Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: How a thing happens, in reply to izogi,
I've been streaming radio using TuneIn in the car over 3G since a got a smartphone about 3 years ago. It has the advantage of there being tens of thousands of channels to listen to. Also, I can listen to BaseFM outside of 5km from Ponsonby. But when you're driving around there certainly are quality of service issues - dropout mostly, which can make it tedious, and for the local content the FM receiver works for most channels. I can time-shift with TuneIn, also, but actually when I comes to radio I generally CBF.
Outside of the city the dropouts are worse - 3G coverage is much less sure in the coutryside.
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Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Essentially what Ben said, but just a note it does take practice to learn to do well.
I think that I only got the hang of it when I made the decision that the "effort" involved in doing it wasn't worse than trouble of sleeplessness from churning thoughts, and so I decided to try to do it all night if necessary. But it didn't take all night, it took about 20 mins, then less and less. Somehow I'd always been a clockwatcher when it came to meditation because I find it dull, and removing the "is it working yet? No, ffs" from the thought cycle helped. But like any skill, it's something you do clumsily at first, full of rules and tricks, then it becomes more and more habitual, until you're eventually just doing it without thinking about it. So you stop thinking about not thinking, and just stop thinking. Weirdly recursive, but it works.
If it doesn't, the worst is that I'll meditate for the entire night. That might have an almost equivalent effect to having slept for all of it. But I find it incredibly unlikely to happen. Zen monks who meditate heaps do it sitting up for a reason, and there's a guy who wanders around waking up all the people who have fallen asleep sitting up (whacks them with a stick, I think :-)). It's actually a very hard skill to learn, to meditate for a very lengthy period without falling asleep.
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I can tell you right now that swotting how to solve triple integrals is most sleep inducing.
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Some things that have helped for limited times over the years:
1. An app called "Relax and sleep" on my droid. It's a bunch of ambient sounds that can be individually turned on or off. I don't know why, but I found a combination of intermittent thunderclaps and traffic noise quite effective. There are many more.
2. Ambient music. There's plenty of streams that are actually dedicated to sleep enabling. But watch the bandwidth!
3. Hypnosis recordings. Might also help you quit smoking. Can't say the various post-hypnotic suggestions ever worked a damn for me, but the hypnotic induction can be extremely relaxing, has helped me sleep many times. The main problem with them is that they usually deliberately wake you up at the end. There are ones that are also intended for bed which don't do this. Hemi-synch and other strange snake oil sounding things abound.
I also recorded my own ones, my own voice, with my own choice of post-hypnotic suggestions. I think I'm unfortunately not very suggestible :-) But being able to choose the relaxation visualization in detail means it's one that worked for me.For all of the audio solutions, a major downside is ear pain - I share the bed so I can't just play it over a speaker. I don't really think it's that healthy to have a headset playing into your ears for hours and hours. Earbuds are uncomfortable, and ear covering phones get hot and sweaty, and you can't roll over.
4. Watching TV lying down in the dark. Only problem is the posture. Easy to get a sore neck.
5. Reading on the phone in the dark. Arabian Nights has been good to me - I've been working my way through that one for about 9 years now - I don't know if it's been 1001 sittings, sounds a bit much. The point of light surrounded by darkness is itself sleep inducing, too. Hard to find a comfortable position, though. Books that are interesting don't do it for me, I tend to find I can't put them down.
6. Sleeping somewhere else, or even just a different way around.
7. Working on something tedious.
8. Sitting outside.
9. Doing dishes.
10. Hot chocolate. -
Hard News: How do you sleep?, in reply to B Jones,
What works for me is turning off the audio/verbal part of my brain, the bit that subvocalises all my thoughts and reminds me of all the things I need to do the next day, what I should have said yesterday, and what I’d really do first if I won lotto; and turning on the visual part, eyes shut. For some reason, if I can imagine something visual vividly enough, it’s enough like a dream that it becomes lucid dreaming then the real thing.
Yes, this is what I'm doing. I notice when verbal thoughts happen that there is an accompanying slight feeling of tension, which I isolate by feel and relax it. Hard to describe, mostly it just feels like my scalp relaxing.
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I have only recently kicked 20 years of insomnia. It had become so normal I just didn't worry about it any more, and would just do stuff until I nodded off doing it, at whatever time. The main thing was to make sure I rose at the right time, even if I had only had 1 hour of sleep. Then it was usually unlikely that the pattern would continue for several days.
In only the last week or so I finally decided to try meditating, a practice I find far too boring to ever sustain, normally, despite all the known benefits. It was an instant hit. Asleep rapidly every time. I do this actually in bed, and just keep it up until I'm asleep - I figure that if I don't sleep, then at least I'll get 8 hours meditation, which wouldn't be any less unendurable than 8 hours of clock watching or fretting.
It's an extremely simple formula, I just stop thinking. There are many tricks to reset this when a thought pops up, as they usually do. Big yawns are a good one. Concentrating on what I can hear or see (which is mostly nothing) pushes thoughts out. Moving the eyes around helps with this. Mantras are OK, my main one is "let it go". Within a few minutes, I'm still awake, but basically in a trance, extremely relaxed. At an unknown amount of time after this, I will often wake slightly, realizing I'd dozed off. At this point, if I was dreaming, I just let it continue. Furthermore, I'm getting better at it every night. Less tricks needed, the letting go is pretty much automatic as soon as I notice a thought.
It's been such an empowering feeling, that the only trouble I've had is being a little bit excited about going to bed. I've never experienced having the certainty that I can fall asleep at the time of my choosing. I'm not concerned now to go to bed, and lie there thinking a bit, as has been my habit since I was very young, because I can just switch off now. I've spent years berating myself for thinking in bed too much, quite why this idea never occurred to me I don't know. I'm not even changing the time I go to bed - if I'm up late it's usually because I'm too interested in something to put it down. But now it doesn't even cross my mind to wonder "am I tired enough yet? Will be stink to just lie there bumming out again". It's a very strange feeling, like I've been handed the switch to my own brain.
I do actually like thinking in bed. It's not a bad time to mentally rehearse things, to go over events, etc. I don't want to stop doing that. Now, I've realized I don't have to.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to TracyMac,
I don’t like the hint of “victim Olympics” in it.
I'm sorry in hindsight that it came out like that, since my point was to actually question that very idea. I think it's great that there's finally so much anger about this kind of rape. Our societal reaction to notorious violent rapists, from which we draw our cues, has been applied to these offenders.
severity or longevity of harm doesn’t necessarily equate with the “severity” of the assault.
No, and that's true of practically all crime. Punishment is more closely tied to the severity of the assault. But the unforeseen-but-foreseeable consequences do weigh in - reckless driving causing death is more severe than reckless driving alone. Assault that causes death can be manslaughter or murder depending on the circumstances.
The consequences of rape are drawn out, well beyond a trial, if one ever happens, and they may not be obvious from the outside. I think that it's a tricky area for the law to be consistent about, emotional harm is often not given much credence against the more easily seen harms, in the case of other crimes.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
She's thought provoking, for sure. A public outpouring of rage over rape is a good thing to see, considering the nature of these rapes, that they're not your textbook Mark Stephens type offences At least a large segment of society does actually consider this to be rape now. But from the Facebook page you'd think the crimes were in the same category.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Kracklite,
drunk is my usual remedy.
Please don't . Contact Russell ASAP.
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Hard News: Narcissists and bullies, in reply to Kracklite,
Well Marshall just tried to call me personally at my own home. I hung up immediately when he identified himself.
Are you serious? Did he ask for you by name or handle?
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