Category Archives: Health & Lifestyle

A review of my JoMo week

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I started my JoMo week on the 25th of June, and as I wrote on my initial post, I was planning to write on the blog my experience throughout the week. Well, no posts were made since then and now its the 20th of July. I guess that can say a lot about how it went 🙂

I was hoping to be feeling a lot of “things” in the first few days, but perhaps due to the fact that I am not THAT addicted, it went just fine. Also, considering the fact that my free time is scarce, I didn’t really had a problem to deal with boredom.

During the week, it did happen just once or twice that I felt the urge to pull the phone and browse… but it was empty of any “browsing” apps… or so I thought, until I opened my local classifieds apps (facepalm).

All in all, I got to the end of the week just fine and didn’t really miss anything at all. I also used my time better and more productively.

On the first day after the JoMo week I was happy to visit a few couple sites and read whatever messages people might have left me… which were very few actually (terrible social life, I know!).

Since then, I decided not to install twitter or instagram on my phone, nor to enable any shortcuts on my browser to news sites. So now I only check twitter/instagram when I’m on my computer, and I don’t really feel the need to do it at all.

All in all, I really feel some sort of “detox” has been accomplished as I stopped visiting and wasting time in many sites I used to before. Of course that, like in any detox, nothing lasts forever so I’ll be aware of how my tech-dependency goes and will do more of these every X months (X to be defined later).

10/10 would recommend 🙂

From FOMO to JOMO – an experimental week

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I read Christina’s Crook book “The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World” some years back. Since then I did a couple of unplugged days/weekends. More recently I’ve been finding myself too stuck in the never ending loop of checking news(the good ones) and social media (even though I don’t use Facebook, twitter and IG still pull me a lot).

I found myself brushing my teeth in the morning and checking twitter at the same time. Mind you, I’m not even a very active user and don’t really care for follower counts or likes. But it’s a habit… a bad one.

And there’s really no point in arguing your way out of bad habits… our body and mind needs harsh training to get discipline.

At the same time, I’m at a point in life where I really need to make a better use of all the time I can, and even though I don’t keep track of it, I’m suspicious of wasting quite a good chunk in social media and news.

So I’ve decided that this time I’ll do something a bit more extensive. One full week without twitter, Instagram, reddit, tech news. I’ll keep my email due to work going on, but that’s about it.

I’ll probably want to journal the experience to register what I felt during the week, so I’ll be using this blog for that. I love mental experiments!

In order to avoid breaking my own rules, I’m going to cut all possible shortcuts to open said apps and websites. That includes:

  • uninstalling apps on the phone
  • removing shortcuts from firefox mobile
  • removing shortcuts from firefox desktop (those in the new tab page)
  • turning off all notifications (I have 90% of them off since years ago, but just to make sure I’ll turn everything off)

Very excited for this!

 

Resuming my fasting practice

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When I first started practicing yoga and meditation, about 16 years ago, I also started a fasting practice. My spiritual master advised for a twice-a-month dry fasting method (unless health issues would justify not doing it that way). I’m not going into details of the method since it’s not the point of this post.

I loved fasting in so many ways, not only the physical benefits but the mental as well (meditation was so amazing the next day!). It also helped me recognize that I have more cravings for food than I though (and I’m a slim guy!).

I suspect that those cravings and my mental weaknesses to deal with fasting periods, actually ended up messing up my body due to many occasions when I broke the fast in a terrible way. As time passed, fasting became more and more difficult, throwing me into a very weak state, with tremors by the end of the day. The next morning I would wake up with a bad feeling in my stomach. Drinking water would just end up in vomiting, and I would often need the whole morning just to recover my “normal” state. I began to feel that fasting was making me waste all this time and gradually stopped it.

Since then, so many times I’ve wanted to go back due to wonderful feeling a good fast gives to the body and mind and all the proven health benefits.

I’ve tried Ayurvedic fasting a few times, which consisted of a mono-diet for 2-3 days. It was surprisingly good because you can eat 3 meals so you’re never really that hungry. And what surprised me most was that at the end of the 3rd day I was feeling very similar benefits (both physical and mental) to the one-day dry fast. For some reason I stopped doing those as well, its really boring to eat the same thing for 9 continuous meals! (that’s my taste buds speaking out, instead of my brain)

This year, my first since moving to our house in the middle of nature, surrounded by trees and tall grasses, my seasonal allergies exploded in full force like! I’m writing this post with goggles because I feel like tearing my eyes out due to the itching feeling 24hrs a day. My nose drips and itches for the same period and when I sneeze my daughter laughs because it’s like 10 sneezes in a burst.

When I woke up today the first though in my mind was “oh no, another day of allergies”, which is a terrible way to wake up and a sad focus to the mind. So fasting came to my mind again and after a short research I found countless testimonials of people doing Intermittent Fasting and also find a relief in allergic reactions. This is a good one, in case you are interested in reading.

I’ve thus decided to resume my fasting practice, how, I am not sure yet. Today I’m starting with a fruit-and-water-only fast, and see how my body reacts tomorrow morning. Intermittent Fasting also sounds good for my particular case, or should I say, more bearable. In my country and culture people tend to eat dinner really late, I admire the American schedules for their healthier meal times. But I’m planning a 10hr eating period (8-18) followed by a 14hr fasting period. If everything goes well with my fruit-fast today, I’ll probably start the Intermittent Fast tomorrow.

Very curious to see if it will also help me for the allergies. I’ll write back my findings!