Category: health

I got a new pair of glasses today, with progressive lenses. My eye doctor has been mentioning the possibility to me over the last few years, but I didn’t feel like I was ready to give them a try until recently. Since we got a vision plan at work this year, I though I’d use it to get a new pair of glasses, and give progressives a try.

I got them from LensCrafters, so I’m solidly in the mainstream Luxottica ecosystem now. As this article points out, Luxottica owns Lenscrafters, all of the licensed brands that are sold in LensCrafters, and even EyeMed, the vision plan that we have at work. I’m not too happy about this kind of monopoly, but there’s not much I can do about it.

A few years ago, I got a pair of glasses from Warby Parker, and they were a lot cheaper than LensCrafters, but honestly I didn’t really like the glasses, and they’ve sat in their box since then. So I guess Warby Parker is a good alternative if you like their glasses and if maybe your eyes aren’t as bad as mine are. But if you need special lenses, and you want a professional to help you pick the right frames, and get the glasses adjusted properly, maybe you need LensCrafters or something more traditional.

So far, I’m finding that these progressives aren’t as much of an adjustment as I’d thought they’d be. So that’s good. On the other hand, I’m not sure if they’re really going to help me with reading or computer work, like they’re supposed to. I’m wearing them now, and I can’t see the computer screen any better than I could with the old glasses. I’ll wear them at work this week and see how things go.

I’ve been doing pretty good with meditation since my last update. I’ve been meditating for about 10 minutes, 3 or 4 times a week, usually with just the plain timer from Insight Timer. I’ve tried a few guided meditations, but haven’t found any new good ones, really. I was feeling pretty good about this, but then I saw the Kickstarter for The Every Day Calendar by Simone Giertz. In the intro video, she mentions that she meditated every day for a year, except for the day she went in for brain surgery. So, heck, if she can meditate every day while dealing with a brain tumor, I should probably be able to meditate every day while dealing with my significantly less serious life problems.

Her Every Day Calendar is pretty cool, but I don’t think I want to spend $300 on it. I’ll stick with tracking stuff on my iPhone. But I have a lot of respect for her, both for making cool things and for handling her brain tumor so well. I’d be a mess if I had to deal with that. (Heck, I’ve been dealing with a relatively minor car problem for the last three weeks, and that’s almost broken me.)

It’s probably overkill to be posting an update on my progress with meditation, since my last post on the subject was less than a week ago. But I’m trying to stick with it, and obsessing about it a little. Obsessing about something that’s supposed to help me calm down and relax is probably counter-productive, but it’s my way. I managed to meditate four times last week, for about 10 minutes each time. I finished the meditation essentials series in the Meditation Studio app.

I think I have a basic idea of how this stuff works now, but I don’t quite feel like I’m ready to just set a timer and sit quietly yet. And I’m not sure if I want to continue with the Meditation Studio app. So I’m trying a different app now, Insight Timer. I started their seven-day intro course today. I’m guessing it’s going to go over a lot of the same ideas I’ve already gone through in Meditation Studio, but the point is just to have something to reinforce the basics as I try to establish the habit.

There’s a lot of content in Insight Timer, but it’s a pretty messy app, in some ways. But it works. It’s a free app, and has a lot of free content. There’s an interesting post on Medium from the current owner of the app. I hope his approach to generating income from it works. In a nutshell, he’s not trying to switch everybody to a paid subscription. He’s offering a couple of features, like offline listening, as relatively inexpensive subscriptions. And he’s offering some content for sale, via one-time purchase. So I think I can probably use the app for free for now, without any worries. If I want to pay for features and/or content later, I can, but I don’t have to worry about ponying up for a one-year subscription any time soon.

I blogged back in January that I was going to give meditation a try this year. I got off to a slow start with that, then pretty much gave up on it back in April or thereabouts. Well, I’m going to try again.

I still have two books on meditation waiting to be read: 10% Happier and Search Inside Yourself. (The Great American Read group that I’m in on Goodreads has really sidetracked all my other reading.)

I was using the Meditation Studio app (mentioned in my January post) to try to learn meditation, and I guess I’m going to pick back up on that. I had finished their starter series, and am now partway through the meditation essentials series. My short-term goal is to do one meditation from that series every weeknight this week. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve noticed that Meditation Studio was recently acquired by the company that makes the Muse headband, which worries me a little. Muse seems like a bit of a gimmick, while Meditation Studio seems like more of a serious no-nonsense app. So we’ll see if they keep the app as-is, or mess it up.

