoughts express a need that I am not aware of?
Then, return to awareness of the body, it’s movements, and vedana.
For this third phase, we will also introduce a dedicated mindfulness moment. This should be an activity you do daily, that doesn’t take too long and where you tend to be alone. For example, brushing your teeth or showering. Define when your moment starts and where it ends.
Approach the mindfulness moment it the same way as the mindfulness walk. Become aware of the body, it’s movement, and vedana first and only then try to tune into your mind. You can use the same questions listed above to investigate citta.
For this phase’s daily mediations, try to sit completely still. When some uncomfortable feeling arises, catch it, and observe it without responding. Then, you can follow this week’s focus schedule provided in the book:
- Day 1: start with a complete body scan, followed by an inquiry to your state of mind. Can you identify what mood you are in?
- Day 2: begin as in day 1 by establishing awareness of the body. Then ask yourself the following questions: ‘what makes me happy?’, ‘Am I happy now?’, and if not ‘Am I telling myself a negative story?’, ‘When I’m happy, what does that feel like?’ Ask, feel and pause. Then ask again. Drop a thought and then wait for any vedana to occur.
- Day 3: become aware of the body, and pay particular (observing) attention to what is distracting you. These can be thoughts, but also vedana.
- Day 4: become aware of a particularly unpleasant sensation in your body. Observe the narrative your citta produces about it.
- Day 5: observe vedana and citta, then let them go. You can make this process easier by letting go on the out-breath.
- Day 6: observe citta, but allow yourself to follow the thought. But, as you do, try to become aware of the breath as well, and later add awareness of the body as a whole.
- Day 7: be aware of your sensations and mind. Notice your inner naratives and where you feel them; do they express a need or value? Can you respond to that need in your meditation?
Fourth practice week
Elaborating on the modifications I proposed in my previous post; these are my aspirations for this phase of life with full attention:
Vedana diary
Whenever I feel a particularly strong vedana, I will note it down in my pocket-journal. Additionally, I will send myself a random reminder once a day to do the same. Again, I will write down (1) the sensation, (2) where and how I feel it and (3) what the sensation might try to tell me.
Daily meditation
I will follow the pointers provided in the book. Additionally, I will inquire how I feel after the mediation by answering (one of the) following questions:
- Where did I feel most tension?
- Where did I feel most relaxed?
- How would I describe my state of mind?
Mindfulness moment
The best mindfulness moment for me would be my morning shower. 🚿 For that, I added a new principle to my momentum cycle:
Whenever I take a shower, I tune in to the feelings of my body, followed by the thoughts in my mind, so I start my day mindfully.
Mindfulness walk
As said yesterday, I will walk to the local sports café for an espresso as a reward to motivate me to do it more often. Additionally, I will take the stairs when I arrive, and take those mindfully as well.
During the walk, I will get acquainted with observing thoughts by answering the questions mentioned before.
Feeling Awareness: Reflection
It’s been well over a week that I shared my aspirations for the third phase in Maitreyabandhu’s life with full attention. Time to reflect on and adapt my strategies! I’ve ordered them per topic below.
Health audit
In the health audit, I continued a diary of my physical health habits: sleep, being outside, exercise, eating, and drinking on a 5-point scale (as explained in a previous post). I was happy with the second phase’s results, except for the scores on eating and drinking. The goal was therefore to get the latter from 2.9 (eating) and 3.2 (drinking) above 3.5.
While my score for drinking has remained the same, I managed to improve my eating habits (now 3.9) while maintaining good scores for the rest as well (all 3.9 or higher). I’m quite happy with the result, although I know it will be hard to maintain them throughout the winter holidays. All the more reason to try and do better on the in-between days!
I will maintain the health diary, but probably not reflect on it further in these posts during the rest of the course since I don’t see myself modifying my approach on this any further.
Body scan
I have neglected the body scan, in part due to the fact that I haven’t been consistently meditating over the past 4–5 days. I will re-incorporate this and try to get into the habit of writing one sentence about how I feel after every mediation. To make that a bit easier for myself, I will think of some prompts to answer, which I will share in the next life with full attention-post.
For now, I was thinking about things such as “where did I feel most relaxed?” and “where did I feel most tension?” Any suggestions are more than welcome!
