How to Fail at Absolutely Everything!

How to Sleep Really Badly

Sleep is a darned annoying thing… without enough of it you die, you tend to need it most at the least appropriate times and you can’t bank it for future use! Anyway, I have compiled some tips to ensure that you never get a full nights sleep again and that you live the rest of your life in a zombie-like sleep deprived state, feeling terrible, looking haggard and being generally grumpy!

Top of my list in how to make sure you’re really shattered all the time is to have kids! If you can can bring a new one into the world every three years or so you will me maximising the amount of time you have terrible sleep for. It’s not just the screaming to be fed and nappies changed etc that takes chunks out of your sleep each night, when they get older they’ll be out late and you won’t be able to sleep without worrying about them. Parenthood is not for the feint-hearted, the impatient or those lacking in stamina!

Another thing to do is to have a really badly sprung bed. An uncomfortable bed will be something you can wrestle with all night much to your annoyance and sleep avoidance.

Have a TV / office in your bedroom! From a psychological point of view it’s important for there to be a clear distinction between where you work / watch TV and where you retire! If you’re used to feeling hyped watching action movies in bed etc then you’re not going to find drifting off to sleep the easiest of tasks. So to really confuse your body and ensure that sleep comes far from easilly you should have a telly and computer etc in your bedroom.

Make sure you drink lots of caffeine. Caffeine mimics adrenalin and keeps you wired and hyper making it difficult for you to unwind and it reduces the quality of the sleep you get. This habit becomes self fuelling because you drink coffee / cola… you sleep badly… you wake up and need a ‘lift’ so you… drink more coffee, round and round you go. So, abuse caffeine, especially later in the day for really unsettled sleep.

Go to bed on an argument. Got a spouse, parent, kid, sibling, friend that you can have a fight with? Go for it, make sure you say lots of stuff you don’t mean in the heat of the moment and that they do likewise and then go to bed without actually making up. You’ll be a seeting tangled mess of anger and guilt that will surely take you some time to wind down from.

Eat a good sized fatty meal before you go to bed. Late night munchies? Have a pizza before you go to bed, this will raise your metabolic rate and keep your body ’stoked’ as it struggles to digest the fat (which is more difficult to breakdown than carbohydrate). Both of these mean that sleep will not come quickly and will probably be quite fitful when it does finally descend on you. Also, in the case of pizza, all that cheese will give you wierd dreams (dude!).

Go to bed at a specific time i.e. before you are tired. Going to bed before you are ready to sleep is a good way to feed your insomniac tendencies. All that tossing and turning in bed getting increasingly frustrated at your inability to become enveloped by sleep will be great at keeping you awake longer and conditioning your body that the bed is not a place for sleeping in, but is really a place for not sleeping in!

Not a very practical one this but if you get the opportunity then move next door to some really noisy, party-animal neighbours. The sound of loud techno music at 2a.m. is not renowned for its sedative effects and the associated sounds of people screaming and shouting, car horns honking and wheels screeching will ensure that you arise bleary-eyed and thoroughly unrested.

Leave the curtains open and / or a light on - the production of sleep hormones tends to be stilmulated by by darkness so lots of light, especially the early morning sun in summer, will ensure that struggle to sleep and then awake early. This is why people in Canada and the Scandanavian countries struggle in Summer so much with their sleep, so I guess takling this to the extreme you could emmigrate to Canada, Greenland, Norway, Finland, Sweden etc…

Sleep on a very narrow bed. Preferably not next to a wall. You will be uncomfortably concious of not wanting to fall off the bed when you roll over and this will be an unsettling distraction when you are sleeping / trying to sleep.

Make sure you are too hot or too cold and just generally uncomfortable. It’s difficult to be soothed by sleep’s calm embrace if there’s beads of sweat grouping on your face or you’re shivering uncontrollably. A couple of blankets too few or too many can take hours of sleep away from you. As indeed can tight bedclothes that threaten to cut you in half or act as tourniques with every move you make.

Have a lumpy pillow - guaranteed to annoy the hell out of the most saintly of people. The icing on the cake would be to have a nylon pillow case - I can almost feel the prickly heat now!

Last on my list is an unusual one as it tends to make you sleep more! Yes drink alcohol before you go to bed - while it does induce sleep it’s the wrong kind of sleep so even if you get an hour more sleep than normal you’ll wake up feeling like you only slept half the night (or worse!).

That’s it, I reckon that by following these tips you’ll be able knock at least three hours of sleep off a day and make yourself look about 10 years older! If you have any other tips about how to feel shattered 24/7 then please share them… assuming you’re not too tired to tell me!

