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#1 Taln Fan

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  1. #1 Taln Fan

    How Emotions Work

    By #1 Taln Fan,


    Psychology
    I’ll probably be yapping a lot about emotions on this blog, since it’s what I research, so I first want to give some general info on how emotions are created, most of which comes from Dr. James Gross and Dr. Jennifer Veilleux.
    Emotions are difficult to define, and even experts in the field can’t agree on a single definition. But essentially, they’re messages from our brain about something that matters to us. Emotions are brief, usually only a couple minutes at most, as compared to moods, which are longer. But what actually causes emotions and generates them? If you’re like the majority of people, you may think that they’re caused by some sort of event or even thought/memory. While the process of generating an emotion is indeed caused by a specific trigger, that’s not actually what creates an emotion. If it were triggering events that caused emotion, we’d all have the same emotional reactions to the same stimuli. The trigger is only the first stage out of four. 
    The next stage is Attention, in which we attend to a specific aspect of the triggering situation. It’s the aspect of the situation that’s most notable to you in the moment. If you get in a car crash, you could attend to your own physical safety, or the state of your car, or the safety of the other person.
    The third step is Appraisal. This is what happens inside your mind, where you interpret what you’re attending to. If someone cuts you off in traffic, there’s different ways you can appraise the driver’s crazy behavior. Maybe they’re just being a rude person who doesn’t know how to drive, or maybe they’re driving their pregnant wife to the hospital who’s about to give birth. 
    Then lastly there’s our emotional response, which is generated by our appraisal of what we attended to. Oftentimes the emotion wants us to do a particular action in the moment, though we have the choice whether or not to follow it. Back to the traffic example, if we appraise the situation as unfair/rude, our brain wants us to seek justice and fix the wrong, which is the message of anger. But if you appraise the situation and think that maybe the driver had a good reason for acting that way, you may feel sympathy or only mild annoyance instead.

    This four step model can be both good and bad news for some. On one hand, it means that it’s possible to change your appraisal or attention, even if you can’t control your trigger. But that also means that we can’t fully make ourselves the victim. Yes, there are some situations that will inevitably result in certain emotions. If someone kicked your pet in front of you, you’d almost certainly experience anger. But there are a few situations with some wiggle room, where it’s up to you how you appraise the situation and respond. Ofc this level of self control takes practice, and I’d recommend starting by trying to change how you appraise small situations, to try and be open minded and understand others’ PoV, which can help mitigate our negative reaction to others’ actions. Easier said than done I know, and I’m far from the best at it myself. It’s impossible to fully control your emotions, and that’s a good thing. Our negative emotions serve plenty of useful purposes, and you shouldn’t try to smother out all your negative feelings. But there are lots of times (like the traffic situation) where it’s ultimately not that important, and you can save yourself from unnecessary distress by tweaking how you appraise things a little. However, the majority of the time, you’ll still feel negative emotions when a negative stimulus occurs, and that’s totally fine.
    And when you do inevitably feel negative emotions, don’t try to push them away or blame yourself for feeling them. Acknowledge that your feelings are valid, and think about what the emotion is trying to tell you, and feel the message of that emotion. For example, sadness often tells  us that there’s some sort of loss or lack, and wants us to seek comfort, whereas anger tells us that there’s some sort of injustice, and wants us to seek reparation or justice. You don’t have to do what the emotion is telling you to do, but just naming the specific emotion and identifying what it’s telling you can help reduce the intensity of the negative emotion. 
    If you have any questions, comments, or topics I should yap about, lmk  
  2. #1 Taln Fan
    One thing I've been diving a lot into this past week is learning about learning, which has been super interesting. Most of what I've learned has been through Dr. Justin Sung, who's a learning coach and makes a bunch of great youtube videos. (Almost all of this is summarizing what I learned from this video)
    If you're like me, if you take notes, it's probably the standard handwritten/typed full page of words, directly copying down words of powerpoints or what the teacher says. Maybe the odd diagram or two, but mostly just writing down things slightly worded differently or verbatim, in a linear fashion down the page in bullets or paragraphs. This is seen as "normal" notetaking, but it's actually one of the worst ways to write notes, and is only slightly worth doing.
    Our brains don't hold information in a linear way like that, and neither does the brain of the person teaching the info, whether that's a professor or a textbook author. Our brains hold information in a complex network, made up of countless relationships. When we learn new information, our brain then tries to relate that info to other info it already holds. And when it can't, it's much more likely to forget it. (Part of why languages are hard) Our brain uses 20% of your body's total energy, so it's very good about preserving that energy, by getting rid of unnecessary information. That's great in some ways. It'd drive us insane if we remembered every minute sensory detail of every second. But our brains often throw away info that we actually want to learn. When we forget things we study, it's because our brain deems it unimportant and irrelevant. 
    So then our task as learners is to make our brain recognize that info as relevant. When we just copy down linear notes, or speed through a book without taking ample time to process the info, then our brain forgets most of it very quickly. (About 90% of new info after one week) The primary way of fixing this is through improving our encoding methods, which is how we transfer new info to our memory and make it stick. (Most "genius" students who can ace their exams with little to no studying are often just really good at some of these encoding methods, even if it's unconscious) For example, instead of linear maps, try mind maps, where you draw out info in a super summarized, visual format where you spatially arrange concepts and show relationships and make comparisons. (Plenty of examples and youtube videos on how to do them)

