YouTube Is The Enemy of Concentration.

May 24, 2018May 24, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 10 Comments

The internet is one of the most significant inventions of the past 100 years and was probably designed with the intention of providing us with instant access to information and the ability to communicate with people across the world.

However, sometimes it seems like the internet was created for the sole purpose of distracting me.

The internet has the power to completely and utterly eradicate any semblance of focus that I have previously established.

For me, the site that poses the biggest threat to concentration is YouTube.

The majority of the videos on YouTube are short and it is therefore easy to click on a video under the impression that you are taking a brief break from being productive.

However, each individual video is linked within a seemingly infinite network other videos.

By clicking on a video, you are heading directly into a trap.

Whenever I go on YouTube, I feel a bit like Hansel and Gretel, except instead of following a trail of breadcrumbs to the house of an evil witch, I am following a trail of video clips, moving rapidly towards a procrastination pit.

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How To Motivate Yourself To Exercise.

May 10, 2018June 13, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 16 Comments

When I first started doing exercise, I found it quite hard to motivate myself so I bought an ambitious amount of sportswear in the hope that wearing it would help me get into the mind-set of an athlete.

I reasoned that, if I looked like an athlete, I could delude my body into thinking it was capable of performing impressive feats of strength and endurance.

Once I started exercising, I was able to maintain this illusion of supreme athleticism for a short amount of time.

However, it soon became clear that I wasn’t an elite athlete and was, in fact, just a regular bog-standard unfit person.

Before exercising, I would perform elaborate warm-up routines in preparation for what I assumed would be a high intensity workout.

Warm up stretches are a useful way to prepare your body for exercise.

However, they are considerably less useful when they are used to actively avoid doing exercise in the first place.

Eventually, I decided that I needed to be more disciplined in my approach to exercise so I drew up a plan that detailed exactly how I was going to spend each workout to ensure that I spent less time stretching and more time actually exercising.

I thought that if I could stick to my workout plan, I would eventually fall into a routine and motivating myself to do exercise wouldn’t be such a struggle.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until my workouts started to deviate slightly from the routines that I had originally set out for myself.

At one point, I also tried going to exercise classes in the hope that the group camaraderie would help drag me through the workout.

The concept of the exercise class has been around since Mulan times (very historically accurate…) in which the renowned military personal trainer Li Shang whipped his recruits into shape to the tune of the song ‘I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’

‘I’ll Make A Man Out Of You’ is a highly motivational song that makes getting fit feel like a heroic mission.

However, the message relayed to participants in fitness boot camps nowadays tend to be slightly less stirring and dramatic .

At the end of the day, there is only one thing that will truly encourage me to exercise.

In theory, healthy exercise cancels out unhealthy cake consumption and everything balances out at a vaguely acceptable level of healthiness (this is a very scientifically accurate statement that I tell myself so that I can eat cake without feeling too guilty…)

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What I Want To Be Now That I Am All Grown Up.

April 25, 2018April 25, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 6 Comments

As a child, I had a very over-active imagination.

As a result, I had some pretty outlandish plans for what I was going to achieve when I grew up and became an adult.

I have officially been an adult for several years now and I am yet to achieve any of the goals that I set out for myself when I was five.

I haven’t written a novel (unless you count the Warrior Cats fan-fiction that I wrote when I was 13…) and I know from previous experience that I can’t be trusted to keep a house plant alive for an extended period of time, let alone five ponies.

I’m not famous and the closest I’ve come to going to space was the time I went to see Gravity at the cinema and paid £5 extra for an ‘immersive’ IMAX experience, which basically meant that my seat vibrated a little bit whenever Sandra Bullock was in the middle of an action sequence or an explosion.

What five-year old me didn’t realise is that being an adult (aka. someone who is self-sufficient, responsible, financially and emotionally stable and just generally has their life more or less under control) can be a hard enough task in itself.

Nowadays, the goals that I set for myself tend to be slightly less outlandish.

That being said, I do still want to write a novel set in space and that will make me very famous and give me the money to purchase an entire herd of ponies…

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The Trials and Tribulations of Having Curly Hair.

April 19, 2018April 19, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 16 Comments

I have thick, unruly, frizz-ridden, curly hair.

As a result, pretty much every day of my life has been a bad hair day.

Deep down, I know that my hair has massive potential and I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to style it in a way that expresses its true beauty.

Unfortunately, I still have absolutely no idea how to control it.

My hair is at its most tame directly after I step out of the shower.

However, as my hair begins to dry, it starts to rebel.

Hair It has visions of a new better future for itself – a future in which it will rise up into a set of full, luscious, voluminous curls.

Hair Unfortunately, by the time my hair has fully dried, this rebellion has deteriorated into something that it never intended or planned for.

Hair In my teenage years, I had a brief period where I genuinely believed that I could control my hair through the power of modern cosmetics.

I tried using a wide variety of hair serums, all of which claimed to eliminate frizz.

Many of the serums that I used were even backed by scientists.

Unfortunately, my hair gives zero fucks about scientist’s opinions.

‘Flawless’ isn’t a concept that it recognises.

In fact, my hair is probably the kind of natural phenomenon that would make scientists doubt their knowledge of the fundamental laws of the universe.

If my hair is particularly unruly, I sometimes attempt to make it more manageable using various hair accessories.

Unfortunately, this rarely proves effective as my hair is on a mission to completely annihilate any hair accessory that attempts to subdue it.

After years of struggle, I am now finally transitioning into a period of acceptance.

I have fought my hardest against my hair and have well and truly lost so I am now trying embrace it in all it’s frizz-ridden glory.

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How To Deal With Problems.

March 27, 2018 ~ Joanne Sarginson ~ 3 Comments

I like to think that I am quite good at solving problems… as long as they aren’t my own.

It is easier to solve other people’s problems because you are not so emotionally wrapped up in them.

As a result, it is possible to look at the situation in a from a neutral perspective and come to a solution using the powers of reason and logic.

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When you are trying to solve your own problems, a range of different factors (e.g. your emotions, your past experiences and your specific hopes and fears) are added to the equation.

As a result, the decision making process is much more complicated and finding a solution to the problem becomes much more difficult.

Recently, I have been trying to come up with some tactics to help me deal with problems because curling up in a ball and having a minor existential breakdown wasn’t proving to be the most effective solution.

I think that one of the best ways to deal with present problems is put them into perspective by reflecting on problems that you have faced in the past.

Most problems tend to be much less intimidating in hindsight.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to check out some of my other posts. For more blog posts and drawings, you can also follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.