How and Why You Need To Become Strong Today

To be truly strong, strength must be developed in three different realms: the physical ream, the mental, and the emotional realm. Let’s take a brief look at each of these.

Now that we know what we’re talking about, let’s see how to build each type of strength.

Building Physical Strength

Eat Real Food

Before you can build any type of physical strength, you’re going to have to feed your body correctly. If you don’t pay attention to what you’re eating, all the work that you will put in later to build strength will be wasted.

So what is real food, anyway? Real food means any food produced by nature. Lettuce is real food. Beans are real food. Beef is real food. A banana is real food. Organic dark chocolate is real food. You can always tell real food from fake food because real food has life energy in it.

Fake food is almost always found in the center aisles of a grocery store. Protein bars or protein powder? Fake food. Chips and salsa? They used to be real food but have been processed into fake food. Chocolate cake? Sadly, fake food (too highly processed). Fake food will always be highly caloric but will be low in nutrition. They will also usually have high sugar content but little to no fiber…and little to no life force.

Then there are some foods that look like real food but are not. These are the GM (genetically modified) foods: corn, soybeans, potato, papaya, summer squash, alfalfa, canola oil, apple, and sugar beets. You should search for non-GM versions of these; if you can’t find non-GM versions, avoid these modified foods. Foods certified as organic will also be non-GM, by the way. Why avoid GM foods? Because we’re not certain how the genetic modifications made to these foods affect their processing in human bodies. Without surety, it’s best to avoid potential problems.

By feeding your body real food, you give yourself the essential nutrients and micronutrients you need to live your best life. Need selenium? Eat a brazil nut, and you’ll get the recommended daily amount. Want to stave off a cold? Feed yourself a cup of red bell peppers, broccoli, or orange slices (not the candy sort, though!), and you’ll have exceeded the amount necessary to help boost your immune system. We all need correctly functioning brains. So eat some eggs or liver to provide your body with choline, which is essential for brain function.

Some people will say “But if I eat fruit, I’ll be eating too much sugar and my insulin will spike.” No, you won’t, as long as you don’t juice your fruit. You see, the sugar in fruit is packaged along with fiber. The fiber in the fruit helps act as a time-release mechanism for the fructose that is in the fruit. Consequently, your body gets the glucose it needs to feed your brain and you get some beneficial fiber to help move the food in your colon along.

Let’s spend a further moment on sugar. The only sugar to avoid is the highly processed kinds you find in the grocery store’s center aisles, especially corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup. Oh, and avoid agave nectar: despite many health claims, agave nectar is more highly processed than high fructose corn syrup.

Why avoid these sweeteners? Part of the answer is in what we talked about above. These sweeteners do not have any fiber with them to mediate their introduction to your body (nor do the foods they are usually included in). As such, they will spike your glucose levels and cause your body to produce more insulin to lower your blood glucose concentration. Over time, the overproduction of insulin by your pancreas can lead to diabetes. Even before that, though, you may experience symptoms of insulin resistance. If you’re avoiding fake foods, though, you eliminate most of your risk from consuming these sweeteners.

Here’s yet another part of the answer. Certain sweeteners belong to a group of food-like substances known as techno-karbz (a term coined by nutritionist Julia Ross); these are highly processed carbohydrates that are low in nutrients and highly addictive. Unlike real foods, techno-karbz do not come from plants or animals; they come from a science lab. Here are the sweeteners to avoid: high-fructose corn syrup; agave nectar; any syrup derived from fruit; cane sugar; and beet sugar.

Notice that I said addictive. All the techno-karbz mentioned above (and more, including white flour) stimulate the same reward systems in your brain as cocaine or heroin does. As such, once you begin eating techno-karbz, your body wants more and more of them to get the same feeling of happiness. One French study found that table sugar (the processed white stuff) is twice as addictive as cocaine, once thought to be the world’s most addictive substance (check out this link for a solid overview of this issue, as well as this one).

If you can’t stand not having a taste of real sugar, here’s some good news: you can chew on a sugar cane and get that sweet taste along with some fiber to mediate it. You can generally find whole sugar cane at organic markets. So get snacking!