    The very act of drawing the mind map makes your brain compare ideas to see how they relate to each other and to info you already know, which in turn makes you remember more of it. The key is to spend an equal time digesting info as consuming it. How often do you read a chapter of a biology textbook, then just sit and think about the content? Not writing it down, not highlighting, just thinking and processing it in your brain to relate it to other concepts and understand it. It can be time consuming yes. But if you're only retaining 10% of info, then you're already wasting time, and spending more time digesting will ultimately result in more efficient and higher quality learning.
    Summarizing is also key. It helps you to remember the actually important bits, and that act of deciding what info to prioritize also helps your brain remember it better. One strategy that helps is delayed notetaking. After learning a new bit of info, especially via lecture, try to wait 30+ seconds before writing it down. Your brain can't juggle all that info for very long without having to write it down, so it forces you to summarize that new info to be able to remember it.
    This all isn't to say that route memorization doesn't have its place. There's plenty of types of learning that doesn't really have much relationship to other info, like memorizing formulas or language vocab. In those cases, applying the info through practice problems/sentences is key, though you'll likely have to just grind through some of it with flashcards and the like. Also in high school, more of the learning tends to be lower level and not require as much higher order thinking (look up Bloom's learning taxonomy for more info on that), and there's a lot of brute memorization. But in some of the science classes like chemistry and biology, or history, can be learned really well via mind mapping and other techniques. It's also useful to pre-study before classes, since you already have a vague outline of the big picture and can fill in as the teacher gives the lecture
    TLDR: When learning, if you spend ample time mentally organizing new info and focusing on how it relates to other info, how it compares and contrasts with each other, then it makes your brain consider it more important, and therefore remember and understand it better. 
    I'd highly recommend the video linked above, despite it's length. It's really a goldmine, and most of ya'll likely spend 5 hours a week on the shard or scrolling anyway 😛
  3. #1 Taln Fan
    Hey ya'll! Some of you may know I'm very passionate about getting adequate sleep. It's been proven to be vital for both physical and mental health. But many of us (myself included until several months ago) just get 7 hours (or less) and say we're good, but wonder why we're tired, struggle to get out of bed, and deal with so much fatigue and mental struggles. You've probably heard the estimates that teens should get 8-9 hours of sleep, and adults should get 7-8 or so. But that doesn't do as much good if it's not quality sleep. There's a whole crap ton of factors that can worsen your sleep. One of the worst culprits is blue light, which I'm sure you've heard of. While blue light glasses or the "night shift" settings on devices certainly help, that light still affects your sleep quality. In addition, even just a bathroom light on in your room or a night light can affect your melatonin release, meaning that even after you close your eyes to go to sleep, your brain may not want to for quite a while longer. Though most indoor lights are warmer than screens, so those are still the worst for your sleep.
    While you don't certainly have to do this, one good solution (and what I do) is to cut off almost all light 2-3 hours before bed, and only allow the reddest of red lights. There's ways on most devices (apple for sure) to make your color filter completely red (if you want help finding the setting, lmk), and that's much better than the basic slightly warmer night shift filter. This is ofc a bit extreme, but I've found that it works amazingly for my own sleep quality. Whatever extent you can do is good. 
    Another key factor is sleep consistency. Research shows that sleep consistency is actually more important than sleep quantity for longevity. Try to generally go to sleep (or attempt to) and wake up within 15 mins of the same time every day.  Caffeine. It has a half life of 4-5 hours, which means that if you drink a Dr Pepper at 6 pm, half of that caffeine is still in your system at 10-11pm. Even if you "can still go to sleep after having caffeine", your brain still has to process it, and it'll worsen the quality of your sleep Try not to eat any heavy meals or intense exercise 3 hours before sleeping, and not drink anything an hour before sleeping As alluded to before, try to make your room as dark as possible when trying to sleep. Ideally, an hour before sleeping, turn off all devices and light whatsoever. You could use this time to do whatever, but I personally like to stretch, meditate, and listen to music, a podcast, or an audiobook. Again, that's over-optimizing a bit, dimming lights is also good. Pick whatever time you want to wake up throughout the week you want to wake up, and try to go to sleep 8-8.5 hours before then. You can also fiddle around with the timing to see what your body naturally prefers when you're following the proper steps. I always thought I was a night person, but when I'm following this routine, my body starts getting sleepy around 9, and I wake up with no alarm at 6:30-7  Lastly, I know that this routine isn't always feasible. Some people work late, and lots of activities occur late at night. I've certainly spent many nights not following this routine. But when I do, especially consistently, I've personally found that I have way more energy that lasts throughout the whole day, I can retain learned information way better, and my mood is just better.  Thank you for reading my ramblings, and go get some good sleep 


