Anuradha Sridharan

I'm currently reading Luke Coutinho's ebook - " The Magic Immunity Pill - Lifestyle ". It has been such a great read so far. I totally resonate with his holistic approach towards health. Highly recommend this book, it is a free download available on his website . I stumbled upon this sentence in this book which struck a chord   "We have become disconnected with ourselves in a connected world" It made me pause, reflect and jot down my thoughts. I have been on this journey to reconnect with my own self for the past few years. Through self-learning about food and regular Yoga practice, I have now been able to connect with my body easily. I had written about the importance of listening to one's body earlier. I have also been incorporating certain practices to connect with my mind and my soul. Removing distractions and unnecessary information overload has been the first step. Spending quality time with myself in solitude and through chores have also eased m...

All of us on this planet have the same 24 hours in a day. How we manage these 24 hours make a world of difference - in terms of our health, wealth, relationships and our mental peace.  When we plan our personal finance budget, based on our monthly income, we tend to allocate a fixed portion of it towards savings/investments and the remaining towards monthly expenses. Within the monthly expenses, a portion of it is allocated for fixed or mandatory expenses and the remaining goes towards discretionary expenses.  Let's say, the split is 50% towards investments and 50% towards expenses. The expenses are again split into 30% towards fixed expenses and 20% towards discretionary or variable expenses. This strategy helps us to become more mindful of our expenses. It also makes us prioritize our savings and investments for the future. Money lost can be earned but time lost can never be regained.  A similar budgeting strategy can be employed for our daily time as well. In a 24 hou...

My daughter D is an imaginative person. She can whip up stories and characters on a whim. I'm totally in awe of her imagination as I'm more of a logical, realistic person. During these lock down days, she has come up with so many events and activities on her own that we can do together as a family. Usually, if she comes up with an idea, my husband K and I would just go along with her flow and not interrupt her plans. One afternoon, she took us out on a ride to a different planet. She had thought through every single detail - right from packing our bags, checking in at the airport, security bag scan, going to a different city where we board our rocket ship that will take us to a new planet. We then did sight seeing of the planet - waterfalls, mountains, animals that are only present in this new planet (Our pet cat played a guest role here). The experience felt so real. One other day, she had organized a birthday party for one of her dolls, with other dolls being the guests. The...

On days I don't feel "productive", I get quite annoyed. One such day happened this week but instead of getting annoyed, I accepted it and even wrote a short post about the same.  Later in the day, I asked myself - What is productivity? When do I find myself "productive"? The dictionary definition of the word might be different but the answer I have come up with is I feel productive when my thoughts, words and actions are in alignment. Let me explain with the help of a flow diagram. Being a computer engineer, a flowchart will find its way in my thought process 😉 Our thoughts lead to words; words that we tell ourselves as well as words that we tell our family/friends/social media. These words lead us toward action. When we act upon these words, we feel productive and experience a sense of accomplishment. When the thought/word doesn't convert to the intended action, that's when the misalignment happens and we end up feel...

  I had stepped out to the terrace last evening to witness the Neowise comet. Though I couldn't spot the comet thanks to cloudy evening in Bengaluru, I spent an hour on the terrace, admiring the crescent moon, spotting Jupiter and stars. It felt so good. What made me happier is the sight of moving vehicles on the main road. I never thought I would feel this way about traffic.  It's been almost 5 months since the lockdown started in March. After the initial chaos and confusion, days seem to be whizzing past by. Some of the days are happy, peaceful and filled with gratitude, while others leave me with a mixed bag of emotions. I worry about Appa who is managing by himself in a different city during these times. I wish I could have brought him here to my home in March. But then I tell myself, "I should just trust life and not worry about things which are not in my control". My project with a startup got stalled, thanks to COVID. As a result, my contract got...

