YOUR Creative Experiments, Eye-Care & Positives Journal

Hola,

I'm in Mexico with the Write of Passage team for our first in-person retreat.

Now that's a sentence I didn't expect to write this year.

Less than 10 months ago, I was working in advertising, feeling unfulfilled and fretting over what I was going to do with my career.

It's wild (and deeply underrated) how much can change in one year if you throw yourself into something new and unknown.

🤸‍♀️ IN THIS WEEK'S STRETCH:

• YOUR Year of Creative Experiments. A workshop on December 21.

• 2 Protocols for Eye-Care. Smooth pursuit & Accommodation.

• A Positivity Journal. Re-wiring your brain for positivity & opportunity.

👩‍🔬 YOUR YEAR OF CREATIVE EXPERIMENTS

As my final 2022 Creative Experiment, I'll be doing the ultimate experiment:

A workshop.

Absolutely terrifying. What if no one shows up? Or worse - what if only one person shows up and witnesses this bloodbath?!

The second I caught myself considering, "Maybe I should wait until next year," I knew I had to do it now. Pushing through embarrassment and ego is the whole point of these experiments.

So, if you've been thinking about ways to get more creative, or you have a particular skill you'd like to start or pick up again in 2023 - join me.

It'll be a 1-hour practical and interactive session. The goal is you walk away with new ideas and a first Experiment to kick off 2023.

🗓 Wednesday, December 21 at 4:00 pm UTC (see in your timezone).

You can find all the details & register HERE.

Any questions, just hit reply to this email.

👀 EYE-CARE DURING A WALK

Ever since the pandemic, I've fallen in love with walking—every day.

Something I used to see as a boring and useless activity has become the most exciting thing for several reasons:

1. It modulates your circadian rhythm

2. You get creative juices flowing

3. It reduces overwhelm & anxiety

4. You start to appreciate your brain & body

And now I'm adding a 5th point to the list.

🆕 Take care of your visual system

When we hear the word vision, we most often think about eyesight - our ability to perceive shapes, objects, faces, and colors.

But our eyes are responsible for much more than that, like setting our mood, level of alertness, and focus.

As Huberman says in the intro of Episode 24 - The Science of Vision, Eye Health & Seeing Better:

"We are going to talk about practical tools you can and should use to help maintain the health of your visual system and eyesight. You can leverage your visual system for better mental and physical performance."

Huberman's ophthalmology colleague at Stanford School of Medicine, Jeff Goldberg, says some of the best exercises to train and support our eyes are:

• Smooth pursuit training

• Accommodation near/far training

The idea is both these exercises is to use the visual system regularly for what it was designed for - and you can easily do this while out on a walk.

Smooth pursuit

Our visual system is tuned to the motion of things around us. One way it does that is through a process called 'smooth pursuit':

Our ability to track individual objects smoothly through space in various trajectories.

In other words: a type of eye movement in which the eyes remain fixated on a moving object.

You can train or improve your vision by looking at smooth pursuit stimuli. This is going to keep the eye muscles conditioned and strong.

And that's more important than you might think.

The brain follows the eye's movements, and the neural circuits in the brain have to cope with changes in smooth pursuit.

Smooth pursuit is a great way to keep the brain's and the eye's visual and motion-tracking systems eye working in a nice and coordinated fashion.

If you're doing a lot of reading up close, not viewing horizons, not getting a lot of smooth pursuit-type stimulation in your life, these mechanisms will deteriorate over time.

So, one recommended protocol in the Huberman episode is to watch Visual Exercises videos on YouTube.

I find there's something slightly depressing about these videos so instead, do this while out on a walk. Look for moving objects in your surroundings you can visually track. Swooping birds, passing cars, kids playing (just make sure it's not creepy for that last one).

Accommodation

Our eyes are designed in a way that allows them to adjust to things close or far away from us.

They have a) a dynamic lens and b) tiny muscles within the eye moving the lens.

In order to see clearly, the tiny muscles are constantly adjusting the lens accordingly - pulling, squeezing, making it thicker or thinner.

That process is called accommodation.

This all happens automatically, but here's the problem:

Most of us are forcing our visual system to fatigue by close viewing.

Think about it: how much of your waking time each day is spent looking at things further than 10ft / 3m away?

Just staying indoors, only artificial lights, and looking at things up close is like visual obesity. It leads to visual defects.

So it's important to take breaks and focus on distant objects every so often.

It's good for your eyesight, keeping the lens nice and elastic and the tiny muscles nice and strong.

Plus, it has a relaxing component (still my all-time favorite protocol I've learned from Huberman).

🧠 A GRATITUDE POSITIVITY JOURNAL

I used to be extremely averse to anything I viewed as too soft or too woo.

Things like 'gratitude journaling' would make my skin crawl.

But just like with meditation, the reason for my shift was science-based: learning that these practices fundamentally change the structure of my brain.

The book that originally got me into this form of journaling is The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor (Positive Psychology researcher at Harvard University).

He spoke about the Tetris Effect.

Studies have shown that people who played Tetris for hours, day after day, often start to see Tetris patterns in their everyday lives. This is a psychological phenomenon where objects in our view continue to appear in our eyes even when they’re no longer in our field of vision (i.e., “cognitive afterimages”).

Just like in the Tetris study, our minds become conditioned to view the world in patterns.

When someone is stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, their brain is literally incapable of seeing positivity and opportunities. Their brain is biased towards a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure.

But here's the good news about having a mind that sees things in patterns:

We can take charge and instruct the brain to look for what's right - to consciously shift to a Positive Tetris Effect.

The key word here is consciously. Recognizing and replacing negative thoughts takes awareness, discipline, and practice — and that’s where my Positivity Journal comes in.

If you leave your brain uncontrolled, its tendency and instinct is to look for what's wrong.

Now, I don't call it a Gratitude Journal because a) the name still makes me cringe and b) I write down more than just the things I'm grateful for.

Positive moments and interactions are self-explanatory, but just a few words on the other points:

Appreciations

As explained in Huberman's episode on gratitude, the strongest happiness benefits come from receiving or witnessing gratitude, not just making a list in your journal.

I try to take a minute every day to reach out to someone and express gratitude - just a quick text or voice note.

Counter-facts

A counterfact is an alternate scenario our brains create to help us evaluate and make sense of what happened.

For example. You fall down the stairs and break your leg. There are 2 counter-facts:

• You could not have fallen and gone about your day.

• You could have broken your neck.

Both counter-facts are imagined, but you have the power to choose the version that makes you feel fortunate rather than helpless.

So when something negative happens, I'll consciously write down the positive counter-fact.

Opportunities

I love this one. When I get stressed, my awareness collapses. I lose perspective of the bigger picture.

So instead, I try to scan my upcoming days and weeks: where are the hidden opportunities? What am I missing because I'm focusing on what's hard, stressful, and annoying? How can I approach those moments differently?

This exercise is helping me go from reactive ➡️ proactive.

Now, to be clear: my intention is not to blindly happy all the time or to force myself to see the good in every single situation.

For me, this is a brain thing. It's about using my brain to change how I process the world, and that, in turn, changes how I react to it.

I noticeably see and feel a difference in myself after doing this for a couple months.

And I won't need to do this forever. Given the beauty of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to rewire itself — this practice of shifting things into a positive light will become more and more automatic until, ultimately, it'll be like second nature.

Thanks for reading!

Charlotte