Mindfulness walk
Again, I haven’t done many of these, even though I’ve thought about doing them quite occasionally. I feel like a big issue is that I’m seated at the eighth floor of a building and going up and down alone already takes me quite some time, so there’s a bit of a barrier for doing it on office-working-days.
Nevertheless, I still want to try and make it work, so I’m going to start rewarding myself for going out. For the next time, I will actually mindfully walk toward the local sports café to treat myself to an espresso (which are really good there). Let’s see if I can manage to do that at least once in the soonest workweek (which will be 3 weeks from now due to winter holidays).
Vedana diary
The most recent habit introduced by the course was the vedana diary. For that, I deviated a bit from the book and added the following principle to my momentum cycle:
Whenever I experience a particularly pleasant or unpleasant sensation, I pause for a moment to neutrally observe the sensation, after which I write down (1) the sensation, (2) where and how I feel it and (3) what the sensation might try to tell me, so that I become more aware of the sensations in my body and experience life more freely.
So far, I have 4 vedana diary entries: 1 positive, 3 negative. However, I have noticed that I’ve become much more mindful of these feelings overall. That is to say that, even though I did not always write them down, I did ‘complete’ several more vedana entries in my head.
I think that essentially, this is the goal of the whole exercise; to learn to observe sensations when they come up. As such, I’m quite happy with the results. Nevertheless, I’d also like to get into the habit of noticing more subtle vedana. Therefore, I’m going to look into the possibility of sending myself a random reminder during the day, in which I write down (1) what I feel, (2) where and how I feel it and (3) what the sensation might try to tell me. More on that in the next phase’s starting post!
What have you managed to implement since last time, and how did you experience it? Don’t hesitate to share your insights below!
Alternative currencies in developing economy communities
Last week, a colleague told me about a paper presenting preliminary results of an alternative currency project in Kenya. The paper, titled Complementary currencies for sustainable development in Kenya2, highlights the potential of alternative currencies in informal settlement (slums) communities.
The idea of the project was to introduce an additional currency (Bangla-Pesa) to facilitate the trade of excess capacity amongst small businesses. The potential of such a currency is best explained through the following example:
As an example, most households in Bangladesh use maize flour, vegetables, and charcoal for cooking every day. Now, imagine you are a mother of three in Kenya, selling peanuts, a high-demand supplemental food. Your stock has a limited shelf life and will go bad after a certain period. If members of your community do not have sufficient funds to buy peanuts, you will lose the money you spent purchasing your stock, leaving you unable to buy the goods you need.
In informal settlements, the official money supply is highly volatile and unpredictable. This makes it difficult for businesses to know whether customers will have cash on hand on any given day.
Now, imagine a collaborative credit system is introduced into this scenario. You use a voucher to purchase maize flour. This voucher acts as a promissory note (IOU), promising to repay an equivalent value in peanuts or other goods and services. The person selling maize flour can then use the voucher to buy well water. The water vendor can use the voucher to purchase vegetables, and the vegetable seller can use it to buy charcoal for cooking. Finally, the woman selling charcoal can return to you and exchange the voucher for the peanuts you promised to repay when you first used it to purchase maize flour.
In this system, excess stock that might have gone bad—such as maize flour, vegetables, or peanuts—and unused services, like well water collection, are utilized. This happens through the exchange of a voucher, which represents the value of those excess goods and services. Such a system creates a circular flow of resources, ensuring that surplus capacity is put to good use.
p.23
As such, the Bangla-Pesa helps to facilitating trade when cash is scarce. Bangla-Pesa allows businesses to exchange goods and services when there’s insufficient cash in circulation.
Furthermore, excess capacity can be utilised. Businesses often have unsold goods or unused service capacity that would otherwise go to waste. Bangla-Pesa allows them to trade this excess capacity within the local network, generating value that wouldn’t occur with Kenyan shillings alone.
Unlike direct barter, where two parties must want each other’s goods or services, Bangla-Pesa can circulate within the network, creating more flexible trade opportunities.
After the first week of implementation, aggregate sales of the community grew by 22%, highlighting the capacity for local economic growth, independent on national economic conditions.
The potential of community currencies like these is higher in developing economies. However, it makes me wonder about the potential in developed nations as well. Goods and services, particularly those with an expiration date, are just as common here. Having an alternative currency to exchange these might enhance community prosperity, but also the interconnectedness of those who participate in it.
