Beeminder was helpful for smaller habits, but I'm too scared to pledge a truly painful amount of money, so the cost of failure was often too low to motivate me.
When possible, I've found that simply moving to a new setting is helpful. I can crank through tedious tasks if I go somewhere other people are being productive. I like the university library (I graduated long ago, but it's free and open to the public).
I work well when I have externally-exposed structure. I reliably make it to the gym when I have a standing appointment with a personal trainer. Working a job with a fixed schedule is easier for me than working a flexible schedule. Back in college, I struggled to keep up with homework but I almost never missed a class.
Sometimes I'm surprised at why I'm avoiding something. I thought I just hated doing the dishes, but when I added a clean/dirty marker to the dishwasher I magically started staying on top of it. Turns out the blocker wasn't the chore, it was needing to figure out whether the dishwasher was ready for dirty dishes each and every time I finished eating. Once I no longer had to assess & decide, I could simply act
Similarly, if there's a technical task on having trouble getting started with, it goes a lot easier if I just break it down into the most itty-bitty steps I can think of. Sometimes I'm not avoiding the task, but figuring out what the task is.
Thanks for your insights. At the end it's a very personal thing that varies a lot among people.
Your statement about the setting is also very much true for me. I do work better in public settings and enjoy the atmosphere of people working around me. Interestingly, this effect seems to wear off. A certain location does not help indefinitely. Switching it up alleviates this problem. But maybe that's just me.
Unfortunately, the university library is inconveniently far from my new apartment and the local library has opening hours that are incompatible with my full-time job. Well, I'll find a way.
>Better than no-parking-zones are cities like Paris where they created parking spaces specifically for bikes and scooters. You rarely see problems in these cities.
I’m aware. But it wasn’t because people are tripping over scooters like they do in cities without parking spaces. In many Canadian cities, accessibility groups are fighting rental scooters because of a perceived risk of tripping hazards when dedicated street parking zones can easily alleviate this risk.
As a test I just successfully charged my Suica in my iPhone (card was issued in 2019) with my EU-issued Visa (issued 2021) through Apple Pay.
Is there maybe some another condition that may influence whether it works or not?
Edit: this article explains it: https://atadistance.net/2023/03/15/troubleshooting-apple-pay...
My Visa is actually listed as one of those which still work ("Some VISA debit cards work for adding money to Suica (DKB, Hyundai Zero, Revolut works depending on the country of the account, no other issuers confirmed).")
Yes as per the article I'm luckily an outlier. :)
But this is a very unfortunate situation especially in combination with the stopped sale of physical cards. I still have an old PASMO which I used for a commuter pass in 2016-2017 so I may be able to use this card when I visit Japan again next year. Well, unless these cards expire. Not sure about that.
Is it known whether this foreign-VISA situation is supposed to resolve and get fixed eventually? The article didn't mention whether the current situation is on purpose or an error. I fear that if this is on purpose it might actually get worse and other foreign cards eventually stop working as well.
>Not in Japan anymore otherwise I would have tried again.
I'm neither. Does this change anything? I could charge from home directly in ¥. But the card is from DKB so expected to work.
Had a similar experience during my Bachelors thesis. I was adding new functionality to an existing code inspection framework and was also supposed to add a graphical interface with GTK (this was 2014). At some point I identified a performance bottleneck within a GTK component. My advisor suggested fixing it and I just couldn't understand how I lowly student am supposed to tackle anything in this big behemoth.
In the end, I didn't do it but it made me think and jump into various big open source projects in the following years. And you get used to navigating these suprisingly fast.
As a native German speaker, I have a very similar problem with Japanese. In Japanese it is possible (and popular, I'd say) to describe an object before mentioning what you are describing. For example, I can go on a tangent and have elaborate descriptions of an object ("is painted white, has two floors, a nice garden, a bus stop is close by, ...") but only at the very end of this description I tell the audience what object I'm describing ("a house").
It feels like my brain has to buffer all the adjectives and verbs before I finally know what I can apply them to. Very challenging for me.
Well, I guess the better you get, the earlier you can deduct what this is about and I also guess that my analogy of "buffering" is not how it actually works but it feels like it.
