Sun On Herbs » Articles

Link: The A to Z of beauty baddies

shawn — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:53:00 +0000

From The Ecologist: The A to Z of beauty baddies: Ingredients to avoid in cosmetics and more.

Barefoot Article: A Study on Barefoot Running by Dr. Daniel Lieberman

shawn — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:49:29 +0000

Here are the key points from a study Dr. Daniel Lieberman did on Barefoot Running. This study was in the British science journal Nature magazine back in January 2010.

The article I draw from is on runbare.com entitled New Study by Dr. Daniel Lieberman on Barefoot Running Makes Cover Story in Nature Journal. The study itself can be found at the Skeletal Biology Lab at Harvard University. in Nature 463: 531-5 and Nature 432: 345-352, both in .pdf.

In this study, Dr. Lierberman and his team looked at the difference between barefoot runners and shod runners. They studied and compared those who always wear shoes while running, testing with and without shoes, and those who do not wear shoes while running. The key points from the summary on runbare.com are:

Higher Impact and Lower Efficiency When Heel Striking: “…running on the heel increases impact (up to three times the impact force of forefoot landing, and up to 7 times the impact loading of running barefoot) and decreases efficiency (causing a braking effect with each stride) while running on the forefoot decreases impact and increases efficiency, by translating stored kinetic energy in the muscles into rotational or forward propulsion.”

Barefoot Runners Lower Center of Gravity to Reduce Impact. “…barefoot runners suffered no greater impact when landing on hard surfaces than soft surfaces… dispels the myth that we could once run barefoot on the Savanna, but cannot do so on harder ‘modern’ surfaces such as asphalt and pavement…”

We Evolved to Run on Our Forefoot. “Natural selection suggests that if endurance running was important to our survival, then forefoot running came about to protect the foot and reduce the chance of injury. While barefoot runners or those who wear minimalist shoes avoid rear foot landings and the associated impacts, in contrast, most shod runners today land almost exclusively on their heels.”

Modern running shoes may be dangerous. “…they promote a heel foot strike, which…produces far greater impact than landing on the forefoot… barefoot running may help reduce the chance of injury…”

The authors and researchers do conclude that more study is needed.

When I used to run, with prescription Brooks Beast, I ran with a heel strike. If I do take up running again, it will be barefoot running with a forefoot strike. To read the articles and educate yourself, follow the links above.

Help for victims of Locked In Syndrome – Two BBC articles

shawn — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:15:48 +0000

The technology in this article and video is incredible. This is the early works of viable and working technology that will help those who suffer from locked-in syndrome, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and more. As one article says The inner workings of the brain can now be read using low cost hardware. This technology would be termed a game changer or a 10X.
Read the articles and watch the videos:

Real-life Jedi: Pushing the limits of mind control by Katia Moskvitch, Technology reporter, BBC News.
Mind-control computers for disabled people

Response to Article: Hey, Vegetarians and Vegans: You’re Not All That Healthy

shawn — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:44:21 +0000

My response to an article by Christine Egan entitled Hey, Vegetarians and Vegans: You’re Not All That Healthy.The original article is at BLISSTREE.com. Author Christine Egan says:

“Some…of my vegetarian friends basically subsist on a steady diet that includes: Hard cheeses, French fries, pizza (meatless, of course), soft cheeses, breads, ice cream, vegetarian burgers, semi-soft cheeses, onion rings, mac-and-cheese from a box, cereals, pasta, microwaveable vegetarian meals, cookies, cake, anything vegetarian and pre-packaged, energy bars, wine, beer, hard liquor, and many, many vegetarian burritos. It’s a good thing they’re not preachy.

Some of my vegan friends aren’t much better: They consume basically the same diet I describe above, with necessary dietary substitutions including non-dairy ice cream, pretend eggs, and fake cheese.

… many of my vegetarian and vegan friends are unabashed processed food junkies. If all you ate every day of your life were the “foods” I rattled off above, I wouldn’t consider you to be healthy, and, more importantly, you shouldn’t, either. In fact, I would consider you to be woefully unhealthy, mostly because your diet is crap. I don’t care how much you work out or how thin you are. Those things don’t negate your terrifyingly over-processed diet…”

I agree, though to be picky, Christine should substitute the all encompassing word omnivore instead of carnivore, as the latter implies meat exclusively. Sadly, I have encountered too many preachy vegans and vegetarians who look like death warmed over, and whose diet I find undesirable.