I still haven’t signed up for a paid subscription to the app. As a legacy customer, I can subscribe for $24/year. (The regular rate right now is $50/year.) Some of the more popular meditation apps, like Headspace, cost around $100/year. (You’d think an app that just helps you sit quietly for a few minutes wouldn’t need to be so expensive…) I should probably hold off on paying for anything until I see if I can stick with it for more than a few days.

I worked from home yesterday, because of the snowstorm, and I called in sick today, because it was so cold this morning that I started losing feeling in my fingers and toes while I was trying to clear out the snow around my car. (I am legitimately getting over a cold. I’d probably be fine by now if not for all this weather…)

This leaves me with a whole day to just mess around, which has led me to try to knock a couple of “rainy day” projects off my list. One of those is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: trying meditation. I’ve been bookmarking (and occasionally reading) articles about meditation for some time now. I even downloaded a meditation app to my phone a year or two ago, but never got around to using it.

Well, long story short, I convinced myself to start using that meditation app today. The app is called Meditation Studio. When I first downloaded it, it was a paid app, but I got it for free via the old Starbucks app of the week thing (Which I guess is dead now. Oh well.) Anyway, I guess it used to be a paid app with (mostly) free content, but (as with many apps) they’re switching to a subscription model. But they’re allowing legacy customers to keep using it for free with all the currently available content, so that’s cool. The subscription price is a bit steep — $10/month (or $60/year). There’s a “holiday discount” going right now, which makes it a little more reasonable, but still not great. I did the first meditation in their starter series today, and my goal is going to keep going through that, one session per day for ten days, and see how that works out.

As I said, I’ve been thinking about meditation for a while now. It came back to the front of my mind recently, due to a few things. First, just thinking about New Year’s resolutions; I didn’t really make any this year, but it got me thinking about stuff I’ve been putting off. Second, I saw a few references to Dan Harris’ new book over the last couple of weeks. When he published the first 10% Happier book in 2014, I was kind of interested, but not enough to buy or read the book. The new one is called Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, and is a follow-up to the first one. Third, the Note To Self podcast re-posted their episode with Chade-Meng Tan recently. After listening to that episode last year, I added his book Joy On Demand to my Amazon wishlist, but never got around to buying it.

I’m still somewhat skeptical about this whole meditation thing. My skepticism probably comes from looking at stuff like this astral projection video on YouTube that just makes me think of Doctor Strange. And it’s possible that it’s all just a plot to get us corporate drones to work harder, as this article (pretty much) asserts. On the other hand, here’s an article from HBR that makes a good case for meditation. And I should probably read this NY Times meditation guide that I bookmarked a long time ago; it seems pretty reasonable and practical.

I’ve also been giving the Breathe app on my Apple Watch another try. I disabled it pretty quickly after it first came out, because the reminders were a distraction, and I wasn’t convinced that it was at all useful. But now I’ve re-enabled the reminders and I’m giving it another chance. (Of course, the reminders seem to have stopped working now, so that’s something else to troubleshoot, which is only going to make me more stressed…)

I often bookmark articles on sleep, like this recent one from the New Yorker, which is a review of a book called The Mystery of Sleep. (Sometimes I actually read the articles, but mostly I just bookmark them…) I’ve been having some trouble sleeping again recently, though I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it, without making some pretty major life changes. (For instance, last night, there was somebody outside playing music at 3am. Not much I can do about that.)

I’m still using the Sleep Cycle app on my iPhone to track my sleep and act as an alarm clock. They added the ability to track snoring a while back, and that confirms that I do, in fact, snore. (And also that listening to recordings of yourself snoring is kind of horrifying.)

I’ve thought about buying a new mattress (though my current one is only a few years old). I was looking around at internet mattress companies, but after reading about all the shenanigans involved in that industry, I’m a little less interested in that. (Though maybe my takeaway from that should be that they’re all just selling slabs of foam, and they’re all pretty much the same, so I should just pick one and buy it and not worry too much about which one.)

Here’s another article, this one from NPR, with Terry Gross interviewing a scientist who wrote a book called Why We Sleep. In this case, I can skip the article and listen to the audio, so maybe I’ll do that. (Not that I’m likely to learn anything I haven’t already heard, but you never know.)