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!
Science says: use your circadian rhythm to plan your day
Have you ever felt your brain sluggishly trudging through an early morning tasks? Or have you found yourself unexpectedly sharp and productive late in the afternoon? You’re not imagining it.
Our bodies are wired to perform differently throughout the day. The circadian rhythm influences everything from our energy levels to cognitive sharpness, including attention. 🧠
In a world of rigid work & school schedules, we’ll likely find ourselves at odds with our internal clocks. The effect of this is explored in today’s study of ‘science says.’
The review study analysed four components of attention:
Tonic alertness is like our internal “ready mode.” It is the baseline level of alertness that keeps us prepared to notice and react to what’s happening around us. It represents the overall state of arousal or mental activation that our body and mind maintain at any given moment.
Phasic alertness is our ability to quickly respond to something after a warning signal. It’s what helps us prepare and react swiftly to sudden changes in our surroundings.
Selective attention is the ability to focus on one stimulus and respond to it while ignoring others. It helps us filter out distractions and concentrate on what matters.
Sustained attention: is the ability to stay focused and respond over an extended period of time (minutes–hours).
The basic conclusion is as follows:
In the morning (7:00–10:00), attention is at its lowest due to the body’s natural rhythm and the lingering effects of sleep inertia. It improves by late morning (10:00–14:00) but tends to dip again after lunch (14:00–16:00). Performance picks up in the late afternoon and early evening (16:00–22:00), reaching a peak before declining again at night (22:00–4:00). The lowest levels occur in the early morning hours (4:00–7:00).
This pattern applies to people with a typical sleep schedule (23:00–7:00) and an intermediate chronotype. You can adjust the times above according to your chronotype by adding or subtracting the difference in sleep & waking time.
When we misalign our natural circadian rhythm with demanding tasks it can impact our performance. Eating snacks, taking short naps, or consuming caffeine may provide temporary boosts in alertness. However, the authors not that “[a]lthough these measures tend to offer a transitory increase in alertness, they may not be effective to improve phasic alertness, selective attention or sustained attention” (p. 87).
While some of us have the freedom to synchronise our cognitively demanding tasks with this circadian rhythm, kids at school are not. Consequently, the authors conclude with a critical note on school schedules (often starting from 07:00–08:00). Even for those with a ‘normal’ circadian rhythm, these times are severely misaligned. For the evening chronotype, this effect is exacerbated: school starts when their attention is lowest.
This ‘science says’-article is based on: Valdez, P. (2019). Circadian Rhythms in Attention. (link)
Science says: drink tea, not coffee, for focus and alertness
When we feel tardy and unalert, most of us take a quick trip to the coffee machine. Rightfully so: coffee’s high dose of caffeine effectively ‘blocks’ the neurochemical adenosine that makes you feel sleepy. However, as a side effect, it also delays our sleep onset, reduces sleep quality, and shortens the total sleep duration.
Consequently, a 2000-study set out to compare coffee to its ‘light’ counterpart: (black) tea.
The study had 30 healthy adults (both men and women) drink black tea, black coffee, or water in equal amounts four times a day (morning, afternoon, evening, and late evening) over separate test days. Participants rotated through these drinks in a randomised order, with a six-day break between test days to reset.
They tested alertness, reaction time, and sleep quality using various methods, like reaction-time tests and questionnaires, to see how each drink affected performance and sleep.
The results on sleep were not so surprising. Because tea has less caffeine, it messes with sleep much less than coffee does. Drinking coffee—especially at higher doses—deteriorated participant’s sleep much more.
On focus and alertness, things got interesting. Within 30–90 minutes of drinking tea, participants scored better on a test measuring alertness compared to coffee when the caffeine content was matched. On reaction time, coffee drinkers responded only slightly faster than tea drinkers did.
Tea drinkers in the study had consistent levels of alertness throughout the day. Coffee, on the other hand, gave a quick boost but sometimes led to sharper drops later.
As such, the study concluded:
This study […] demonstrates that day-long tea consumption produces similar alerting effects to coffee, despite lower caffeine levels, but is less likely to disrupt sleep. (p.)
