Why Complaining Rewires Your Brain To Be Negative

Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behaviour, which changes how people perceive you.

And here’s the kicker: complaining damages other areas of your brain as well. Research from Stanford University has shown that complaining shrinks the hippocampus, an area of the brain that’s critical to problem solving and intelligent thought. Damage to the hippocampus is scary, especially when you consider that it’s one of the primary brain areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s.

While it’s not an exaggeration to say that complaining leads to brain damage, it doesn’t stop there. When you complain, your body releases the stress hormone cortisol. Cortisol shifts you into fight-or-flight mode, directing oxygen, blood, and energy away from everything but the systems that are essential to immediate survival. One effect of cortisol, for example, is to raise your blood pressure and blood sugar so that you’ll be prepared to either escape or defend yourself.All the extra cortisol released by frequent complaining impairs your immune system and makes you more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. It even makes the brain more vulnerable to strokes.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

- David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Quote of the Day

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

- Leonardo da Vinci

Imagine If - OMSCS from Georgia Tech

I am learned a lot and still learning - A life changing experience!!

Quote of the Day

Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be traveled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.

- Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress

A Unified Theory of Randomness

Sheffield and Miller have already posted the first two papers in their proof of the equivalence between LQG and the Brownian map on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org; they intend to post the third and final paper later this summer. The work turned on the ability to reason across different random shapes and processes — to see how random noncrossing curves, random growth, and random two-dimensional surfaces relate to one another. It’s an example of the increasingly sophisticated results that are possible in the study of random geometry.

“It’s like you’re in a mountain with three different caves. One has iron, one has gold, one has copper — suddenly you find a way to link all three of these caves together,” said Sheffield. “Now you have all these different elements you can build things with and can combine them to produce all sorts of things you couldn’t build before.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild . . .savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.

Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

The Post-Swim Session!!

Quote of the Day

A data scientist is someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning. Data scientists not only are adept at working with data, but appreciate data itself as a first-class product.

- Hillary Mason

Wisdom Of The Week

Now as to yourself. All you have to do is to live up to your reputation: but beware of three things:

1. Don't look for another than self-approval.
2. Don't base happiness on anything but virtue
3. Don't, as fools to their physicians, conceal a moral sore because the world call you sound. 

- Epistles of Horace via Nassim Taleb