Author: yamtimsina

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

My friend was a very unsatisfied and unhappy person back then, it was almost more than a decade ago.
I knew that he had a family tragedy, his mother died at age sixty seven due to heart disease.
He used to think personally that he is the most difficult and arrogant human being on the earth but for his family and friends, he was amiable and very helpful.
“Worst of all, for me, I was a procrastinating lazy dude in my personal affairs,” he told me.

“I had no knowledge of differentiation between important and urgent activities in my life.
I would give hours to others without thinking about my health and well being, I never had any idea of the intangible value of life, for example, long term personal health and prosperity,” he further added.

One day, at night, all of a sudden, something unexpected happened to him.
At midnight, he’d walk from one corner of his bedroom to another corner to watch his surroundings.
He said “don’t ask why? I don’t know.
Sometimes, this happens to everybody’s life.”
He saw his wife in deep sleep, his only daughter back then surrounded by her stuffed animals with her favorite Dora the explorer.
Peeking through the window, he saw a quiet dark night outside, all were good outside, all were in deep sleep inside, he felt that his wife and his daughter were happy and, most importantly, very safe.
His mind whispered, “you have everything you could possibly have at the moment, yet you are completely failing to appreciate it.”

The following morning turned out to be different from his usual mornings.
He committed himself that he would change, he didn’t know how but he would change everything, his health, his mindset, his thinking, and most importantly, his habits, the root cause.
The first thing he would change is his health status which was at the moment very poor.
Every morning he would start his day with some minor physical exercise so that he would renew his body early in the morning for the day, a new and fresh day every single day.

Dr. Ernest Becker, PhD, author of  “The Denial of Death” says that death is life’s ultimate motivator, that what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives is an attempt to create something that will outlive us when we die.

Triggers for mind and habit change

“From that day forward, I started to work and think of my life as a matrix,” he said.
He didn’t pay much attention to what others were saying, though he gradually became a good listener but always made decisions by himself.
He developed some fundamental and tacit knowledge about his life, his health, and his family.
“I learned to know the value of my people around me, and I began to take these different components of life and synthesize them into a coherent whole. I got a clear picture of me and the rest of my life,” he said.

It was a cold morning, he saw some ants on the floor, and realized how they were sharing information with each other.
He would relate that to how he should share information around his close friends and family members.
He visualized how bees colonize and compare what would happen if all families colonize in the same way as bees.
He compared his mind with a pure glittering diamond to view the world.

“I have read that a diamond that has the most glitter has fifty six different angles, so I have to look at something from many different perspectives.
I needed some mental training in my mind but personal habit comes first to check who we are and where we stand,” he added.

First, he changed one very bad habit of spending hours on the phone before and after bed scrolling about people who have zero to negligible influence in his life.

James Clear, an author of “Atomic Habits” says “it’s not sufficient to simply change our behavior, but we also have to change how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.”

He almost stopped using his phone in the bedroom. His whole health was affected by poor sleep in different ways.
“I didn’t need LED or any light in the bedroom because it delayed the release of melatonin, a sleep signaling hormone.
I needed darkness to release melatonin for my good night sleep, a key component of a healthy lifestyle,” he commented.

Remember, melatonin is a hormone created by the pineal gland in the brain that’s released directly into the bloodstream.
Darkness initiates the pineal gland to start producing melatonin but light causes it to stop.
“By adopting good night sleep, we can create more focus in our own life rather than focusing on someone else’s pictures on facebook and instagram because focus creates change.
If we gradually measure the different components of our life we always see noticeable improvements,” my friend added.

Second, he completely changed his sitting habit.
His BMI, body mass index, was still in the normal range but moving beyond the upper range of 25.
He remembered his mother and her heart disease which was somehow also associated with obesity.
So, he decided to be more of a moving figure, a person of movement.
He would even start reading a book or watching a movie and walk at the same time in the living room.
Once he starts talking on the phone, he would start walking simultaneously.
“I would read fifteen pages without stopping walking, I would feel so much clarity in my mind that led to my clear thinking pattern and subsequently the productivity skyrocketed.
I would remind you of the saying, sitting is the new smoking,” he added.

