Author: Dave

North Wales explorer

Top Tips After 1 Year of Reading Self-Development Books

On By DaveIn Parenting, Random2 Comments

I’m guessing some of this stuff will help as a parent at some point, hopefully.

Here’s a list of the best bits I’ve read about:

  • Self Serving Bias is a massive influence on all of us.  Build the emotional intelligence to prevent you acting on it.  It’s got a long history too, apparently Buddha said something about it, and so did Matthew in the Bible:
    “Never mind the black spec in my eye, first remove the log from your own”
    Meaning, don’t be a hypocrite.
  • Some people suffer from feelings of inferiority and low self esteem, depression etc, whilst many others suffer from feelings of superiority, resulting in anger, having no-patience and a low-frustration-tolerance
  • Avoid comparing yourself with others
  • Avoid ‘What if’ statements, verbally and as thoughts. They make you anxious
  • Avoid ‘should’ statements, they will make you angry and unhappy.  E.g. “This should have happened” (or shouldn’t)
  • Acceptance. Accept what you can’t change – e.g. having a crap night’s sleep
  • Flexibility. Those who are flexible with their mindset, and with their plans, are generally the happiest people.
  • Aggressive opinions of right and wrong cause all sorts of unnecessary conflicts. I’m sure many of the members of terrorist organisations feel what they are doing is morally right.  The best way to avoid such strict views, is by spending time with a range of people with different thoughts, political affiliations etc.
  • Have a flexible mindset not a fixed mindset in terms of learning, using statements such as “I can’t do it yet”, rather than “I can’t do it”

Josh

  • The best way to stop caring about what others think, is to stop complaining about and judging them yourself
  • Have a preference for the way others behave, but don’t demand it.  For example, don’t demand that people drive how you deem appropriate, or you’ll just spend every commute being angry.
  • Practice gratitude, or you’re likely to want more and more, when you don’t actually need anything

Things to do for Free – Night Walks

On By DaveIn Uncategorized1 Comment

I think it’s important to find things that are fun, that you can do for free.

If you don’t mind the risk of getting arrested, or attacked by a bear, then night-walking is awesome. Especially in the woods, on a clear night.  Unfortunately, on the video, I couldn’t get the sky to ‘show up’ nor the moon-light that was on the river.

Trust me though, it’s amazingly peaceful and a cool thing to do. It’s help if you have a dog so that you don’t look like a complete weirdo, and a head-torch.  Picking up poo in the dark can be a bit of a challenge too!

You can make it a cool meditation-esk practice too, by focusing on the sounds you can hear for 10 seconds, then focus on what you can see, and finally what you can feel – e.g. the wind on your face, breathing, feet on the floor etc.

 

 

Underfloor Heating?

On By DaveIn Home, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Underfloor heating, always makes me think of Arsenal football club for some reason – I think, they were one of the first clubs to have under-soil heating; avoiding postponed matches during the winter.

Under-soil heating, may be a bit expensive and not massively practical in terms of the domestic market, however, under-floor heating is becoming quite trendy.

But is it worth it?

Some of the advantages of under-floor heating include:

Pros
1. The floor is actually warm, not the radiator on one side of the room.
2. The heat is more evenly dispersed throughout a given room, rather than heating an isolated area
3. It adds more space to a room, assuming radiators are ‘the other’ heating option being considered.
4. Underfloor heating can work at a lower temperature than radiators
5. It might; might enhance the home’s selling price
6. You don’t get dust mites gathering around and on the radiator, because you probably won’t have a radiator

Cons
1. Difficult to ‘retro-fit’
2. It can take longer to warm up (but you can just use a timer to get it going by the time it’s cold)
3. A cheaper system might not provide enough warmth, so you might end up fitting radiators anyway!
Underfloor Heating Options
Two main types of underfloor heating systems exist – electric and water ones. Water based systems are more expensive to fit, but are cheaper to run than electric ones.

 

I think I’ll stick to my wood-burner for now…but here’s an interesting infographic if you are a bit of a heating-engineer-geek or general nerd that enjoys sciencey images:

Energy Saver 101: Home Heating

by sarahgerrity.

From Visually.

15 minute workouts for knackered dads

On By DaveIn FitnessLeave a comment

Equipment:
Chin up bar
Strength bands
Caffeine tablets

Tabata intervals, done once every other day, are a great time-efficient way of gaining many of the benefits of cardiovascular exercise, in a much shorter space of time – 4 minutes.

Choose any exercise, for example squats with bodyweight.
Find a Tabata Timer on Youtube or download an app.
Do 20 seconds of squats, rest 10 seconds, then repeat 8 times.
This gives 4 minutes of high intensity exercise.
I like to do these with MMA specific exercises like sit-throughs.

