SB 184: The JND method, Modern Monks

Feb 26, 2023

Hi, I’m Matt. Welcome to Steady Beats: a newsletter about building the middle-aged life you want in small and steady beats.

Just a couple of quick items to share this week. Hope you find them useful.

Fitness Beats

Sugar.

Along with alcohol, I’d guess sugar is the substance most people struggle to cut down on the most.

But what if you could cut sugar without even noticing?

Psychologist Corey Wilks says you can using a Just Noticeable Difference (JND) strategy:

Switching from using five packets of sugar in your coffee to none is a huge difference. But going from five packets to four and three-quarters? Virtually undetectable.
With enough time and patience, it's possible to cut out processed sugar—as long as you stay below the JND (and check with your physician).

I’m no sugar-conqueror. Love my M&Ms and Golden Grahams. But I did conquer a nightly ice cream / frozen yogurt habit by swapping in Oikos Triple Zero greek yogurt.

Sometimes it’s about finding a better substitute.

And sometimes, like Corey says, it’s about making slow and incremental progress toward a better outcome. Steady Beats, you might say.

Book Beats

I’m reading A Simpler Life, an anonymously-written book from The School of Life Series.

I’ll have a review when I’m finished. But in once sentence, this book is about stripping away society’s expectations of what your life should be so you can focus on what you care about.

For example, here’s a quote from the chapter on “How to be a Modern Monk:”

“The appeal of this monkish simplicity is that it has a positive, rather than a negative, motive. Rather than miserably forgoing the comforts of life, as we might expect, the aim is deliberately to seek out what we are really interested in, helped by or excited by–and to pare down our life so as to let what really counts finally emerge.”

By paring down the extraneous, we can power up the good stuff.

Thank you for reading.

Let’s keep the Steady Beats going. 💚

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