🙌🏽 Hello to all the new subscribers and welcome to another week in Monday Madness.
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Good morning folks,
We are into the New Year!! I hope you had an amazing time celebrating the festivities in December.
With 2020 coming to an end, I'm composing this newsletter on the night of 31.12.2020 at 8:00 PM sitting on a worn-down sofa. This year has been a rollercoaster with its highs and lows impacting the lives of everyone. In the unpredictability of the year, we yearn for the normality of comfort. And naturally, in that yearning - we hope to reset the year for a better future and a brand new tomorrow.
As the clock reaches 11:59 PM, I rejoice in the happiness for the year 2020 to pass away in the dark shade on the night. Welcoming, the sound of a new tomorrow with glimmering lights, the star stunned rockets that are flying in all directions. The world has welcomed in 2021. As I lay on my bed, I started to consider that should the attitude enlightened by the world influence our behaviour of the year?
Our external environment "world" tries to influence, provoke and converts us to the thinking of the norm. The year 2020 is what "you" and "I" choose to be and not what the world tries to dictate.
So consider 2021 with a similar thought.
I'll see you next week.
Abhishek
Welcome to my home on the internet - abhisheknair.org
Blog post
Year 2020: Apps and Tools: In this article, I highlight a few of the apps that have honed my creative outputs. Such apps have also contributed to my overall productivity. Let me know your thoughts on what other apps I should explore in the following year.
Show you work by Austin Kleon: In this updated book summary, I enlarged upon the learnings of the book. I explored various teaching that I found to be effective, to which I'm an active user.
Highlight of the week
Moving the body regularly lifts your concentration, speeds up the processing potency of your brain as well as accelerating its learning capacity, raises your energy, elevates your optimism, helps you sleep better via the production of more melatonin and promotes longevity through the release of human growth hormone (HGH), along with the lengthening of your telomeres. Telomeres keep the ends of our chromosomes from fraying—they’re like plastic caps at the tips of shoelaces. Aging shortens our telomeres, which is why they are sometimes compared to a bomb fuse. The powerful point here is that it’s well-documented that exercise slows this shortening, helping you stay healthy longer. You should also note that meditation, a diet rich in whole foods, proper sleep quality and intermittent fasting have all proven to protect our telomeres from degenerating.
Book: The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life by Robin Sharma
Snippet of Value
What I enjoyed watching - A documentary by Yes Theory on Wim Hof, explores the nature of accepting extreme cold conditions as a new normal, exercising breathing techniques to reach a sense of tranquillity and understanding the importance of having cold showers on boosting immunity.
Article - 6 Categories of Resolutions for a Happier Life, with the new year, the focus draws on the resolution we should come to uphold. In this article, there are six areas of categories that we should stress upon: Care for yourself, give more, connect more, accomplish more, have more fun and appreciate more.
Podcast - Your Food and Mental Health with Dr. Uma Naidoo
Summary Notes:
Understanding what specific foods that impact our mood and depression - with the addition of two spices like saffron and turmeric can improve our mental state.
Artificial sweeteners worsen the mood. Refined sugar in the form of baked goods and candy are not ideal for physical health. However, they also linked with studies regarding mood.