Science behind exercise

Pretty quickly, he learned the chemistry behind physical exercise and why he was having more clarity in his mind.
Do you know physical exercise motivates our body and mind in positive thinking?
For those of you who still are not clear about this powerful science or you know but don’t practice, I’m telling you the secret sauce, exercise does amazing things for our body chemically.

When we start to exercise, our body makes an important chemical called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).
It informs our entire body that we are exercising, this internal communication is key and very powerful.
This chemical causes muscle cells, brain cells, and liver cells to break down stored glycogen and fat to use as energy.

A simple exercise not only improves the health of many vital organs like the heart, it increases the blood flow to our brain, improving our cognitive ability.
Once we develop the habit of exercise, we gradually change the quality of our life mentally, emotionally, physically, and even sexually.
We change everything from our sense of awareness to attractiveness and our sense of power to health and vitality.

My friend was very weak from many angles from a health perspective.
His doctor said his bone density degraded pretty badly even though he was not even 30.
For most of us, bone density peaks by age 30.
Once we hit 40, we begin to lose up to 5% of our bone density each decade.

His cardiovascular system was very weak, he could feel that while running for a few minutes.
He started to learn about life, vitality, health, and endurance.
“If I’m not taking care of my body, exercising and eating healthy foods, I can suffer gradual heart failure or a sudden heart attack,” he said.

In his reading, he found an eye-popping scary fact about cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer, one American dies every 36 seconds from it.
Globally, one out of five people die from heart disease, more than any other disease on the planet, 18 million deaths per year and 50 thousand deaths everyday.
Research shows the amazing thing about heart is that simply walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.

Heart disease and stem cells

Can you guess why so many people die from heart disease?
Because, the heart is the least regenerative organ in our body, meaning there are no stem cells in the heart.
What does it mean?
Stem cells are used for regrowth in all kinds of tissue repair, they have regenerative in the body.

In general, the native stem cells are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks.
They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial for two reasons: they keep inflammation normal and they repair damaged tissue.

The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people of chronic disease.
The other bigger problem of the heart is that the heart can’t heal itself on its own after an injury like a heart attack.
Let me tell you why.
Our heart contains 6 or 7 billion heart muscle cells.
If we have a serious heart attack and are lucky enough to survive, we can lose more than one billion of those cells.
The heart can not replace them, so it never replaces their ability to function either.
Ultimately, the problem becomes severe, that is why it’s the world’s leading cause of death.

Dr. Stephen Hussey, DC, an author of “Understanding the Heart” says, “We cannot hope to successfully understand and address modern chronic diseases without evaluating them in the context of a toxic modern world.”

Conclusion

The good news is that prevention is the single best defense against heart disease and many other life threatening diseases.

Therefore, this is worth repeating one more time: just walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.
Remember, this is research proven published data.

One more thing regarding cardiovascular disease.
One natural therapy called sauna or hot shower, is very effective for cardiovascular disease.
This actually started for my dear friend personally because in one of his health issues, modern medicines didn’t work.
The reality is our body is so complex that sometimes doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of the problem despite visiting many specialists.
One of the habits that he developed is getting in the sauna or hot shower because he noticed the improvement.
At that time he was using primarily a hot shower but a little longer shower probably 15 to 20 minutes.

I will take you a little deeper in the science of sauna and what actually happens chemically.
Sauna generates heat stress responses within the body, including the activation of heat shock proteins.
This protein family is produced by our cells in response to stressful conditions, such as excessive heat and are important to many cellular processes.
It regulates the cell cycle, cellular signaling, and functioning of the immune system.
By adopting a sauna at least 4 to 7 days per week at at least 73 degree celsius, our risk for cardiovascular diseases or any premature deaths decreases significantly.
We also reduce the risk of cognitive disorders like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, skin disease, depression, and stroke.

