Tag: Adults

Terminals are chaotic by nature, and the chaos is the opportunity. Touts work in it, and so do thieves and confidence tricksters.

Rule one travels with you everywhere: strangers get no trust, and you stay alert. Past that, a handful of specific habits are worth carrying.

Never leave your bags unattended

Luggage, briefcase, anything at all. A bag that has been put down belongs between your feet or up against your leg, where it cannot walk off without you feeling it go.

Be careful at the currency counter

Where you can, keep away from the exchange windows altogether, or change only a little at a time.

Nobody watching should learn how much currency is on you. Worn under the clothes, a money pouch beats a purse or a wallet that has to be opened in public view.

Check that porters and guides are real

Imposters work this trade. Before anyone carries your bags or leads you anywhere, satisfy yourself that the uniform is genuine or the identification is.

Use only authorised transport

Terminals usually run pre-paid taxis and auto rickshaws. Stick to vehicles that are authorised and properly identified.

Travelling with a great deal of luggage changes the calculation. In that case the advisable thing is to arrange a private car transfer in advance, through your travel representative, rather than negotiating it on arrival.

Being yourself has a plain enough definition. What you say is what is true for you. The ideas and the thoughts you order your days around are your own. Something then becomes visible in you from the inside out, and other people read it as certainty.

Why pretending costs so much

Anyone in the world who is not doing this is hunting for that same assurance about who they are.

The reason is not mysterious. Stop being you, and the thing you have started attempting is to be something you are not.

Sustaining that has a price, and the price is charged internally. Stress arrives. So does confusion. So does a competitiveness that has nowhere to go, because the person being forced into existence is not you.

Where the habit was learned

Look at the crowd of people around you who have no idea who they are, and the origin of the habit becomes visible.

Nobody sat us down and taught it. As children we absorbed it: that in this society attention has to be competed for, and so does affection, and so does respect. Above all we absorbed two instructions: that a person must become somebody, and that a person must fit in.

Every one of those lessons carries a person away from what they already were.

The part of you that does not change

How you appear from outside will shift across the years. That is ordinary, and no cause for concern.

What sits underneath does not shift. There is a child in there still, unspoiled, fresh, playful, wide awake. At that depth, a person is not a version of life. They are life.

People who have stopped performing are simply what is true about them at that moment. They talk out of that inner place, and nothing about them needs managing.

It gives other people permission

Here is the effect that is easy to miss. Dropping the performance does something to the people around you, because it frees them to drop theirs.

Allowing another person to be who they are, and treating that as their right, is precisely what opens the same room for you. The two movements are one movement.

And anyone who recognises the genuine article in you will respect you for it, for the simple reason that it is what they are looking for themselves.

When the time comes to name your own business, putting your own name on the door feels like the logical move. You are the one in charge, and you are the one staking a reputation on whether the thing works.

It is entirely your right to call the company whatever you like. But a business named after a living, breathing person carries risks that nobody mentions at the start.

The name arrives loaded

Your company’s name will carry meaning whether you intended any or not.

The quality of what you sell is obviously a better measure of an organisation’s potential. That has never stopped names from doing work of their own. The names we are born with have been shown to carry associations well beyond our control, and the same goes for the labels we choose for companies.

Some researchers have gone further and found that firms owned by and named after their heads are 21 percent less valuable than comparable others. Since the name is your decision and nobody else’s, that is damage you may be doing to your own organisation before it has traded for a single day.

The successor problem

Think ahead to the day you might want out, or want to bring in an equal partner. Both get considerably harder when the company is tied to your name.

You will be filtering out qualified buyers and partners who do not relish buying something they will never quite feel is theirs.

And if the sale does go through, consider what you have handed over. Your name, and with it your reputation, is now under somebody else’s control. Should your public image take a knock, the company follows, and there is a reason the words name and reputation are so often used to mean the same thing.

You are not limiting yourself by staying off the sign

The fear that pushes founders the other way is that the company will overshadow them personally. It is an understandable worry and it is mostly unfounded.

If the business succeeds, your name gets out there regardless.

