Blissful Life

Author: akshay

  • How to Get Rid of Obsessions

    [update on 2011/02/11: This is by far, the most read post on this blog. And this is also one of the oldest articles of this blog. And I think this article hasn’t been well-written. But, I won’t edit my articles (except for grammar/spelling mistakes) and I don’t want to lose my readers from this article. So I’m doing some gimmick here]

    Added on Feb 11, 2011:

    The bad news is that there is NO ‘ONE surely working way’ to get rid of an obsession.
    But the good news is that there are several ways you could try to get rid of an obsession.

    For example, if you’re addicted to the internet, you could try the crazy tip given in How to Get Rid of Addiction to Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Twitter, Other Social Networking Sites, Internet or Computer in General

    And usually addictions set in when you are not a happy person. So, try reading The Secret to (Infinite) Happiness (which tells you how to control your mind and be happy)

    You may also find 3 Questions to Define What is Productive and What is Not interesting too

    And if you want to hear a largely biology oriented view about obsessions, read on the original article below

    If you find yourself watching endless hours of tv, or jumping from site to site without noticing the clock on your desk running away, you probably know what an obsession is.

    obsession – an irrational motive for performing trivial or repetitive actions, even against your will

    While what you think is an obsessive behaviour of yours may be anything ranging from obsessive compulsive disorder to humane laziness, it is best to avoid them. It takes away most of your time. It shifts your focus away from things you need to really concentrate upon. It makes you feel less confident. So, we reach our topic of discussion. How do we get rid of obsessions? Of course some obsessions may be biological in origin and may need medication. But, let us try with our mind.

    GET RID OF IT

    The first thing we need to know to get out of a problem is to know that we are in a problem.
    So let us tell ourselves that we are going to fight it. That we will master our mind and direct it to do what we want and not what it thinks.

    And when we are ready, we are almost there.

    ” You are free the moment you think you are.”

    So, what next? To get to the next step let us think why we developed the obsession at the first place. We are back home in the night. We have got nothing to do. We switch on…

    Why? We’ve nothing else to do, we do something we normally don’t do. And this continues even when we have something else to do. Thus the behaviour is established. And our focus is destroyed. Now our bodies start loving the behaviour and it automatically repeats appearing in our daily life.
    And that brings us to the next step in getting rid of obsessions – breaking old habits. It’s really easy to break your obsession if you know the right technique to it. If you observe your obsession for a few days you will see that it usually comes right after something else in our daily schedule. Sometimes you might be coming straight from work and getting into your obsession. Sometimes it would be after having tea. Or sometimes right after waking up in the morning. But it always comes just after something. Find that something. That thing which switches on your obsession. That thing which invariably precedes your obsession. And when you’ve found that, things are simple.
    Eliminate the predecessor . The successor will lose its way.
    Yeah. If you come home and get carried away, come home doing something, or reading something and continue that even after you’ve reached home. If you wake up to your pc, meditate from your bed itself.
    Just don’t give a chance for the obsession to start.
    Thus you have shaken the base of the obsession.

    Now exploit the chance. The obsession is losing ground. And if we launch our attack right now, the obsession will sure fail. And our weapon?

    Our only weapon against an undesirable behaviour is a desirable behaviour. Take a sapling from the desirable behaviour and plant it where the undesirable used to stay. So, we need a new behaviour as a substitute. Anything from reading to exercising will do. And it need not be static. You can exercise one day, read another day, cook one day, blog another day, but there should be a substitute ready to enter the playing field.

    Now cement your victory by watering the new plant everyday. Never go back to the obsessive behaviour. Whenever you feel like just get away from the thing that lures you (physically, away). And start doing the other thing.
    Now there will be a voice from our mind talking about why the obsessive behaviour is probably not bad for you. But just don’t listen to it. If you try to argue, almost always only that voice will win. (It has biological reasons: There is a neurotransmitter called dopamine in our brain which is related with the pleasure system. It is designed in such a way that whenever we get a pleasure, it is released, and whenever it is released we desire to have pleasure. Read more)

    Due to this dopamine effect, the obsessions that have already been with you for a long time cannot be uprooted with anything I have discussed above.

