Only you can decide if its for good or evil

Cof­fee is a reg­u­lar part of many person’s diet;  about 1/3 of peo­ple in both Europe and Amer­ica reg­u­larly drink the caf­feinated bev­er­age.  Whether this is a good or bad thing is up for debate.  I have scoured the Inter­net and pro­fes­sional jour­nals for years about a con­clu­sion on cof­fee and caf­feine, and there is none to be had.  The Olympic com­mit­tee has banned the sub­stance because caf­feine has been proven to increase ath­letic per­for­mance in skills such as dis­tance run­ning. But from an over­all health per­spec­tive, it seems cof­fee isn’t too bad, but nor is it a panacea.  There are numer­ous arti­cles out there on quit­ting cof­fee, but if you plan to quit, you will need a good rea­son to do so, for as I have found, reduc­ing caf­feine intake can be a chal­leng­ing task.

I have had an abbre­vi­ated his­tory with caf­feine, as I didn’t drink soda as a child.  I first stared drink­ing cof­fee reg­u­larly in sopho­more year of col­lege, and have been drink­ing it ever since.  Caf­feine has a pro­nounced effect on me, prob­a­bly in part due to my late intro­duc­tion and per­haps just due to my body chem­istry. The Mayo Clinic talks about caf­feine sen­si­tiv­ity, but luck­ily its effects aren’t that severe with me, but a cup at 10:30PM will keep me up until 4am.  So why stop?  When I first started work­ing a stan­dard hours job, I wasn’t get­ting enough sleep, and was con­sum­ing 1 to 3 cups a day.  The expe­ri­ence was a daily emo­tional roller­coaster, a lit­tle too much to reg­u­larly han­dle.  I cut it down to 1–2 cups a day, but I still had a rise and fall in the morn­ing and early after­noon, which would often con­clude with a cup of tea around 2PM.

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Links to Part 1 and Part 2. My first jour­nal post dis­cussed keep­ing a pos­i­tiv­ity jour­nal and get­ting into the habit of keep­ing a diary.  Part two offered dif­fer­ent meth­ods of keep­ing a jour­nal and the con­cept of a neg­a­tiv­ity jour­nal.  Part three of this series is abut the most use­ful kind of jour­nal, a pro­duc­tiv­ity jour­nal.  A pro­duc­tiv­ity jour­nal can track your suc­cess in any­thing you par­tic­i­pate in, from gui­tar play­ing to rela­tion­ships. If you can keep an hon­est record of suc­cesses, fail­ures and strate­gies for improve­ment, you can suc­ceed at almost anything.

I have been keep­ing a pro­ductiv­ity jour­nal for a num­ber of years now, and I have markedly improved in every­thing I’ve tracked.  As I stated in part two of this series, I keep my pro­duc­tiv­ity diary sep­a­rate from my positivity/negativity one.  This is because a pro­duc­tiv­ity log is used for tan­gi­ble goals, rather that emo­tional ones.  For exam­ple, did I make con­tact with at least one out-of-state friend today?  Did I meet my fruit and veg­etable intake goals today at work?  I have mainly used my pro­duc­tiv­ity jour­nal to track my progress in my favorite hobby, play­ing sports.
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Some purists believe in writ­ing a jour­nal the old-fashioned way. Tobacco pipe not required.

In the last post, I dis­cussed the advan­tages of keep­ing a diary, and how to ensure you see the good in every day. This is the best place to start, as most every­one will repeat an action that makes them feel good. In decid­ing to start, you must con­sider how to record and keep your diary. There are numer­ous options to weigh, choos­ing the best for your writ­ing style is impor­tant to keep up your inter­est. Once you are in the habit of keep­ing a pos­i­tiv­ity jour­nal, there are a few other types of jour­nals to try: a neg­a­tiv­ity diary, and for another post, a pro­duc­tiv­ity log.

Where to Write

I write using one pri­vate online blog for the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive entries, and one for the pro­duc­tiv­ity entries. I think the media and method for writ­ing is an indi­vid­ual choice; the impor­tant thing is to track and record your thoughts. The options I have found (and tried) are:

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Ben Franklin knew that keep­ing a jour­nal can be quite electrifying.