“We must be the CEO of our own health and body, we have to educate ourselves and make solid independent decisions for our well being and longevity.
Remember, in reality, who we are is what we do in our free time and what we eat normally,” my dear friend added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“While the science is complex, our application of it is both straightforward and practical: eat well, stress less, move more, and love more.” -Dr. Dean Ornish

Few months ago, in a casual conversation among friends, one of my friends asked, “why do I get sick even though I have been adopting a healthy lifestyle for so many years?”
There were some biochemical and biophysical scientists at the moment.
For me, this was a simple question but very difficult to answer.
I said, “there are lots of pieces we have to put together regarding our body, its construction, its functional mechanism, and obviously our ancestral evolution.”

This question really intrigued me because I’ve also experienced the same thing in my own personal life.
I plan to write about this in my future posts.
Not only myself, I’ve also experienced the same thing in my family as well as in my extended family, so the question was worth digging a little deeper.

Some of my family members never get sick even though their lifestyle is not healthy, especially in practice of diet and exercise, but some other members whom I’ve seen for many years always get sick despite their adoption of a healthy lifestyle for a very long time.

I read pretty regularly in areas like health, technology, biology, biochemistry, medicine because this is my area of interest, so I did a little more digging in reading and I found some devoted scientist’s work in the area.
The group of Dr. Valter Longo from University of Southern California, Dr. Dean Ornish from University of California, San Francisco, the work from Nobel laureate Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn from University of California San Francisco, and Dr. David Sinclair from Harvard University are some of them.
These are the people I would recommend to go after to find the answer to my friend’s question.

Health, food and genes

Of course, one fundamental aspect of our health is our everyday fuel.
The fuel that we take everyday as food to run our human engine is our key component for health and well being.
The common food for most of us has loads of carbohydrates and fats.
The other part we have to keep in mind is how our body utilizes carbohydrates and fats genetically, which is very difficult to know.

Before the mass migration in human history which is not that old, people used to have marriage within the same cultural population, the genetic pool was the same.
But now there is tremendous mass migration internationally and cross marriages are common across cultures.
This is the key reason in gene variations.
This also answers my friend’s question partially, but at the moment we are not able to understand the genetic implication regarding individual human biochemistry yet scientifically.
We are making progress but it will surely take some time to make genetic technologies available in our local hospitals and clinics.

It appears that humans from different ancestral backgrounds utilize foods especially carbohydrates and fats differently, the main energy source in our body.
This is one of the reasons that people who are on a ketogenic diet gain weight immediately when they start a normal diet.

The role of genes in our body is key to knowing what makes our body happy and healthy.
We are opening the door of genetic diet but still we have to go a long way.
As an example, genetically preferred food is the key whether our body prefers carbohydrates, fats, or a combination of both.

Let’s put it this way to make it a little bit more clear.
Some people burn carbohydrates very quickly so they eat without gaining a lot of weight.
If they don’t eat they can go into hypoglycemic state, that lowers blood sugar and that is very dangerous.
Biochemically, carbohydrates burn very quickly in our body.
Whereas some people burn fat as a primary source of energy which burns slowly so they go many hours without seeing much drop in energy.
This happens due to different genetics set up in the body.

On the negative side, in general, when we eat too many refined carbohydrates like pizza, pasta, sodas, white bread, pastries, fruit juice with high fructose corn syrup, we are adding too much sugar and it goes straight into our bloodstream and blood sugar spikes.
Our pancreas makes insulin to bring our blood sugar down, which is good but insulin also accelerates the conversion of those extra calories into fat.
It causes chronic inflammation and many of these mechanisms lead to chronic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases.

Data driven individualized health

To answer my friend, many biotechnology companies are leading a data-driven future to make individualized interventions for our health.
In the future, we can optimize our eating, fasting, exercise, rest, and sleep based on our genetic and microbiome map.
That would only answer my friend’s question completely.

Some biotechnology companies are already doing tremendous work in this area.
Biotechnology is about using biology as technology on many fronts.
The fundamental components of life like genes, proteins, and cells are behaving like tools to shape and improve our life.

In the book, “Life Force” authors Tony Robbins, Peter H. Diamandis, MD, and Robert Hariri, MD, PhD, bring many world’s top medical minds and the latest research, inspiring stories, and amazing advancements in precision medicine that we can apply today to help extend the length and quality of our life.

