Instant feel better: the breathing exercise

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Most people don’t know how to breathe. Say what? Most people don’t know how to breathe! It’s shocking really as oxygen is the single most important element for good health.

Let’s take a closer look. The foundation of health is a healthy bloodstream, the system that transports nutrients and oxygen to the cells in your body. Breathing controls the oxygenation of the cells and also the flow of lymph fluid; the body’s sewage system.

The cells take oxygen and nutrients they need and dumps the toxins. Dead cells, blood proteins, and other toxic material are removed by the lymph system. And the lymph system is activated by deep breathing.

It’s the reason that health systems like yoga are so focused on healthy breathing. There’s nothing like it to clean your body. It also plays a major role in causing cells to become cancerous.

So here’s what you do:

Inhale/breathe in for 7 seconds
Hold your breath for 28 seconds
Breathe out slowly for 14 seconds

Repeat 10 times each session.

See the ratio? It’s 1 – 4 – 2.

Start breathing in through your nose from deep in your abdomen. But never strain yourself. See how many seconds you can build up to by slowly developing your lung capacity.

There is no food or vitamin pill in the world that can do for you what healthy breathing can do!

Me, the newspaper column writer

Today I made it to the news! Writing a column at least.

The NRC Next has a column called 'waarom hebben wij dat niet?', meaning 'why don't we have that?' It's a column that describes 'inventions' or things that you see in other countries that makes you wonder it's not in your own.

Short translation: The article is about the buskers, street musicians who play on one of the 500 designated spots in the London tube.

Write column for a national newspaper: Check.

Party hardy with Improv Everywhere mp3 experiment 8

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You might already be familiar with some of their work, such as the 'no pants subway rides' or the 'frozen grand central'. Their latest project is called 'the mp3 experiment 8', where 3500 people downloaded and pressed play at the same time to participate in a series of synchronized actions using flashlights, camera flashes, glow sticks, and masks.

The Improv Everywhere group do all sorts of pranks in public places, which they call 'missions'. Their goal of these missions is to simply cause scenes of 'chaos and joy'.

So awesome.

How to break your routine

Genius.

How to thrive by carefully picking your environment

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You have this crazy idea. It's a bit risky. It's a bit out of the ordinary, but you know that if you succeeded you could be living the life you really wanted. So you start telling your friends and family about it. And then it starts.

"That's crazy, it's not as easy as you think." "But what if you failed?" "Stop dreaming, that doesn't happen to people like us." Just keep listening to their arguments and the sooner or later you'll say to yourself: "Hey, I guess that makes sense, what was I thinking?"

Sounds familiar?

Now what would happen if instead, this is what they would've said: "Wow, that's a brilliant idea, I can't believe I never thought of that", "This could really work, make sure you have a plan B if things go wrong, then go for it!" or "Great idea, you should call my friend Steve and talk about it, I'm sure he can help you work out your plan".

Would that make a difference?

It's often your environment that makes or breaks you. Especially when your discipline and self-confidence isn't as hard as steel. Who are you 5 best friends? You're the average of those 5 people. Look around in your social circles, your friends, your classmates, your colleagues, or even your family. Who of them do you really envy, do you look up to, and feel like they're really successful? Who of them only pulls you down and who of them actually encourages you to be successful?

It's not always that easy to consciously choose your environment. You've grown on them. The temptation is great when they call to sit in the bar chitchatting about the same useless stuff for the fourth time this week. But let's be brutally honest: you know deep down inside the only reason why you 'hang' with them is because you think you're better than them and that makes you feel good about yourself.

But once you constantly and only surround yourself with positive and successful people, you'll automatically follow in their footsteps. You'll have no choice, it works as peer pressure. Make them your mentors. The great part? Everyone will encourage and help you to succeed!

Old Spice Guy: The Internet duel of the century

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This is what the genius marketer must have thought:

Put a bare-chested, deep-voiced, over-the-top ladies man in a bath towel promoting deodorant on video and voila; I've got myself the perfect ingredients for the most epic ad campaign ever.

And he was right.

It started with the Old Spice Twitter feed: “Today could be just like the other 364 days you log into Twitter, or maybe the Old Spice man shows up”, when everyone could ask questions to Isaiah Mustafa, or better known as The Old Spice Guy, and he would make 30-second videos to answer anything you ever wanted to know.

Up until recently, The Old Spice Guy was being ‘replaced’ by his long-blond haired evenly muscled alter ego Fabio, or better: The New Old Spice Guy. But when The Old Spice Guy found out, all hell broke loose. And so the ultimate ridiculous popularity battle of all time began, called ‘Old Spice Guy Mano a Mano Fabio in El Baño’, in battle arena Internet.

People from all over the world send in questions like “@OldSpice I challenge you to a laser cat duel. Are you manly enough to duel with laser cats?” resulting in a series of hilarious video replies which have literally nothing to do anymore with deodorant whatsoever (see the reply below).

The fierce battle proceeds as I’m blogging this, so follow the battle live on foot (click here) and make sure to get answers to anything you’ve always wanted to know!

BBC’s hunt for the answer: What is reality?

I am me. You are you. But what if we’re not? In BBC’s Horizon documentary ‘What Is Reality?’, scientists explain that we live in an infinity of parallel worlds.

Think of a tennis ball bouncing off a wall. On the moment it hits the wall, it can bounce to the right, to the left or any other direction. Every possibility creates and continues in its new parallel world. We can only see one world, which is the parallel world we live in.

Looking for clues within the atom, scientists find 6 essential elements that everything in the world is made of. We know it is, but we don’t know why. Why 6? Others argue that everything can be defined by mathematics, making reality a mathematic structure. It further discusses how black holes can suck in literally everything including light, and how we all might be part of some sort of cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe.

So, what does this imply to our daily lives? For one, we can use the law of attraction to teleport ourselves into our desired parallel world. Or: we’re part of an alien mathematical super computer that’s projecting our reality and we really live in the Matrix.

Are you still with me? No, you’re not. In the words of one of the scientist: “We only know that it’s there and what it does, but nobody understands it.”

Thus, in a parallel world other than this one, given the ‘facts’ that time is relative (Einstein said so) and we’re living in an infinity of parallel worlds, I might be you and the other way around.