But how can this be? The authors argue that the benefits of tea on concentration might be attributed to its flavonoid content, which could enhance focus on their own.
What’s more: research indicates that these flavonoids may play a role in cognitive health, slowing down age-related cognitive decline. (See for example this recent systematic review by Godos & colleagues).
Tea offers a smoother, balanced boost compared to coffee’s intense jolt, keeping you alert without wrecking your sleep. For focus and better rest, tea might just be the smarter sip.
This ‘research says’-article is based on: Hindmarch, I., Rigney, U., Stanley, N., Quinlan, P., Rycroft, J., & Lane, J. (2000). A naturalistic investigation of the effects of day-long consumption of tea, coffee and water on alertness, sleep onset and sleep quality. Psychopharmacology, 149(3), 203–216. https://doi.org/10.1007/s002130000383
Awareness of the Body
We have been alienated from out physical nature through changes in work and living. Many of us have shifted from physical to mental work and live in the city—far removed from nature. Furthermore, the dominance of the literate mind, favouring abstractions, classification and analysis, distance us from direct experience. We want to stand back and examine it cognitively.
The first of the Buddha’s spheres of mindfulness concerns the body. Awareness of the body makes us feel alive—an exploration into the nature of experience itself. The first step toward awareness of the body is to inquire our present attitude toward it.
We tend to think of the body as separate from the mind. While we often perceive it as an object from the outside, we experience it from within. Hence, the first thing we should learn is awareness of our inner physical sense.
Most of us hold habitual tensions and posture of which we are completely unaware. By cultivating mindfulness, we become aware of them and allow ourselves to let them go. However, as we will notice, letting go of physical tension has as much to do with the mind as it does with the body.
Some of our tensions are ‘physical memories.’ By gradually exploring our pains and tensions through meditation, a memory may rise and fade, and with it the tension that contained it.
Gradually, awareness strengthens the integration of body and mind; they become more connected. Through sensation, the body will ‘communicate’ with us in a similar way to how thoughts manifest in the physical realm. When we allow both to be, we become an integrated whole.
Tensions in the body that have become habits, or instinctual, go beyond simply that. They are at the core of our being; they have become part of I. We can clearly observe this in others; the way someone walks, moves, stands and sits, each express who that person is.
Even when these postures of movements may be uncomfortable, we hold on to them, because they express our habitual self. When we strongly want, or strongly resist something, our body tenses up. Letting go of our bodily tensions requires loosening our attachment to self.
‘Self’ is the habit of being a particular way—which is also a habit of holding our bodies in a particular way. By letting go of one, you let go of the other.
Cultivating bodily awareness
‘Step 0’ for deepening bodily awareness entails taking good care of it. We will therefor start by cultivating awareness of what and how much we eat and drink, but also how well we sleep.
We know the beneficial health effect of a vegan or vegetarian diet and the habit of getting (at least) 30 minutes of aerobic exercise several times a week. Make sure you engage your body, and get those breaths of fresh air, every single day. Avoid junk food, and processed food more generally. Drink enough water and get sufficient sleep. The latter meaning that you sleep until you wake up naturally, adjusting when you go to sleep at night to get up at the desirable time in the morning. 🛏
After taking this baseline step, we can start to find ways to escape the chatter of our mind. An effective way to do that is in deliberate physical movement, or more specifically, a mindful walk. The richness in sensations of movement and in being outside make it much easier to connect to our body. 🚶♂️
Here are some actions you may take to improve your awareness during such a mindful walk:
- Describe your route in advance: where will you walk and what will you see? Try to visualise the walk in its entirety. To do so you may want to draw it out or write it down.
- Write down what obstacles you may face when trying to take a habitual mindful walk.
- Think of (creative) ways to address these barriers.
- Review how it went immediately after the walk or combined with the journaling exercise at the end of the day.
- Use ques during walking, for example:
- Focus on the movement of your body as you walk.
- Bring your attention to the soles of your feet.