Our body is a collection of billion cells and the function of these cells determines our actual health.
Each cell contains 3.2 billion letters from our mother and 3.2 billion letters from our father, these came with us as gifts at birth.
This is our DNA, our genome, the software that codes for everything: our hair color, our face appearance, eye color, our lip size, our height, our voice, our personality, exposure to many diseases, our lifespan, and many others.

Not only that, there is one more factor that plays a key role is called epigenetics.
The epigenetic controls how our genome functions and is more powerful than the genetic code itself.
Epigenetic is affected by various factors, some are diet, obesity, physical activity, tobacco, alcohol, environmental pollutants, stress, and working at night as well as many others.

Habits, lifestyle, and quality of life

Our basic day to day lifestyle has a profound impact on our quality of life, our healthspan, and our lifespan.
These lifestyle choices are entirely in our hands.
For example, moderate exercise can halve our risk of dying from heart disease.
Recent research has suggested that careful dietary decisions can reduce our risk of death from any cause by 36% while poor diets can increase our risk of death by 67%.

The importance of moderate exercise is even higher when we enter old age.
When we get older, our common occurrence is that our hormone levels get changed.
We develop fatigue, insomnia, depression, no interest in sex, loss of our youthful appearance, loss of our muscle mass, accumulated body fat, and many others.

Healthy lifestyle also includes good night sleep.
It’s not only a sufficient number of hours of sleep but a sufficient number of hours of sleep at the right time especially at night.
It’s possible to get a sufficient number of hours of sleep each day, but there is a caveat – our body is designed to follow the sun from evolution.
Our hormones, cardiovascular system, microbiome, and immunity all are coordinated to follow a circadian rhythm.
Staying up all night forces these systems to be out of sync with their coordination and our health defense becomes weaker and we become vulnerable for chronic diseases.

Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, author and professor of University of California Berkeley says routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes our immune system and we become vulnerable to chronic diseases. The shorter we sleep, the shorter our lifespan.
From his book “Why We Sleep”, Dr. Walker says, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

One more example is Parkinson’s disease.
It is caused by the loss of neurons that manufacture dopamine, a natural chemical messenger that controls our muscle movement.
Dopamine also helps to regulate our sleep patterns, our recall, our appetite, and our mood and self control.
If we don’t make enough of it, we will have a serious problem.

One more cause of chronic disease is severe stress.
Severe stress increases cortisol secretion from our adrenal glands, places undue demands on our heart, alters our microbiome for the worse, disrupts angiogenesis, impairs the function of our stem cells, and lowers our immunity.

One of the secrets for a happy and healthy life I found in the work of scientists is eating plant based food, plenty of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and brussels sprouts during lunch and dinner.
There are many factors but one key bioactive in cruciferous vegetables is they contain sulforaphane, a compound that reduces inflammation in our body and can even slow the growth of tumors.
Inflammation is the main cause of many chronic diseases including cardiovascular diseases.
As Michael Pollan, author of “How to Change Your Mind” and professor of Harvard University says, “if it’s a plant, eat it, if it was made in a plant, don’t.”

Another secret for a healthy and happy life from Dr. Valter Longo, PhD, from University of Southern California is intermittent fasting.
The beauty of intermittent fasting is it involves harnessing the healing and protective powers of letting the body rest from constant consumption, breakdown, and digestion of food.
This is the strategy for preventing disease and staying young for a longer time.

Dr. Longo’s research suggests that a combination of prolonged fasting and chemotherapy can be highly effective in fighting various cancers.
Cancer cells rely on glucose as a source of energy so cancer cells become weaker by starvation.

Conclusion

During fasting, our energy reserves are depleted and our body undergoes a metabolic shift from a sugar burning mode to a ketogenic mode in which we use fatty acids and ketones for fuel.
Due to fasting our cells shrink and enter into a protected state.

When we start to eat normally, cells rebuild.
This cycle of starvation and refeeding triggers regenerative and self-healing processes.
This process reduces our biological age, which means the age of our cells and organs decreases.

For a happy and healthy life, I would like to repeat Dr. Matthew Walker, PhD, “sleep is probably the foundation on which the other two pillars of diet and exercise sit.”