Tags [ Fun | Funny | Humour | Humor | Life | sleep | insomnia | dreams | work | Sleep Disorder | Healthy Sleep ]

Add comment November 12th, 2006

How to Give Yourself High Blood Pressure

High blood pressure isn’t a nice thing, it can lead to premature death via kidney failure, stroke, heart attacks to name but a few. Blood pressure tends to rise with age due to a variety of factors including stiffening and furring of the arteries which makes the heart have to work harder to push blood around and this ‘pushing harder’ means higher blood pressure. We have compiled a list of the most effective ways of raising your blood pressure!

The easiest way to boost both your systolic and diastolic blood pressures is to put weight on - the more the better. The bigger you are the more blood you have and the more blood vessels you have and so the harder your heart has to work to ensure that all your body’s cells are getting the fuel, oxygen and nutrients they need. I have an article that outlines the best ways to gain weight quickly if you are stuck for ideas about how to bloat fast.

Eat as much ‘hard’ fat as you can. Animal fat, butter, lard, cheese, full fat milk, cream, ghee, coconut, palm oil, processed meat products (i.e. burger, hot dogs etc) etc all contain more than their fair share of saturated fat and it is this hard fat that cruises round your blood stream looking for somewhere to latch onto. The accumulation of these fatty deposits on the inside of your arteries results in ‘furred’ arteries which are narrower than they would be on account of the fat that’s clogging them. Narrower blood vessels means a higher blood pressure is needed to get blood through them, so eating fatty meat products or cheesey / creamy foods etc is a great way to increase your blood pressure. Worthy of particular note are the ‘trans’ fats also refered to as ‘hydrogenated vegetable oil / fat’ which are made from vegetable oil that has been made solid (at room temperature) by passing hydrogen through it - these kinds of fats are quite widely used in many processed foods, snacks, cakes, chocolate, biscuits, margarine etc. Anyway, the trans fats / hydrogenated veg oils etc are noteworthy as they appear to be *worse* than normal saturated fat - so double portions of chocolate biscuits all round!

Start smoking or smoke more than you are doing now. Smoking tobacco constricts your blood vessels pretty much instantaneously and if the blood vessels shrink then by definition your blood pressure sky rockets. Smoking is an excellent and efficient way to stress your heart although it’s not as cheap a method of raising your blood pressure as it used to be, not in the UK anyway. Note: if you find the idea of smoking to be an unpalatable way to raise your blood pressure you can console yourself with the fact that because (a) nicotine (the drug that you’re smoking the tobacco for) enters the blood stream so quickly and (b) that it is metabolised from the blood stream in a very short time (i.e. minutes) and (c) that your body becomes tolerant to nicotime very quickly, that you won’t need to smoke for very long before you become physically addicted to smoking. So if you persevere with smoking regularly for the first few weeks you’ll find that you’re over the worst of it and that it soon becomes a craving that demands being satisfied.

Drink too much alcohol is good for another few points on your blood pressures. By ‘too much alcohol’ I mean more than one or two beers / glasses of wine a day. Beware, drinking a modest amount of alcohol (say one drink a day) can actually *lower* your blood pressure so to keep it high make sure you either drink no alcohol or, preferably, drink a bucket load each day.

Make sure your diet is rich in sodium (i.e. salt, MSG etc). Sodium encourages the retention of fluid which equates to an elevated blood pressure. So to push your blood pressure higher you should make sure that you regularly eat takeaways, junk food, processed food, tv meals, tinned food, seafood, salted snacks etc and also add sea salt / sauces to your meals. Note that these kinds of foods tend to be calorifically dense so they will help you put weight on too thereby boosting your blood pressure further.

Avoid or reduce the amount of exercise you do. In scientific study after scientific study it has been shown that regular aerobic exercise reduces your blood pressure and strengthens the heart muscles. So in order to keep your blood pressure high or raise it further you need to become more sedentary. Reducing the amount of exercise you do will mean that you’ll put more weight on (unless you diet) which will further enhance the blood pressure raising effect.

Elevated and constant levels of stress raise blood pressure too. So why not become a city trader or a school teacher (that’s *got* to be stressful!) or become a perfectionist or just one of those people that everyone refers to as a ‘worrier’. Work long hours, don’t take breaks (or holidays / vacations for that matter), skimp on sleep, make sure you commute long distances and don’t practice any ‘relaxation techniques’ like Tai Chi, Yoga or going for casual strolls etc. Tip: if your life isn’t actually that stressful then you can always mimic the effects of stress by consuming caffeine which induces an adrenaline-like response in the body which increases your pulse rate and raises blood pressure.

If you follow the advice above I can pretty much guarantee your blood pressure will go on the up and up! If you have any other tips you have found effective in raising your blood pressure then please let me know.

Tags [ Fun | Funny | Humour | Humor | Life | stress | work | life | depression | Anxiety | blood-pressure | lifestyle | Hypertension ]

Add comment November 7th, 2006

How to fail at Dieting

With a little motivation and behaviour change I will show you how to pile the pounds on even whilst ‘dieting’! We have compiled the 11 of the biggest and easiest ways to ensure your diet doesn’t work, whatever diet you’re using!