- Count your steps (when you are particularly stressed or distracted).
- Bring feelings that prevent you from walking mindfully into awareness.
- Bring an appreciative attention to your experience.
- Use your imagination, e.g. how your steps reverberate through the ground.
When we have the room to do so, we can add a mindful body scan to our daily meditation practice. Besides cultivating bodily awareness, body scans are particularly useful to uncover and dissipate habitual tension. ⚡
The body scan is about filling the body with awareness; bringing a non-judgmental awareness to whatever it is that you can feel—comfortable or not, relaxed or tense. It is important that you do not try to change anything, you should not even try to relax. The procedure is as follows:
- Lie down on the floor with feet flat, knees bent, and only the head supported (you should be able to touch the back of your neck). Have your elbows to the side and hands rest on your belly. When you are ready: close your eyes.
- Bring your awareness into the body and feel its weight on the floor. Then, cultivate detailed awareness of each part of your body in succession. It doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you move through your body in its entirety. Notice what you feel, not what you think you feel.
- Open your eyes. When we think about moving, our mind often jumps to the end of the movement and hence creates tension within our body. When you roll to your side, try to make the movement completely deliberate, try to make the movement itself the end. Try to maintain that attitude as you get up from the floor.
Second practice week
For this week, join me in starting the following habits in addition to what we wrote down last week:
Health audit
Every day, I will take into awareness and reflect on my body’s state in the following health domains:
- sleep,
- being outside,
- exercise,
- eating, and
- drinking,
using the following scales to assign overall scores:
- extremely bad,
- poor,
- neither particularly good or bad,
- good, and
- excellent.
Mindfulness walk
I will go for a mindful walk every day. This means deliberately committing to walking mindfully for at least 5 minutes time. It can, and ideally should, be combined with walking that is already planned.
The most likely obstacle I can envision is that I either (1) don’t have enough time or that (2) it is raining, and I don’t want to go. When I foresee that time is limited when I schedule my time the day before, I will go on a mindfulness walk directly after lunch instead of hanging out longer with colleagues. In the case that it is raining while I work from home, I will take my umbrella. When I’m in the office, I will instead ensure that I will do the body scan when I get home.
Body scan
Whenever I get home, I will first do a 10–20-minute body scan to make sure I don’t carry over any stress or tension I’ve built up throughout the day.
Here the most obvious limitation is time. Whenever it seems I do not have the time to do the body scan, I will remind me of its importance and how it will likely help me save time later as I will be more focused and aware.
Are you ready to add this week’s habits to last week’s commitment list?
Day-to-day mindfulness: Reflection
During the first two weeks of life with full attention, I listed some habits and routines in order to enhance my day-to-day mindfulness. Since the course’s second week starts tomorrow, I wanted to briefly reflect on the past two weeks.
First of all, I wrote down the following habits, which I marked by how often I managed to maintain them (red, orange and green, for almost never, occasionally, and often respectively).
- Journal at least one sentence every day, before going to bed. 🔴
- Read at least one section or chapter from a book before starting my day. 🟠
- When I notice I started to feel some form of displeasure, recall what caused it and write it down in my pocket-book. 🟠
While I made no spectacular progress on any of them, they remained in my awareness and occasionally I even managed to do them.
Particularly the habit of taking a moment when I feel some form of displeasure was an interesting experience. While I only wrote it down once, I could often retrace a plausible cause of my displeasure. Often, these were the results of actions taken against my better judgment. Hopefully, growing this awareness will help me to make better decisions in my day-to-day life.
Now, doing the same for my routines:
- Clean up dishes from the drying rack while cooking, and do the dishes directly after eating dinner. 🟢
- When I get home, put the keys in the door, put my coat on the hanger, put my shoes away, and clean up the contents of my work and sports bag. 🟠
- Before starting a new task at work, make sure there are no unnecessary programmes opened on my PC. 🔴
- Make my bed after waking up. 🟢
- Clear my desk/table after having done something there. 🟠
- Write a to-do list for tomorrow at the end of my day (already doing this). 🟢
- After using something (like my scissors) put it back where I got it from. 🟠
Here also some mixed results, but overall, I’m happy with the progress I made. I realised that for many of these routines, such as making my bed, it does not even feel like an extra thing to do. Just the moment of being aware of it is all that I need to do it!
