As I was stumbling through my laze filled day of boredom, I fell back my favorite activity: browsing through Netflix and adding things to my ever growing 'Instant Queue'. Yes, I actually do spend more time adding things to my queue rather than watching them. This is a very curious behavior and I found that it reflects on my other activities as well. For. e.g. I love acquiring books whenever and wherever I can. Every time I see a book sale or discount store or even a interesting e-book online, I quickly procure it, feeling good about the whole process, envisioning myself reading the book and becoming smarter in the process (I truly believe that every book you read makes you a better person even if just by a tiny bit). However that has only led my stocking of a huge number physical and virtual books, which are still unread. But coming back to my current state, I'm enjoying my temporary single status (my wife is in India for a month) by slobbing throughout the day and in general being a bum. And due to my aforementioned habit, my Netflix queue has bloated to this:
Anyway, moving on, today I came across a collection of Ted talks in Netflix clubbed as a series called 'Lifehack' and put in the 'Recently Added' queue. I thought that was extremely cheeky and clever of Netflix to know find free video and content from Creative Commons to boost their sometimes weak library. Nothing wrong with it and there can never be enough mediums to bubble up and curate for good Ted talks. So the two videos that I want to talk about and recommend are as follows:
Amy Cuddy: Your body language shapes who you are
(Since Blogger doesn't allow meet to easily embed videos from other websites, the link above is from Youtube. But here is the actual link to the Ted page if you want to get more details.)
The power of body language is no secret. Research has proven time and again that the way we portray ourselves physically affects how others perceive us and this in turn impacts decisions that they make. This is also quite common in the animal kingdom where they use body language to display their strength of weakness and this is turn is a impacts who others in the group or even enemies react. This also plays an important role in giving rise to empathy. Contrary to popular perception, empathy is not a uniquely human emotion. Animals depict it quite often in their own communities and it turns out that not only is it affected by body language for animals, but the same is true for humans too. For e.g. if someone opposite you is smiling, you tend to smile back an'd the same way if someone looks depressed or sad, you'll feel that way and probably wont be smiling anymore.
Amy talks quite a bit about that but she's more interested on how body language affects our own persona. She points out how a lot of people sometimes 'fake it till they make it' when it comes to acting strong or in control. But interestingly faking it can actually slowly get you 'becoming it'. It turns out that this phenomenon is caused by the difference in the balance of Testosterone and Cortisol. And positive body language is the critical to controlling that balance. So go ahead and watch that video and once you're done join me stretching the arms wide and feeling good and strong.
Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life
Amy's talk is incidentally a nice segue-way to Jane McGonigal, a game developer who talked about how a few little things can make us more resilient physically, mentally, socially and emotionally and that in turn can increase our lifespan by up to 10 years. If this doesn't pique your interest instantly, I don't know what can. The concept itself is very intriguing but Jane also shares a painful episode of her life which got her into researching into this topic in the first place. Its an extremely moving story but also a very inspiring one about how you can take control of life and look for solutions, no matter how dire the circumstances may feel. And she ended up creating an app out of the process to share the science with others. Here's the website: Superbetter.com. Go check out both.
p.s. : If anyone is interested, here is the list of movies on my Netflix queue