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

“A healthy person has a thousand wishes, but a sick person has only one.”
– Indian Proverb

Few days ago, on Saturday morning, I was having breakfast with my two daughters.
I asked a question to my daughters, “Five frogs are sitting on a log, three decided to jump off. How many are left?”
My both daughters replied, “Two.”
“No, the correct answer is five,” I replied.
My both daughters asked at the same time, how?
“Because the three frogs are still thinking, they haven’t jumped off yet,” I further explained.
My both daughters laughed and ran away.
“Silly dad, I heard the voice behind me.”

So the point I was making was why our mind is so weak to make decisions.
What blocks us when time comes to make a decision?
I remember, at one point in my life, my doctor recommended me to perform certain lab tests related to cancer to check my body, but I couldn’t make a decision, though it was optional.
The reason was I was scared of bad results.
I wasn’t making decisions of those actions whose results were far from reality.

Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary, PhD, professor of psychology and neuroscience and author of “Future Tense” says “we can acknowledge the discomfort of anxiety and see it as a tool, rather than something to be feared and reviled.”

Many years ago, I restricted all kinds of sugar products in my diet because I was almost prediabetic and my family history wasn’t great.
I don’t know how I came back to eating normal sugar products again after beating my prediabetic status.
Now, I’m still trying to avoid all added sugar products, though I’m not diabetic because I knew that they are not good for my lifelong health, but up to now I am unable to make a decision.
I’m still eating sugar products as a normal kid.

Negligence on body and health

At one point, I was so bad and negligent to know about my body, I simply used to ignore it thinking that there are more important things to do rather than go to my primary care physician’s regular check up.
I never even tried to know what those numbers are on the lab report and what they are referring to me.
To be honest, I never reviewed my lab results seriously in any physicals until my doctor indicated some alarms in my report.
The problem is I used to memorize a lot of biochemical data when I was in school and college but I never tried to understand my own body biochemical data.
I never tried to know what my BMI, body mass index, cholesterol, sugar and blood pressure were and what they do in my body.
Body gives a lot of information but we never try to learn what the body is asking for.

Dr. Dain Heer, DC, an author of “Body Whispering” says “the secrets to be healthy and happy lie within our own bodies, we have to start a conversation with our body and have a best friendship.”

At present, medical and biotech innovations are thriving globally.
There are many reasons for this, but for me, one reason is that the study of biology and chemistry is no more traditional science as we used to have in the past, they are becoming more of an information technology of our complex body.

We all human beings are different, we have different genes, we have different biology so the biochemistry is also becoming not one size fit all.
We have heard the stories that the same medicine works for one but not for others though both are diagnosed with the same disease.

We all have different lifestyle choices, we have different types of nutrition, we have different types of exercise, we have different types of sleep patterns, and we all have different mindsets to operate.
These are key factors to affect our health and well being.
These activities affect our complex and sophisticated body in one way or another.

Complex picture of body and our awareness

Just think of our body, it is a complex automated machine.
It has 30 trillion cells and produces 330 billion new cells each day. Not only that, there are more bacterial cells in our gut, microbiome, than human cells.
Isn’t this surprising to you?
Just one more snapshot of our body’s biochemistry, red blood cells can race through our entire body in less than 20 seconds, this is nothing more than internal communication in the automated machine.

If we don’t eat anything our body machine survives three weeks maximum, if we don’t drink it survives three days maximum, if we don’t inhale oxygen, it survives three minutes maximum then after that we see damaged brain, the key component of the machine. Our automated machine starts shutting down, the communication system gets damaged and the whole machinery crumbles down.

On the negative side, just to get the glimpse of our internal biochemistry of our body, if we inhale cyanide, we die in thirty seconds; it targets our mitochondria and blocks using oxygen and producing ATP.
All these mechanisms are regulated and affected every second by what we do every day, every hour, and every minute based on our lifestyle.
This is one of the reasons why our health is becoming more personalized day by day.