Having things like verbs, and negation at the end also allows to say the total opposite of what the listener might be expecting from the beginning of the sentence.
> (insulin sensitivity is your ability to clear blood sugars, exercise does not improve insulin sensitivity directly but helps clear the sugar making it as if insulin was more effective).
Can you elaborate? As far as I'm aware exercise (even moderate) does indeed increase insulin sensitivity. I was told so by my doctor and as type 1 diabetic with 24/7 glucose monitoring sensor I can "see" this. A day long hike (not intense, just long) does incredibly things to my required insulin dosage. It can go down to mere 10% the amount of insulin per carbs that I usually use. Now of course some of this is due to the exercise itself and the muscles taking in some of that energy. But some should be due to a reduced insulin sensitivity.
Regardless of the type of diabetes you have, your body needs to clear sugar from bloodstream. It really does not matter how this happens, exactly. Insulin performs other functions in your body... but ability to clear sugar is the absolutely most vital concern.
If you can do things that either prevent or clear blood sugar levels from your bloodstream you can technically live without the need for insulin at all.
With a proper diet and discipline you can theoretically even dispense with continuous monitor. What this would require is observing yourself with a monitor while you test your lifestyle choices to validate you are not making mistakes and then stop using it when you trust what you are doing is effective.
Please, do not misconstrue this as an actual medical advice (I am a software developer and definitely no medical education). But if I was type 1 diabetic I would probably try to ensure correct levels of sugar without external insulin. The problem with external insulin is that the dosage is always delayed, it is a point in time and is never perfect. This is not perfect for your health, it is just the best we can.
Now, I would never recommend this to a person I don't know they can be responsible and disciplined enough not to endanger themselves this way. I think this is critical and I also think that unfortunately most people who have diabetes are not fit mentally to do this.
But lowering your blood sugar without insulin would lead to much better results because you would avoid the spikes altogether and you would not risk getting sensitive to insulin from overdosing it.
FYI when I am on keto diet my blood sugar levels are staying consistently low regardless of how much I eat. I have lower blood sugar levels right after a large meal than most people have before the meal(~85mg/dL or 4.7mmol/L after a meal with ~75mg/dL or around 3.9mmol/L before the meal).
I do not plan to stay on keto all the time, I am using it as a tool to build metabolic flexibility. But if I was diabetic I would probably consider keto very seriously to improve my prospects and break dependency on external insulin, constant blood sugar monitoring and every day decisions on what and how much to eat.
I'm afraid but this is a very simplistic view and not how it actually works.
You cannot keep your blood sugar stable by eliminating intake of carbohydrate. Something every diabetic who goes into weight lifting learns really quickly (and is well established in literature and known by doctors): protein will increase your blood sugar. It is a very delayed response (3-5h+) and its amplitude is low but it will happen. The process is called gluconeogenesis. Your body has multiple metabolic pathways to create glucose out of nearly any kind of protein found in your body (figuratively speaking) and will do so even in the presence of enough calories (i.e., this is not a response to malnutrition or under-eating).
And then there are all the hormone-based reactions. The classic obvious culprit for raising blood sugar out of nowhere is of course adrenaline but even many others can do so. Stress reactions and others will do this. The glucose in this case comes from your liver which stores it as glucagon. Note that your liver will store glucagon even when you have no carbohydrate intake. As mentioned above, your body will metabolize it eventually.
Your advice about keto is downright harmful. Type 1 diabetics should not go on a keto diet. This is actively advised against and will lead to coma and death. The reason keto works for healthy people is that they actually do not go 0 on carbohydrate and, therefore, still have some amount of insulin in their blood (also for other reasons). Even vegetables contain small amounts of digestible carbohydrates that will trigger trace amounts of insulin and protein, through the pathway illustrated above, will do so as well.
Please understand that diabetes is an old and very well researched condition. Modern medicine has a trove of long-term detailed data and statistics telling us what works well and will lead to a side-condition-free life in old age and what will lead to long term damage. This is well understood. Contrary to what you suggested, modern diabetes management does not advise to reduce insulin need as much as possible through dietary means for type 1 diabetics.