A quick word about cheese: cheese contains fragments of a protein called casein. The casein fragments are known as casomorphins because they are a morphine-like compound. So, cheese contains opiate molecules. And we all know that opiates are addictive, right? Bye-bye cheese, we hardly knew ye.

The most important reason to feed your body real food? When you feed your body real food, all sorts of wonderful things happen — including building muscle. That’s our next topic.

Genuine Muscle v. Model Muscle

In the 1980s, The Incredible Hulk appeared on TV every Friday evening. I remember watching the Hulk and thinking, “Wow! That guy is strong!”

As I grew up, I was exposed to more and more bodybuilders. At some point, I realized although these guys had arms that made my legs look tiny, many of them did not have much strength in their muscles.

Having big, useless muscles = model muscle.

If I’m going to spend significant time in the gym, I want the strength to show for it. That means I need to spend time training my nervous system to recruit muscles when needed, like when chopping wood, lifting heavy items, and generally living my life. To do that effectively, I also need to reinforce my joints, harden my bones, and develop stronger connective tissue.

To achieve my goal of building strength, I need to concentrate on developing the proper form for each exercise, doing the correct number of sets for the muscle groups I’m training, keep my joints from locking out and concentrate on never cheating on an exercise. If I can’t do many reps with perfect form, I concentrate on doing as many reps as I can with as heavy a weight as I can use without sacrificing form.

Strength training also has another, more subtle advantage: it allows us to experience aggression in a controlled way. Instead of taking out our frustrations on people around us, we can take that aggression and use it to fuel our weight training. Pretty cool, eh?

Cross-Train

Remember those other things I mentioned above, like developing harder bones and more supple connective tissue? If I concentrated on building strength to the exclusion of all else, I would have to sacrifice some of those goals.

Because I like to have it all, I incorporate other disciplines into my training regimen. Having attempted many types of complementary training over the years, I find the asana practice of yoga works best in tandem with strength training. 

I can hear some of you now: “Yoga? Isn’t that just for women?” No, it’s not, any more than strength training is exclusively for men. Traditionally, most practitioners of yoga were male, not female. It’s only been in the few decades that yoga has been in the West that women have made up the majority of practitioners.

While strength training encourages muscles to shorten, yoga helps lengthen both muscles and fascia (connective tissue). Don’t worry, though; doing yoga won’t erase the gains you make at the gym.

Doing compound exercises at the gym (you are doing compound exercises like deadlifts, squats, incline bench press, pull-ups, etc., right? If not, get on that.) helps activate your fast-twitch muscle fibers, the type of muscle needed for explosive movements. Holding a yoga pose, though, activates your slow-twitch muscle fibers, which you need for building endurance. If you build up one type of muscle fiber without building up the other type, you miss out on half of your strength equation.

Holding a challenging yoga pose has the added benefit of concentrating your attention on what you are doing in the present moment. By bringing your mind back to the present while simultaneously encouraging your body to sweat, yoga helps healthfully alleviate stress.

When you’ve spent an hour pretzeling yourself into different shapes and removing your stress, guess what happens? You feel peaceful, calm, and centered. To me, that’s a priceless side effect.

There are many other benefits of yoga, besides physical de-stressing. I encourage anyone who has an interest in yoga to explore all eight of the limbs of yoga, not solely asana practice. I have found many useful techniques and practices which help me live a worthy life all around, not simply a healthy physical life.

Martial Arts

Finally, I suggest incorporating some type of martial arts training into your life, whether that martial art is Russian Systema, Krav Maga, Karate, or something else altogether.

If you want to become stronger in general or want to do something specific like running faster or lifting heavier, martial arts is the ticket. Why? Because martial arts trains the whole body simultaneously, not just one muscle group.

Martial arts also fills in a significant gap in our conditioning: cardiovascular training. The techniques of various martial arts systems are vigorous enough to raise the heart rate into the cardiovascular zone. Since martial arts training also encourages multiple training sessions a week, over time cardiovascular endurance is raised. And a healthier heart is good, right?

