When one is too much

How many of you have gone to a restaurant, and gotten a plate full of food that was larger than your previous three meals combined? I'm willing to bet you didn't put too much thought into how much you were about to eat, after all, it was one meal, granted a little larger than you would normally eat. I'm also willing to bet that you were completely stuffed by the time you finished the meal. You just ran into a phenomenon called Unit Bias.

Unit Bias
Unit bias, as defined by the Wikipedia, is “the tendency to want to finish a given unit of a task or an item with strong effects on the consumption of food in particular”. 1
Let's take food, according to the definition above, we will want to finish one unit of food when offered food. That doesn't sound so bad, after all, *a* unit is only one. That's where things start to get misleading, and people get in trouble. A unit may have many servings in it. The restaurant you went to above, there were about three servings on that one unit (plate).

Great, so we know that we are more likely to treat food as one unit rather than the actual number of servings it consists of. So, who decides what the acceptable size of a unit is? That would be your culture. The American culture, when faced with two differing sized units, will normally choose the largest unit. Progressively the acceptable size of a unit will increase, and the number of servings increase as well.

Why we choose the larger unit
Our ancestors had to face the possibility of starvation everyday, so they would often take as much of something as they could; it was a strategy that served them well. These days most people are not facing the possibility of starvation, but we still use the same strategy when dealing with our lives. The more we have, the safer we are. Don't forget the perceived added value of getting the larger unit, they might cost more, but they are cheaper per weight measure, so your money goes further.

Why unit bias is bad for your health
Unit bias will often times cause people to overeat without knowing that they are doing so. Overeating can cause people to become overweight. Being overweight can cause many health problems. There are plenty of articles out there that describe the possible problems of being overweight.

What you can do to fight unit bias
The time when unit bias becomes a problem is when the unit gets to be too large. So the secret is to use smaller units, easier said than done; but here are some suggestions that should help you.

You can control the size of the unit much easier when you are eating at home. So naturally, eat at home as often as you can, this has the added bonus that you can control exactly what goes into your food. The easiest way to control unit bias at home is to purchase smaller units when you go shopping, get the cans of pop rather than the the larger 20oz bottles, purchase the smaller packages of pre-packaged foods, only purchase what you will need for the next two days, and carry around a basket, don't push that large cart. The second easiest way to control unit bias, is to cook smaller amounts of food; but for this to work you should get smaller plates, bowls, and glasses, otherwise you will feel that you have not received your full unit of food, and will often times want more.

Eating out can make controlling unit bias more difficult, you don't really control what goes on your plate, or how large the unit will be. Fortunately there are some simple tips to help control how large your unit is. When ordering from the menu, look and see how large the serving is, order the 8oz steak rather than the whole cow. Ordering from a different section of the menu will often times provide you with smaller servings, the children's, senior's, or the lunch menus are great places to find smaller servings. Ask for your beverage to be served in a smaller glass. If all else fails, when you order, ask them to split the meal in the kitchen, and package half of it to go.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Copyright © 2007 by Duane Hubbard

Writing Away Your Stress

Let me introduce you to a system of self discovery that I found. I call it Guided Free Writing, or GFW for short. GFW is a way of getting all of your stresses, joys, and annoyances onto paper so that you can more easily understand what they are, and find constructive ways to work with them. Plus is rather surprising in it's simplicity, and it's effectiveness.

For those of you who don't know, free writing is when you sit in front of a piece of paper, a computer, or anything that will write, and just write for a set time frame. You can write “I don't know what to write” for ten minutes, just so long as you are writing. It is a great tool for writers to overcome writers block. Guided Free Writing is like that, in that you will be writing, and that you don't want to stop, you need to keep going, though we are not using it to get over writers block, we are using it to get over stress block.

Why you would want to use GFW
Our bodies are not built to handle the long term stresses that we often inflict upon them. Emotional stress has similar effects on the body as physical stresses, your body gets tired, your immune system weakens, you can't focus on anything but the stress; stress uses up your body, one piece at a time. I don't think I need to go on about how stress affects us, I'm sure we have all felt it.

