Golf and Other Bad Habits
In the middle of your brain lives your basal ganglia. It's about the size of a golf ball. Personally, I don't play golf for two reasons. First, the hole is just way too small. Imagine if you could instead aim for a target the size of say, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's waistline. I think it's likely golf would bloat up with a whole new audience.
The second reason for avoiding the links came from my father, Glenn Rhys Best. He liked to say "I'm not old enough to play golf yet. " He died in 1993 at the age sixty seven––strangely enough, killed by his own basal ganglia.
According to research conducted at MIT, the basal ganglia is command and control for all your habits. My dad––and, I suspect, the NJ Governor––never met a lunch buffet that didn't whisper his name. And once a habit loop gets established, it's virtually impossible to eradicate. In his book The Power of Habit, why we do what we do in life and business, Charles Duhigg estimates that 45% of your total day is built out of little bits of habitualized neural code that runs in your subconscious, like a computer program operating in the background of your brain's motherboard. My dad apparently loaded up and ran the FAT version of DOS 2.0. which eventually crashed his colon.
And so we are, among other things, each a whole golf bag full of habits. Turning off the lightswitch at night, starting up the coffee maker in the morning, the way you walk, the cadence of your voice, even the way you pretend to wash your hands in the men's room at O'Hare's concourse F (newsflash to the guy next to me on the flight this morning: you're fooling no one)––habits, habits, habits.
All of this programming takes years to build, but once it's rolling, it continues to run behind the curtain as long as you manage to stay above room temperature. It takes 21 days to mylenate enough neural coding to make a new habit, or change an existing one. The neuroscientists refer to this habit process by the technical term: 'chunking', which means something entirely different for freshman college students, and still different for those treebound Keebler elves that chunk chocolate chip cookies 24/7 in their elvish sweat shop.)
I am busy trying to evade the Keebler elves by chunking a new lifestyle sans white flour and sugar. This is goal #1 on my list, but it also dovetails nicely into goal #5: drop 10 pounds.
Bottom line, all 14 of my goals are dependent upon my basal ganglia relaxing, planting both feet and gripping––as the golf pros will tell you, "like you're holding a baby bird." Yet another reason why I don't play golf. Now getting a firm grip on a Chicago style Italian Beef from Portillo's: that's the money shot.
Habits, habits, habits. Miss you, Dad.
The second reason for avoiding the links came from my father, Glenn Rhys Best. He liked to say "I'm not old enough to play golf yet. " He died in 1993 at the age sixty seven––strangely enough, killed by his own basal ganglia.
According to research conducted at MIT, the basal ganglia is command and control for all your habits. My dad––and, I suspect, the NJ Governor––never met a lunch buffet that didn't whisper his name. And once a habit loop gets established, it's virtually impossible to eradicate. In his book The Power of Habit, why we do what we do in life and business, Charles Duhigg estimates that 45% of your total day is built out of little bits of habitualized neural code that runs in your subconscious, like a computer program operating in the background of your brain's motherboard. My dad apparently loaded up and ran the FAT version of DOS 2.0. which eventually crashed his colon.
And so we are, among other things, each a whole golf bag full of habits. Turning off the lightswitch at night, starting up the coffee maker in the morning, the way you walk, the cadence of your voice, even the way you pretend to wash your hands in the men's room at O'Hare's concourse F (newsflash to the guy next to me on the flight this morning: you're fooling no one)––habits, habits, habits.
All of this programming takes years to build, but once it's rolling, it continues to run behind the curtain as long as you manage to stay above room temperature. It takes 21 days to mylenate enough neural coding to make a new habit, or change an existing one. The neuroscientists refer to this habit process by the technical term: 'chunking', which means something entirely different for freshman college students, and still different for those treebound Keebler elves that chunk chocolate chip cookies 24/7 in their elvish sweat shop.)
I am busy trying to evade the Keebler elves by chunking a new lifestyle sans white flour and sugar. This is goal #1 on my list, but it also dovetails nicely into goal #5: drop 10 pounds.
Bottom line, all 14 of my goals are dependent upon my basal ganglia relaxing, planting both feet and gripping––as the golf pros will tell you, "like you're holding a baby bird." Yet another reason why I don't play golf. Now getting a firm grip on a Chicago style Italian Beef from Portillo's: that's the money shot.
Habits, habits, habits. Miss you, Dad.
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