    But fortunately I have found a cure for dopamine.
    Just like any other hormone, the effects of dopamine don’t last more than a few minutes. So, the moment you feel like doing something you don’t want yourself to do, tell yourself that you are ready for the obsessive behaviour (Am I telling the opposite? no! wait, read it completely). Then borrow a little time from your obsession. Think of how dopamine is working. Think of why you feel like doing that. And just sit in silence for a few minutes. And by that time dopamine will have failed to affect. You will slowly be thinking more impartially. And you will at last decide not to sway towards the obsession.

    Bear in mind that fighting dopamine is difficult. But it is not impossible. And once you win this battle, you will certainly be rewarded by a stronger will.

    Tell me whether this has worked for you after trying out.

  • How to Make Resolutions and Keep Them

    We make a lot of resolutions. And we break all of them.
    Can you tell out loud at least one resolution that you’ve kept (If yes, the comments section is open and waiting for you )
    By the time you rack your brains to find one such resolution, I bet you’ll have found out ten resolutions you haven’t kept.

    Why do we make resolutions and break them?

    The reason is that we don’t make proper resolutions. When you make a resolution properly not only does you keep it, you will most probably end up building on the resolution. What makes a proper resolution different from an improper one?

    • Proper resolutions are made when they are least required.  Most people resolve to do things better just after doing the worst. If you’re a student you will decide to start learning daily only when you do your examinations very bad.
      But if you make that resolution during holidays, then it’s a proper resolution.
    • Proper resolutions come from your heart, not from someone else’s. That is why most new year resolutions fail. On the new year eve, everyone is making resolutions. So, you too does and not because you want it from your heart.
      Proper resolutions are made during moments of solitude, when no one is around, and you are talking with yourself. You ask yourself who you are and who you want to be. Then you resolve to be that soul which you always wanted to be.
    • Proper resolutions are not postponed for the next day. Most probably you would have done this. You resolve to stop watching TV, not from today, but from tomorrow. Today is the last day and you go on breaking resolution today thinking that you will keep it tomorrow. The rest I need not tell.
      But when you make a proper resolution, you begin this moment. The moment you resolve you begin realising the resolution. You do not postpone it for another hour.
    • Proper resolutions are well planned.
      You just resolve to do something. You will fail.
      But you plan it in detail, how to do, what to do, when to do, for how long, where to do… A proper resolution is so well planned that the person who makes it knows exactly what he means to do.
    • Proper resolutions are properly motivated. 

     Think like you want to make a new resolution, right now? One which you have been making and breaking. Let us start together.

    1. What is it?
      Think of it. Think of why you need to do it. Think of how you can do it.
      Now clear some time in your daily schedule, and keep a time for your new habit. (If you had resolved to lose a bad habit then fill the time you used for it earlier, for something else. Read my post on getting rid of obsessions)
      Of course when you decide to do something new you will have to devote lesser time to something else. For example if you decide to exercise, you will naturally need 30 minutes to warm-up, exercise, and cool down. Your day can’t go as long as 24 hours and 30 minutes. The only thing you can do is to cut short something you do daily by 30 minutes. Be it sleeping. Be it blogging. Be it chatting. You’ll have to cut something short.

