Optimal, Creative Thinking:
De-Distracting Your Life

Socrates said what is the most important key to lifelong happiness: "The unquestioned life is nor worth living." Without questioning your life to eliminate time-wasting distractions, you will distract and waste your life away. You will never know the pure serenity of taking time to smell the roses.

If one wants to be more than the average Walter Mitty, one need undertand how to maximize one's integrity of intellect and information, i.e., one's iCube. iCube is analogous to the nature/nurture dichotomy. It emphasizes the dynamic nature of one's mentality based on many modifiable factors in one's daily and long-term life. The latter reflects one's goals and values that should refect on-going questioning.

1. Time of day (top)
   One's daily potential for creativity thinking is more than the needed accumulation of relevant information. A sleeping brain has the samed stored information as a woke person. Most would agree that early morning thinking is better than late-at-night before bedtime thinking. Like the best time to exercise your body so is the best time to think is in the morning.
   
2. Catabolic/Anabolic Bodily Cycle Timing: (top)
   The REM cycle is the nocturnal component of a biological cycle reflecting body's allocation of resources between the cognitive system(CNS) and alimentary system, aka, Central Nervous System(CNS) and Autonomic Nervous System(ANS). In a sense, it is the difference between catabolic and anabolic activity, that is, consuming energy and building energy reserves throughout the body. The adult cycle is normally 75-90 minutes (a newborn is 30-50 minutes). The daily component of the "Catan" cycle is alertness and drowsyness.
   
   One should know this cycle and adjust one's mental focus based on alertness. Trying to finesse a solution to a problem while drowsy is often a blind alley trip from which one must back out.
   
   An important factor that has broad political implications is the correlation of attention span to the Catan cycle. If one's attention span is not sufficient to juggle sufficient information to form a solution, one will not solve the problem. It is like the frog that can jump 6" trying to climb a staircase with 7" steps. Drowyness reduces attention span.
   
   The importance and dominance of the ANS is its fight-or-flight component which initiates a transfer of body control to the CNS. This transition occurs regularly without any danger or fear when one experiences the mental clarity and serenity after having a "good dump."
   
   The endogenous catabolic/anabolic cyle is insufficiently appreciated by the counseling community. If a person, relative to most people, has an exaggerated Catan roller coaster, one will subject to manic-depressive diagnosis. Medication usually affects a modulation of these extremes, sadly by lowering one's over-all iCube which can lead to depression.
   
3. Diet (top)
   In the animal kingdom, the high-activity predators are carnivores that hunt protein while the slow-pace herbivores are content with carbohydrates--moo or bahh. One's roller-coaster iCube is affected by digesting proteins or sugars. One's information will be the same whether one eats proteins or carbs, but the latter tends to induce drowsiness. Think about Thanksgiving dinner. I do a small can of tuna or a chicken thigh/leg in the morning along with coffee poured the night before. My evening meal of carbonhydrates puts me into a quick, deep sleep.
   

4. Sleep Personal Note: One semester of seven courses ace's for 24 credit hours (transcript) (top)

   When this writer went to college, the central guideline was "What is the meaning of life?" I was encourged in this endeavor by a great human being I met in the Navy, Jeff Patton. Beginning with philosophy, I realize that if I understood the brain better that I could deep-six a lot of philosophical questions. A goal developed to optimize learning and memory from which the basis of Timism began (ROI) and adjustment of my diet and sleep. My diet had coffeed and protein for breakfast and carbohydrates before sleep. As to sleep, I slept twice a day: From 4pm to 6:30pm and 4am to 6:30am. Both regiments I still mainly observe. "Whoa, you might say, that is weird." Or, ingenious? This diet/sleep schedule allowed me to have to two fresh mornings each day for motivated clear thinking. This allowed me to have an extra 3 hours each day which I translated into cum laude in just over two years. It also allowed me on weekend nights when most males were crashing by 1am to keep dancing and dallying with energetic co-eds. My undergraduate days were not a grind.