Digital currencies seem particularly interesting, with the added advantage of their dynamic malleability and tracking. For example, assigning an ‘expiration date’ to the (digital) voucher after a transaction will stimulate a steady flow of trade, which helps stabilise its value.
I’m curious to learn more about alternative currencies, especially concerning how they can enhance communities in developing contexts as well. Feel free to share any examples you may have!
Footnotes
Uncertainty and risk
Today, I wanted to share a short section from Doyle Farmer’s book: Making Sense of Chaos – A Better Economics for a Better World. The passage presents an interesting contrast between the seemingly identical concepts of risk and uncertainty.
By risk, he [Donald Rumsfeld] meant situations where we know the set of future events and their probabilities. In contrast, he used uncertainty to refer to situations where we don’t know the probability of future events. Under what he called true uncertainty; we may not even be able to imagine all possible future events.
p.107
Risk involves situations where probabilities of outcomes are known or can be estimated based on historical data or models. Uncertainty, on the other hand, arises when probabilities are unknown, or the situation is too complex or novel to predict reliably. Decisions under uncertainty often require more subjective judgment, creativity, and adaptive strategies.
Making this distinction apparent is crucial. Risk management relies on probabilistic tools like statistical analysis, simulations, and decision trees. But uncertainty management demands different techniques such as scenario planning, heuristics, and flexibility in strategy.
Misapplying risk tools to uncertainty can lead to overconfidence, while ignoring risk metrics can result in missed opportunities or unnecessary caution.
Opinion: “free will” is destroying us and the world we live in
When we bombard girls with fashion news, influencers with bedroom-sized wardrobes, and an unlimited fast fashion supply on flashy discounts just fingertips away, is it fair to put all the responsibility on their ‘free will’ to buy sustainable clothing?
When we pump our foods full of additives that open our dopamine gates, make it the cheapest option available, and ready for delivery at your doorstep in 60 minutes time, is it fair to put all the responsibility on our ‘free will’ to eat healthier?
When commercials and reality shows make it seem as if sunny beaches and five-star hotels are the pinnacle of life, and when you can fly to Barcelona for less than taking a train a few hours away, is it fair to put all the responsibility on our ‘free will’ to stop flying?
When the smartest people in the world are channelling all their knowledge to develop algorithms that grab as much of our attention as possible, when billions are invested to make people addicted to their screens, exploiting psychological weaknesses that are hard-wired into our biological nature, and not offering any type of regulatory protection from it, making it accessible en masse, is it fair to put all the responsibility on our ‘free will’ to regain our focus and solve the most complex problems of today?
When addictive media and the commercials in-between tell us that all we need is ‘more’ to be happy, and when these commercials further dominate the streets, newspapers, subway radio and now even on top of our mail, is it fair to put all the responsibility on our ‘free will’ to stop consuming?
I myself do not believe in free will, but even if it exists, we put a damn lot of faith on it to save the planet and our well-being.
Likert-Leeds Sleep Evaluation Test
The Likert-Leeds Sleep Evaluation test is a simplified version of the original questionnaire. The latter is a widely used tool designed to assess subjective sleep experiences. It evaluates sleep quality across four key dimensions:
- ease of getting to sleep,
- the quality of sleep,
- the ease of awakening, and
- behaviour after waking.
With 10 questions, the LSEQ captures an individual’s perceptions of their sleep and waking experiences, making it a valuable resource for tracking sleep.
By reducing the scoring range to a Likert scale, the scoring loses some detail, but becomes less ambiguous, which I personally like a lot for tests you’d want to do repeatedly.
You can find the Likert-Leeds Sleep Evaluation Questionnaire (LLSEQ) here:
Science says: Caffeine impairs REM-sleep
A few days ago, I reflected on the importance of the REM sleep phase for knowledge workers. Today, I want to highlight a study related to this topic that investigates the effect on continuous caffeine consumption on this particular sleep phase.
The paper3 was written by Janine Weibel and fiends in 2021. In it, they investigated sleep statistics for three different ‘caffeine consumption configurations.’ Each participant was part of each configuration (group) once.
- This group was administered three doses of 150 mg/day for 11 days.
- This group was administered the same dose but received a placebo in the final two days.
- The last group received placebos for all 11 days.
