Welcome back to the Laughing Matters podcast. I, as always, am your humble host, W.S. Walker,
and we're going to do a show today. So just a few things that I wanted to touch on. We'll
start one out with a kind of innocuous one, but it's a little trick that I found that
I thought you guys would really appreciate. It is kind of a biological hack. It's not
quite a polling case of emergency, but it is something you want to kind of reserve for
more serious situations. Basically, when you get tired, you get that far away feeling,
you know, when you're really tired, you're trying to focus on something, which is essentially
your semi-conscious. And when you, you may have heard of thing called micro naps, it's
where you kind of just, you're not sure if you nodded off or not. That's typically when
you get the little head bobs. What's happening there is your brain is essentially cleaning
itself. It's clearing out toxins. And during those moments, because it's just kind of either
a brief shutdown or over a period of time, I'm not absolutely certain on the science
on this one. But what it looks like to me is that when you're in that far away state,
kind of like you got your belt rung, semi-conscious, your brain is limiting function. It's clearing
out the toxins from certain areas. At some areas, it's just got to shut you down for
man, for just maybe five, 10 seconds. And then you pop right back up. We've all done
it. What look at any baby half the time.
We're watching a movie with somebody that you know, you're not supposed to fall asleep
during, but you just keep and you keep telling, no, I'm good, man. I'm good. No, I can stay
awake. I just, but it never occurs to you in those moments. Your brain won't let you
have that realization that I need to shift positions. And this way, I'm not going to
be able to stay awake if I don't shift positions. At the moment, you realize that you're like,
okay, you sit up and you're usually good. But if you just stay in that position, you're
back to Nod Town in no time. You barely miss any of the rhythm of it taking you down. And
then when it's done it enough times, if you leave it unchecked, then it'll, you know,
kind of give you the full reboot. You'll start waking the rest of the way back up. And we've
all had our little nap and rally. And also, if you're unaware, apparently they say 20
minutes, 10 to 20 minutes is the ideal little nap time. If you go further than that, you
start dipping into, you know, other rhythms and other stages of sleep. So you want to
be able to come back up easily. That does the most essential kind of clearing out in
your brain. But what I'm going to teach you today is one that I've used for several years
now for well over a decade now. It essentially in those times that really they're like, okay,
everybody clear out of this section. We're going to give it a cleaning. This tricks your
brain into manning all stations instead. Yeah. So if you're ever feeling mentally sluggish,
if you have that far away feeling, if you have the nods, if you feel a micro nap coming
on, you can use this. The way that I first heard it was that you just hold your breath
for like 45 seconds, 50 seconds, as long as it takes for your body to start wanting to
fight back against it. Like it's just like, I need to, I need to breathe. And you start
getting those kinds of pangs of your body going, wake up. We need to breathe. See, at
that point, there's something going on in your head. What a little guy is like, sir,
I need to get you out of bed. Everybody up, everybody up. Phillips, did you hit the button?
There you go, son. Hope that gets you breathing again soon. I'm going back to bed. You'll
feel it happen. You get this nice little squirt of adrenaline. It's not a typical, at least
not for me. It's not a, I don't feel jittery. I don't feel hyper. You just feel awake, bad.
You feel like you, that you woke up in the last like hour and a half after a good night's
sleep. Like it's, you just feel it and even keel and that'll last for a while. But I discovered
that if you instead in a far more uncomfortable way, blow all the breath in your lungs out.
To be honest, I was editing the other night and I did not want to get up to get a five
hour energy. So I did the blowout trick and wide awake, perfectly awake within 10 seconds.
So yeah, you don't really have to wait for 45. That's kind of hard to do in an exam
class. People start looking at you at a certain point, but yeah, it's only 10, 15 seconds
of having your breath out. Typically you'll do it. Do it enough for it to be serviceable.
If you really, really want to wake up, give it all 30 seconds. Cause man, you know, hold
your breath for a fairly long time, holding all the breath in your lungs out of your body.