    2. Get going
      You’ve decided. Now start doing. If you can do it now, do it right now. (Of course after finished reading the next few tips). If you need a prop, get one as quickly as possible.
      But that is not enough. As I told, you need to be motivated so as to keep the momentum. So, how do you get motivated?
      Here is the most important thing to remember
      The motivation that you create by yourself won’t last long. It will run out as soon as you meet the first obstacle. So, we need a never ending source of motivation. For this, I’ve found two extremely useful sources.
      1. The opposite sex:
        If you’re a boy, think of impressing girls through what you have resolved to do. If you have started exercising, think of how having an attractive body can help you in winning their hearts.
        Not only that, have a crush on the best girl around you. By the best girl I mean the girl whom everybody wants to be a friend of. Now how can you make her feel for you? Keep those resolutions. Cultivate those enviable qualities, like an attractive body, or sharp intelligence, or sweet voice. Just exhibit those when you get a chance.
      2. Lie:
        Lie to your friends that you have already achieved your resolution. Not to go straight to him and tell “I have done this”, but during conversations distantly related to your resolution, just put in your resolution and ‘how you achieved it’. If you lie to someone, and if you are not a big fat liar, you would probably want to make that lie a truth. And you will actually keep the resolution. Got me?
      3. Just tell others:
        Now if you don’t want to lie, you can just tell people that you’ve made such and such resolution. Only that it would be a little less effective. Still, when you tell others about your resolution make sure that you tell them in a tone of confidence or over-confidence. Tell them that you are going to do it and you are going to show them the results. Otherwise you will slip back.

    3. Keep the momentum
      So, you are properly motivated, and strictly keeping your resolution. Now after a week or a month, just do a review. See how much your muscles have grown, how good you can sing, how good you are with people,…
      If you are on the right track, the results will possibly be what you expected. And those results will in turn motivate you to keep doing things.
      Don’t worry if you don’t find any results. Think of what you could have missed, where you could have gone wrong. Rectify those errors. And start from step 1.

    If these steps do not work for you, there is one last resort I would recommend you – similar minded people. Find online groups doing what you intend to do. Hear from people who have already done it.  And you will probably know why you’ve been failing.

    So, happy resolving. (OK! It’s over, now you can start from step 1, what is it?)

  • 2 Freeware Tools to Monitor Your Network Traffic

    Here are two tools which I’ve personally used and found extremely useful in calculating how much data i’ve downloaded/uploaded through my internet connection.

    Anyone using a minimum pay internet connection will sooner or later need either of these tools.

    The first one is a very small single file application called Network Traffic Monitor. This thing allows you to find the amount of data downloaded or uploaded in that particular session and also the speed of downloading or uploading. This comes useful when you have low memory or is just checking out how much downloding does browsing actually cause.
    Direct Download Network Traffic Monitor (zip file, about 0.5 MB)

    The next tool is a larger software, which always runs in the background – NetLimiter Monitor provides details and exportable daily/monthly statistics. It can be used to find the amount of data sent or received by individual applications. It also keeps a track of all the statistics. So, it can be used to find the total amount of upload and download in a month.
    Direct download NetLimiter Monitor (exe file, about 2.5 MB)

    Take control of your network life…

  • The Secret to (Infinite) Happiness

    Everyone knows how to be happy when it’s party time. But how to be happy when s*it is happening to you?

    Being happy always, in everything that’s happening in your life, even when tears are rolling down your cheeks, even when you’re wilting with pain, even when you’ve failed at the most important tasks… Yes, that’s possible, and that is what I call infinite happiness (This is not infinite bliss that is supposed to be coming after God realization)

    You needn’t be successful for being happy. Because unlike success happiness is within you. You decide whether you are happy or not. There is no external condition necessary for happiness. When it comes to being happy you’re the boss. No matter what the world showers upon you, your state of mind is what you decide. If you decide to be unhappy even when you are having everything that an average man needs to be happy, then you will be unhappy. And if you decide to be happy when all the odds are against you, if you decide to smile at your enemies, if you decide to laugh out loud when the worst is happening to you, you will be happy. Happy or not, you decide.

    The first step for being so is to know the mechanism of happiness.
    What brings about happiness?

    As Will Smith says in The Pursuit of Happyness (or as he should have said) “When you are pursuing happiness, you will never be happy. To be happy you must leave worrying about being happy and start enjoying life.

    Did you say enjoying life?
    Yes. Enjoy life. Enjoy failure. Enjoy success. Enjoy doing nothing. Enjoy doing things. Enjoy eating. Enjoy sleeping. Enjoy exercising. Enjoy reading. Enjoy life.
    And how?