150 mg of caffeine is roughly equivalent to: 3 cups of black tea (141 mg), 1.5 cups of brewed coffee (142.5 mg) or 2.5 shots of espresso (157.5 mg).
The capsules (caffeine and placebo) were administered 45, 255, and 475 min after waking up. If you’d wake up at 8:00, this means your last supplementation would occur at roughly 16:00.
The last 43 hours of each group’s 11-day experiment, participants were placed in a (very) controlled lab setting. There, they completed two full sleep cycles, the second of which was used to measure the slow-wave (i.e. deep) sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) share of the total sleep time (TST). The results are shown in the two graphs below.
Accumulation of REM sleep and SWS proportion across the sleep opportunity of 8h, from J. Weibel et al. (2021).
The graphs show that the share of deep sleep does not appear to be significantly affected by caffeine levels. For REM% however, the effect is more significant. Both the withdrawal (2) and the continuous caffeine group (1) consistently underperform the no-caffeine group (3) in terms of REM-sleep during the 8-hour cycle.
A bit further into the paper, we can more clearly see why:
Amount of REM sleep in each hour spent asleep, from J. Weibel et al. (2021).
Here we can more clearly see that it isn’t necessarily the amount of REM-sleep that is so much reduced, but rather the timing of it. Where the peak REM% occurs after 2 hours of sleep for the withdrawal (2) and placebo group (3), the continuous-consumption group (1) had its peak 2 hours later. In other words, caffeine consumption during the day delays REM-sleep cycles.
Coming back to the argument I made two days ago; it might be the case that knowledge workers suffer more from cutting short on sleep. Now, we can also say that this effect is further exacerbated by continuous caffeine consumption.
The interaction here is interesting, and I’ve tried to illustrate it below:
When you consume caffeine, your REM-cycle is affected, and your sleep quality impaired. Because of this, you feel more tired in the morning (this was also confirmed in this study) and are encouraged to consume caffeine to feel more awake. This reinforcing cycle makes that you become ‘locked-in’ to a caffeine-routine. The only way to escape it would be to sleep for (say 2) extra hours on top of your typical cycle and to refrain from consuming caffeine afterwards.
It’s important to note that consuming caffeine is not a substitute for REM sleep. While you might be able to mitigate the ‘sleepiness’-effect, you still miss out on enhanced learning, memory consolidation, creativity, and emotional regulation. Furthermore, you will feel more refreshed when you wake up, not only after having your ‘first cup of Joe.’
This study and my previous post got me excited to add a new dimension to the ‘dry January’ that is upcoming. I’m curious to see how abstaining from caffeine (both coffee and tea) affects my sleep (which I can measure very roughly with my sports watch) and my sleep quality (which I can measure through maintaining a record of my results on the Leeds Sleep Evaluation Questionnaire). I’ll get back to you sharing the results in February!
Footnotes
- Weibel, J., Lin, Y.-S., Landolt, H.-P., Berthomier, C., Brandewinder, M., Kistler, J., Rehm, S., Rentsch, K. M., Meyer, M., Borgwardt, S., Cajochen, C., & Reichert, C. F. (2021). Regular Caffeine Intake Delays REM Sleep Promotion and Attenuates Sleep Quality in Healthy Men. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 36(4), 384–394. https://doi.org/10.1177/07487304211013995
Abandoning ‘body-notions’ in guided meditation
When we meditate, we try to be one with our awareness and whatever occurs in it. This means losing the so-called ‘ego,’ a mental picture of ourselves as separate individuals, rather than the open awareness we really are.
Yet, most guided meditations speak about “becoming aware of the sensations in your body,” which constrains our feelings to our physical form.
Let me explain.
When you have closed your eyes and I tell you to “focus on the sensations in your feet,” you might catch yourself doing the following. You imagine your feet: they shape, the surface they rest on, and the position they occupy with respect to the rest of your body. Then you experience the sensation inside this mental image you’ve created.
You create a mental construct of yourself—your ego—in which you place the sensation you experience. In a way, this meditation is built on a false foundation, and you’re unable to be with the sensation as is.
We shouldn’t “go through our bodies” when we mediate, we should “go through our awareness” instead. While it may seem like a subtle difference, the lived experience is completely different.
Hopefully I’ll be able to illustrate this notion in a guided meditation I hope to record soon!