Ooh, not nearly as long. Your body will not put up with that. So there you go. If you
get tired during a rather crucial time and your brain starts to micro nap, you turn around
and you say to yourself, that was so stupid. I'm sorry. It's late and I did not use that
trick yet. Um, I wouldn't do this too often, but, uh, just some examples of where I've
used it. Uh, 7 a.m. college class exams. Those, uh, yeah, they're not fun. I actually drove
back from Florida last year on a family vacation and started to feel it coming on. I was doing
everything I could do. You know, I was turning up the music, I was rolling down the windows,
wasn't working. And so I did that and that got me home safely. Thank God. It's a little
scary that kind of had that in my pocket because I don't know what I would have done without
it. Nothing was working that kept. I mean, like I had to drive another almost 45 minutes
before there was a place to stop to get something. So, um, you know, I've been noticing a drift
happening lately and honestly it's been happening for a while, but like really only coming into
focus recently and so many of us drift, including myself, of course. What do I mean by that?
Okay. So televisions, let's start at televisions. The majority of us do not use this technology
to create, to communicate or better somebody else's life with it more than they use it
at least to fill space and time. And it gives them time to be sedentary and mobilized and
comfortable or as a way to pass the time, which if you think about it, the fact that
our lives are so limited in time, given that it takes us, you know, 20 years to get really
steady on our feet and up and running in the last 20 to 40 years, more or less start the
process of feebling. Most of us pass the time is a bit more like taking an X amount of hours
of your limited remaining balance and waving your hand at it. They have nothing productive
to be done here. Or I surrender these hours for, I have no use for them. Now, people that
see these hours as much needed breaks from a busy schedule. I get that in that you are
taking recharge time while being told stories or what's happening elsewhere in the world
or taking looks inside other people's mostly scripted lives, Mark does reality TV or watching
people risk it all for a chance at something. But it's still surrendering usable hours
where you could be strengthening an interpersonal connection or giving thanks to God or helping
one of the countless people that could use your help right now or just use a couple of
nice words or kindness or it's time that you have that you could use to convey something
that's good. It's time where you can research and learn where you can be better and whatever
your purpose ends up being. For me, it's it's more time that I could slash should be writing,
filming, editing the shows that I'm working on getting a book agent so I can go to publish
a little sidebar here guys. I've had several people ask me why I don't go to publish with
Amazon. Well, Amazon has a three year exclusivity contract in which no one can publish the book
except for Amazon. And I would prefer to have the option to have an agent getting a deal
with a publishing house where there would be some marketing push on the book to get
it into more hands. I am of the sincerest opinion that if I can get some money to read
it and to take it seriously when reading it, I will almost certainly have someone else
fighting on the side of me in the book trying to get the book out. As it stands like yes,
I know you guys really enjoy the podcast. Thank you so much for letting me know that.
Can't tell you how much that just, but currently the you know, the shows have very small audience.
I mean, like, yes, I am so appreciative of every listener and every viewer we have. But
in the scope of how many people will have read the book, I mean, that's going to be
a fraction of that. And given how, you know, small that hardly it's already is, like this
is something that deserves to be known. I mean, if you guys have come with me this far
and are listening to the show still, I've got to think that at least most of you would
agree with me when I say that this is a message that deserves to be out there and that mankind
needs to have available to those seeking answers in the same categories that my book and the
concepts lie with them. It deserves to outlast me. It's not about the guy that found it.
