Archive for the ‘Book Summaries’ Category

Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture by Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel (© 2013, Riverside Books: NY, NY) explains how they use Google’s repository of 30 million digitized books to investigate human culture. Their analytical tool lets them see how words and phrases have come and gone over the years and what these trends can tell us about ourselves. As more data becomes available they see many positive and negative possibilities. This is one book you don’t want to miss. Click at the bottom of any page to get a copy of this important book.

Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

• Erez has a PhD from Harvard and MIT. After stints at Harvard and Google he joined the faculty of Baylor and Rice were he directs the Center for Genome Architecture. In 2009 he was named as one of the world’s top innovators under 35 and has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
• Jean-Baptiste is a French and Mauritian entrepreneur and scientist and the founder of Quantified Labs. He is an associate scientist at Harvard and a former visiting faculty member at Google. He has a PhD from Harvard, is a TED Fellow, and one of Forbe’s “30 Under 30” winners.

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Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind by Judson Brewer offers actionable advice for anyone who suffers from anxiety. There is also a free app available that can further help make your life less stressful. Learn how you can use curiosity and kindness to your advantage. While I don’t suffer from anxiety, I know many people who do. If you are anxious, you need this book. It also makes a great gift for anxious friends and family. Thanks, Jud.

Introduction

• Judson has MD and PhD degrees which took eight years to complete. He then went on to a career as a psychiatrist doing research on anxiety. He found that anxiety is in and of itself a harmful habit. It hides in peoples’ bad habits and feeds other behaviors. When he realized this, due in part to his own panic attacks as a student, he was determined to “science the hell out of it,” to cite a Matt Damon quote from The Martian. During the last decade, his research has lead to excellent results in helping people quit smoking, overeating, and other bad habits with the help of smartphone apps. This book is intended to be a useful pragmatic guide to changing how you understand anxiety so that you can work with it effectively, and as a bonus, break your unhelpful habits and addictions.

Part 0 Understanding Your Mind: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Anxiety

1. Anxiety Goes Viral

• Anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is experienced by people who generally worry throughout the day. This usually results in poor sleeping habits. Other symptoms include edginess, restlessness, tiring easily, impaired concentration, irritability, and increased muscle aches. Specific phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder also fall under anxiety diagnoses.
• Anxious parents are likely to have anxious kids. Uncertainty and lack of structure cause anxiety for many. It is tricky to diagnose as most people experience it to some degree. Worries about health, safety, finances, politics, and relationships are the top sources. COVID-19 has certainly added to our collective stress. People with GAD usually also suffer from depression or something else.

2. The Birth of Anxiety

• Anxiety and its close cousin panic are both born from fear. Ironically, fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive. Being afraid of dangerous situations and doing something about it is a good thing. The pre-frontal cortex (PFC) portion of our brain is where future scenarios get played out. It thinks slower than the reflexive part of our brain. When it doesn’t have enough information to predict the future it may start working on worst-case scenarios causing anxiety.
• Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism. Anxiety is maladaptive. Fear + Uncertainly = Anxiety. Without past experience or accurate information, it’s easy to turn on the worry switch. This is why fake news, which travels faster than real news, promotes anxiety. Our news media is more likely to give us stories that feed our anxiety than those that make us feel good. (Doug: If the news you watch makes you anxious, consider not watching it.) Anxiety is also contagious. Knowing this and that uncertainty triggers anxiety can help put you more at ease. It is possible to replace old habits like worry with habits that are more rewarding so stay tuned.

3. Habits and Everyday Addictions

• Most of us are addicted to something as addictions are not limited to things like hard drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Compulsive behaviors like shopping and overeating also fall into this category. Our modern world has increased the likelihood of addictive habits as just about anything is much more available. The goal of the media is to increase clicks and eyeballs. Therefore they design not to inform, but to create addictive experiences. This starts with a Trigger, which is a thought or emotion. Next comes a Behavior like worrying. Finally, we have a Result or Reward such as avoidance or overplanning. Reinforcements and immediate availability are a dangerous formula for modern-day habits and addictions. This is how our brains work and this is important knowledge.