    Disclaimer: I'm not a sleep doctor, but most of this is based on things I've learned from the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker, which I'd highly recommend. This is stuff that's just worked extremely well for me, and I hope it helps for someone else.
  4. #1 Taln Fan

    On phone use and thinking

    By #1 Taln Fan,


    General
    Do people read these? Ig we'll find out! But I wanted to share some recent thoughts and discoveries I've made recently, and hopefully they'll be helpful.

    I know we've all heard the lecture time and time again about how bad phones are, how they're rotting our brains, etc, etc. I think we can all acknowledge that spending 2 hours scrolling on a phone or watching youtube on your computer is a waste of time. But almost as dangerous is the smaller, shorter uses. Checking your phone in the morning, or while you're walking somewhere, or even going to the bathroom. There's so many small snatches of inactivity or silence throughout our day that we are desperate to fill with something. Sometimes phone use, or music, or the Shard, or whatever it is. 
    But these brief moments of silence are important, and we shouldn't rush to fill them. The past month or so, I've started walking to all my classes with my phone and earbuds in my backpack, where I can't easily access them. In doing so, I'm only left with my thoughts, and nature. I find myself appreciating more little things, like the big tree I walk by every day on my way to breakfast. But most importantly, it gives me more time with my thoughts. Oftentimes, a lot of our stress and anxiety is generated by suppressed emotions, and we often suppress them simply because we never take time to process and think, because we always fill up those spare moments with something else. Ofc, oftentimes we don't want to stop and think, and so phones (or whatever it is for you) become an easy avenue of escape, to scroll mindlessly instead of facing our own problems and emotions. 
    Sometimes, when life isn't going well, we don't want to reflect on what we're feeling and what's bothering us, because it's painful. But if you can't identify what's causing you emotional and mental stress, you'll never find a way to fix those problems. Not cope with them, but fix them. 
    Yes, having a dedicated time for meditation is good, and I encourage that as well. But I encourage you to take small moments throughout the day to really think and reflect, to analyze yourself honestly and objectively. Think about what's causing you the most stress emotionally and mentally, and think about what practical, concrete steps you can take to either change that cause, or change your response to it. 

    * One more note on music (maybe I'll make another post about it more in depth about its Psychological effects), it's not inherently bad. Music can be both helpful and harmful to us. But if you're the type of person to listen to music all the time, take some time to just have silence, and really think. If you can drive, take some drives without listening to anything, as that's a great time for thinking.

    ** If you don't have a phone, I get this may not be as applicable to you. But it's still good to take time to really think. And also appreciate not having a phone, however cool it may seem 
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