It's about what was found. It's something that I definitely have to put in more time
on. I'm sure that there are things in your life that if you imagined the TV were not
an option to fill that time with, there's something that you can think of something
that is definitely in the in run really, really worth your time. Sure, take some time to recoup,
recover, wind down, but try not to surrender it as an activity. I don't know if you guys
know this about me, but I didn't have any cable TV until I went to college. It was included
in the room. But up until then, we grew up on free stations, over the air programming
and VHS tapes, of course. But when I went to college, I found myself getting very quickly
addicted to cable television. It wasn't that it was like slotting time to sit down and
watch TV. It became something that was on in the background and that I would consistently
give varying levels of attention to. It filled my time in a very literal sense. It was like
the things that I had to do during the day were all piled in a bucket. That was the size
of the amount of time in which I had to do everything that day. And I had been pouring
concrete in on top of it, filling in all the gaps in all the things that I had to do. And
the more I did this and the more sedentary I became, the more that concrete seemed to
harden. I mean, it took more and more energy to get started on creating something or writing
on something or doing all the other things that I could have been doing instead that
would affect others. And the reason it took more energy was because I had to first pull
myself away from this thing that I was enjoying. You know, because you're enjoying it. You
don't want to pull away from it to actually do something, especially something that would
require creative effort. It's almost like you have all of this replacement content.
It's not that which I don't like saying content that much. If you're saying content, it kind
of indicates that, you know, it's like filler because you think of it as that we need content
here. It's something that's thrown in to fill space. And that's not what I do, man. But
that's what cable did. It was content, spewing out of the cement truck. It's at this point
in the podcast, you can probably pretty easily take a look at your own life and decide for
yourself where you sit with your relationship with surrendering time to television, streaming
services, YouTube, etc. And to answer the question that I'm sure at least a couple of
you thought, you know, generally speaking about I would not count time spent listening
to this podcast or watching could help videos on YouTube, or other videos under those categories.
Those of you who tune in, you're hearing things that you could use to help shape a better
way of thinking and being and acting in your decisions in the world. This can help you
and what you leave behind the influence that you send out into the world that you know,
doubles over itself doubles over itself as it affects each person. And those effects
of their decisions and the way that they were affected, it just keeps going outwards guys.
So value your time, because it has enormous value. You add a little bit of effort or attention
into the mix, and it can be made into almost anything. And so many of our hours are already
spoken for by sleep and growing up and working and maintenance, that we need to treat the
hours that aren't any of those, especially the ones that happened during that crucial
middle period of your life with far more reverence than we do. This is, as far as we know, your
one go around in the waters of life and humanity's history. How much of that would you prefer
to get thrown out as time spent down the recommended video YouTube rabbit hole, or binge watching
a series? I want you to understand though that I'm not calling you lazy. I'm not saying
you don't have a life. What I'm saying is it, it does take you away from the history
being made out of cause and effect. Bench watching a show easily takes us out of the
everyday flow of all those interactions that shape our world. And all of those things that
can shape another's life, their mood, and most importantly, influence their decisions.
They're just opted out of. You didn't show up for the game. And before you say that you've
had an entire friendships forged over a game or film or television series or another kind
of media fandom, I'm simply pointing out that this exists, whether or not you yourself fall
into these categories or degrees of it, it's going to be up to you to determine that. How
would I know that? Again, I'm not making any claims that in cases of everything mentioned,
they are definitively a yes or no that we do. We did guys. We do love labeling so many
things in that way for ease of mental categorization. I think we got a cap to that, but this is
just to help you understand another side of it. It's up to you to determine if this is
accurate in your own life. Regardless of where you sit on the spectrum of this, I think that
anyone that does an honest inventory on this and finds themselves to share some resemblance
and some of the descriptions here that they would agree with me on this particular point.
Those hours, they are far more valuable than I can know. So I'm going to try to spend them
and I'm going to try to do more. And that's it. I just wanted to share that with you guys.
Of course, go to youtube.com slash could help. You can write me, which, oh my goodness, please
write me. Or if you want to record yourself asking a question, I'll play it on the show.
Bring it on. Thanks once again for tuning in. Of course, you can catch me at youtube.com
slash could help and please write me. Oh yeah, I'm not begging anymore. Please write me.
Totally not begging anymore. But of your own volition, if you choose to write to me or
record yourself, you know, ask you a question, I'll play that on the show. You can get to
me at will help mail at gmail.com. So I guess I'll leave you guys with this. Oh, the seconders
are ready to sing along. Be good to them. Be good for them. And you're going to be fantastic.
I'm WS Walker. You're the fantastic you be sweet.