Tomorrow we will see what the next step will be in the life with full attention-course. Let’s keep up the habits and routines!
What was your experience on day-to-day mindfulness through simple habits and routines? Do you feel like your overall awareness has improved?
The freedom of truth
On my trip to Paris, I started reading the book Principles by Ray Dalio. Principles are an important part of the inner philosophy. However, I haven’t really specified them for myself, and I rarely reflect on their implementation.
An interesting passage in the book, where the author share’s some principles which he thinks are universal for any human being, is about the act of speaking the truth.
For me, and I think for many others, speaking the truth is seen as a virtuous thing to do. It is a part of being ‘a good person’ and is often mentioned in the value and aspiration domain.
Dalio sees speaking the truth not from the other’s perspective, but from your own. In the book, he writes: “being truthful was an extension of my freedom to be me.”
Personally, I find this an illuminating perspective. You speak the truth for yourself so you can be who you are. Not as an honest service to others. This makes honesty a noble goal to pursue for yourself.
In my own inner philosophy, ‘honestly’ was connected to one of my core values ‘authenticity,’ but not yet to freedom. Now it is stronger integrated than it was before!
Is honesty part of your core values? How does this perspective resonate with you?
TIL@ISCFS Day 2
Today was my second day at the International Symposium for Climate Finance and Sustainability (ISCFS). Just like yesterday’s post, there are my reflection on the conference as a research gathering, and my top5 learnings of the day.
Doing research or defending outcomes
I have seen about 15 presentations, and so far, only one presenter has been taking notes during the question rounds. Yet, I’ve heard quite a few presenters note how grateful they were for the insightful comments… 🤔
This extends to something I observed yesterday as well, that a lot of researchers are not looking for feedback. While I probably have the tendency to do the same, it seems as if every question has to be refuted or discredited. Except for one person, I felt like no one in the sessions I attended was actively and enthusiastically looking for feedback.
This is also in line with what I talked about yesterday. Do quantitative researchers skip qualitative validation because it is too difficult or inaccessible or it is because they are scared they might find out they were (partially) wrong?
Adding to yesterday’s observation, this is another slightly disappointing one to me. I think the pursuit of the truth is not only our task as scientists, but also the joy of our occupation. Wouldn’t conferences be so much more fun when we would all put our heads together to help each other with our research goals?
More cool (and not so cool) facts
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Following the second and third phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), power companies reduced their emissions by 12 and 19 % respectively.
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The US leaving the Paris agreement has a statistically significant negative effect on US ESG scores. The scores decreased by 1.something points. The decrease is persistent, so not just the first year after the withdrawal. For firms in areas susceptible to extreme weather events this effect is more pronounced. Also, the effect is more relevant for red states. With Trump in office again, this is a worrying signal.
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When people are in a very efficient house, they are warming their houses warmer than average. When they are in a very energy inefficient house, it is lower than average. This is called the ‘rebound effect.’ While the rebound effect is often mentioned as a critique to the labels, the pre-bound effect is stronger: so, people that have a very high expected consumption are using ‘more less’ than that people with efficient houses are using more.
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For institutional investors, it is more interesting what a company says they are going to do with respect to sustainability than what they then actually do. When corporate governance is strong (high G-value in the ESG score), the impact of emission reduction commitments is higher (1.5%).
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There is more finance flowing from the developing to the developed world (without china) in terms of debt repayment than there is money flowing the other way.
TIL@ISCFS Day 1
Since I’m attending the International Symposium for Climate Finance and Sustainability (ISCFS) today and tomorrow, I thought it’d be nice to share some of the things I learned. Today and tomorrow, I will start with a reflection on the conference as a research gathering, and then give you my top5 learnings of the day.