My response to Christine’s article:

People classify themselves into categories: vegan, vegetarian, paleo, frugivore, carnivore, raw, macro etc. yet how much attention do they pay to what they ingest, the source and conditions of productions? Do they assume that because they eat within a particular label, they are healthy? Or are they making a ‘lifestyle statement’ regardless of any potential health consequences?

Eat what you enjoy. Be mindful of its impact on the environment. Listen to your body. If you feel great, always have lots of energy, sleep well, are slim and trim and happy: great. If not: change what/when/how you eat, and fine tune until you feel great. After a couple of decades of feeling/being great, then you can preach, because you will be a living example.

That is what I am working towards.

Article: The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

shawn — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 05:43:16 +0000

This article is from Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association, and is so vital to know, I have included the entire article.It is copyright Organic Consumers Association. The original article is at http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22449.cfm and I thank Ronnie Cummins for informing us all.

The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

By Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Association, Jan 27, 2011

Straight to the Source

“The policy set for GE alfalfa will most likely guide policies for other GE crops as well. True coexistence is a must.” - Whole Foods Market, Jan. 21, 2011

In the wake of a 12-year battle to keep Monsanto’s Genetically Engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation’s 25,000 organic farms and ranches, America’s organic consumers and producers are facing betrayal. A self-appointed cabal of the Organic Elite, spearheaded by Whole Foods Market, Organic Valley, and Stonyfield Farm, has decided it’s time to surrender to Monsanto. Top executives from these companies have publicly admitted that they no longer oppose the mass commercialization of GE crops, such as Monsanto’s controversial Roundup Ready alfalfa, and are prepared to sit down and cut a deal for “coexistence” with Monsanto and USDA biotech cheerleader Tom Vilsack.

In a cleverly worded, but profoundly misleading email sent to its customers last week, Whole Foods Market, while proclaiming their support for organics and “seed purity,” gave the green light to USDA bureaucrats to approve the “conditional deregulation” of Monsanto’s genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa. Beyond the regulatory euphemism of “conditional deregulation,” this means that WFM and their colleagues are willing to go along with the massive planting of a chemical and energy-intensive GE perennial crop, alfalfa; guaranteed to spread its mutant genes and seeds across the nation; guaranteed to contaminate the alfalfa fed to organic animals; guaranteed to lead to massive poisoning of farm workers and destruction of the essential soil food web by the toxic herbicide, Roundup; and guaranteed to produce Roundup-resistant superweeds that will require even more deadly herbicides such as 2,4 D to be sprayed on millions of acres of alfalfa across the U.S.

In exchange for allowing Monsanto’s premeditated pollution of the alfalfa gene pool, WFM wants “compensation.” In exchange for a new assault on farmworkers and rural communities (a recent large-scale Swedish study found that spraying Roundup doubles farm workers’ and rural residents’ risk of getting cancer), WFM expects the pro-biotech USDA to begin to regulate rather than cheerlead for Monsanto. In payment for a new broad spectrum attack on the soil’s crucial ability to provide nutrition for food crops and to sequester dangerous greenhouse gases (recent studies show that Roundup devastates essential soil microorganisms that provide plant nutrition and sequester climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases), WFM wants the Biotech Bully of St. Louis to agree to pay “compensation” (i.e. hush money) to farmers “for any losses related to the contamination of his crop.”

In its email of Jan. 21, 2011 WFM calls for “public oversight by the USDA rather than reliance on the biotechnology industry,” even though WFM knows full well that federal regulations on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) do not require pre-market safety testing, nor labeling; and that even federal judges have repeatedly ruled that so-called government “oversight” of Frankencrops such as Monsanto’s sugar beets and alfalfa is basically a farce. At the end of its email, WFM admits that its surrender to Monsanto is permanent: “The policy set for GE alfalfa will most likely guide policies for other GE crops as well True coexistence is a must.”

Why Is Organic Inc. Surrendering?

