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Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.
Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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FREQUENCY
June 13th, 2018
We cannot do all our breathing on Sunday and expect we’ll be set for the week.
But we apply this sort of thinking to other aspects of our life.
What has a better effect:
Working out once a week for 7 hours OR working out 1 hour every day.
Eating a really healthy diet once a week OR switching one very nutritious meal every day/
Meditating for an hour and 20 minutes once a week OR meditating 20 minutes a day?
Breathing is a constant non-negotiable practice. The consistency and frequency of breathing are both really really high. Ignore either of these variables about breathing, and… well… you die.
We all have activities and habits that we wish were more engrained, more effective and easier to carry out.
Have we asked what sort of consistency and frequency is optimal for each of these habits and activities?
Is our fitness plan really doing much good if it’s got high consistency but low frequency? Once a week just isn’t enough. The brain needs a daily dose of endorphins.
Does that one good day of nutrition do much good if the other 6 are crap? Many argue that at minimum, it needs to be the other way around: 6 days of healthy eating and one cheat day. Consistency, and higher frequency.
Meditation? Can’t say. Perhaps one single long meditation a week would have comparable effects as daily meditations?
The point is that such activities and habits that we benefit from exist on a spectrum of consistency and frequency. Some require very high frequency and consistency. I.E. breathing. Whereas others are not so needy of our time.
Realizing that each practice has some mysterious optimal frequency is the first step.
The second step is experimenting:
Trying different frequencies for consistently long enough periods to be able to note differences in effect.
And be wary of what works for others. Each person has their own frequency requirement for any given activity or practice that might benefit. And that magical metric probably changes over time.
But like anything else:
best to just find out for one’s self.