It also turns out that even when you aren’t directly working out, the cardiovascular training of martial arts translates into blood flowing more easily throughout your body. When your heart uses less energy to pump your blood, it also means less chance of high blood pressure.

All that intense activity also has another effect: it burns fat and helps develop muscle. More muscle mass in your body equals a faster metabolism and a faster metabolism means you burn more calories.

That fat burning effect also lowers LDL cholesterol naturally. So the next time your doctor suggests a statin to control your cholesterol, give martial arts chance instead. As you can see, the side effects of martial arts are much better than anything any drug promises.

Building Mental Strength

Discipline

Ask someone if they like discipline and you’re likely to get a strange look in return. That’s because when most people think of discipline they think of a drill sergeant yelling at them or perhaps their parents punishing them because they transgressed some rule.

The other misconception comes from a pattern we’ve all seen in our lives: you start something, do it for a while, and then quit (New Year’s resolution, anyone?). When they quit, people say, “I simply wasn’t disciplined enough.” Not true. Or at least not exactly.

The primary reason you failed is you simply ran out of motivation to do what you were doing. You didn’t run out of discipline; you had nothing to hang it on. What does that mean? We’ll discuss that in a moment. So what is this mysterious force called discipline?

Simply put, discipline is the habit of giving up a short-term goal so that one can secure a more valuable long-term goal. Discipline is the force that can bridge the gap between motivation and desire for a certain result. It can cause you to act, even in the absence of motivation. That’s it. There’s nothing to fear about discipline, since it is simply a habit, much like drinking coffee in the morning is a habit.

So since there’s nothing to fear, let’s get to developing some discipline. To do so, we need to have three realizations.

Inertia Is Real

I remember being in high school when I first heard the term inertia. If it’s been a while since you sat in a high school (or any) physics class, here’s a brief refresher: inertia is the tendency for an object to stay in a given state (either resting or in motion), unless acted on by an outside force.

Put simply, if you are not doing something right now you are not likely to start doing it anytime soon — unless something outside yourself gives you a push. Sometimes, it has to be a big push.

I remember a time in my life when I did not think I would ever be able to give up alcohol. I remember seeing a course that I wanted to take and one of its prerequisites was that I had to give up alcohol for a week. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow, that sure looks interesting, but I’ll never be able to go a week without taking a drink.”

A few years later, I was laying on the floor of a jail cell (not for the first time) and realizing that if I did not quit drinking, I would be in that jail cell again and again. That realization prompted me to find Alcoholics Anonymous. Currently, I am eleven years sober. Without the intervention of the police in my life, though, I doubt I ever would have been motivated to change my behavior.

I remember when I was one year sober, I decided to give up smoking cigarettes. Why? Because I found I enjoyed riding my bicycle, and realized that smoking was killing my potential in that area. So, the external force does not always have to be a huge, dramatic event.

The easiest way to make a change that you will stick to, though, is to have someone to be accountable to for producing that change. Let’s talk about what that looks like now.

Accountability Is Necessary

I have found that when I want to make a change in my life it is necessary to have a person to whom I am accountable. In the examples I gave above, my AA sponsor and my counselor were the people I chose to be accountable to. I knew that between the two of them, they would help keep me on track to reach my goal.

If you don’t have someone you trust to be your accountability partner, I suggest looking for a group who is working to do the same thing you are working on and ask a member of that group to be your accountability partner. One caveat: I would not choose my spouse as my accountability partner; having your spouse act as an accountability partner puts unnecessary strain on your relationship.

It took me a long time to accept that I needed an accountability partner to help me in my life. I always considered it a bit shameful to have to ask for help. If you study people who have achieved great things, though, you will find that all of them have mentors (another word for accountability partner) and some of them have many mentors. These people don’t consider having a mentor as shameful; on the contrary, they view having a mentor as a shrewd investment in themselves.

My experience has also taught me that if I attempt to impose discipline upon my life and I do not have an accountability partner, I am going to fail imposing that discipline. Why? Because without someone looking over my shoulder, it’s easy for me to make excuses and let my discipline slip. When there is someone else in the mix, though, I find I don’t want to appear weak or foolish in their eyes, and so I am more likely to be disciplined.