According to informed sources, the CEOs of WFM and Stonyfield are personal friends of former Iowa governor, now USDA Secretary, Tom Vilsack, and in fact made financial contributions to Vilsack’s previous electoral campaigns. Vilsack was hailed as “Governor of the Year” in 2001 by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and traveled in a Monsanto corporate jet on the campaign trail. Perhaps even more fundamental to Organic Inc.’s abject surrender is the fact that the organic elite has become more and more isolated from the concerns and passions of organic consumers and locavores. The Organic Inc. CEOs are tired of activist pressure, boycotts, and petitions. Several of them have told me this to my face. They apparently believe that the battle against GMOs has been lost, and that it’s time to reach for the consolation prize. The consolation prize they seek is a so-called “coexistence” between the biotech Behemoth and the organic community that will lull the public to sleep and greenwash the unpleasant fact that Monsanto’s unlabeled and unregulated genetically engineered crops are now spreading their toxic genes on 1/3 of U.S. (and 1/10 of global) crop land.

WFM and most of the largest organic companies have deliberately separated themselves from anti-GMO efforts and cut off all funding to campaigns working to label or ban GMOs. The so-called Non-GMO Project, funded by Whole Foods and giant wholesaler United Natural Foods (UNFI) is basically a greenwashing effort (although the 100% organic companies involved in this project seem to be operating in good faith) to show that certified organic foods are basically free from GMOs (we already know this since GMOs are banned in organic production), while failing to focus on so-called “natural” foods, which constitute most of WFM and UNFI’s sales and are routinely contaminated with GMOs.

From their “business as usual” perspective, successful lawsuits against GMOs filed by public interest groups such as the Center for Food Safety; or noisy attacks on Monsanto by groups like the Organic Consumers Association, create bad publicity, rattle their big customers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, Costco, Supervalu, Publix and Safeway; and remind consumers that organic crops and foods such as corn, soybeans, and canola are slowly but surely becoming contaminated by Monsanto’s GMOs.

Whole Food’s Dirty Little Secret: Most of the So-Called “Natural” Processed Foods and Animal Products They Sell Are Contaminated with GMOs

The main reason, however, why Whole Foods is pleading for coexistence with Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta, BASF and the rest of the biotech bullies, is that they desperately want the controversy surrounding genetically engineered foods and crops to go away. Why? Because they know, just as we do, that 2/3 of WFM’s $9 billion annual sales is derived from so-called “natural” processed foods and animal products that are contaminated with GMOs. We and our allies have tested their so-called “natural” products (no doubt WFM’s lab has too) containing non-organic corn and soy, and guess what: they’re all contaminated with GMOs, in contrast to their certified organic products, which are basically free of GMOs, or else contain barely detectable trace amounts.

Approximately 2/3 of the products sold by Whole Foods Market and their main distributor, United Natural Foods (UNFI) are not certified organic, but rather are conventional (chemical-intensive and GMO-tainted) foods and products disguised as “natural.”

Unprecedented wholesale and retail control of the organic marketplace by UNFI and Whole Foods, employing a business model of selling twice as much so-called “natural” food as certified organic food, coupled with the takeover of many organic companies by multinational food corporations such as Dean Foods, threatens the growth of the organic movement.

Covering Up GMO Contamination: Perpetrating “Natural” Fraud

Many well-meaning consumers are confused about the difference between conventional products marketed as “natural,” and those nutritionally/environmentally superior and climate-friendly products that are “certified organic.”

Retail stores like WFM and wholesale distributors like UNFI have failed to educate their customers about the qualitative difference between natural and certified organic, conveniently glossing over the fact that nearly all of the processed “natural” foods and products they sell contain GMOs, or else come from a “natural” supply chain where animals are force-fed GMO grains in factory farms or Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

A troubling trend in organics today is the calculated shift on the part of certain large formerly organic brands from certified organic ingredients and products to so-called “natural” ingredients. With the exception of the “grass-fed and grass-finished” meat sector, most “natural” meat, dairy, and eggs are coming from animals reared on GMO grains and drugs, and confined, entirely, or for a good portion of their lives, in CAFOs.

Whole Foods and UNFI are maximizing their profits by selling quasi-natural products at premium organic prices. Organic consumers are increasingly left without certified organic choices while genuine organic farmers and ranchers continue to lose market share to “natural” imposters. It’s no wonder that less than 1% of American farmland is certified organic, while well-intentioned but misled consumers have boosted organic and “natural” purchases to $80 billion annually-approximately 12% of all grocery store sales.