The dominance of quantitative research and misaligned worldviews
My first observation, already after the third morning presentation, is that doing statistical analysis is really cool. The format is similar: I have this hypothesis, I take this data, there’s a correlation that is statistically significant, so this is true. 😎
Following from that, my second observation is that qualitatively investigating whether the thing you concluded with all these numbers is not so cool. 😕❌
A lot of researchers look at the world as almost separate from themselves, not even considering the possibility of asking someone in the domain that they are researching whether their conclusions could be true!
Honestly, I find this very disappointing and scary even, because we are setting ourselves up for disconnecting ourselves from reality and, more crucially, making policy recommendations that are based on a world that might not be ‘true.’
I am a bit baffled by the fact that journals don’t maintain any minimum requirements for validating statistical analysis. As scientists, we should be doing our absolute best to find out the truth, not hide from it behind our screens.
Cool facts
Life hack: when one of the presentors has to chair a session, schedule them to have the last presentation in the slot. When you do that, they have a strong incentive to make sure the prior presentations do not take more time. 🧠
In the Netherlands, licence plates are connected to the car, in other countries (e.g. Belgium and Germany), they are connected to the driver.
For the second-hand market of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), we should require the disclosure of a measure of the state of the battery alongside things like age or mileage. Currently, when these cars are sold on the second-hand market, people assume the worst for the battery quality, driving down the prices of second-hand BEVs substantially.
Carbon assurance is the act of hiring an independent entity to check reported CO2 emissions. There is a statistical correlation between the amount of woman on a company board and the likelihood that this company would initiate a carbon assurance inquiry. Although I wonder if this is because of the woman in the board or because these companies have a different corporate culture that coincidentally also has the effect to have more women in higher positions. But yea… Statistics don’t tell us this…
Increased hot and cold spikes hurt the visits to small businesses and consequently their sales. Since these small businesses have little back-up cash, many such spikes in a short period of time can cause them to go bankrupt. The latter part is not the case for big retail chains. Consequently, increased extreme weather events, like heat or cold shocks, will re-balance the markt in favour of big corporations.
Assessment cycles for an integrated life
After having derived a suitable period for assessing the relationship between your goals, habits and principles with your aspirations, we now have the final piece of the puzzle to create a structure for assessment cycles for an integrated life. With an ‘integrated life,’ I here refer to a life lived in line with one’s inner philosophy as established in one of my earlier articles.
Let’s start with an overview diagram:
Very abstractly, we kickstart this whole process by taking a day to develop our inner philosophy. This should contain all our (core) values and our aspirations for how we want to embody them (who we want to become). Furthermore, we have a base archive of the goals, habits and principles that we are already implementing or pursuing, and the ones we (think we) want to pursue at some point in time.
Once we have developed this initial structure, which we will do again every 1–4 years depending on how ‘solid’ you feel your foundation is, we can work on our first ‘momentum cycle.’ Here we select what goals, habits and principles to explore in the coming 4–8 weeks, focusing on 1–3 of our aspirations.
This can also be a moment to do or plan some extra research into one of our aspirations. For example, if you want to become more mindful, we can look for possible goals, habits, and principles that can help us achieve this first.
Besides focusing on the ‘what’ (what to do), we have a moment to devise a strategy on ‘how’ we will do it. How can we facilitate ourselves best to achieve our goals and maintain our habits and principles?
The latter part, the strategy, is what we will evaluate by the end of each week. What worked out and what didn’t? How can we re-strategise to be more successful in the coming week? We need to give ourselves some time to do these things properly, because we cannot know beforehand how exactly things will turn out.
I think a healthy mindset is to see it all as an experiment: you think this habit, goal or principle will help you to become (for example) healthier, and you are now trying to find out whether this is actually the case. This, as opposed to having to convince yourself you need to adhere to something simply because someone else told you that it works (and if it doesn’t you must be doing it wrong).
Every 4–8 weeks, depending on how often you needed to adapt your strategies, we will do a momentum assessment. As I introduced in this post, we should periodically evaluate whether our goals, habits, and principles are actually living up to their expected effect—the pursuit of our aspirations. This is important because in principle, the ultimate goal of the goals, habits, and principles that we define is to live up to the aspirations of who we would want to be.
