Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

Don't hold it for too long! Image by michitux via Flickr I always like it when different parts of my life come together in a common theme or idea.  That's been happening a lot lately, particularly after reading Mark Sisson's The Primal Connection: Follow Your Genetic Blueprint to Health and Happiness , and comparing it to what I've learned via MorningCoach.com .  The ways that J.B. Glossinger and many other success coaches and personal evolution gurus teach us totally jibe with the ancestral instincts that we've evolved with as per Sisson and others.  It's really amazing. Case in point:  today, J.B. told us the story of a lecturer who came into her lecture holding a glass of water.  Expecting this to lead into a glass-half-empty-or-half-full story, the audience was surprised to hear her discuss just how that glass is like stress. Holding that glass out for a minute would be no big deal.  It really doesn't weigh that much, and no one would have troub...

No Coffee For Me! Well, I don't know what I learned on this issue.  No, that's not true, I learned a lot about N=1 tests. One of the problems with N=1 testing of any kind is that it's hard to isolate all the variables one needs to have a conclusive outcome or result, and that's most certainly the case with my 30-Day Caffeine and Cortisol challenge. I was doing well with the removal of caffeine from my diet on all fronts until last week, when I did my first shift of a week of monitoring our nightly processes for my employer.  While this wasn't supposed to be a stressful situation, it was for a couple of reasons, one of which was a change in the amount of sleep I got. I normally get to bed around 10:00 and wake up around 5:00 or 5:30 in the morning, making my normal sleep time about 7 hours.  But as one of the processes I had to monitor finished at 10:20 PM, that meant staying up later than normal.  And not only that, it necessitated sitting in front of the computer a...

[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Fight the dark side!"] [/caption] As you know from my previous post about Caffeine and Cortisol , I started a 30-Day Coffee fast last Thursday.  And so far, so good. I've been coffee-free since then and I'm feeling pretty good. I was experiencing some minor withdrawal headaches on Thursday and Friday (slightly worse on Friday), but that was nothing to worry about - I didn't even take aspirin for it on Friday, just gutted it out. I had one slip-up when I had a small iced-tea on Sunday, I'm hoping that that was small enough that the effects were negligible.  I wasn't even thinking about it at that point, though, so the withdrawal problems that some were telling me about were limited to the small headaches. I'll take it. At the beginning of this experiment, I was jut a hair under a 34 waist on my pants.  And my sleep, while okay, wasn't super-great.  So t...

The myth of the dumb jock is a pervasive one, to be sure.  I often think that this is one of those things that less athletic (or motivated) people tell themselves and others to boost their self-esteem, but it's proven again and again not to be true. When I was in college, I found that some of the smartest guys and gals were the varsity athletes.  It seemed that at least a couple times a season, the play-by-play guys broadcasting our football games pointed out the GPA of the offensive linemen on our team and how high it was - and not in easy majors, either.  No, we're talking engineering, the sciences, etc.  Hard stuff.  Some people like to play that off to lessons learned from having to manage their time better, and that certainly will play a role, but perhaps there's an additional reason. Along comes The Primal Blueprint author Mark Sisson , pulling together a group of studies on both rats and humans that indicate the importance and effectiveness of strength tr...

Last Sunday afternoon, my wife and I went out to see a movie ( The Eagle , with Channing Tatum. It was pretty good).  I've been eating cleanly with good regularity for a few weeks again, and I decided it wouldn't hurt anything to go on a bit of a bender with some of the refreshments there. Boy, was I wrong. The bender included an order of soft pretzel bites with "cheese sauce," a bag of M&Ms, and a large Coke.  Normally, before I was Paleo, I could go through such a repast without blinking an eye.  But as I mentioned on the  About  page, I've been Paleo for a couple of years now.  And as I said, I've been keeping the carbs down with a lot more intensity of late. So during the movie, I started feeling pretty lousy.  Bloated, gassy, the whole nine yards.  And the rest of the evening, I didn't eat too much and pretty much took it easy.  I didn't sleep well, probably because of all the carbs running rampant in my system and keeping me too ene...