The Solution: Truth-in-Labeling Will Enable Consumers to Drive So-Called “Natural” GMO and CAFO-Tainted Foods Off the Market

There can be no such thing as “coexistence” with a reckless industry that undermines public health, destroys biodiversity, damages the environment, tortures and poisons animals, destabilizes the climate, and economically devastates the world’s 1.5 billion seed-saving small farmers. There is no such thing as coexistence between GMOs and organics in the European Union. Why? Because in the EU there are almost no GMO crops under cultivation, nor GM consumer food products on supermarket shelves. And why is this? Because under EU law, all foods containing GMOs or GMO ingredients must be labeled. Consumers have the freedom to choose or not to choose GMOs; while farmers, food processors, and retailers have (at least legally) the right to lace foods with GMOs, as long as they are safety-tested and labeled. Of course the EU food industry understands that consumers, for the most part, do not want to purchase or consume GE foods. European farmers and food companies, even junk food purveyors like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, understand quite well the concept expressed by a Monsanto executive when GMOs first came on the market: “If you put a label on genetically engineered food you might as well put a skull and crossbones on it.”

The biotech industry and Organic Inc. are supremely conscious of the fact that North American consumers, like their European counterparts, are wary and suspicious of GMO foods. Even without a PhD, consumers understand you don’t want your food safety or environmental sustainability decisions to be made by out-of-control chemical companies like Monsanto, Dow, or Dupont – the same people who brought you toxic pesticides, Agent Orange, PCBs, and now global warming. Industry leaders are acutely aware of the fact that every single industry or government poll over the last 16 years has shown that 85-95% of American consumers want mandatory labels on GMO foods. Why? So that we can avoid buying them. GMO foods have absolutely no benefits for consumers or the environment, only hazards. This is why Monsanto and their friends in the Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations have prevented consumer GMO truth-in-labeling laws from getting a public discussion in Congress.

Although Congressman Dennis Kucinich (Democrat, Ohio) recently introduced a bill in Congress calling for mandatory labeling and safety testing for GMOs, don’t hold your breath for Congress to take a stand for truth-in-labeling and consumers’ right to know what’s in their food. Especially since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the so-called “Citizens United” case gave big corporations and billionaires the right to spend unlimited amounts of money (and remain anonymous, as they do so) to buy media coverage and elections, our chances of passing federal GMO labeling laws against the wishes of Monsanto and Food Inc. are all but non-existent. Perfectly dramatizing the “Revolving Door” between Monsanto and the Federal Government, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, formerly chief counsel for Monsanto, delivered one of the decisive votes in the Citizens United case, in effect giving Monsanto and other biotech bullies the right to buy the votes it needs in the U.S. Congress.

With big money controlling Congress and the media, we have little choice but to shift our focus and go local. We’ve got to concentrate our forces where our leverage and power lie, in the marketplace, at the retail level; pressuring retail food stores to voluntarily label their products; while on the legislative front we must organize a broad coalition to pass mandatory GMO (and CAFO) labeling laws, at the city, county, and state levels.

The Organic Consumers Association, joined by our consumer, farmer, environmental, and labor allies, has just launched a nationwide Truth-in-Labeling campaign to stop Monsanto and the Biotech Bullies from force-feeding unlabeled GMOs to animals and humans.

Utilizing scientific data, legal precedent, and consumer power the OCA and our local coalitions will educate and mobilize at the grassroots level to pressure giant supermarket chains (Wal-Mart, Kroger, Costco, Safeway, Supervalu, and Publix) and natural food retailers such as Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s to voluntarily implement “truth-in-labeling” practices for GMOs and CAFO products; while simultaneously organizing a critical mass to pass mandatory local and state truth-in-labeling ordinances – similar to labeling laws already in effect for country of origin, irradiated food, allergens, and carcinogens. If local and state government bodies refuse to take action, wherever possible we must attempt to gather sufficient petition signatures and place these truth-in-labeling initiatives directly on the ballot in 2011 or 2012. If you’re interesting in helping organize or coordinate a Millions Against Monsanto and Factory Farms Truth-in-Labeling campaign in your local community, sign up here: http://organicconsumers.org/oca-volunteer/

To pressure Whole Foods Market and the nation’s largest supermarket chains to voluntarily adopt truth-in-labeling practices sign here, and circulate this petition widely: http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_22309.cfm

And please stay tuned to Organic Bytes for the latest developments in our campaigns.

Power to the People! Not the Corporations!

Ronnie Cummins
Organic Consumers Association

Article: Yoga better than walking for mood, study confirms

shawn — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 22:05:30 +0000

This article is in the online edition of The Baltimore Sun.

