Do you stress & want results "now"?
Well, well, well, look who's back listening to the podcast trying to improve their life. Today's podcast is a bit of a different one. The reason I'm talking about this topic is that one of the main factors behind you not losing weight, keeping it off, gaining muscle, whatever your goal is, the unrealistic expectations on how quick it happens. It's not a quick process, if you try and speed it up it's going to go against you. You need patience, you need time.
Speaker 1:Another topic of time, there's a book I'm reading called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and it talks about the brief history of time which I'd love to share with you now. So I'm just going to read out this book. Hopefully it's not too long guys but I'll try and cut down. Okay, you ready? Are you ready?
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's go. Okay, so in 200 the Roman playwright Plato turned anger into poetry. He said this: The gods confounded the man who first found out how to distinguish ours. It goes on about the first sundial. He said it was terrible to break and hack your days into such small portions.
Speaker 1:But then it goes on in the book to say, in 1370 the turning point in West relationship with time. That year the first public clock tower was erected in Cologne, Germany. Before that time was natural, it was linked to the rotation of the earth on its axis and the four seasons. You went to bed with the moon and got up with the sun. Days were long and busy in the summer, short and slow in the winter.
Speaker 1:There was a rhythm to the day and even the year. Life was dominated by agrarian rhythms free of haste, careless, unconcerned by productivity. In the words of the French medievalist, Jacques Legault and yes I just quoted a French medievalist, by the clock changed all that. It created artificial time, the slog of the nine to five all year long. We stopped listening to our bodies and started rising when our lambs drowned us with an aggressive siren.
Speaker 1:Not when our bodies were done resting, we became more efficient, yes, but also more machine, less human being. Listen to one of historians summary of this key moment. Here was man's declaration of independence from the sun, new proof of his mastery over himself and his surroundings. Only later would it be revealed that he had accomplished this mastery by putting himself under the dominion of a machine with imperious demands all its own. When the sun set our rhythms of work and rest, it did so under the control of God, but the clock is under the control of the employer, a far more demanding master.
Speaker 1:Then in 1879, you had Edison and the light bulb, which made it possible to stay up past sunset. Okay. Brace yourself for the next start. Before Edison, the average person person slept eleven hours a night. Yes.
Speaker 1:Eleven. I used to read biography biography yeah. Sorry. I used to read biographies of great men and women from history who got up to pray at 04:00 in the morning. Saint Teresa, John Wesley, Charles Spurgeon, I would think, woah, they are way more serious about Jesus than I am.
Speaker 1:By the way, this author's a religious guy. True. But then I realized that they went to bed at 07:00. After nine hours of sleep, what else was there to do? Now at least in America, we're down to about seven as the medium number of hours of sleep a night.
Speaker 1:That's two and a half hours less sleep than just a century ago. Is it any wonder we're exhausted all the time? About a century ago, technology started to change our relationship to time yet again, this time with so called labor saving devices. For example, in winter, you used to you used to have to go out into the forest, risk being eaten alive by an animal, chop a tree down with an axe using your bare hands, drag the tree back to your cabin, chop it into pieces, and then make a fire again with your bare hands. Now all you have to do is walk over to the thermostat on the wall and, bam, magically magical warm air appears.
Speaker 1:Examples are legion. We used to walk everywhere. Now we have cars to get from place to place in a hurry. We used to make all our food from scratch. Now we have a takeout.
Speaker 1:We used to write letters by hand, I still love doing this by the way. Now we have email and of course our new best friend AI. Yet despite of our smartphones and programmable coffee pots and dishwashers and laundry machines and toasters, most of us feel like we have less time, not more. So what the hell is going on? Where did that time go?
Speaker 1:Answer, we spent it in other things. In the nineteen sixties, futurists all over the world from sci fi writers to political theorists thought that by now we'd all be working way fewer hours. One famous senate subcommittee in 1967 was told that by 1985 the average American would work only twenty two hours a week for twenty seven weeks a year. Everybody thought the main problem in the future would be too much leisure. Are you laughing right now?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's funny, kind of. Unless you're French to all three of my French readers, we mock you, but it's only because we're jealous. The exact opposite has happened. Leisure time has gone down. The average American works nearly four more weeks per year than they did in 1979.
Speaker 1:Harvard Business Review recently conducted a study on the change in social status in America. It used to be that leisure was a sign of wealth. People with more money spent their time playing tennis or sailing in the bay or sipping white wine during lunch at the golf club, but that's changed. No busyness is a sign of wealth. You see this cultural shift in advertising, commercials and magazines, ads for luxury items like a Maserati or Rolex used to show the rich sitting by a pool in the South Of France.