A System Makes Things Easier

Okay, so now you’ve decided to make a change and you have picked your accountability partner (you did do that, right? Right.) Now what? How do you actually make that change?

Here’s the system in a nutshell:

1. Interrupt your normal pattern
2. Take daily small actions (that’s right, DAILY)
3. Embrace discomfort

Pretty simple, right? Clear as mud? Let’s dive in and see what the above four steps look like in action.

Let’s go back to my quitting smoking example. To be successful with quitting smoking, I had to not pick up a cigarette. Duh, right? So instead, I bought a box of nicotine gum and a box of nicotine patches. When I arose in the morning instead of reaching for a cigarette, I reached for a piece of nicotine gum. I also put a patch on. The gum allowed my system to get some nicotine before the patch kicked in (it takes time for a transdermal patch to release what is in it).

Chewing the gum and putting on the patch represented an interruption to my usual pattern. But notice the action that replaced my habitual action wasn’t too different: instead of a cigarette, I reached for gum.

If you want to change a habit and are struggling to find an action to take to interrupt your usual pattern, there’s a rule that I first heard about through (I think) Marie Forleo. It’s called The 5 Second Rule, and it was popularized by Mel Robbins, who wrote a book of the same name.

Here’s how the five second rule works: let’s say your alarm goes off and you don’t want to get out of bed. Instead of hitting the snooze button (ahem), you count down 5-4-3-2 and when you get to 1, you swing your legs over the side of the bed, stand on your own two feet and get up. Note you count down from five instead of counting up to five. Why? Because if you count down, you eventually run out of numbers, e.g. you eventually have to take an action. If you count up, you could count forever. Basically, the five second rule gives you five seconds to take a different action from your habitual action.

So now what were my daily consistent actions that I took to break my cigarette habit? Again, I made slight changes. Whenever a craving for a cigarette would come up, sometimes I would chew another piece of gum. Sometimes I would go for a bike ride; the endorphins created by exercise took my mind off my cravings. No matter what, though, I didn’t reach for a cigarette. I also made it a daily habit to keep my accountability partners in the loop with my progress.

Note that you don’t necessarily have to take the same actions day after day. What is important is taking a small daily action that advances you towards your goal instead of away from it. If your goal is to become disciplined about writing, for example, all that is necessary is to write or polish your writing. One day you may write sixty pages, another day you may write six sentences and polish what you’ve already written. Both are excellent, since both move you in the correct direction.

And embracing discomfort? Let me tell you, quitting cigarettes is not an easy thing to do. I remember initially having cravings so strong that my jaw would tighten up and my teeth would grind together. I remember trying to figure out what in the world to do with my hands (spoiler: there was significant fidgeting). I remember smelling cigarette smoke when I was out and thinking “Man, I want a cigarette right now.” I also remember my temper flaring more easily than usual (and that’s saying a lot) and wanting to punch people. Did I have a cigarette? Did I punch people? No. At most, I had another piece of gum. I wanted to punch people, though. A lot.

Remember how I said earlier that someone who is motivated to make a change and fails didn’t have anywhere to hang their discipline on? Here’s what I mean: the one thing you can do to make the above system even more effective is if you can tie the new habit you want to create to a habit you already have.

For example, if I want to create a habit of taking vitamins in the morning, I can piggyback that on my habit of drinking coffee in the morning. To make it even easier on myself, I put my bottle of vitamins right next to the coffee maker. That way, when I get ready to brew the coffee, the sight of the vitamin bottle reminds me to take my vitamins. Or I might put the bottle in the filter basket of the coffee maker; that way I have to remove the bottle to brew the coffee.

The small daily actions I need to take are straightforward: shake one or more pills out of the bottle, pour a glass of water, and swallow the pills. And embracing the discomfort? I’m probably going to have some negative self-talk along the way. You know, “I need one more thing to do today like I need a hole in the head.” That negative talk will eventually go away, but only if I continue to take my small daily actions.