4. Anxiety as a Habit Loop

• Anxiety can act as a trigger that leads to the behavior of worrying. The result of this behavior can be feeling more anxious. That is the loop or cycle. While worrying usually doesn’t work, this doesn’t stop our brain from trying it again and again. Being aware of this is a good place to start. Judson and his team developed an app (Unwinding Anxiety) that they use to teach mindfulness to the subjects of their research. You can get a free trial or pay for the complete program. They used this app on doctors who do not get training on how to handle their emotions in medical school and found success with 63% of their subjects. First, you need to map out your anxiety. Then you tap into your brain’s reward system before you tap into your own neural capacities to step away from anxiety-producing habits.

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Upstream: How to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath deals with the notion of preventing problems before they happen rather than being stuck with constantly fixing things after they break. He discusses barriers to Upstream thinking and offers questions Upstream leaders need to address. Whether you are a leader in your organization or just an ordinary individual trying to reduce stress and live a happier life, this book is a must.

1. Moving Upstream

• The book starts with a parable about two men rescuing drowning children who one after another come past them in a river. When one man stops the effort to head Upstream his friend asks what he is doing. The man says that he is going Upstream to tackle the man who is throwing the kids into the river. The key point is that Upstream efforts are aimed at preventing problems while Downstream efforts react to problems once they’ve occurred.
• An example is Expedia’s 58% call support rate. When they looked at the problem they found that none of their teams were judged on this number. Once they looked at the reasons for the calls it was easy to lower the rate to 15%. Another example compares one police officer who stands on the corner causing people to slow down and preventing accidents to another who hides and gives out tickets. Dan sees health care as one area where the US needs to shift to more Upstream efforts as other developed countries have done. The general goal in this book, therefore, is that we should all shift more of our energies Upstream.

Section 1 – The Three Barriers to Upstream Thinking

2. Problem Blindness

• Problem blindness happens when we believe that negative outcomes are natural and unavoidable. A successful example of fighting this problem happened in the Chicago Public Schools where the graduation rate in 1998 was 53%. They found that the key to graduation was a successful freshman year and a program to attack this problem was put in place. It involved teachers getting to know individual students better, giving more support, and collaborating with each other to help students in need. By 2018 the graduation rate had risen to 78%.
• Sometimes we miss problems because we focus on one thing and miss a problem in our peripheral vision. In the 1960s and 1970s, sexual harassment had been normalized in the workplace to the extent that women were encouraged to embrace it. In 1975 a journalist coined the term sexual harassment. Now that the problem had a name demanding a solution was an implied obligation.
• Another example relates to the extensive use of C-sections for child delivery in Brazil. They increased as they were convenient since they could be scheduled and they resulted in more money for the doctors. They also resulted in more babies ending up in intensive care as they were born sooner than necessary. Thanks to one woman and one doctor who saw the problem and took action, the C-section percentage is now coming way down.

3. A Lack of Ownership

• An example of this issue goes back to the Chicago Public Schools with its dismal graduation rate. It got that way because the adults saw it as the kids’ problem. It was greatly improved when the adults decided to make it their problem. There is a story here about a man who owned a carpet business. When he read about our environmental problems he decided to see what he could do. He motivated everyone in the company to look for ways to do things like recycling old carpets. When a doctor in Tennessee found out that more kids died inside cars than outside cars he went to work in 1976 on legislation requiring car seats for kids. By 1985 all 50 states had car seat laws. In short, upstream work is generally chosen rather than demanded. If you find yourself saying “it’s not my problem,” you are likely living downstream.

4. Tunneling

• When you are reacting to problems it can be like you are in a tunnel just digging forward. You don’t have time to step back and take a system-wide look at why the problem exists. Such time would be slack time and it is smart to build slack time for system thinking into your schedule. Poverty tends to cause more tunneling as it reduces bandwidth and causes stress. People who aren’t poor can solve some of their problems with money, which leaves more resources for the problems that money can’t solve. Dan gives examples of situations where tunneling gets in the way of upstream problem-solving.

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