Once we are more aware and knowledgeable about our internal communication technology within our body, scientists can develop sensors which can transform medical diagnostics.
Robotics and 3D printing are reinventing the traditional medical procedures.
Artificial intelligence (AI), genomics, and gene editing tools are transforming the medicines.
As we all know, the planet’s own health is declining day by day due to our own activities.
We all are exposed to more chemical toxins, pollutants, radiation, and infectious diseases more than ever, no matter where we live in the world.
The only thing we can do is be more vigilant and informative about our body, body’s reaction, and our own actions.

Life is unpredictable, and in many times this unpredictability appears at the expense of our negligence, ignorance, and unintentional actions.
We think that we know what is good and what is bad for our body.
But in reality, we have no clue of many things in the body to happen.

One of my friends’ experiences, he thought he was doing the right thing for his body by eating lots of fish, a healthy form of protein and omega 3 fatty acids.
He had no idea that the fish that he ate all the time like tuna and swordfish were full of mercury.
Mercury silently deposited on him to toxic levels in his body and caused severe brain fog.
He was losing his memory and felt unbelievably exhausted all the time.
Many doctors couldn’t pinpoint the cause but finally one doctor revealed that he had an outrageously high level of mercury poisoning.
How it happened because he was eating a lot of fish thinking that they are good for health.
This is just one example of how we are hit by life.
Everything comes down to the right information and being very smart and alert on what we do for our body.

Ask why, why not, and what if for our body

Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is connecting things.”
He spent a very long time exploring new and unrelated things in his life.
He spent time on the art of calligraphy, meditation in an Indian ashram, and the fine details of Mercedes-Benz which are very unrelated to each other.
Finally he connected all different dots and formed the information channel for iPhone, and Mac.
He always asked questions why, why not, and what if, to get more and more information.
At least for me, this principle also applies to our body biochemistry, which, of course, is vast and complicated but still why, why not, and what if applies to our body.

Few weeks ago I met a scholar at a networking event and he was heavily influenced by Dr. David Sinclair, genetics professor at Harvard and author of “Lifespan” for his research on aging and epigenetics.
When he talked about Sinclair, I became more interested in listening to him because I was a little bit familiar with Dr. Sinclair’s work.

The scholar suggested five things to do for a long healthy life based on his twenty plus years experience in the area.
He said one thing, I will never forget, based on the information we’ve gathered from our body, up to now.
Remember: “based on the information we’ve gathered from our body.”
The first thing he told me is to be very smart about what we eat everyday.
Can we eat the foods that help to protect our health defense systems like angiogenesis, regeneration, microbiome, DNA, and immunity. He categorically emphasized on limiting red meat and avoiding almost all sugar for a long healthy life.
Second thing he suggested is caloric restriction lifestyle and recommended, if possible, choose one meal per day. I was a little skeptical on this and asked a question but he told me it depends on how you regulate your body.
Third thing he told is limit alcohol consumption and drink only red wine moderately.
The fourth, he said, is a key for our internal body biochemistry, eight hours of good night sleep.
He said, “during sleep, thousands of neurons in the brain switch functions. The complete biological role of sleep still isn’t fully known but good night sleep reinforces the cardiovascular and immune systems and helps regulate body metabolism.
In fact, our brain and body remain very active during sleep and do housekeeping that removes toxins in our brain that build up while we are awake.”
The final, he emphasized, was exercise at least three days in a week.

Conclusion

Please, accept it, we all have our personal health risks.
Numerous factors can affect our body and influence our risk of developing a serious disease over our lifetime.

From childhood to adolescence to adulthood, wherever we are, what we do for work, what we eat, and how we spend our free time can increase or decrease our health risks.
Our genes determine the stage for the diseases we might eventually develop, but we can change our fate by understanding and lowering some risks.
This understanding is the information provided by our body everyday.
Now the question is how easy to make a decision on these five activities mentioned above: eating good food, calorie restriction, limiting alcohol to red wine only, good night sleep, and exercise.
I’m not going to remind the frog’s story, everyone.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw

“I broke my vertebrae and suffered from a traumatic brain injury in a car accident” my friend told me.
He had acute back pain and depression after the accident.
He started drinking heavily.
“Due to depression, I began to have suicidal thoughts” he added
One night he went to his bed and stared in his medicine cabinet.
He said to himself, “if I take all of these prescription pills, what do I have to lose?”