Embrace Uncertainty

In my thirties, I was engaged to a woman that my parents did not like. They did not like her because I spent more money when I was with her than I did by myself alone. Before I met her, I had given my parents the ability to sign on my bank accounts if something happened to me, and they needed to have access to my money.

To try to get me to “come to my senses,” my parents decided to move all my money out of my account and into another one that I did not have any access to (although they lied to me and told me that I did when I confronted them about it). In one fell swoop, I was penniless.

To say that the future was uncertain would be an understatement. I had bills and expenses to meet and had no idea how I was going to do that. I was working around the clock already trying to get a new business off the ground and needed that money to keep me afloat for a while.

You may have had similar experiences in your life. Maybe you lost your job unexpectedly or found out you had a disease. When these types of events occur, it is natural initially to have countless different feelings: shock, anger, sadness, as well as many other emotions. I encourage you to experience everything.

Once you have gotten past your initial feelings, though, it’s time to redirect your mindset to the positive side of the situation. Although it may be hard to grasp the positive side of your particular situation, it is worth trying to do so.

If you do, you may find that you have received a gift. A diagnosis of a disease may cause you to reevaluate what is truly important in your life. Losing your job may be stressful, but it may also be the impetus you have needed to ask yourself what type of life you want to be living. Having the opportunity to break out of our daily routines and reevaluate what direction we want our lives to go is exciting and empowering.

One unexpected event that we have all lived through recently is the coronavirus epidemic. I remember that when the initial guidance came out that suggested it would be best to lock ourselves in our homes came out, I was kind of excited about it.

While most people thought their lives were over for a while, I wondered how I could leverage the time to learn new skills. So I began to learn about the licensing requirements for HAM radio and started to pursue other projects I had been putting off because I felt I had more important things to do.

Other people I know did not learn any new skills, but they were able to spend more time with their children than they had before the coronavirus epidemic. While initially, it was a challenge for them to adjust, once they did adjust, they found they were building a much better relationship with their children than they had before. They also found they enjoyed being home more, even while simultaneously working from home.

While uncertainty may not be easy to face, and we may have strong reactions against it, I encourage you to mine the situations that cause you to be uncertain. You may find a diamond in the rough.

Endurance

I once had a personal trainer who was often disappointed in my performance because I would quit doing an exercise due to volitional failure. That’s a fancy way of saying my body could have performed more exercise, but my will gave out before my body did.

That type of failure is a failure of mental endurance. Apart from physical activities, we encounter this type of failure when we start a project but do not finish it. We lack the mental fortitude to get through the project, probably because it is emotionally demanding.

It doesn’t have to be this way, though. Always remember that a failure today is nothing more than a lesson in how not to approach the same situation in the future. In order to build mental endurance, though, we need to find out where our current limits of that endurance are.

Physical Considerations

It’s important to recognize that we have different capacities on different days since we are human beings. One day we may ride a bike thirty miles without a problem; on the following day, we may have trouble riding that same bike six miles.

There are a couple of physical states we need to monitor to have the best possible mental endurance. In addition to eating correctly, we need to make sure that we are getting enough sleep and that we are taking steps to manage our stress. If we are sleep deprived or under stress, we are already at a disadvantage before we even begin a project that requires mental endurance.

Proper sleep becomes even more important when we are under stress. If we do not get quality sleep, our bodies and minds will not be adequately prepared to deal with that stress. A sleep deprived person will have a slower reaction time and split-second decision-making than someone who has received adequate sleep.

How much sleep is adequate? That depends. Despite the received wisdom that everyone needs a full eight hours of sleep per night, some people may need more or less. My suggestion is to get a sleep diary and record how you feel when you receive different amounts of sleep. Personally, I have a “hangover” feeling if I get much more than ten hours of sleep per night, or less than six.

If you have trouble going to sleep due to anxious thoughts, try writing your thoughts down in a journal before bed. I have found that when I get my anxious thoughts onto paper they have less power over me. Or you might prefer to try hypnosis to manage your anxiety. Find something that works for you and isn’t a hassle to do.

