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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • You know how to can get turned off of eggs if you get the egg ick.

    I don’t think I do know actually. But here’s an attempt at answering this question anyway:

    And bonus, anybody know why that happens?

    We are usually very quick at relating sickness or even discomfort to the food we ate at the time or slightly before. This is a very valuable trait to avoid food that is unhealthy or even poisonous. But it’s only based on correlation, so it can turn us off food that is not actually causing the sickness but we just happened to eat at the time.







  • You’re doing neither yourself nor anyone else a favour by being overly shy and reticent. You yourself will enjoy life much more when you are yourself and while not everyone will like you, the ones who don’t often don’t stay in your life long and it’s easier to find people you vibe with if they can see you for who you are.

    Granted, I very much did not take this advice as a teenager and even now I’m occasionally too shy. But looking back it was good advice and I really wish I hadn’t wasted so much time and energy on not being negatively noticed by people I didn’t really care about then and who haven’t been in my life for years.





  • Think about it like this: There is an almost endless amount of stuff around us at any given moment that we could be aware of. If we factor in the things that are not actually there but we can still think about, then there are infinitely many things we could be paying attention to at any moment.

    But we only have a finite amount of energy to do it. The more energy we use to think about one thing the less energy remains to think about everything else.

    I wouldn’t say that we are ignoring things when we concentrate. Because to me when you ignore something you are actually aware of it but choose to ignore it. When you concentrate, you just don’t have enough energy left to be aware of other things.


  • I used to have this problem, too. Both when trying to fall asleep in the evening and after waking up in the middle of the night for any reason.

    What really helps me is putting on an audiobook or podcast that I like but already know (this part is important because otherwise I will just listen to it for the rest of the night because I want to know what happens) and setting the volume to very low. I set the sleep timer to 15 minutes and most of the time I’m asleep way before it turns off.

    I had to experiment a bit to find audiobooks that hit the sweet spot of being engaging enough to keep my mind from wandering but not so much that I can’t drift of to sleep but once I found a few, it’s been a real game changer.



  • Not only more readable than A and B but I would argue it’s also easier to remember who did what a few sentences or paragraphs earlier since Alice and Bob invoke slightly less generic mental images than A and B. For example one is a woman and the other one is a man, maybe even some person or character you know.

    And now that I’m thinking about it, the different gender also makes it easier to keep track of who does what because different pronouns are used (at least in English and many other languages).