    The courtesy of the following idea goes to ancient Indian philosophy.
    Who are you? Are you your hands or legs? or your heart or brain? or your body? Or are you your mind? Are you any of these? If you think you are your body or your mind, then you will be unhappy when there is some sorrow to any of these – your mind or your body. And it’s easy for your body and mind to get hurt. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Think of yourselves as someone else, a consciousness that controls your mind and body. Think of you as someone who sits at the back of your head and monitors the thoughts in your mind and the movements of your limbs. Don’t associate yourself with your mind or body. Dissociate yourself from them. Just be a witness. A witness of your actions. Of your thoughts.
    When you are reading, it is not YOU that is reading, it is your mind that is reading with the help of your eyes.
    When you are getting angry, YOU are not getting angry, it is your mind that is getting angry.
    When you are exercising, YOU are not exercising, it is your body that is exercising.


    Keep yourself out of everything. Let your body and mind do things. They are your servants. You are their master, sitting happily in a chair and enjoying the little mistakes that your servants – body and mind – do.

    And when you are not your body or mind, nothing in this world can hurt you. Am I right? Things in this world can only hurt either your mind or your body or both. But they can never touch you. Because you are not your body or mind.

    So, watch your thoughts. Watch your actions. Watch how your actions affect others. Watch how your actions affecting others in turn affect your thoughts. Watch how your actions affect their thoughts. Watch how they react. Watch how you fail. Watch how you succeed. Watch how you eat. Watch how you wash. Watch how life goes on. Be a witness to everything. Don’t involve yourself in anything (Now, your body and mind can involve in anything, but YOU won’t be invoved, you know how.)

    And then you will reach a state where you can manipulate your mind and body as you wish. You tell the mind to be happy and it will be happy. You tell the body to be strong and it will be strong. You decide how your mind and body must be. This state of mind:

    This state where you actively screen yourself, see your thoughts, and feel your actions; this state which is sometimes called “living in the present” or “being present minded”; this state where you feel no excitement and no worry but just a serene calmness; this state is the secret to infinite happiness.

    Now go, be happy, and spread beauty in the world. Just remember “you are beyond your body and mind”

    _________________
    Similar posts:

  • Let Us Ask Ourselves On This Independence Day…

    …we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves – if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?
    This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time – to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunityfor our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim…

    US President Barack Obama asked Americans this question on the day of his victory. “What change?”
    And he is on the path of answering that question.

    Not very long ago, an Indian invoked in the Indians a similar vision.


    “A developed India by 2020, or even earlier, is not a dream. It need not be a mere vision in the minds of many Indians. It is a mission we can all take up – and succeed.”

    That is what Dr APJ Abdul Kalam said Indians through his book in 1998.

    We are halfway there in terms of years (2020-2009=11, 2009-1998=11)
    But have we made even a sway towards the dream in terms of progress?

    Halfway through we still have poverty, corruption, crime, violence, …

    Why? We are a billion strong, we have huge amount of human resource, we are intelligent, 34% of NASA employees are Indians, Americans are amazed at the quality of education in India, … and yet we can’t perfect ourselves? Why are we succesful in everything else but nation development?

    We lack proactive citizens.

    We have citizens who are ready to act when asked to. We have citizens who get goose bumps on hearing the National Anthem. We have citizens who speak/blog against injustices. (Well, I am not eligible to vote right now)

    We have people willing to do when they must. We have active citizens.
    But we don’t have people doing when they need not. We lack proactive citizens.

    We need practive citizens.
    Citizens who start movements against injustices.
    Citizens who start charity organisations to help the poor.
    Citizens who march in protest in order to protect the environment.
    Citizens who start health clubs, libraries, schools (or tutorials), industries, businesses, super-markets, search engines,…
    Citizens who create their own political party and strive to be a good minister.
    Citizens who adopt poor orphans or sponser their education.
    Citizens who take an accident victim to the hospital.
    Citizens who complain about a crime to the police, or be a witness to something they’ve witnessed.
    Citizens who read and make others able to read.
    Citizens who are healthy and make others healthy.
    Citizens who submit engineering projects to the government.

