“If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
David Foster Wallace
“Take your mind off the problems for a moment, and focus on the positive possibilities. Consider how very much you are able to do.”
Ralph Marston
On lower back pain, disc herniations and why mornings can be painful in the begining.... We turn to Stuart McGill from the University of Waterloo.
"discs are hydrophilic (water loving), that means they suck up water while you sleep and when there are no stresses present.
After rising, hydrostatic stresses of just walking around and using the muscles during the day compress your spine and the fluid is squeezed out, decreasing the annular tensions in the disc. So, when you wake up the extra height in the discs are analogous to a full water balloon ready to burst and if you bend, you build up much higher stresses in the disc. In fact, the stresses are three times higher than when you perform the same bend two or three hours later.
Now I’m not talking about getting up and going for a walk or perhaps a boxer going for a jog first thing in the morning. I’m talking about heavy bending exercises, like for example the good-morning exercise or doing sit-ups. Somehow people thought that this would be a good thing to do in the morning. It’s the worst possible thing you could do for the back first thing in the morning."
Paraphrased from Professor Stuart McGill author of Ultimate Back Fitness and Performance
A great quote on getting started....no need for perfection
"With all the messy stiff, no matter how messy it is, just start where you are - not tomorrow, not later, not yesterday when you were feeling better - but now. Start now, just as you are."
Attributed to Pena Chondrites
I have not be able to track it down but thought I would share this just the same.
"On the way the stress we experience today is different from Paleolithic stress
Stress creates this vicious cycle, ... you crave unhealthy foods, but when you're stressed you also have a harder time sleeping, and when you have a harder time sleeping that elevates your levels of stress. It just sets off this chain reaction that keeps going on and on. Now normally, when we're stressed, the stimulus that causes the stress should be a short-lived one; that's what evolution predicted. ... So a lion chases you, that's a very stressful event, obviously, hopefully you managed to run away from the lion ... life goes on. But much of the stress we create today results from social conditions. If you think about the most stressful things we experience, they're often our lives — they're our jobs, our commutes, not having enough money, the list goes on. Those, of course, elicit chronic levels of stress. And when stress becomes chronic, then it helps feed a variety of mismatch diseases that make us ill, that make us depressed, that make us anxious, that make us overweight, which causes more stress and then keeps the cycle going."
Daniel Lieberman Author of the Evolution of the Human body.
This is a particular interesting and thought provoking book if you are working to understand how today's world effects us. The chapter that covers the "Mismatch" diseases gets right to the heart of it.