Right then his cell phone rings.
He closed his eyes and said to himself, “don’t answer it, it’s my time.”
But he didn’t know why, he looked over and saw it was his mother.
He picked up and his mother said, “son, I know you are suffering, I am quitting my teaching job and coming to your place. You need me at this point, I will be there if you need anything.”

“I don’t know why my brain turned upside down that day, I thought, my mother is quitting her job for me and I’m thinking of taking my life” he said.
“That day I began rethinking and it became a habit in my life, from that day forward, I never looked back in my life again,” he continued.
“I’m a design engineer now and work for one of the fortune 500 companies” he said.

Progress, habit of rethinking and scientist

Design engineering is his bread and butter at the moment.
He said, “The habit of rethinking became fundamental to my profession if I have to survive but for me it gave more energy in my personal life.”
At best what he assured me is he is constantly aware of his limits of thinking but still expects something new everyday and he is convinced that it is possible by the practice of rethinking.
He always doubts what he knows and he is always curious about what he doesn’t know.
I became very impressed by what he was telling me.

I was more interested in how he does it.
I realized that I should update myself as much as I can based on what he was saying.
We definitely need new data from our own as well as others’ experiments and experiences to make a habit of rethinking.
Every single individual should update from his or her inner and outer experiences through thinking and rethinking process.

Recently, I also realized that being a scientist or engineer itself isn’t only a profession, it becomes more and more of a pattern of thinking.
It improves other parts of life significantly.

Though my friend works in design science, I believe working on any science is a lifestyle of thinking and rethinking which is completely different from preaching and prosecuting.
Why do scientists and engineers think and rethink is because they are trying to find the truth out of something.
To find the truth, they have to run an experiment to test their hypothesis and make the result known called knowledge.
These experiments and results are so crucial that they not only guide their daily decisions regularly but also the norm of our society.
Look around, the most luxurious and essential things we use everyday are products of scientists.

Naval Ravikant, an entrepreneur and investor, says, “technology leads society, not the other way around. New scientific breakthroughs lead to new societies.”Eric Jorgenson, the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, has given an incredible source of Naval’s wisdom.

Scientists are always trying new things.
Their experiments often fail, but they become happy in the newness and don’t mind the failures. They never think of overinvesting in their experiments and don’t take it personally if a new experiment fails.

My designer friend told, “science is not only an academic concept and doesn’t come only from literature.
My mother’s telephone call is one example of how our mind changes subconsciously.
Many things in life come from experience.
Experience teaches us that as a practitioner we shouldn’t fall in the trap of confirmation bias and desirability bias. This is the problem of academic people.”

In his words, confirmation bias is to see what we expect to see and desirability bias is to see what we want to see.
These biases stop our curiosity.
They might make us good at thinking but worse at rethinking.
We become lazy on rethinking because we just accept linear thinking.

I learned from my friend that rethinking is a skillset, but if we go deep down it’s also a mindset.
We have many mental tools that we need in life.
We only have to get them out and remove the rust and dust.
Rethinking habits helps us to find the correct mental tool.

Good judgement in life

He further added that the curse of knowledge is nothing but knowledge itself because it closes our mind to what we don’t know.
Good judgment depends on having the skill and the will to open our minds.
Our mind only opens when we rethink and think continuously in a cycle.
Every time when we take a step forward with an open mind, we have to revise and update our understanding of the work and the world.

“My mother opened my mind and helped me to live and understand the world,” he said.

Any work is for the world so all works in life are connected irrespective of the nature, professional or personal.
This revision usually involves a lot of thinking and rethinking regarding our facts, opinions, and beliefs. The most important thing is we have to readjust our expectations that shape our thinking.

John Brockman, the author and editor of “Thinking” explains original ideas by today’s greatest psychologists and neuroscientists who are radically expanding our understanding of human thought and thinking process.

At present we have to view our experiences as periods of our lives. For example, youth, apprenticeship, marriage, parenthood, sickness, and death are connected to our work. Everyone has to capture this progression when we think of the next step.
The career that we always worry about nowadays is the capacity to navigate this course of progression through experiences rather than facts.
This is how my friend views his life as a design engineer.