We can use this moment to see whether or not we feel like we have ‘gained momentum’ on any of our aspirations, but particularly those we set out to work on before. If we made progress, that’s great! If not, we may want to reconsider the effectiveness of the goals, habits, and principles we thought would be worthwhile.
In any case, we can come back to our inner philosophy and see what aspirations to (continue to) work on next. Periodically reflecting on why we are doing things will motivate us to keep at it by igniting our intrinsic motivation, and help us to lead a more integrated life.
Planning your day a day ahead
Last time in ‘habits that stick’ (perhaps I should make this a dedicated series!) I talked about the benefits I experienced from reading at least one page from a book each morning. Today, I want to talk about planning your day ahead. 📅
There have been many days at work where after arriving, I never quite got started until I was ready to leave. I quickly found out that this happened mostly when I didn’t have something on which I could simply get started. I would do something here and there, check my email, annotate a paper from last week, talk to a colleague and go for an early swim.
Besides these days being unproductive, they also felt unproductive. Tones and hints of guilt and shame and lack of purpose were certainly meandering around.
To-do's from yesterday
During these kinds of days, it’s when I most clearly see the value of to-do lists, and particularly the value of making them the day-ahead.
Similar to the post about reading, I feel like our brain needs some time to go from dream-state, when we seem to be thinking about ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ to focus state in order to get stuff done.
When we do not have at least the first thing written out in front of us, we set ourselves up for failure. Our brain seems incredibly susceptible to finding everything equally important and unable to decide on what thing to start. We activate all our brain regions a little bit and are, indeed, far from focused at all.
So, today’s habit I’d like to recommend is to find a moment, at least before the end of your (work)day, to decide what you will do tomorrow. This doesn’t have to be a detailed planning of your entire day, but at least the first thing you can focus on. If only to get your brain from dream- to focus state. 🧠
How often should you re-evaluate your principles, habits and goals?
Yesterday I elaborated on the importance of assessing the progress on your aspirations, the traits of the person you aspire to be, e.g. becoming healthy, mindful, or compassionate.
Assessing to what extent your goals, values and principles contribute to your aspirations is critical to strategically live up to them. However, assessing progress in this rather ‘fuzzy’ domain is challenging, and I presented the momentum framework for dealing with this.
But when or how often should you re-assess the effectiveness of your goals, habits and principles? How often should you regroup and re-strategise your efforts to achieve your aspirations? That’s what I want to talk about today.
Timeframes for changing life experiences
The higher we move up the foundation of our inner philosophy, the more ill-defined our methods seem to become. Hence, we need to get a little more creative in our design. 🧑🎨
A good source of a potential estimate is in the domain of habit formation. When we ask our AI friend how much time it typically takes for our habits to bear fruit in different contexts, we find the following:
Physical health: 1–8 weeks
Mental health: 2–8 weeks
Productivity: 1–4 weeks
Learning: 12–24 weeks
Social and emotional well-being: 1–2 weeks
Cognitive performance: 4–8 weeks
We can plot these ranges to see how many domains we can or will experience after weeks of implementation.
From this graph, we can extract a useful rule of thumb. Namely: you should assess the progress on your aspirations over a period of no less than 4 weeks, and no more than 8 weeks’ time. 📆
This is, of course, when we presume that you are pursuing various things in various aspiration domains. When you are hard focusing on only one, you can take a more dedicated assessment period from the list above.
Special case: life-changing events
I’d say that a special exception to my rule of thumb is when you are about to experience a life-changing event. Significant events, like moving to a new place, starting a new job, or experiencing a major life transition, act as powerful psychological ‘bookmarks.’
Re-assessing your aspiration state just before, and then again 4–8 weeks after the event, can bring you illuminating insights into how the event influenced you as a person.
What do you think would be a good estimate? Do you think you will still be able to compare your progress on your aspirations with how you felt 4–8 weeks ago? Share your insights below! 👇