If you want to fail at dieting here’s our collection of Do’s and Don’ts:

1) Skip Breakfast - breakfast is the most important meal of the day and having a good and healthy breakfast can reduce the hunger you feel throughout the rest of the day and therefore reduce the calories you are likely to eat. So it is important that you skip breakfast each day, just have a cup of coffee instead.

2) Only Eat When You’re Really Hungry - by not eating very often your body goes into starvation mode i.e. your metabolic rate slows right down (the rate at which you burn calories) as your body doesn’t know when it’s going to get its next meal and so it preserves the calories it has already rather than waste them! This means that when you do finally eat pretty much all of it gets stored as fat in readiness for the next ‘fast’. This is a good way to make sure that you don’t shed any weight and bloat faster than a puffer fish.

3) Have a Couple of Big Meals Each Day - when you eat you force your metabolic rate higher for a time which means you burn calories faster - so, from a fat preservation point of view, it’s best to consume the same number of calories as you would do normally but distributed between fewer meals.

4) Eat Sugary / Starchy Foods with a High GI - GI stands for glycaemic index and is a measure of how fast a food that you eat can be converted to fuel (glucose) that gets transported in your blood. After a meal your blood sugar level (BSL) goes up and (in non-diabetic people) this is met with increased insulin levels which help to take this unneeded fuel out of your blood and store it for later use, i.e. glucose in your blood gets changed to glycogen or fat and stored. The higher the GI of the food you eat the quicker you will be flooding your bloodstream with unnecessary fuel that needs to be stored rather than used. Low GI foods on the other hand would offer a slow release of fuel into the blood more inline with the body’s requirement and so aren’t as effective at making you fatter. Also, a time after eating high GI foods your BSL tends to ‘crash’ which can leave you feeling faint, in a cold sweat, feeling weak and very hungry… so you will tend to want to eat some more high GI food to boost your blood sugar level etc etc and the carb loop continues. So, recapping, if you want to fail to lose weight then high GI foods like potatoes, pasta, rice, white bread, cakes etc should never be far from hand and lower GI foods like whole grain foods, fruit, veg, beans, nuts, fish etc should be relegated to the back of your cupboard.

5) Drink Soft Drink / Caffeinated Beverages - soft drinks contain lots of sugar (sucrose) which if you’re not exercising is likely to be converted to fat in quite an efficient manner. Caffeine on the other hand, while it does increase your metabolic rate (i.e. helps you to burn calories), it also makes you crave for starchy / sugary foods. So to keep your weight up you’d do well to keep soft drinks and coffee etc as your main sources of fluid intake throughout the day.

6) Weigh Yourself Every Day - your body weight will naturally vary quite a bit from day to day for no easily isolatable reason. Weighing yourself every day (rather than say once a week) will mean that you will see days where you’ve been ‘good’ and your weight has *still* gone up. This will be a body blow for morale and will make you more likely to give up your diet so weigh yourself at least once a day.

7) Anorexic Supermodel as Your Target - research has shown that having realistic targets helps ensure that goals are met. If you have a ludicrous target as the envisaged ‘destination’ of your diet then you are likely to get very frustrated by your (relative) lack of progress and give up trying i.e. “what’s the point?” syndrome. Surround yourselves with magazine photos of the most underfed supermodels and convince yourself that that is the look you should be striving for.

8) Easy on the Fruit and Veg - fruit and vegetables contain calories so by skimping on these nutrient packed foods means you’ll have earned the calorific right to sniff a cube of chocolate.

9) Bedtime Snack - the night is long right? And you might die if you went all that time without eating mightn’t you? Having a meal or snack just before bed makes use of your body’s reduced metabolic rate whilst sleeping and ensures that you are able to efficiently convert the calories in that late meal into fat. Better still, you can use the fact that you had a late meal as an excuse to forego breakfast the next day!

10) No Extra Exercise - not only do you burn extra calories while exercising you also raise your metabolic rate for a time after you have finished exercising - a double whammy! So to keep the pounds on you should avoid exercise like the plague!

11) Say ‘No’ to Water - don’t drink spring water or tap water. When you are dehydrated your body tends to misread thirst signals for hunder signals so if you are thirsty all the time you are more likely to overeat. Sugary / fizzy drinks are good water replacements as not only are these laden with calories they are also ‘water-robbing’ meaning that you are actually thirstier *after* you have drunk them than you were before - an easy habit that pretty much guarantees you’ll keep hold of your hard earned fat!

If you have found any other methods very effective at stacking on the pounds relentlessly then let’s hear them!

Tags [ Fun | Funny | Humour | Humor | Life | diet | weight loss | fitness | obesity | weight | fat | dieting | weightloss | size zero ]

Add comment November 2nd, 2006