I have a built-in resistance to things like meditation; while you can point me at the statistics and show me that it is a good thing, I still kick against it and I don’t know why. But it might be to do with the terms.

There’s this thing called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Bollocks: it’s talking to yourself. Before you can persuade me that this is good, you have to get by me thinking you’re trying to con me by giving it a pseudo-scientific name.

Emotional intelligence. Bollocks. It’s street smarts. I am forever against this term because of an Emotional Intelligence expert who tried to show me a mathematical formula for why this was more powerful than regular intelligence. He didn’t have enough regular intelligence to answer a simple question about a base assumption that the formula depended on.

He also told a group of us that one man with Emotional Intelligence can defeat an army and in fact is literally unstoppable. I don’t really mind that he had no answer when someone asked what happens when such a man is in conflict with another one. That just amused me. I mind very much that he genuinely had not thought of this before.

I miss out on some things because of this twitching bias.

I’m generally okay with that as it’s also a useful filter against the nonsense. But I am now persuaded that mindfulness meditation helps.

I just had to tell myself that it was really shutting up for a minute and stopping thinking.