If you can spare another 10-15 minutes, here are a couple of workouts you can do at home for muscle-mass or just muscle-maintainence.

Remember that ‘return on investment’ in terms of exercise and ‘gains’ in strength and muscle mass is not proportional.  In fact, there are a lot of fitness professionals who argue that 1 set of exercise to failure, is all that is required per body part.  See Mike Mentzer and Dorian Yates’ training philosophies (not 1-set training, but certainly an in-and-out of the gym mentality)

 

 

 

Most importantly, do something, and form the habit of exercising whenever possible. Even if it’s just doing squats whilst the kettle is boiling!

Home Birth ‘Review’

On By DaveIn Home, ParentingLeave a comment

For your first child, I seriously would not bother.

We hired our birthing pool for 5 weeks for £90 which isn’t bad to be fair. Although it is basically a paddling pool (in fact my mate’s wife gave birth in a paddling pool rather than a ‘birthing’ one)

 

Everything was going great, until it came to the final stages – the bit where you have to do all that pushing…

Nothing was happening, so the midwives phoned an ambulance, which took well over an hour to arrive.

All the neighbours came out (even though most of them have never spoken to us) to see what was going on, and my wife was taken out on a chair in the middle of the road, which couldn’t have been the best experience ever.

She was exhausted, and in lots of pain by the time we got to hospital. What the home-birth groups and Daisy Foundation didn’t, apparently mention was the fact that once you are at a certain stage in labour, you can’t have any extra pain relief. Considering that 45% of home-births, for the first child, end up in hospital, it’s an important thing to consider.

So without any pain-relief (wasn’t allowed gas and air even, perhaps because of her shallow breathing) my wife was ‘cut’, and the baby was taken out with forceps.  She was in so much pain, it’s borderline traumatised me, so I’ve no idea how bad she must feel.

Anyway, all is well, that ends well. We did have to go back into hospital because baby lost a bit too much weight, and Jo had to feed her every 3 hours, but all okay now.  Thank God.

How To Meditate

On By DaveIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The quality of this video is terrible but the content is there:

 

Meditation is great for enhancing focus, reducing stress and controlling negative thoughts.

You can learn to meditate, by being guided through 10 minute sessions, for 10 days with the free app from HeadSpace, which you can find here.

Breathing meditation can be done without the app.  Just sit up straight, and set a timer for 10-30 minutes.

Breathe in for 10 breaths, focusing on the feeling of the breath coming into and out of the nose, lungs and mouth.
Then breathe in for 10 breaths focusing on the sound of the breath. Then for 10 breaths visualise the air coming into and out of the body.

Repeat this until your time is up on your timer.
If your mind drifts (which it will!) just bring the focus back to the breath.

You can also try using a mantra, a short phrase you can repeat over and over with each breath.

‘Mindfulness’ can be applied to everyday tasks such as washing the dishes.  Focus on the dishes, not what you want to do in 5 minutes time.  Focus on the feelings of touch, the noises etc as you do the dishes, it should make it more enjoyable!  Should!

Don’t Get Stuck on the Negatives

On By DaveIn Random, UncategorizedLeave a comment

 

Why do we spend so much time thinking about the negatives?
Dwelling on the tiny injustices and trivial occurrences which damage our egos…

Here is a great video about the importance to think about the positives, and how to do it –

 

One of the best tips, that we can probably all relate to us when you’ve come home from work. Tell your loved one(s) specifically about what was good about your day.  Don’t go into the negative things.
This will prove very difficult at first!

This is one way that you can train yourself to focus on the upside of your day. Other techniques include writing down what you’re grateful for each day.

Positive affirmations are also simple, yet effective.  For example, next time you go into the gym, think or state out loud – “this is going to be an amazing workout”

I think being positive is a very important aspect of parenting.  Children copy their parents, so try remember this next time you start moaning about things that don’t really matter.

 

I’m 34 – Should I write a Will?

On By DaveIn Parenting, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Will_myths

 

It’s not something that I’ve considered before, but no that I have offspring (well one on the way in 1.5 months) it’s something I should put in place.

This webpage does a convincing job of persuading me to get the proverbial ball rolling, and contact a solicitor to get this sorted.  Especially as I have a mortgage, and well, 2 dogs as well!

You can use the webpage by clicking on the 3 bits of pink text, and separately, choosing a reason that you haven’t bothered writing a well from the pink drop down menu that appears.

I chose “it’s too expensive”, “I’m too young” (haha) and “it’s too time consuming”.  Apparently, it’s not too expensive (normally costs about £150 from my research), I could die anytime and it only takes 1 or 2 appointments to get the will sorted out.

So get going, and contact a solicitor or will writer. After all, you don’t want your kids worrying about finances, when they’ve just lost a love one. Poor Ted wouldn’t know where to start…

TedSnow