Coinciding Narratives
Coinciding Narratives
An online notebook where I explore creativity and many other topics.
July 2026
August 2026
Top Words
- week
- increasing
- mental
- energy
- walking
- world
- diary
- reflections
- creativity
- sleep
All posts (23)
A couple of weeks ago, I went to the “Spiders of Paradise” exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery. This is a small collection of photographs and video by the artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso. The exhibition is about the Maratus (Wikipedia link) genus of spiders. They are commonly known as “peacock spiders”,...
Notes These are some things I learned from the book Circadian Rhythms: A Very Short Introduction by Russell Foster and Leon Kreitzman: While mammals only have photoreceptor (light-detecting) cells in their eyes, other vertebrates also have photoreceptors elsewhere, such as in the pineal gland – sufficient light can...
Reflections on the week During this week, I started focusing on gradually increasing the amount of exercise I’m doing, particularly exercise that raises my heart rate. I think this helps improve my mental energy, but there’s a complicated trade-off: physical fatigue and mental fatigue are linked to some extent. For...
Reflections on the week I managed to keep to my planned sleep schedule over the week, and my levels of mental energy increased noticeably. I’m naturally waking up earlier, which is a bit annoying – I’d rather get more sleep instead – but I still seem to get enough sleep to maintain concentration throughout the day....
Reflections on the week I’m definitely noticing improvements from making my sleep schedule more regular. But I need to continue with this – in the past, I’ve found that I get the most benefit after a week or more of keeping to a fairly strict sleep schedule. Improving sleep: what’s worked for me Over the years, I’ve...
Reflections on the week This week was a bit of a rocky start to the experiment – I think I was trying to change too many things at once. I am just beginning to get my sleep schedule back on track, and this will be my focus for the upcoming week. Other thoughts Earlier today, I posted some notes on cognitive...
Personality Type: An Owner’s Manual (by Lenore Thomson) and Personality Hacker (by Joel Mark Witt and Antonia Dodge) are two books that use the concept of “cognitive functions” to explain differences between personalities and the varying challenges people may face depending on their personality type. Cognitive...
I’m beginning an experiment to try to increase my levels of mental energy. By “mental energy”, I mean being able to focus on challenging or creative tasks without quickly becoming mentally fatigued or susceptible to distraction. I often find myself in a vicious cycle of low mental energy causing stress and...
Keep Going is a short book written and illustrated by Austin Kleon. The subtitle is: “10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad”. Notes Kleon says he wrote the book because he needed to read a book answering the question of how to keep going with creative work. The book is a list of what’s helped him. The...
I’ve been reading about empathy over the past year or so, and a chapter from the book On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers caught my attention. The full chapter title is: “Dealing With Breakdowns in Communication – Interpersonal and Intergroup”. Notes Rogers suggests a rule for debates and arguments: each person can...
Page 1 of 3