However, if you have insomnia despite not having anxious thoughts at night, you might want to consider your sleep hygiene. What is sleep hygiene? It’s all the things you do right before bed that set you up for successful sleep or unsuccessful sleep. Reading non-fiction before bed or staring at screens often keeps people awake. If that describes you, consider reading fiction and not looking at any screens for at least an hour before bed. That will allow your mind to relax instead of being stimulated by information.

If you find you have significant muscular tension when going to bed, consider taking a hot bath for at least thirty minutes before you go to sleep. The warm water will help your muscles relax and that will contribute to giving you a better night’s sleep.

Think Positively

The primary technique to build our mental endurance is to think positively. If you are doing something and your mind is saying “I can’t, I can’t”, guess what? You won’t be able to do what you have set your mind to doing.

Whenever my mind says “I can’t”, I reach back into my memories for a time when I accomplished something I didn’t think I could do. I don’t just passively remember it, either. I remember how I felt as you did what I didn’t think I could do. I pull forward as much detail as I can from that memory: what was I thinking then? What feelings did I have as I overcame obstacles? How did I feel when it was done?

By bringing the experience of success from the past to the present, I give myself a push to do what needs to be done, whether that is running one more step or completing a task I don’t want to do right now. I remind myself that I can do what needs to be done; I don’t want to do it. I then begin to remove the objection of not wanting to do something by actually doing the activity that needs to be done. To paraphrase Ryan Holiday, the obstacle becomes the way.

Visualize the Result

I’m going to talk more on visualization a little bit later, but for right now I want to just touch on how to use the power of visualization to help mental endurance.

As I’m doing what needs to be done, I visualize the result. If I’m running, I see myself putting one foot in front of the other and stopping only when I have hit my current goal; if I’m doing a project, I visualize doing everything I need to complete the project. When I’m doing this visualization, I am often hit with insight into other things I can put into practice to reach my goal.

The mind does not recognize a difference between actively visualizing a result and using the body to bring that result about. So when I visualize my success, I am giving my mind an additional boost to actually completing what I want to complete.

Don’t Take Anyone’s Word For It

Every day we are presented with an information fire hose. From an early age most of us have been trained to accept certain sources of information as authoritative; this is certainly true of the mainstream media.

Is the information coming from these “authoritative” sources actually true, though? If you explore the news that you are exposed to on a daily basis, you will find it ranges from somewhat true to mostly false. This is because the media do not present facts alone; a certain bias colors those facts.

Even acknowledging bias, though, one truth remains: if you have not examined what is being said on the news, you are developing the same bias as your sources of information. Beginning to pick up someone else’s bias is not a good idea.

Why? Because you’re being played — and played badly. Here’s how badly: in the 1960s, the CIA created a worldwide propaganda network to shape public opinion around political issues. According to a CIA official interviewed by the New York Times, this network ranged from important outlets like Radio Free Europe to “a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper.”

If you were reading those papers or listening to those radio stations, the CIA was shaping your opinions without your knowledge. You were being turned into a disinformation tool. Using people as tools is a branch of intelligence known as HUMINT (human intelligence).

If you don’t want to be someone else’s tool, then it’s time to step up and do your own research. If everyone is saying the same thing about something, make sure you dig deep — there is someone who finds the issue being discussed important. As such, it’s doubly important for you to find out what is going on.

Here’s a mild example: as Trump was campaigning for re-election, he stated that Joe Biden, his opponent, thought he was running against George Bush for President, not Donald Trump. Trump used this to show how his opponent was unfit to be President. He even showed people a clip of Biden saying something like what Trump was claiming he said.

If you bothered to go dig up the full footage, though, you would learn Biden was clumsily using the historical present to describe his political career. Far from being senile, he was trying to make a point about his experience. My biggest criticism with what he was saying was that he was using English in a clumsy manner, perhaps because he has always struggled with stuttering.

Taken out of context, though, the clip Trump used caused Biden to look like a fool. That’s why digging in to find out what is happening is important: context is often manipulated to push someone’s agenda, even if in doing so the original intent is lost.