Speaker 1:Now they're more likely to show the in New York or Downtown LA leading a meeting from a high rise office, going out for late night drinks at a trendy club, or traveling the world. Woah. Okay. A century ago, the less you worked, the more status you had. Now it's flipped.
Speaker 1:The more you sit around and relax, the less status you have. Not surprisingly, over this time period we've seen the death of the Sabbath in American life. Until the 1960s, blue laws forced businesses to close on Sabbath, a government mandated speed limit on the pace of American life. My dad is pushing Sempty, and he tells stories about growing up in the Bay Area in the fifties and how the entire city would shut down at six on weekdays and all day on Sundays. Nothing was open but the church.
Speaker 1:Nobody went out to brunch or the sports game, less shopping. Can you imagine that happening in Silicon Valley today? I can't. My dad still talks about what a big deal it was when seven eleven came to town. The first chain store to stay open seven days a week and until eleven in one generation, Sundays evolved from a day of rest and worship to a day of buy more crap we don't need, run errands, eat out, or just get a jump start and all work for the week ahead.
Speaker 1:Our culture never even slowed down long enough to ask what will this new pace of life do to our souls. We lost more than a day of rest, we lost a day for our souls to open up. All of this reached a climax in 2007 when history books are written, they will point to o seven as the inflection point on par with 1440. And 1440, of course, was the year Jonas Gutenberg invented the printing press, which set the stage for the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, which together transformed Europe and the world. And 2007, the year Steve Jobs released the iPhone into the wild.
Speaker 1:So the world has radically changed in a few short years. In very recent memory none of us had a smartphone or Wi Fi access, now we can imagine living without this. The Internet alone has changed the world and not just for the better. Depending on who you talk to, our IQs are at least our capacity to pay attention has gone down. What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation whether I'm online or not.
Speaker 1:My mind now expects to take information the way the net distributes it in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words, now I zipped along the surface like a guy on the jet ski. A recent study found that the average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,600 times a day. Each user is on his or her phone for at least two and a half hours. That's for all smartphone users.
Speaker 1:Another study on millennials put the number twice that. A similar study found that just being in the same room as our phones will reduce someone's working memory and problem solving skills. Translation, they make us dumber. Let's skip a bit. Clear the terrifying trend.
Speaker 1:Our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, was twelve seconds, so it's not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room, but since then it's dropped to eight seconds. To put that into perspective, a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. We actually are goldfish now, that's mad. That's supposed offensive to someone.
Speaker 1:You can't mind if a goldfish. Yeah, we do, all of us know, happy days. But the odds are none your favor. There are literally thousands of apps and devices engineered to steal your attention. And, guys, before earlier started way back in 1936, another, literary prophet, Aldous Saxley, he's amazing, wrote of man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.
Speaker 1:In his in his in his novel Brave New World, we he envisioned a future dystopia, not of dictatorship, but of destruction where sex, entertainment and busyness tear apart the fabric of society. It's almost like he was onto something. The problem is even if we realize and admit that we have this digital addiction, it's an addiction, our willpower doesn't stand a chance against the LightBotan. So if you think of the exceptions that look great, prove it. Turn off your phone for twenty four hours straight, do just one day, call it digital Sabbath.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be hard for us, isn't it? Then he goes on to say, It's easy to just assume the pace of life is normal, it's not. The time of farming we grew up in is relatively recent. We're still testing out as a species and early results are terrifying. To summarize, after the millennia of slow gradual acceleration in recent decades, the sheer velocity of our culture has reached an exponential fever pitch.
Speaker 1:My question is simple, what is all the distraction, addiction and pace of life doing to our souls? Well, well, I don't know how long that was but I found that very interesting and I think we have to really take serious note of this. It's not going to happen with us just going, yeah, yeah, I'll make more time. We covered a book on Book Club called How to live on twenty four hours a day. You think you're going get more hours in a day?
Speaker 1:You're not. Like this book says, we've always had twenty four hours or sixteen waking hours, we fill it with so much crap now, we feel like time's going quicker, there's nothing to do, we have to start saying no to more things. That's why I think your daily walk or a few walks a day, really slow paced, you can listen to a podcast or you can just listen to nothing, slow everything down. Everything is fast. You might have to go to bed earlier to get those few peak hours in the morning.
