Bad habits

Our lives are entirely habitual. Everyday we do the same things that we did our entire life. Some of these habits are bad and might have an unwanted influence in the quality of your life. On the other hand you can develop good habits that benefit you (like doing exercises once you wake up or drinking plenty of water when you sit near a computer). Old habits are hard to break and new habits are hard to form.

I myself have plenty of bad habits that I'd like to get rid of (nail biting, throat clearing,swearing,procrastinating, etc.). But I can tell that I've also formed some good ones during my adolescence.

So are there any techniques that help you break bad habits and form good ones? Well let me list a few that I found helpful:

1. Get rid of one habit at a time. Trying to rid of all at the same time is unproductive and reckless. Multitasking will show no good outcome in this area.
2. Replace them. Every time you feel doing something irritating out of habit, do something else to keep you occupied. Start using light profanity instead of those horrible curse words. The best thing is to replace your bad habits with good ones.
3. Make a public commitment. Tell your friends or your relatives that you will start/stop doing that, not wanting to look like a failure will keep you motivated to stick to it. Commit something precious to you, for example make a deal and give your friend fifty bucks and if you don't follow your terms he will get to keep it. Also if you find a buddy who wants to do the same thing, make a bet that whoever snaps the first must pay the other one some money, competing like that will give great boost of motivation.

I remember once before class I've made a deal with a friend that whoever swears gives the other one half a dollar. He snapped in like two minutes, but then later on we've remained quiet for quite some time. It was hard to concentrate trying not to slip a curse out. There's a popular method to set up a jar in the home, where one must put some money if he's caught swearing. You should try it out!

I can't think of anything else right now but I would like to hear some of your thoughts.
How do you guys deal with habits? Leave some tips in the comments.

Sleep

At least one third of every man's life is spent sleeping but not much people think about it and how it affects the quality of the day. If a person doesn't get enough good quality sleep he will end up feeling tired therefore his performance in his daily activities will not be as good as it could be. Sleep is a very important part of a healthy lifestyle.

There is still not much information about the purpose of our sleep. Our body is still fairly active during it but it's known that sleep is very important for our mind. In our sleep the mind organizes the gathered information, stores important stuff into our memory and  rests our body.

In order to know how sleep impacts our lives and what to do to make the best of it, first we need to know more about it.

There's 4 stages of sleep: 3 stages in NREM (non-rapid eye movement sleep) and a REM stage (rapid eye movement sleep).

NREM that consists of three stages (N1,N2,N3) has relatively little dreaming.

N1 is the stage in which a person transits from a state of awake into sleep. The person looses the most conscious awareness of the external environment.Usually a person will not be aware that he slept if he was awaken from this stage.
N2 is the stage in which conscious awareness of the external environment completely disappears, this stage occupies the most time of the total sleep. A person will be very much aware that he was sleeping if he was awakened from this stage.
N3 is the stage which is also called the deep sleep. This is the stage where sleep-walking,sleep talking and other parasomnias occur.

The REM stage is often said that is the most important stage of sleep. It occupies around 20% of a person's total sleep. In this stage most vivid and memorable dreams occur. If you wake up at night, it's most likely after this stage.

The REM stage is marked green.

A typical adult need around 7-8 hours of sleep per day. Less than that might have a bad effect on your everyday life. That is when a person sleeps once a day. Some people practice the so called polyphasic sleep where they sleep more than once a day but in shorter amounts. When people are prevented from experiencing REM, they take less time than usual to attain the REM state. By preventing your body to get enough its desired sleep, it adapts and falls into the REM stage more quickly. By doing that, such people spend less time sleeping in total and have more free-time to do their favorite activities. But it requires great effort and determination which I personally lack.

Generally if you want to have a higher quality sleep you should drink some water and avoid heavy foods before going to sleep. Also you shouldn't use alarms, because you will feel much better and more rested if you wake up by yourself after a REM stage than you'd if your sleep was interrupted even if you slept longer. If you keep your sleeping routine consistent and tend to go to sleep and get up at exact times everyday, you'll find that your body will get used to it and in general will feel much more rested and will have no problems waking up.

The fate of the universe

After watching Carl Sagan's Cosmos I've came up to a lot of new stuff to think about. I've always been a thinking person, I had no problem being alone and do nothing because I've always had something to ponder about.

Sagan said that if there's enough matter for the gravitational forces to stop the expansion of the universe and start the contraction (Big Crunch) until it reaches a critical point at which big bang occurs and it starts expanding again then the universe might be oscillating and undergo an infinite amounts of cycles in which the universe expands and contracts. But such theory in not reconciled with the second law of thermodynamics and caused cosmologists to abandon the oscillating universe model.

However new understanding in dark matter suggest that its interactions with mass and gravity demonstrate a possibility where an oscillating universe could be possible. I somehow would prefer this idea of a cyclic universe to an open universe where the acceleration of expansion becomes so strong that it overwhelms the effects of gravitational, electromagnetic and strong forces.

If the universe was cyclic and once started to contract in exactly the same way it expanded, it might be that causality will be inverted and effects will precede causes. Which might not be easily understandable to us where the time might seem to be going backwards. Also a question arises if every universe and the laws of nature are randomly determined or are always the same and perhaps the same cycle is repeated infinitely.

I'd like to believe that same guy like me will live in another cycle of the universe but I know that most likely the universe is open and in many many years there will be nothing but particles left in the universe. But we never know.