So, how does one go about checking out what’s going on beyond what has already been suggested? Here are a few tips:

• Does it smell true? If the claims being made sounds incredible, it probably is. When serious claims are made, then be skeptical, especially if they have a whiff of the sensational about them.
• What credentials does the author have? If the author of what you are reading has credentials in the field they are reporting on, then they are more likely to be reporting factually. Confidence in credentials goes down over time, though, if the author has not spent time keeping up with his or her field since receiving their credentials.
• Check Sources Find any sources the author cites and determine if the source actually says what the author claims it says. Often the author will be citing the source correctly; at other times, they may be skewing the information. You won’t know which until you check. If you can’t find the source, be skeptical.
• How Old Is The Information? Human knowledge is constantly progressing. What is true one day may be false the next day. Check to see if new information has come to light since the author wrote their article — and then check that new information as carefully as the original information.
• Beware of Confirmation Bias Like Agent Mulder in the X-Files, people, even you, tend to seek out and interpret information in ways that confirm beliefs they already hold. This is known as confirmation bias. When reading new information, ask yourself, “Do I believe what is being presented because it is factual, or because I want to believe it?”
• Check the URLs of information presented online. Who owns the domain presenting the information? Just like the CIA example cited above, certain people and organizations have a vested interest in getting you to believe their way. Checking domain ownership is harder these days due to WHOIS (a directory of all domains on the Internet) privacy. Also, check the actual target of a URL. Many scammers use what appears to be an authoritative domain in a link, but the target links to another domain. If the author of the information is unscrupulous, they can also hack a legitimate domain and install an HTTP redirect to send visitors to another domain.

Buck the Trends

This probably doesn’t need to be said, but I’m going to say it anyway: if you’re thinking for yourself, you’re probably not a trend follower.

Being an independent thinker gets harder every day, though. Even the most basic function of human beings, eating, has been turned into a fad. Don’t believe me? Go onto social media and tell me how many people you can find following the Keto diet. Or Paleo. Or Vegan. Just like the number of spirits in the swine that Jesus exorcised, they are legion.

Trends have one purpose: to earn money for companies. The diets I mentioned above are not necessarily the best for your health. They are, however, excellent for the pocketbooks of many corporations.

Take the Keto diet: sure, you can lose weight on it. You are, however, activating your body’s emergency mode to do so. Sustainable? Nope, and people are slowly figuring that out. While you’re on that diet, though, you’re probably going to buy books, supplements, meal plans, any number of items related to that diet. Corporations love you for buying what they have created to sell you, and they don’t worry about the sustainability of what they are selling. They know that as one person drops out, another will hop on and make up for the loss of the revenue from the first one. And the beat goes on.

It’s not just diet, either. That’s merely low-hanging fruit on the tree of trends. What music do you listen to? What clothes do you wear? What phone do you use? Chances are no matter what your answer is, you have been following a trend (whether you meant to or not).

As I write these words, Google Trends tells me that this is what people are looking for on the Internet: Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, World Cup, Georgia runoff election, coronavirus, and TurboTax.

What the above shows me is this: people are not as unique as they like to think they are. Our minds are being influenced to think in certain ways by the information we are exposed to, especially the media. We see something bright and shiny and want to have one for ourselves.

The disturbing pattern in the Google Trends results I mentioned earlier is Taylor Swift and Kim Kardashian are getting more searches than the Georgia runoff election or the coronavirus, both of which have the potential to completely rewrite our world. It seems most people would rather numb themselves with the adventures of two completely forgettable personas rather than deal with anything serious.

Following the trends makes it easy for people. Instead of spending time figuring out what the best choice is for themselves, it’s much easier to hop on a bandwagon. And with all that extra mental bandwidth, it gives you more time to Google Taylor Swift.

If all the above sounds gross: I salute you!

Explore Your Unconscious Mind

Have you ever found yourself doing something that you didn’t want to do…again? Your first reaction was probably, “Man. I can’t believe I’m doing this again. What’s wrong with me?”. There’s nothing wrong with you. The reason you found yourself doing something you didn’t want to do was simple: your unconscious mind was driving you.