Edit:
Please note that blood sugar is not a "lower means better" metric. A low blood sugar has risks associated just as high blood sugar has. The "band" of good values is well understood and the headroom "upwards" (i.e., higher than normal values that still won't cause damage) is a lot larger than the headroom "downwards". In fact, standard therapy for diabetics keeps them a little higher than the normal person just for safety reasons. Personally, I stay in a "normal person" range but I also have the luxury of fewer trouble managing my values than others.
> Something every diabetic who goes into weight lifting learns really quickly (and is well established in literature and known by doctors): protein will increase your blood sugar.
It is true that EXCESS protein will be converted to sugars. As long as you limit your protein intake it will be used exclusively for housekeeping. That's why keto diet is not only carb elimination, it is carb elimination WHILE restricting protein to about 30% of your calorie intake.
It is exactly this reason why keto diet is so hard to maintain -- because you have to fill the rest with fat and this is a hard thing to do.
> Please understand that diabetes is an old and very well researched condition.
It is funny that you mention it, because do you know what was the actual first treatment for diabetes? Before they were able to produce insulin?
It was actually eliminating carbs from the diet. Yes, in the past, keto diet was the main (and the only) way to treat diabetes.
>It was actually eliminating carbs from the diet. Yes, in the past, keto diet was the main (and the only) way to treat diabetes.
Except it didn't work. People died. Meanwhile, today, we have a very good understanding about the secondary diseases, long-term damages, and how to prevent those with therapy. And a keto diet is no part of that.
Edit:
>It is true that EXCESS protein will be converted to sugars. As long as you limit your protein intake it will be used exclusively for housekeeping. That's why keto diet is not only carb elimination, it is carb elimination WHILE restricting protein to about 30% of your calorie intake.
While excess protein is indeed converted that way, it will also happen to small amounts of "non-excess" protein. Protein in your body is in a constant flux. Your muscles are not static but undergo constant breakdown and build-up.
While gluconeogenesis can be strongly reduced with dietary restrictions, it cannot be completely stopped. In fact, an important inhibitor to gluconeogenesis is insulin and thus, for a healthy person, consumption of carbohydrates.
I'm also experiencing this currently. I can sit in front of my thesis and stare into the screen for a whole good day. I also can distract myself with a smartphone but that's merely a distraction from the boredom.
Around the topic of procrastination, I read "doing the thing would be horrible" for the first time and it just rings so true.
Doing this thing (this kind of work) feels horrible and I know I'll need to do it for many, many more days and weeks and these will all be horrible. There's no way around it. I often subconsciously try to make this time less horrible by experimenting with listening to music, have the TV running in the background or other things. This never really works. Or I just haven't found what I need.
At the end, whenever I do get a good chunk of work done, I feel really good about it. But I also acknowledge that it was horrible and I need rest now. And some dread builds up, reinforcing that the work is indeed horrible and the next chunk will require me to go through it again. The good feeling of getting work done does absolutely nothing to knowing that the work is horrible while you are doing it. It's the type of work (writing, editing) that I detest, not so much the content/topic.
I have no idea what strategy can help here (I welcome suggestions!).
Strategies such as Pomodoro do not help me. A 5min break doesn't change that the work is horrible and I'll be doing countless Pomodoros throughout the days/weeks anyway. The amount of horrible work is not reduced and the little breaks don't make it less horrible, so it doesn't help me.
What works for me sometimes is tricking me a bit. Just change this one sentences here and... this one also looks really bad... and when I'm at it, this figure there could use an overhaul... and suddenly you are working on your thesis. Key point here is - I think - that you don't go at it with the intention of doing actual work (which you know is horrible). You just change this stupid sentence there because your inner perfectionist wants you to. Thinking about it like that, the horribleness associated with the work may be a state of mind I can work on. No idea how to though.
There's also Consent-O-Matic: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
It allows to decline all the cookie banners. However, it doesn't work with many websites. In fact, it works with relatively few. Still, I like the approach to actively reject all cookies.
The best part of "I don't care about cookies" and "Cookie AutoDelete" combo is that you don't even have to think about it, because even if it accepts everything, it will be cleaned. 0 mental load required.
