A Comfortable Workspace

Your space should make you feel comfortable — and your workspace should make you feel good about working.

Dealing With Your “Stuff,” Without Making It Incredibly Complicated

Many people feel overwhelmed on a regular basis. It’s a familiar pattern all of us have seen and most have experienced at least once. Unfortunately, when people try to address overwhelm, they often talk about it as if they’re stumbling around in the dark, as if there isn’t a simple, obvious way to get a handle on the situation — as if it’s the most complicated thing in the world. Then, just addressing the overwhelm can be overwhelming. This is what makes people exclaim, “I can’t deal with it!” It is the reason why escape is so many people’s main strategy for coping with life. Fortunately, overwhelm isn’t really this complicated.

Dwight Twilley on What to Do When You’re Snowed In

One of my musical heroes, Dwight Twilley, is taking the current extreme weather in stride, based on his last two tweets:

Erasing a Web Site From Your Personal History

Erasing your personal history is a well-known shamanic technique that can help you change your habits and get a new perspective on life. Erasing a web site from your browsing history is a simple exercise you can do that will show you how this works.

Don’t Put Off Taking Action, Change Direction Instead

If you made new year’s resolutions on New Year’s Day and haven’t yet started on them, a day later, it may be that you picked the wrong thing to change. The same consideration applies any time you take on a goal, and a day or more goes by with no action toward the goal itself. It makes sense to look at the obstacles that are getting in your way and pick one of those as the focal point of your efforts.

Action, Not Lists

Today is New Year’s Day, the energy of a fresh start is in the air . . . and people are writing lists of new and different things they want to do this year.

Now, I like lists, but there is a problem with lists of things to do that refer to an extended period of time, such as a year or a month. These lists tend to sit around, untended, for days at a time — and while they’re waiting, the energy drains out of them. People come back to these lists after a few days and don’t find any of the New Year’s Day feeling in them.

If you want to write a list for the new year, I can suggest a more successful kind of list.

What It Means to Go Too Far

If you have too many possessions or too many things to do, you know how easy it is to go too far. In principle, possessions and things to do are good to have, but you can end up with too many of them without knowing where they all came from. In the Shamanic Economist blog today, I write about what it means to go too far:

Going Too Far: Getting Past Minimizing and Maximizing

New Proof of the Power of Sleep

We have all observed that people look better after a full night of sleep. Now a research team has measured this scientifically. At BBC News: Beauty sleep concept is not a myth, says study.

The idea of people needing “beauty sleep” has acquired some scientific backing, according to a Swedish study. . . .

The authors wrote in their paper published in the British Medical Journal: “Sleep deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy and more tired compared with when they are well rested.”