I’m going to use a metaphor first used by Carl Jung to illustrate what’s going on. Think of your mind as an iceberg. Part of the iceberg pokes up out of the water; this is the conscious mind, and it is the smallest part of the mind. This is also the part of the mind most people are familiar with because it is the part they use most often; when people refer to “the mind,” they are usually referring to the conscious mind.

Immediately below the water’s surface, we have the subconscious mind; this part of the mind receives thoughts and impressions that slip out of the conscious mind. The subconscious provides material to the conscious mind in an interactive way.

Deep below the water is the part of the iceberg that represents the unconscious mind. This part of the mind is cut off from the conscious mind. The unconscious mind acts by itself automatically.

To better understand the automatic nature of the unconscious, think of driving. When you were first learning how to drive, you had to think of every action to make sure you were doing it. At some point, though, you were able to get in the car and do everything you needed to do to drive without having to think it through. The routine of driving had become unconscious.

Now that you know what the unconscious is, how do you explore and program it to serve you? If it doesn’t respond to words, what does it respond to? Simple. It both communicates and can be programmed through images.

Have you ever asked yourself where the images you see in dreams come from? Much the time, those images come from the unconscious mind. By presenting specific images to you in your dreams, your unconscious mind is trying to communicate with you.

Because humans are not unique, the images that the unconscious mind uses to communicate are commonly found across many people’s dreams. Jung called these images archetypes and the source of the images the collective unconscious.

There is an advantage to having common images crop up in dreams: many people have thought about what these images mean, what they are trying to communicate to you. This depth of knowledge on dream images means if you study what the archetypes mean, you can get an idea of what your unconscious is trying to tell you.

What if you don’t like the message you’re receiving and want to change it? I’m glad you asked. Humans have a capability that can help them program their unconscious mind in the way they desire: the ability to imagine something that does not exist as if it does. This ability is known both as imagination and as visualization.

Athletes use visualization to help them play better. Before an athlete goes out to practice or play, they will spend some time visualizing how that activity will unfold. A basketball player might see himself doing everything he needs to fake out his opponents and hit basket after basket. He won’t imagine a generic image, either. That athlete will visualize how his footwork will be, how his body will be loose, the exact player he will be defending against, and how he will execute his defense to hit the baskets he wants to hit. He’ll experience the feel of the ball in his hands, hear the crowd cheering him, smell the sweat of himself and his opponents, taste the salt and metal of his sweat, and experience the victory of having shot his basket. And then? He’ll go out and do exactly what he visualized.

Here’s what many find surprising: the human brain does not know the difference between a vivid, multi-sensory visualization like the one described above and someone doing the same things in reality. Because there is no difference to the brain between an actual event and a visualized event, it means if you can visualize something in enough detail, you can program your mind to do them in the real world.

So, if there’s something you don’t like in your unconscious mind, visualize the opposite in vivid detail to undo that unconscious programming. Afraid that asking your boss for a raise will result in rejection? Visualize it going well and your boss deciding to give you even more money than you asked for. Are you struggling with your golf swing? Visualize yourself doing the correct mechanics to make it better. Even better: try swinging an imaginary club along with the visualization so that you start to develop muscle memory for the correct mechanics.

Now that you know what to do, how do you know what to work on? Remember how we talked about dream imagery being a communication from the unconscious mind? You can’t do much with that imagery unless you remember it. To do so, keep a journal and pen by your bed so that you can write down what you dream about. When you first wake up after a dream, write down every detail you can remember. Don’t try to interpret the imagery, just write it down.

Over time, you will begin to notice patterns in your dreams. That’s your unconscious mind trying to get your attention. It’s saying “Hey, there’s something over here you need to deal with.” Now is the time to interpret. Once you see the pattern, the interpretation may be easy for you. If it’s not, there are plenty of dream dictionaries that can give you insight into your dream imagery.

With the message received, get to work on your visualizations. Now that you hold the keys to the kingdom in the form of visualization, your life is about to change. For the better.

Building Emotional Strength

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