Steve Jobs did not need his name on the products to become the most highly regarded entrepreneur in the world. What made him a legend was the dedication he put into building the company, not the word printed on the casing.

Small things, a bit of mindless snacking after lunch and even a cup of coffee, can undo a good deal of effort. A lapse in concentration or a spell of overindulgence in the afternoon is enough to waste the work of the morning.

So which afternoon habits are worth watching?

The afternoon dessert

You ran five kilometres before work, so you have earned a treat. It is a reasonable-sounding thought and it is where the afternoon usually goes wrong.

There is nothing wrong with a cheat meal once a week. The difficulty is that the afternoon ice cream can quietly cancel out the morning’s sweat session, which leaves you with the effort and none of the result.

The leftover indulgences

The half-finished packet of biscuits from the morning meeting is remarkably tempting by three o’clock.

The rule worth holding is simple. Do not give in unless you are actually hungry. If a friend has made you a cake, or it is somebody’s birthday, then by all means. What matters is that it does not quietly become a daily arrangement.

Sitting still all afternoon

An hour of exercise in the morning does not buy you the right to sit for the remaining nine.

A post-lunch doze, or simply staying at the desk without moving, is the easiest thing in the world. Set a timer every hour as a reminder to get up. You do not need a brisk walk in the middle of the working day; take a call while walking, or use the washroom on another floor.

A late lunch

It is tempting to think the timing does not matter as long as the food is good. The body does not work on our preferences.

Research reported in the International Journal of Obesity found that people who ate lunch after three in the afternoon had lower chances of losing weight, because the later meal disturbs the process of metabolism.

Coffee straight after lunch

A large mug to wash down a late lunch is not the good idea it seems.

Coffee does aid digestion, but a great deal of acid immediately after eating can cause problems, and the tannins together with the caffeine interfere with digestion if taken too soon. Wait at least forty-five minutes after your meal.

And watch what goes in it. Sugar, cream and milk add calories of their own, which can cancel out any benefit from the lift in metabolism.

One more, from a study

Researchers at the University of Vermont found that overweight participants who halved their television time burned an additional 119 calories a day on average. Doing something light while you watch, even ordinary household tasks, increases that further.

Are the shelves at home overflowing with bits and pieces? Is it a struggle to turn up a matching pair of shoes, or two earrings, let alone one hairpin?

Here are three ways to get a house better organised, and the pleasing thing about all of them is that they repurpose something you already have.

Binder clips in the freezer

Take a handful of binder clips and clip your bags onto the freezer shelves.

It is a little fiddly at first, keeping the bag sealed while you fix it to the rung, and practice sorts that out. What you get back is time and space, and a freezer that looks considerably more organised than it did.

A magazine rack for pot lids

Once the pans themselves have a home, the lids still need one, and lids are what turn a tidy cupboard back into a jumble.

The walls inside a cupboard are the right spot and they are almost always going unused. You can buy a dedicated lid holder. Or you can save the money and give an old magazine rack a second life doing exactly the same job.

A cutlery organiser for toothbrushes

Toothbrushes are among the most germ-laden things in a house, which is not what most people expect of an object they put in their mouth twice a day.

What they need above all is to dry out properly between uses, and a crowded pot does not allow it. Take an unused cutlery organiser and give every brush its own compartment. Each one gets air on all sides, and nothing touches anything else.

Three small changes, no purchases, and a house that is easier to live in by the weekend.

Are you financially prepared to turn thirty? A checklist tells you whether your finances are heading the right way, which is different from knowing whether this month went well.

Tracking your progress against the same list each year makes it much easier to see what you have completed and what is still waiting.

The career check

Start here, because this is where the money comes from.

Ask yourself the plain questions. Do you enjoy what you do? Is your pay rising at a decent pace? Then review your skills honestly and work out whether you have been keeping up or quietly falling behind.

Your career supplies a major portion of your income, and for most people all of it. Knowing where you stand in it lets you estimate the level of comfort you can expect when you eventually put your feet up.

Medical expenses

What is the picture with yours? How much are you actually spending on your health, and do you hold health insurance?

Health costs are among the largest surprises anyone gets hit with. They arrive without notice and they arrive large. Being prepared for them is a different activity from hoping they do not come.