This article, by Meredith Cohn, is at: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/health/2010/08/yoga_does_improve_mood_clinica.html

August 23, 2010

Yoga better than walking for mood, study confirms

Those who practice yoga probably already know this, but a new study shows that yoga improves mood — even more than walking.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine studied believe that have demonstrated a link between yoga postures and increased GABA levels and decreased anxiety. Their finding are published online in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric, levels in the brain are associated with mood — low levels are found in those with depression and anxiety disorders.

The researchers used magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging to compare the GABA levels in the brains of those practiced yoga three times a week for an hour and those who walked instead. During the 12-week study, those who did yoga had climbing GABA levels.

They also reported at several points during the study that their anxierty was decreasing and mood was improving.

Lead study author, Dr. Chris Streeter, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurology at the university, said the research is promising and warrants further study. Yoga could be consideered potential therapy for certain mental disorders, he said.

Any yogis out there see such an increase in mood? How about walkers?

My comments:

Anecdotally I agree with this study. Yoga improving one’s mood has been my experience. Another factor could be diet: some of the chemicals in processed food negatively affect mood. Those who seriously study yoga tend to have better diets, and avoid processed and chemical-laden foods. Therefore yoga combined with dietary changes may give the best hope for positively affecting the mood of those with certain mental disorders.

Letter to The Editor: The facts about sewage treatment

shawn — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 20:25:05 +0000

This excellent Letter to the Editor entitled The facts about sewage treatment by Ted Dew-Jones, was published in Monday Magazine, 30 September 2010. It shows the absolute idiocy of what Hon. Barry Penner, BC’s Minister of Environment, has ‘mandated’ for Victoria. One of my favourite quotes is from Chris Bouchier “…policy needs to be based on evidence and science, not on ideology.” The proposed land based sewage treatment for Victoria is purely ideological, and is wrong.

The original letter is at mondaymag.com/articles/entry/letters-september-30/

The facts about sewage treatment

In 1968, when I was half my present age, I was assigned the job of assessing an application by the Capital Regional District to discharge screened raw sewage down the first of our long outfalls. The substantiation was by consulting engineers Associated Engineering Services Ltd., and their lead engineer was a brilliant man with a doctorate in engineering. It was more than adequate to prove the discharge would not cause pollution; the length of the outfall was derived form a formula developed by the engineering faculty of a U.S. university using scientific and medical information from the extensive monitoring already carried out elsewhere.

A permit was issued with a requirement that the discharge be monitored by an independent agency, for if land-based treatment was shown by a government agency not to be needed, no one would believe the politicians were doing anything but trying to save money. Indeed, the monitoring was not to prove that such treatment was not needed—which was readily predicable—so much as to enable the public to be so convinced. That purpose was never met for whilst the monitoring results were available; the CRD never publicized them and they have done nothing to justify their original decision to instal that long outfall since it was installed.

Following this, an identical process was carried out for the second of our long outfalls. The agency that the CRD and province agreed on was our own university and the medical health officers. It was obvious that no one was better qualified to assess the impact of the discharges and that is still obvious.

So following 30-plus years of monitoring, not a single biologist, oceanographer nor medical health officer supports the notion that we need land-based treatment. Six medical health officers and likewise as many scientists and not a single exception! When our minister of environment, Barry Penner, ordered land-based treatmnet to be provided, they and many other well qualified people—91 in all—wrote to Penner that he did not have the evidence needed to justify his decision. They received a fatuous answer.

This insult to the university is more important than the irreversible environmental damage that the building and operation of land-based plants will do, although that is significant, and more important than the the diversion of money from needed environmental projects. It not only means that the monitoring over 30 years has been a waste of money; more serious is the waste of talent. The scientists must wonder what their purpose in life is thought to be when the most important recommendation they will ever make is ignored. What was the point of all those exams and all that work?

Not only is their work trashed, so also is the work of the Pat Bay Oceanographic Centre, whose director, a scientist of world renown, gave lectures in Victoria explaining why we did not need land-based treatment. So is the work of the U.S. scientists who selected the director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, Professor Isaacs, to explain to a committee of Congress why land-based treatment was not needed with long outfalls. So is the work of U.K. scientists and medical health officers whose advise to a British Royal Commission led to a famous result that comparing secondary treatment with short outfalls to long outfalls, the latter under the right conditions, could be “environmentally preferable.”