He said, “In driving, we learn to identify our visual blind spots and remove them with the help of mirrors and sensors. But in life, our mind doesn’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly”.

We see the smartest minds today who study computer, biology, chemistry, and math and understand that the world no longer only sees predictable, linear thinking.
Instead, our life is filled with chaos, challenges, and nonlinear complexities.
We experience periods of order and disorder, linearity and nonlinearity. If we go deeper in thinking and rethinking, in place of linearity, we see loops, spirals, and twists.
Linear thinking sees the world in order but non linear thinking removes those boundaries.
That’s what my designer friend experienced.
If we understand these life principles on a deeper level, each one can become a better scientist as well as a better human being.

“The obstacle of rethinking is arrogance, which I have experienced across many areas” he continued.
Arrogance is ignorance plus conviction in one’s mind, that stops rethinking.
Our humility and kindness is a permeable filter that absorbs life experiences and encourages us in rethinking to convert them into knowledge and wisdom.
Rethinking is the integrity of a scientist.

Relationship between rethinking and wisdom

We have to live and we cannot live without making mistakes.
When people make mistakes, we as scientists, have to take it as an opportunity to explore.
So we have to make mistakes but learn from them. Once we repeat these mistakes in life, we acquire wisdom. Eventually, we realize that the wisdom that we acquired is not real wisdom. This realization brings the invention of new wisdom.
We only live truly and happily once we continue the cycle of this old wisdom replaced by new wisdom for the rest of our life.
This is the ultimate consequence of thinking and rethinking.
It’s a sign of wisdom to avoid believing every thought that enters our mind.
It’s a mark of emotional intelligence to avoid accepting every feeling that enters our heart.

Scientists who are productive a lot listen a lot, and change their mind a lot.
If we don’t change our mind frequently, we’re going to be wrong a lot.
The power of listening is not just talking less.
It’s more than that.
It gives the luxury of skillsets in asking and responding.
The most important thing is to show interest in other people’s interests or work rather than trying to judge or prove our own position.

I would think this way.
Scientists and engineers are like who are in outer space and observing things very carefully.
When they get to see an overview of the earth from outer space, they realize we share a common identity with all human beings.
If you are in space then you see the Asia and Africa continents below, they behave like tiny cities from an airplane.
The amazing thing is that we can circle the entire planet in 90 minutes from space.
From space, stars look the same as from earth but earth gives us a different perspective about life, we start to think how fragile the earth is where all of us exists.

There is a difference between thinking effectively and thinking efficiently, that we realize more when we think from far.
As my friend said, thinking effectively means thinking in the right way but thinking efficiently means thinking only the right decisions as I did when I received my mother’s call in the time of turmoil.

Important but difficult to practice

Though the job of thinking is not difficult, but, most of the time we don’t put it into practice. This is the difficult part in life.
Difficulty is not always proportional to importance.
Just take some examples in this respect which are not difficult at all but very powerful for our lives.
In medicine, simply washing hands has proved to be second only to penicillin in saving lives.
How difficult is it to wash hands?

Immunocompromisation is a way to explain a weak immune system in our body.
When our immune system is weakened, our body can’t fight off viruses, bacteria, or fungi very well. This can lead to serious infections and thousands of people die every year.
To improve our immunity, just taking more fruits and vegetables do a vital job.

Fruits are best food for health, vitality, and preventing bacteria from gaining foothold for infection. Similarly, many vegetables contain bioactives which activate the immune system and microbiome in our body.
How difficult is it to eat more fruits and eat a little more vegetables? Its more about practice than any other things.

Conclusion

Scientific and engineering thinking and rethinking are similar to investment transactions.
A lot of professional investors always say that the key to market success is not your skill and knowledge as an investor compared with other individual investors, but the skill and knowledge with which each specific investment transaction is made.
Exactly the same way, the successful scientist and engineer is not equipped only with skill and knowledge compared with other scientists but also with scientific thinking and rethinking practice based on the same skill and knowledge.
This scientific transaction is nothing but the practice of thinking and rethinking.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.