The reason for GFW is to help you realize what is truly stressing you. While you can't stop thinking about that one stress (the deadline of the project that just isn't going right), there are other things that stress you as well, things that possibly cause you even more stress that the one thing you are focusing on. GFW helps you find those other stresses, so they don't fester and cause more harm, this way you have a more complete picture of what is going on in your life.

The basics of GFW
First thing you will need is the supplies, you can find many of these lying around your house. The supplies needed are: 1 tablet or stack of paper, 2 pens, time, and someplace to work without distractions. Don't go out and purchase special paper for this, it's only going to get written on anyway, and be sure to use a pen, not a pencil. The hard part for most people are the last two supplies, time and someplace without distractions, regrettably, the more of those you have, often the less you need to do this.

The first thing to do is label your paper, I label mine “Things that stress me”, and “Things I love”, but label the paper however you wish, or don't label them at all. Ideally you want to have three pieces of paper for each label, you never know how much you will write.

The second thing you are going to want to do is find your time and location. As I said before, these are the most difficult supplies to get, but these are truly the most necessary supplies. Whenever I do this I find that a good time to do it is when everyone else is asleep, that way I have all the time I need, and any location in the house can be a good location; heck when I need to do this I can't sleep anyway. Some other good places might be a quiet park, in your car, anyplace really.

How to GFW
Once you have all of your supplies ready to go, it is time to start writing. There are different ways to approach this, but I will describe the method that I use.

• Take some deep breaths – This will help clear your mind, and get your body ready for writing.
• Set your mind on your stresses – This is what you need to be writing about.
• Start writing – This is when you really get into it, it does *not* matter what you write, just make sure that you are writing. Keep in mind that nothing is too big or too small to write about. Use the labels to help you if you want, ignore them if you want.
• Get everything out – Cry, yell, scream, do whatever you need to; this is an emotional thing.
• Keep writing – If you can't think of anymore to write, then you are only half way through. Write the same things again and again if you need to. Do not erase anything, everything is relevant (this is why you use a pen).
• Stop writing – Do this when you can't physically write anymore, or something happens to your quiet place and time. Be sure not to cause injury to yourself.

That is how you do GFW, isn't it great? You now have a list of everything in your life, the stresses, the joys, the big things, the minor things, everything. Put that list someplace safe. Take a day away from the list, try not to think about it, pretend it doesn't exist.

How to use your list
There are many things you can do with your new list. You could burn it, symbolically getting rid of all your stress, you post it on the internet, so that everyone can see it, heck, you could flush it down the toilet if you wish; I don't suggest any of these. I suggest taking your list, and reading over it, you will be surprised by what you find.

What makes this so powerful is that it gives you a list from which you can work on getting rid of those things that stress you, and work on enjoying life.

Take another piece of paper, and prepare to analyze your list. Start at the top of your list and work your way down. Take each word, and consider where the stress is coming from, and place it in a column on the new piece of paper (example: “Project Monkey bread” that you are working on at work would go under the work column), make the columns as specific or general as you wish. If you have the same word twice, then it goes into the column twice. Once you are done coping everything over, take a look at the columns, see if anything needs to go into a more specific column.

The newly formed columns should give you a fairly good idea where your stress is coming from. The longer the column, the more stress is coming from there. The next step is removing those stresses, if it is a job, then it might be a good time to look for another one, if it is a relationship, then if might be a good idea to talk to the other person and try to work it out. Follow the same process to find what makes you happy, and attempt to integrate that into your life more.

Tips for using GFW
The more emotional you are at the time, the more the writing will flow from you; this is why I find it best to write in the middle of the night.

If you just can't find a place and time to do this, then make the list, and carry it with you for two weeks. Be careful when doing this, lists of this sort have an annoying habit of finding their way into the hands of people who should not have them (your boss for example).

Don't bother to be specific with your writing, you will know what you meant when you go over the list later. Also don't worry about proper spelling, punctuation, or any convention of good writing, it will just slow you down and interrupt the flow of your writing.

Chances are you will be tired after you get done doing this. Don't expect to do this, then head to Chuck E. Cheese's with the kids, you won't be up to it.

Copyright © 2007 by Duane Hubbard