    Citizens who rise themselves and raise others.
    Citizens who organize.
    Ctizens who create opportunities out of thin air.

    Creative citizens. Proactive citizens.

    Don’t ASK what you can do for your country. Just DO something for your country.
    And the rest is assured.

    Jai Hind.

    Wish all Indians a Happy Independence Day

  • Recommendation: 101 Most Inspiring Quotes of All Time

    101 Most Inspiring Quotes of All Time

    That’s a really good collection. You’ll surely end up motivated.

  • Recommendation: Indian Current Affairs [blog]

    I just found an excellent blog – Indian Current Affairs, which has been keeping a note of everything happening in India, day by day. It can be of great help to IAS aspirants.
    Indian Current Affairs
    Go there and see it for yourself.

    It must be read along with
    Discover It
    which is a compilation of essays about particular items.

    Also, don’t forget to check out
    Resources for Preparation and
    Glossary

  • Creating an Offline Home Page

    Most people have google as their home page. And it’s cool if you are a guy who just makes a google search about that thing which he needs to buy, checks his emails once in a while, and checks scraps at orkut.
    But what if you are a person who has multiple blogs, twitter accounts, facebook, myspace and hi5 profiles; and you need to check your earnings at adsense or adbrite, the statistics of your blog at analytics, your broadband usage, your email account at hotmail, your unread feeds in google reader, the latest cricket scores, and your girlfriend’s scrapbook to see whom she is chatting with?
    And you don’t want to forget doing any of these?

    Do you know that I do all that without ever having to type a letter in the address bar, and not even an extra click in the Bookmarks folder.

    That is what an offline home page has done to me. It has worked as a to-do list as well as a bookmarks folder, at the same time helping me saving a lot of time ease-wise.

    Want to try one? Here’s help.

    The first step is knowing a bit of html.
    hyperlinks work with a simple html tag “<a>…</a>”. The page to which it is linked is shown by “href”. And the text which should be shown in blue is written in between the “<a>” and “</a>”.
    That is, if you want to link to Change, the html tag will be “<a href=”http://asdofindia.blogspot.com”>go to Change</a>
    and it will show up like this:
    go to Change
    Learn more about linking here, and practice linking here.

    Now, that is all the background information you need. (Actually you need not even that. But when it gets messy with underlines getting under every wrong word, you will actually need those.)

    Now, you need to create an HTML file with all the links you have. For this you can use Notepad, or MS Word or anything that suits the purpose.
    In Notepad, you will have to type out the html tags one by one and it will soon turn out to be a cumbersome task. So, it is better to use MS Word or such softwares that has features which allow easy linking.

    And to make things even simpler, you can use gmail or blogger too. If you are a blogger, create a new post (which you can discard later). Or in gmail, compose a new mail. Now copy those links you need. When copying take note of one thing you can actually select a linked text and press Ctrl + C and then paste it into your mail, post or MS Word document and the text will be pasted with the hyperlink remaining intact. That is, when you copy Change and paste it, it will automatically be linked.

    To make the best of this feature I am giving a few links applicable to anyone, which you can just copy and save time.

    Myspace Facebook Hi5 Blogger Orkut Twitter
    Google Yahoo! Torrentz
    Gmail Hotmail
    Flickr Youtube
    eBay Amazon
    Wikipedia Wikibooks
    adsense adbrite
    Cricinfo live cricket score
    Blank Page
    (Now, a part of that, I took from the start page of Green Browser, which is an excellent online alternative to this offline home page)

    Now, if you use orkut
    Orkut Scrapbook Communities
    Now don’t forget to add to that the scrapbooks of your dearest friends, or the forums of your favourite communities

    And if facebook,
    Facebook Profile Inbox

    If you have many blogs, add similar links to new post, edit posts, edit layout, view blog, etc.
    Similarly add links to all those pages you visit once a week at least.