Minister Penner quoted from a report by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (a report that never had peer review) in support of his order, but the most reasonable interpretation of the conclusions of that report is that we should not be installing land-based treatment.

We are back to Galileo and the sun going ’round the Earth, which was as obvious to citizens then as the need for land-based treatment is now. This is more than a mistake; it is a disgrace.

Ted Dew-Jones, Victoria

Article: The Crash You Can Avoid

shawn — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 16:03:47 +0000

Here is a great article I found via Twitter. It is a timely and articulate piece, by Tony Schwartz in the Harvard Business Review, The Crash You Can Avoid, who is one of many voices stating that the way we live cannot continue.
Here is a link to the original article, with comments. If any of these links don’t work, go to the original article.

The Crash You Can Avoid

2:07 PM Tuesday July 20, 2010
by Tony Schwartz

We live in a world that defines “more, bigger faster” as invariably better.

It’s an ethic that places the greatest value on companies that offer ever more products and services, and generate ever higher profits.

It’s an ethic that rewards and prizes people who work the longest hours, move at the highest speeds, take the least downtime, and juggle the most tasks at the same time.

But it’s also an ethic that can survive and prosper only so long as capacity — the planet’s resources and our own — exceeds the demand we make on it.

For generations, we’ve acted on the belief that we can consume as many of the earth’s resources as we want, blithely confident that there will always be more where they came from. We’ve done much the same with our internal resources. We spend our own energy at more and more furious rates, on the assumption that our capacity naturally expands to meet rising demand.

The jig is nearly up.

The problem with “more bigger faster” is that it generates value that is narrow, shallow, and short term — diminishing returns until there are ultimately no returns at all.

Was the BP disaster an anomalous event, for example, or an inevitable outcome of the world’s unquenchable thirst for more and more oil, and a big public company’s hunger for higher profit, more and more quickly?

Was the sub-prime debacle a surprising development, or the inescapable outgrowth of a race among large financial institutions to run up profits by creating and selling a product — deceptively packaged mortgages — to customers who couldn’t reasonably afford them?

Were the flaws in recent cars produced by Toyota — a company that built its brand on reliability — anything more than a predictable consequence of ramping up production to manufacture more cars, more quickly to earn more money, faster?

The complexity of the problems we’re facing is growing, but our capacity to meet them is diminishing, precisely because we’re moving so fast. We feel compelled to push ourselves harder and more continuously, so we’re sleeping less, resting less, sitting at our desks for longer, moving and exercising less, eating fast foods faster, and becoming fatter and less healthy.

In the face of relentlessly rising demand, we feel constant pressure to get more done. Seduced by the new technologies, we juggle multiple activities to try to keep up. We’re partially engaged in many things, but rarely fully engaged in anything. By splitting our attention, we sacrifice the qualities we need most: absorbed focus, reflectiveness, creativity and the capacity to think big picture.

Calmness is critical to being able to think clearly and deeply. Instead, feeling stretched and stressed and pushed, we increasingly fuel ourselves with adrenalin, noradrenalin, and cortisol. These “fight or flight” hormones not only wreak havoc on our bodies, but also progressively shut down our prefrontal cortex so we’re more reactive, impulsive and focused on our immediate survival rather than thinking long-term.

The way we’re working — and living — is unsustainable.

We’re in a shared conspiracy of denial because we don’t want to face the sacrifice, pain, and change that recognizing our limits would require. We can’t remain numb to the consequences of the way we’re living indefinitely, but we also can’t change what we don’t notice.

So what has to change to make us wake up? What will it take for us and our employers to connect the dots between the way we’re working, and the accidents, breakdowns, and destructive business decisions that occur with increasing frequency?

Sadly, I suspect the answer is pain. Change rarely occurs until the pain of our current behaviors exceeds our fear of doing something new and different. My own bet is that another severe downturn in the stock market, and the economy, is the most likely trigger.

But why wait?

What if you set aside a specific time every week to get off the treadmill you’re on? What if you stopped moving, quieted down, put away your technology, and took some time to reflect on the consequences of the choices you’re making? What would it look like to move from “more, bigger, faster” to “richer, deeper and more satisfying?”

Try our energy audit for starters. (Click on the link.) It will tell you a lot about whether you’re building your capacity, or draining it.
Tony Schwartz is president and CEO of The Energy Project.