So far, August has been horrendous. Honestly horrendous. I wrote a post about it and then decided not to publish it, because, well…it’s not my story to tell. And it’s incredibly depressing. I’m not even going to read what I wrote back right now because I know I’ll start crying again.

Mostly when people ask me how I’ve been, I wish I could hand them a recording and tell them to talk to me once they’ve caught up on the current season. But even then they’d be forever trying to catch up, because the life I have this week is entirely different to last week’s. As happens every single week.

So instead of me even trying to recap anything at all, which feels impossible, you get this rather more upbeat list of weird things I do. Mostly to cheer myself up in depressing times, which these most definitely are.

01. Eating Japanese food while watching Midnight Diner

If you’re not familiar with Midnight Diner, it’s a Netflix drama series that consists of characters walking into a late night diner in Tokyo to tell their stories and eat their favourite/most memorable traditional dishes. There’s also a short recipe at the end of each episode. The stories are always either incredibly random or incredibly predictable; there’s no in between. I’d rate it about a 7/10 – really good, but not on my all-time favourites list.

It actually kind of reminds me of my own life, which isn’t fictional (presumably), but also consists of strangers walking into my business and saying weird/random things for no readily apparent reason (such as “Is this a government facility?” and “My partner is really into VR porn. Also, he’s a CTO at [large national company that has a local HQ].” To which my responses were, respectively, “We’re not THAT incompetent,” and “Happy for you?”).

Anyway, the nice thing about Midnight Diner is that due to the camera angles you often feel like you’re sitting in the diner with the customers and the owner while the stories are happening. So if you’re eating Japanese food, it feels like you’re in the diner eating with them. Joe thinks it’s weird I like to do that, my friends think it’s fun. I recommend giving it a go.

02. Putting better music to video games

I’ve been playing Mario Kart World lately, and it’s a great game on its own, but also if you have the Circle of Life playing on the African safari themed tracks, and the Jurassic Park music for Dino Jungle, it honestly enhances the whole experience. (Yes, I’m a child, but don’t knock it until you’ve tried it).

It’s also useful to put classical music to things where you need to concentrate on solving logic puzzles, and also to eliminate really annoying music on things you’re failing at repeatedly. Or, you can play an audiobook and make your video game playing productive. I like to do this with racing games because it creates the relaxing element of driving around without the real-life environmental impact or irritating people or having to go slow.

03. Biohacking (that doesn’t involve green juice or getting up at 5am)

Everything that comes up about biohacking seems to be related to torture physical aspects, but I prefer to focus on the brain side of things.

Example: I noticed randomly that a track I listen to (the Cloud Atlas Finale – I’m not a huge fan of the book or the film, which are both fine but not my favourites) has a particularly calming effect on my brain, so I wanted to find out more about why that might be.

So of course I asked AI for some ideas, and it suggested some things, including that it was probably due to tension and release in the orbitofrontal cortex.

Apparently: “It’s a highly sophisticated area of the brain, intricately involved in:

Reward processing: It’s a key player in evaluating the value or desirability of stimuli, whether it’s food, money, social interaction, or music. It helps us determine what’s pleasurable and worth pursuing.

Emotion: The OFC is central to conscious emotional experience. It receives information from all sensory processing systems and translates those raw sensory inputs into representations of their emotional or reward value.

Decision-making (self-explanatory).

Expectancy and prediction (self-explanatory).”

This would make a lot of sense because I’m heavily reward-motivated. It honestly blew my mind a bit because I realised there is such a pattern of a big tension build-up and then release throughout so many aspects of my life. Including even physically in the only sports I really actively enjoy participating in (swimming and rowing). And in that my life is never really on an even keel, it’s always at some point in a build-up or release (mostly build-up tbh). But who knew all these entirely different things are actually all connected for the same reason? It also explains why relaxing is so hard for me, because if I’m trying to relax in a build-up, that is just never going to work unless I’m triggering release first (which isn’t something I always have control over).

I also asked AI to pull a list of other tracks likely to have the same effect on me, and listened to them. Interestingly, most of the suggestions don’t, but I found one that actually has even more of an effect on me, which is this one:

Funnily enough, people have told me they find it rousing rather than relaxing and calming as I do. I think it’s because it’s the release after the tension build-up that makes it calming to me. I’m all for biohacking healthy and relaxing coping mechanisms though, and honestly figuring out that I can find music that affects this cycle that I wasn’t even aware of (and reframing it from just seeing it as a peak, crash, and burn and being a failure because other people don’t seem to do this) is huge.

So, those are my three weird things. No doubt there will be a follow up to this post at some point, because I’ve already thought of some more weird things I do…