    Now is the bit tricky part. If you used MS Word for creating this you can just save it and set it as your home page. But what if you used Gmail, or Blogger? Of course you can copy from them again and paste it to MS word and save it. But a far better alternative is to use the “Save Frame As…” option found in the file menu of Mozilla Firefox. (Oh, aren’t you using Firefox, then switch to it immediately). By saving the frame, you save only the text box in which you typed in the links. And thus you get exactly what you want.

    Now, don’t forget to add Change to your offline home page

    Related Posts:
    How to Make Sure That You Blog Daily or Regularly

  • How to Make Sure That You Blog Daily or Regularly

    So, you’ve set up a blog. And you’ve had some nice posts, and a decent amount of followers. Everything is going nice except for one thing. Once in a while you forget about blogging. You are so immersed in twitter or facebook or orkut that you forget to check out new comments in your blog.
    You know you love to blog, but you forget to love. How do we start loving our blogs again, daily?

    The solution to this is setting up your browser or PC to help you blog easily. When you need to go to your blogger dashboard to create a new post, that is an extra step and you’re most probably not going to do that every time.

    So, let me introduce some tips that can make blogging easy for you.

    • Add the blogger gadget to your igoogle page, (and make it your home page). This simple gadget allows easy posting from your home page itself, and that too to any of your multiple blogs.
    • If you have an offline home page like me, add a link to the new post page of your blog.
    • If you’re using MS Office 2007, use the create blog post feature in it.
    • Use Ping.fm which allows you to post to your blog (and/or even twitter, facebook…) using your chat client. Actually Ping.fm is a tool that allows you to update your account in multiple websites like facebook and twitter simultaneously from a central hub. And when the chat feature is set up you can even send the status update to it as a chat blurb. But using @bl command you can use it to update only your blog. I use it to write my daily diary in my private blog.
    • Set up e-mail posting in your blog, using the mail to post feature.
    • Add the blogger posting gadget to your gmail account. This is done by enabling adding gadgets by URL in labs, and then giving the URL in the special tab that comes up in gmail settings.
    • Try scheduled posts. Go to blogger in draft, create a new post, just before clicking publish, change the post date and time in post options to scheduled at and give a future date and time. Now publish the post. Sit back and relax for your holidays. This is particularly useful if you’re the kind of a person who gets a lot of ideas on one day and gets nothing worth publishing on another day. Schedule as much posts as you can for the future when you feel like. Then just relax for a few days until you get fresh ideas. But for the readers, you will be publishing daily.

    That’s it from my side. What other ways do you have to make blogging a piece of cake?

  • Life Actually is “Trying to Perfect the World Around”


    Wherever you live, whatever you are, you’re never living in a perfect world. One or the other, there will be defects in the system of which you are a part of.

    If you’re a doctor think of uninspired staff, inadequate facilities…
    If you’re a teacher think of lazy children, poor environment…
    If you’re a student think of crazy teachers, small school, small playground…
    If you’re working in an office think of office politics, gossips…
    If you’re a politician think of dirty colleagues, baseless allegations…

    Yeah, in whichever field I choose, I can find imperfections, because after all, the world can never be perfect.

    So, how do we define life in this imperfect world. Life is nothing but constantly trying to perfect the world around us.
    Try and fail. Try and win. Try and half win, half lose. But try. Try to change your world, and you will gradually learn the art of living happily and peacefully.

    How?

    You are going to perfect the system. You can’t do it alone. So you ask for help. You organize. You team up with people. You get to know about their feelings. You understand the way others think. You may get enemies, but more importantly you will get friends (and if you don’t get any, there is something wrong with you or your asking). Convince people to be a part of your team.

    And when you have a team ready?
    Start the revolution. Change the ways. The old ways were made by your predecessors, as THEY like. You are a different generation, a different group. Your thoughts and emotions and world have changed. And the ways too need to change. You needn’t change yourself to suit the old ways, you can change the ways to suit the new you.

    So, you and your team change the world around you. And you strive for perfection. Constantly you do so. Until at last you will call it a day one day. And on that day you will know that you LIVED your life.

    “There is nothing in this world that a small group of inspired men cannot do”