Movies often start with a read­ing from a character’s diary. This nar­ra­tive device offers an inti­mate personal per­spec­tive on the times, locale, and feel­ings of the film’s set­ting, and grounds the audi­ence for the upcom­ing story. There is an easy way to gain the same per­spec­tive in your life. A diary (or jour­nal) that doc­u­ments pos­i­tiv­ity can give you a new appre­ci­a­tion for the world around you. Dairies can also help you explore what you aren’t happy with in your life, and help you make tan­gi­ble improve­ments. There are also many health ben­e­fits of jour­nal­ing. A diary can be a great tool for stress man­age­ment help release emo­tional neg­a­tiv­ity. Addi­tion­ally, jour­nal­ing can help explore the events in your life, and truly gain mean­ing from them.

While diaries such as Anne Frank’s are known through­out the world, count­less suc­cess­ful peo­ple have kept diaries, whether pub­li­cized or not. The best blog doc­u­ment­ing these is The Diary Junc­tion, where you can find excerpts and ded­i­ca­tions to hun­dreds of famous person’s diaries. Although not a direct con­clu­sion, many peo­ple who have found great pas­sion in their lives also keep a journal.

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Van Gogh’s trib­ute to the night sky could give you an inspired morning

You get out of bed, blink your eyes blearily, make a weak attempt to stretch and loosen up, then head to the shower, where you lean against the wall half-asleep and hope the hot water will tease you awake. After you get cleaned up, you trudge down­stairs, inhale a cup of cof­fee, and grudg­ingly walk out the door.

Sound famil­iar?

Not exactly the pic­ture of pur­pose and moti­va­tion, is it?  Wak­ing up is hard, but espe­cially when you do so by an alarm clock (out of neces­sity of course) and by pack­ing your­self full of a stim­u­lant, namely caffeine.

In frus­tra­tion over the inglo­ri­ous way I used to wake up — i.e. very slowly for a cou­ple of hours with a pre­dictable after­noon crash — I’ve brain­stormed and used sev­eral tools effec­tively to get myself off to an inspired start. Read More

Clean up your den­tal habits and get the respect you truly deserve.

John Wooden was an extremely suc­cess­ful bas­ket­ball coach at UCLA.   He has writ­ten numer­ous best-selling books that con­tain his beliefs on excel­lence in life; win­ning on the court was only sec­ondary in his eyes.  Wooden is a man who is con­cerned about char­ac­ter over all else, so why is he con­cerned to always “Be neat and clean?”  A major part of char­ac­ter is inter­act­ing with the peo­ple around you, and that requires an approach­able appear­ance.  Whether con­scious or not, body lan­guage and per­sonal upkeep are intan­gi­bles that every­one judges.  Would you trust a doc­tor that hadn’t show­ered in days, con­temp­tu­ously kept their arms crossed, and didn’t give an easy smile?  As stated by my friend’s sis­ter who is a den­tist, good teeth seem to sep­a­rate the suc­cess­ful from the not.  While tooth care is not exactly some­thing to be pas­sion­ate about, it is some­thing that can only help your chances of success.

Oral health is a big­ger part of over­all health­care than you might real­ize.  As tight ham­strings may cause back issues, its been proven that gum dis­ease is also been cor­re­lated to seem­ingly unre­lated prob­lems.  A while back I read an arti­cle that stated heart attack vic­tims have an unusu­ally high inci­dence of gum dis­ease.  After doing some research it turns out that that peo­ple with peri­odon­tal dis­ease are almost twice as likely to suf­fer from coro­nary artery dis­ease as those with­out peri­odon­tal dis­ease (http://www.perio.org/).  Sci­en­tists the­o­rize gum dis­ease either causes inflam­ma­tion in the arter­ies, or the bac­te­ria from the infected gums also attaches itself to coro­nary arter­ies.  A sim­i­lar con­nec­tion has been found in stroke vic­tims.  With the rate of med­ical research, the num­ber of con­di­tions seem­ingly unre­lated  to oral health can only increase.