The emergency fund

The most important question on the list is whether you are ready for an expense you did not plan for.

Have you got enough set aside to cover three to six months of expenses? That is the benchmark. An emergency fund is what rescues you when money is needed in a hurry, and having one changes an emergency into an inconvenience.

Long-term investments

Saving protects you. Investing is what builds wealth, and they are not the same job.

The piece points at mutual funds and describes them as high-return options. Treat that description carefully: returns vary, are not guaranteed, and past performance settles nothing. The sounder half of the advice is the balance it recommends, between equity investments on one side and traditional schemes such as fixed deposits and recurring deposits on the other.

Saving regularly and early in a career is what produces a sufficient amount in the retirement fund by the time the golden years arrive.

As ever, none of this is advice about your particular situation. A checklist tells you which questions to ask. Someone who knows your circumstances answers them.

Money set aside for retirement is what pays for a free hand in the years after work. That sentence is easy to nod at and easy to postpone, so here is the argument in a form that is harder to put down.

Remember the times you were short

Think back to the moments in your life when you did not have enough put by. The occasions where having just a few thousand rupees available would have made all the difference in the world.

Most people can name two or three without trying. The tight month. The repair that could not wait. The opportunity that needed money up front and went to somebody else.

They do not stop at sixty

This is the part that gets overlooked. Those situations will not politely cease once you have retired.

There will still be emergencies. There will still be months where the money is simply a little short. The difference is that by then the income that used to absorb them may no longer be arriving.

With something put away you ride out those patches in relative comfort. Without it, each one becomes a crisis.

The years behind you are gone, the present is not

It is true that you cannot recover the years when you put nothing aside for retirement. Nobody can give those back.

What you do have is the present moment, and the money saved between now and the day you stop working will go a long way towards improving the life you have afterwards.

That holds even if retirement is only a few years off. Late is worse than early. Late is a great deal better than never, and the assumption that it is too late now is what keeps many people from starting.

Where to put it

It can be saved in any of the usual forms, a pension or a fixed deposit among them. The vehicle matters less than the habit, particularly at the beginning.

What none of this is, is advice on your own circumstances. That takes someone who knows them, which no article does.

There is evidence that one of the secrets of a long and happy relationship is simply laughing together.

What the research found

One study found shared laughter to be positively associated with overall assessments of relationship quality. Put plainly, couples who laughed together often were the ones more likely to be in strong, positive relationships.

A second study looked at something subtler and found something more surprising. Reminiscing about laughter had a positive influence of its own. When couples recalled the moments they had laughed together, the benefit was greater still.

That is worth pausing on. It suggests the good is not confined to the moment it happens. A shared joke keeps paying out years later, every time one of you brings it up.

The thing not to do

Here the advice turns sharply, and it is the most useful line in the whole piece.

Do not force it. Laughing in your partner’s presence is not the point, and fake chuckling is likely to be actively harmful to a relationship rather than merely useless.

Which makes sense once you see what is being measured. The laughter is not the cause of a good relationship, it is the evidence of one. Manufacture the evidence and you have not changed anything; you have only made the reading unreliable, and the other person can tell.

What to do instead

Work on the conditions rather than the result. Arrange the circumstances where spontaneous, shared laughter becomes more likely, and then leave it alone.

That means time together that is not admin. It means the company of people who make you both laugh. It means the retelling of old stories, which the second study suggests is doing more work than anyone assumed.

Set those up often enough and the laughter arrives by itself, which is the only way it counts.

Most people have some idea what brings on their migraines. The useful question is the next one: what can be done to stop them happening at all.

Migraine reaches as many as 18 in every 100 women, and about six in every 100 men. Doctors are still unravelling it. The prevailing view is that a combination of things is at work, with causes running from genetics through to neurovascular imbalances in the brain.

Keep a diary

This is the first step towards a solution, and it is the one most people skip.

Before you can prevent anything you have to find out what actually triggers yours, and memory is a poor witness. Write down every episode, what preceded it, what you had eaten, how you had slept. The pattern usually shows itself within a few weeks.