5. Distractions (top)
   • GIGO:
     1. The brain is analogous to a computer CPU in which GIGO rules: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
        Most home internet traffic is play or pornography(60%). The drumbeat for higher bandwidth and connectivity is like the alcoholic wanting more booze of a higher proof at a lower price. With hundreds of TV channels, the TVholic is in the blissful heaven of mental masterbation.
     2. Gresham's Law: Technology has generated a Gresham's Law of thinking, that is, cheap thoughts crowd out better thoughts. The driving force is people wanting something-for-nothing. The richness in life is not being a passive couch potato but a curious person who takes the time to act on one's curiosity. From unhappy TVholics I have been accused of being too happy. The more one knows about reality, the more happiness from seeing the beauty in life. Well-read individuals are rarely bored as any environment is target-rich with interests and curiosity. Mid-life crises infect people who did college for job-training rather than life enjoyment. (I keep a book of inspirational or historical quotations in my driver-side door pocket as an alternative to the plague of people sitting in offices with cellphone front-and-center. Of course, we are connected, but to what are we connecte: Positivity, placebo or poison?
     3. Screen Time:
        • Computer Games: In my attic I have business micro-computers purchased in the late 1970s costing $6,000 each. The lease payment was greater than my house payment. I have never played a game on a computer.
        • My screen time is factual and historical rather than repetition sports and soaps that yields no useful problem-solving knowledge. True, all work and no play makes Jack and Jill dull people. However, all play and no politics makes Jack and Jill depressed, desperate and demised. The American Dream became a nightmare because of GIGO by end users.
   • Two-things at once: People self-deceive when they say they can do two things at once. The quality of results is less. One cannot create solutions to real problems if doing two things at once. Listening to music can be conducive to thinking if it is background music that complements rather than distracts thinking. (Pachelbel's Canon)
   • Transient distractions: Creating a quiet space is important to have undistracted thinking. Noisy neighbors or cars require earplugs.
   • Long-term distractions:
     1. Troublesome friends or relatives can be a hindrance that is the basis of the cliche, "You can choose your friends but not your relatives." When a friend or lover is no long fulfilling the origin of the words, a freeing friend, it time find new friends or lovers.
     2. Life partner: If you date or marry a person who does not like to be alone, a cook, a gardener or a reader, you will be spending a lot of time formally or informally filling the gaps of this person's life.
   • Screen Time:
     • Computer Games: In my attic I have business micro-computers purchased in the late 1970s costing $6,000 each. The lease payment was greater than my house payment. I have never played a game on a computer.
     • Algorhytms and AI: One must clear caches if one does not want one's thinking to be boxed-in by algorthyms and Big Brother on steroids.
     • My screen time is factual and historical rather than repetition sports and soaps that yields no useful problem-solving knowledge. True, all work and no play makes Jack and Jill dull people. However, all play and no politics makes Jack and Jill depressed, desperate and demised. The American Dream became a nightmare because of GIGO by end users.
       
6. Moving and Stabilty (top)
   1. We (author and wife) have lived in the same house for almost 50 years. Not moving, we saved time otherwise wasted to discover sources for the needs of life.
   2. Oppositely, my mother would not pay rent after the initial payment with evictions averaging three months. By my 18th birthday, she had moved 68 times to another hovel. (I missed most of the moves as I left home at age 8--see I did not kill my mother.)
   3. A house is a home, not a financial instrument. Many PhD's have ended up in apartments after chasing the inflationary housing bubble.
   4. NOBILIS: No one beats inflation letting inflation soar. In 1968 my grandfather sold his house to a younger brother for $20,000 that was worth five years in a middle-class nursing home. Today's average middle-class home is worth only two to three years of nursing care. And, grandma did not work as is the case with today's two-earner homes.
      
7. Racism and building up your attention span. (top)
   1. Improving one's attention span over time is like improving one's health by daily, consistent exercise and diet.
   2. While one's natural attention span decreases with age, one's relative attention span can improve with more knowledge and less igknowance. Igknowance is choosing not to know and to act negatively with that igknowance.
   3. Racism and bigotry are forms of igknowance that igknow all we have in common to act on a piece of information worse than no information at all. If is like controlling one's anger. If one consistently questions one's negative reactions to everyday life, one will peel off the layers of igknowance to find ever increasing founts of happiness. One can cite the peeling of eye-irritating onions that become less and less a life distraction until one a cocktail onion or less. When you have an onion seed personality, you will find more people want to be frank, honest and happy with you.
      
8. Save a dime or save your time (top)
   1. One is bombarded with messages of saving a few pennies or dollars, e.g., three cents a gallon of gas. Like a racist thought, if you automatically stop thinking about petty penny thinking, you save a lot of time over your lifetime.
   2. If you want to have more free time to enjoy who you are then get rid of all the gimmicks that waste your time for a dime. You will enjoy more people that you meet rather than focusing your time on your dimes. Often, when I treat a cashier as a human being and say no membership card, the cashier whips-out a store discount card to give me the discount.
   3. Bulk Purchases: The item cost is less in currency. The time cost is less in your current time. A years supply of something eliminates unnecessary distracting thoughts. One hundred dollars in food will be worth more than one hundred dollars in an inflationary year. During a financial crisis, one cannot eat $100 in a closed bank or an empty ATM machine, One should have a year's supply of rotating staples for survival, security and investment. Some daily needs can be purchased years in advance, e.g., 20 years of toothpicks for $4.
      