Speaker 1:Those first one to two hours in the morning when you wake up are like golden hours. They're worth more like Annie says this in how to live on twenty four hours a day by Arnold Bennett. He says two morning hours are worth four evening hours or one morning hours worth two evening hours, and I agree with him. So we have to protect these. Now when it comes to your goals, you've got to think about do you want to join the frantic pace people over there and if you were to zoom out they're just like headless chickens or a dog running around trying to catch his own tail.
Speaker 1:You look at them going why are they not getting anywhere?' But look how much energy they're using, look how stressed they are. There is an alternative to this, it's the left path, slow. You move slow, you move with intention, you're peeling back the layers of who you are, you're reading the book of yourself, you really aren't trying to understand yourself and your conditioning basically, why you do what you do, your relationship with food, your relationship with exercise, your relationship with lifestyle, your relationship with work, your relationship with your partner. All of these things will reveal themselves to you if you dare slow down and give attention to them. And the attention has to be without condemnation by the way.
Speaker 1:You have to give attention to these things without judging them. You just have to look at them and you're going to start seeing the reality of a lot of these situations. And for a lot of you, when you look at the weight loss journey and you look at yourself and how frantic you've been and how easily you're falling for different plans and promotions, you start realising it's like you feel like you're not good enough as you are now, you have to lose weight in order to be someone that's trusted or someone that's worthwhile. You feel like if you don't get there fast you're going to be wasting your life, all this stuff. But you as a person, your energy and who you are is not determined by how much you weigh.
Speaker 1:You can for sure have that energy, have that impact, be that person that really is a great addition to any group whilst losing weight slowly. Because at the end of the day, when you look back at photos of you leaner from years ago and I ask you how did you feel about yourself then? You'd still say I didn't feel great then either, I felt like I could have always been skinnier. So no matter the mind tricks you, or you lose all this weight then you'll be happy, that's not how it works. You've got to work on being this like, as it said, and Bruce Lee was a big believer in this, it's like self actualisation.
Speaker 1:There's a lot to be said about trying to understand where the hell we want to go. We want to be healthy so we can be the person we were meant to be. We're not trying to lose weight so we can have a cool fort or by a pool. We're not trying to lose weight so we're getting back at someone who said we look terrible, we're not doing it for that. We're doing it for the health benefits and it means most likely that most of us are not going to be walking around with abs because to get to the point of having abs and visible abs really is a slog.
Speaker 1:What you're saying is, I what doing this for? I don't care if I've got abs showing but other people will. Do we really want to go down our path? Or is it that we want to get down to a body fat percentage that's healthy, we want to get to a muscle mass percentage that's healthy, we want to get stronger, leaner as we age so that we can be there for our families and friends. That's really the deep why of all of this.
Speaker 1:So you have to really look at the reasons you're doing stuff and there's a really good thing you can do, it's called seven Levels Deep and there's a website called seven Levels Deep, you can do it. It starts off, you tell it a goal, I want to lose weight and then it asks you why, so I'll do this: Your goal. I want to lose weight. And you say, why? And I say, well, I want to lose weight because I want to be more confident.
Speaker 1:Why do you want to be more confident? Well, if I'm more confident, I feel like I'll maybe attract the right partner in my life. Why do you need to attract the right partner in your life? Well, I feel like with the right partner in my life, I'll be happier. Why do you feel like you'd be happier?
Speaker 1:And you you keep going to a deep why, and then a deep why really for most people is similar in a sense that it's you want to live a life where you haven't wasted time with those most dear to you, most nearest and dearest to you. You want to feel like you've been like a star in their lives, you know what I mean? Like in all of them, you don't want to be the person that's doom and gloom and oh I don't eat this and dinner and this and that, and you need food prison and all this stuff and bringing everyone down, talking about weight loss all the time, blah blah blah. You want to be free from that nonsense so you can give that energy to your family and friends and everyone's in a much happier place about it. No one likes the person complaining 20 fourseven, especially someone that's like I'm only going to have a piece of leaf for dinner.
Speaker 1:No way. Out you go. You leaf? Want Go away. Get yourself.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I hope that was a useful podcast on hurry time and stuff like that, so take it slow. The name of this podcast is one day at a time for a reason. You're gonna focus on now until bedtime, you're gonna get your steps in, you're going to track voice log if it's easy, whatever you want to do, however you want to track, do it that way. Just slow down a bit and enjoy it for once. You get a chance today to improve your health, a lot of people don't.
Speaker 1:Make sure you don't take that for granted. I'll see you back tomorrow.