Change the daily regimen

Adjustments to ordinary life reduce both how often migraines arrive and how severe they are when they do. Four of them matter most.

Sleep. Get enough of it, and go to bed at roughly the same time each night. Disruption to the schedule is a trigger, and so is too much sleep as well as too little.

Regular meals. Eating properly and at regular hours keeps blood sugar level, and a drop in blood sugar can set off an attack.

Water. Dehydration is a trigger in its own right, so drink enough of it.

Stress. Find the thing that genuinely relaxes you, whether that is soothing music, a short walk, meditation or yoga.

Foods worth adding

Cayenne, flaxseeds and fish. Cayenne is thought to help prevent the rapid swings in blood pressure that can bring on a migraine headache. Flaxseeds and fish carry omega-3s, and the fibre alongside them may help to a degree.

On supplements, three come up repeatedly. Magnesium, which you can raise through food such as kale, tofu, garlic and apricots. Vitamin B2, where the riboflavin gives the brain more energy and reduces triggers. And vitamin B12, which is described as effective for relief when taken together with folic acid.

Herbs and medicines

A long list of herbs has been used to reduce or prevent attacks: alfalfa leaf, barberry, bay, cayenne, chamomile, evening primrose, ginger root, peppermint leaf, passion flower, green tea and others.

On the medical side, beta-blockers are ordinarily prescribed for high blood pressure and heart disease, and it is not clear why they help with migraine, though improved blood flow is the usual explanation. Antidepressants act on serotonin, which may be linked to migraine.

Both of those are prescription decisions and belong with your doctor rather than with an article. Herbs are not automatically safe either, since several interact with prescribed medicines. Take the diary to a doctor and let the treatment follow from that.

Exercise

Regular moderate aerobic exercise has been shown to reduce the severity, the duration and the number of migraines in a great many people. It is the one item on this list that costs nothing and carries no interactions.

Doing more healthy things before work each day improves the day rather than eating into it. It may be time to change the shape of your morning, and you will not know until you try.

Making time at the start of a working day is genuinely difficult. Between finding the motivation to get out of bed, handling whatever the house needs, and bracing for what work will ask, the morning can feel like a running reminder that there are not enough hours.

Start it well and two things follow. You focus better on the tasks in front of you, and you enjoy the day instead of merely getting through it.

Get outside

Unless your job takes you between meetings, the odds are that from the moment you board your train until you finally rise from your desk, you will be indoors and in one position.

That makes going outside first a necessity rather than a luxury. Set the alarm half an hour earlier. Run if you are a runner and walk if you are not. There is very little to match being out in the calm of early morning, before anyone else is up.

Switch off

Email, social media and the wish to be reachable at all hours mean most of us never entirely switch off.

Having work email on your phone earns its place during your contracted hours. It earns nothing at five in the morning, and one demanding message from a manager at that hour can spoil the whole morning. Keep work email off until you are actually at work.

Meditate

Before skipping this one, consider what it offers. It is the ideal moment to slow a racing mind and take a few minutes that belong to you alone, and the calm arrives at once, the instant you rise from the mat.

There is little better than watching the skill grow and gradually acquiring the ability to switch off completely.

Talk to someone

If you are fortunate enough to walk or cycle to work, use the time to ring a family member or a friend. It is a good way to take your mind off whatever is weighing on you, large or small.

Make a list

Even done on the way in. Sketching out ideas for the morning meeting, or drawing up a plan for the day before it starts, saves a great deal of time and a great deal of stress.

Rush constantly and you fall behind on tasks that would have taken half as long had you arrived prepared.

Wake up earlier

Nobody enjoys rushing. It manufactures stress and it pulls attention away from whatever most needed doing.

So set the alarm an hour earlier than strictly necessary. This is easier said than done, and nobody likes leaving a warm bed. But lying in it worrying about the day ahead is not much of a pleasure either.

Aim at a passion project

Your job matters and so does everything you do outside it. The morning has long been regarded as the best hours for creative thinking.

If you have nothing in the pipeline at all, use some of that time for a long hard think about what you have always wanted to do.

Elbert Hubbard put the whole argument in one line. The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today.