[personaldev] "Video game snacking" to wake up and break through momentary laziness

I'm often slow to wake up in the morning -- I usually spend half an hour or so in a grumpy, groggy, and not-so-intelligent state.  I also find myself in traps of laziness when I'm tired.  This occurs for example when I'm feeling too tired to do the things I need to do to get to bed (eg brush my teeth) so I end up sitting on the couch relaxing and not going to bed.

I recently downloaded an iphone game called Flight Control.  It's a clever little air traffic control game that involves fast reflexes and very high-speed multitasking.  The hardest level (the aircraft carrier) typically lasts no longer than a minute, as it rapidly overwhelms you with an enormous number of planes that you have to prevent from crashing.

I find that playing 3-5 rounds of the game wakes me up extremely rapidly.  Since my phone is right next to the bed, it takes almost no effort to grab the phone and start playing.  I've used this technique for a couple of weeks now.  I think the game works because it's very short (a couple of minutes at most), very intense, and very accessible as it's always in my pocket.

Last night I tried the same technique to motivate myself to get ready for bed.  It gave me the "activation energy" (to borrow a chemistry term) I needed to get up off the bed and go brush my teeth. 

I'm curious to play the game while hooked up to an EEG.  I'd imagine that the device increases my beta waves during and after playing it.

Thoughts and advice requested on snowboarding

I went snowboarding for the 3rd time in my life over the last couple of days.  I now have a total of 6 days experience. 

- You have to dispose of a hell of a lot of potential energy when you go down the mountain.  If I weigh 90kg (snowboard and clothes included) and the run is 300m, then I have mgh = 90*9.8*300 = 264600 joules of energy that I need to dispose of as quickly as possible.  For reference, 264600 joules is enough to run one of the big 23w compact fluorescent lamps for over 3 hours.  If I fell straight down the mountain, I'd impact the ground at close to terminal velocity and get turned into a pile of mush.  Thus I need to impart that energy onto other things.  These include pushing air molecules around, kicking up snow, pushing snow down the mountain, compacting snow, and warming up myself, the snow, the board, and the air.

- Snowboarding is such a lovely activity because it combines two very different things I like a lot.  One is looking at serenely beautiful 3D terrain (natural or otherwise) from an elevated point of view.  The other is zooming around and feeling the rush.  The two states are nicely alternated -- ride the lift and peacefully take in the landscape, then zoom down it. 

- I never feel quite in control when I'm going straight down the mountain with the board flat   I feel like I'm constantly in danger of catching an unexpected edge and falling over.  I've mostly worked around this by always having a slight edge to one side or the other.  I know this likely slows me down, but it makes me feel more in control. 

- It took a little over an hour to refresh myself back to my prior skill level after 2 years of no snowboarding.  On the second day, there was still a refresh period, but it was around two minutes. 

- I'm wondering how hard to push myself to maximize my rate of learning.  I could go down the mountain at a comfortable pace and learn to maximize my amount of control by repeatedly practicing known movements.  Or, I could try to push myself beyond my comfort zone and learn to perform acceptably well under more demanding circumstances.  One potential disadvantage of the latter approach is that I'm likely to get fatigued faster from falls, and that will likely reduce my learning rate. 

- Having lots of padding totally helps my rate of learning as it reduces the penalty associated with falling.  I have wrist guards, knee guards, and a tailbone guard (ok, ok, I have ass pads). 

- How do I reduce the amount of soreness and pain I feel after snowboarding?  I imagine stretching would help, but the top few google results for snowboarding stretches were unimpressive.  I imagine there are several muscles I need to build up.  My neck, shoulders, inner thighs, knees, and ankles are all sore at the moment.  However, I don't spend enough time snowboarding to give my muscles the encouragement they need to grow.  Are there exercises I can do at home that work out similar muscles? 

- A high school PE teacher told me that heavily exercised muscle groups need a day to recover after a day of heavy use -- if you don't give them a break, then they don't have a chance to build up strength.  This of course makes fitting a lot of snowboarding into a short trip hard.  After two consecutive days snowboarding, I'd have to take it easy the third day. 

- I learned how to carve properly.  It feels really good to carve well, like I'm riding a roller coaster of my own creation.

- It seems like friction is lower at higher speeds.  If I'm moving slowly on a path with a very mild slope and the path itself is slanted, I seem to go farther by going down the slant to get up some speed and then heading down the path. 

- I feel like my reflexes are slow.  If I'm going on an edge and the snow changes from mushy to icy, I have to very quickly readjust my stance.  It seems like I often can't do it fast enough... or perhaps the problem is that I don't intuitively know what stance to switch to, and that slows me down.  It's hard to tell what the snow is going to be like just by looking at it, but I hear the change in sound as soon as I transition onto a new type of snow. 

- I need new snow pants.  My first ones are ready to self-destruct, and that's probably not pretty to watch.