9. Aging: Counter-acting Decline (top)
   1. One's longest natural metabolic attention span seems to peak at age 33. Keeping in mind that one uses one's mind to solve problems as the bedrock of real, lasting happiness, one can within the iCube model extend one's relative or relevant attention span with more information in the form of vocabulary or concepts.
   2. By knowing what a carboreator does, one can quickly understand a mechanic's diagnosis faster than hearing "the device on the car that mixes air and gasoline." Some illiterate explanations become so long that the original thesis is lost in the ether. Problems don't get solved. Reading is a critical part of an individual's or society's problem-solving survival.
      
10. Sex (top)
    Studies have shown that the more intelligent animals have the higher sex drive. If one is seriously into thinking, one must avoid activities that arouse the sleeping monster. Otherwise, one must scratch the itch as quickly as possible.  People think about sex many times each day(Men about 20 times.)  https://www.google.com/search?q=frequency+of+thinking+about+sex&sca_esv=fd3c45d4dd9c35da&ei=SaQraZ75Oteg5NoPs7C1sAI&ved=0ahUKEwjewebc4piRAxVXEFkFHTNYDSYQ4dUDCBE&uact=5&oq=frequency+of+thinking+about+sex&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiH2ZyZXF1ZW5jeSBvZiB0aGlua2luZyBhYm91dCBzZXgyBRAhGKABMgUQIRirAjIFECEYqwIyBRAhGJ8FMgUQIRifBTIFECEYnwUyBRAhGJ8FMgUQIRifBTIFECEYnwUyBRAhGJ8FSOU2UABYtTRwAHgBkAEAmAGEAaAB1hGqAQQyOC4zuAEDyAEA-AEBmAIfoALbFsICCxAAGIAEGJECGIoFwgIREC4YgAQYsQMY0QMYgwEYxwHCAggQABiABBixA8ICCxAAGIAEGLEDGIMBwgILEC4YgAQY0QMYxwHCAhAQLhiABBhDGMcBGIoFGK8BwgIKEAAYgAQYQxiKBcICHxAuGIAEGEMYxwEYigUYrwEYlwUY3AQY3gQY4ATYAQHCAg4QABiABBiRAhixAxiKBcICDRAAGIAEGLEDGEMYigXCAggQLhiABBixA8ICBRAAGIAEwgIGEAAYFhgewgIIEAAYFhgKGB7CAgsQABiABBiGAxiKBcICCBAAGIAEGKIEwgIFEAAY7wWYAwDiAwUSATEgQLoGBggBEAEYFJIHBTIxLjEwoAf81wGyBwUyMS4xMLgH2xbCBwoyLTMuMjAuNy4xyAf8Aw&sclient=gws-wiz-serp. Some ntellectuals time their cheeryOs to think better.
    
    90% rule: CheeryOs are ... difference ... 90% of pregancies are unplanned ... #1 serial killer ...
    Mother Nature says that the right to be a parent is a thing of the past. In an over-populated world killing the future, more parents is a death sentenced for civilization etc ... and I am proving it every day with new disasters.
    
    Intimacy is sex with a person you like as a friend or lover. CheeryOs are a gift from Mother Nature. Sometimes a mistress or sugar friend becomes an emotional distraction out of the bed. Then one must remember the etymology of friend, a "freeing person." When a friend or lover becomes an emotional or mental distraction then one no longers has the overall freedom from the bliss of cheeryOs.
    
11. Sports (top)
    I know next-to-nothing about sports but a lot about how to save life on Planet Earth. Anyone who says their sports-obsesseed information is more meaningful meaning of life is part of the problem, not the solution.
    
12. Political Failure of Moral Leadership in De-Distraction (top)
    1. Lotteries: tax on those who don't know math. NYC 3 more gambling casinos
    2. 401ks: The biggest bank robbery in history stealing wage-earners' retirements
    3. TV ads: Getting people to buy things they don't need with money they don't have.
    4. Sports in Education: America is the only nation that integrates competitive sports into its education system.
    5. Social promotions: long-term costs ... pregancies
    6. Racism: Playing to the igknowance, insecurities and inferiorities of low-information ill-liberals.
       
13. Attitude Determines Altitude (top)
    A positive attitude, self belief and honest questioning takes one higher in life. A positive attitude without reality checking is a pollyanna or an ostriche attitude.
    
    Pollyanna attitude: "an excessively cheerful or optimistic person: 'what I am saying makes me sound like some aging Pollyanna who just wants to pretend that all is sweetness and light'" [Google]
    
    Ostriche attiude: Life is good for me. I will wait till 2028 to save democracy and do nothing in the meantime.