After I shared my post on how we can win back our attention and focus , I received a couple of messages - " What you say is true. I have tried to come out of my phone addiction. I would become conscious, delete apps etc but the effect would last only for a few days. I end up in the same addictive phase again. Why does this happen? " I started to become more conscious of my phone usage after reading this fabulous book " Deep Work " by Cal Newport back in 2017. With the initial motivation, I was able to cut down my phone usage for a few weeks. I had uninstalled FB and Twitter apps but over the course of the year, my Instagram and Youtube usage shot up. I just shifted from one app to another but the behavior remained the same. A similar experience happened in 2019 after I read " Digital Minimalism " by the same author. Though I became more conscious of my overall digital usage, I do tend to go back to old ways of mindlessly checking and scrolling t...

  I bought my first smartphone in Apr 2013. It must have been a similar entry time for most of you in India, +/- a couple of years. In a time span of less than a decade, we have become addicted to this device. Some of us even take it to the restroom. No, I don't do that. Except for restroom, smartphone travels with me everywhere around my home 🙂 It's worth thinking about how we have become so addicted to our phones in such a short period of time. It isn't entirely correct on our part to blame the device. Our smartphone has made our lives easier in multiple ways - be it cab booking, grocery shopping, navigation, instant payments, capturing photos and keeping in touch with our loved ones. When we use it as a functional device, we seem to be in control of it. But when we start using it as an emotional crutch / boredom banisher / a way to escape from reality / coping mechanism to distract from uncomfortable feelings, that's when we yield the control and we feel ...

Last July, I had written a post on how I track my daily habits . One of the habits I started to practice is "No screen usage after 8:30PM". It's been more than a year now and for most days, I managed to stick to this habit. Yes, there were days when I mindlessly scrolled through Instagram or watched random Youtube videos but such nights were fewer. What I have observed during those nights is that I could literally feel my eyes flickering for a few minutes before I could sleep. Have you felt that sensation? I don't watch much of TV/Netflix/Prime. The main reason being I hardly find content that I like to watch. Most of the content that comes up is too dark, violent, explicit which makes me squirm and feel uncomfortable. On those rare nights when I watch a movie until midnight, my sleep cycle gets quite disturbed and the next day morning routine goes for a toss. My only screen dependency is my phone and thanks to the cut-off habit, I have stopped my usage pos...

  "Wholesome, balanced meal" - I keep mentioning this phrase often in my blog posts as well as in my workshops. I suggest this as a solution to fix sweet cravings, to curb junk foods, to prevent mindless snacking etc. As I pondered deeply on this question - "What is a wholesome, balanced meal?", the initial answers that came to my mind are The meal plate should have a good combination of carbs, proteins, fats and fiber For a vegetarian like me, the meal plate should contain a good proportion of dals, 1-2 vegetables and indigenous rice/millets The plate should include more vegetables and greens I wasn't quite satisfied with these answers. I felt there is something more to a "wholesome, balanced meal". The questioning continued and I reflected on the times when I felt like I have eaten a wholesome, balanced meal. Based on my personal observations, this is the answer I have come up with "A wholesome, balanced meal is the one t...

By now, you all know my love for the Indian Food Composition Tables 🙂 I have been going through the document in detail and have been compiling the list of foods rich in specific nutrients. If you haven't taken a look, you can access the complete list - Plant-based sources of macro and micro-nutrients . There is a separate post for each individual vitamin/mineral. It's still work-in-progress and not a complete analysis yet.  My intention is not to promote Nutritionism but rather to help people recognize and appreciate the wide diversity of local and seasonal foods that are available in India and that can meet our nutritional requirements without the need for artificial supplements/health drinks. Going through each and every post might be time-consuming. So in order to make our lives easier, I plan to make a master compilation that you can print it out and pin it up on your fridge. Whenever you write down your weekly/monthly grocery list, my wish is that you refer t...

"Mindful content consumption" or "Dejunk your mind" - pick a name for this exercise. I'm planning to share my journey on how I'm moving away from content overload to conscious content consumption. My first post in this series was on Instagram usage . Check it out if you haven't. In this post, I plan to talk about Youtube content consumption. Though Youtube has been around for a while, the content creation in India started to explode sometime around 2017. More content creators started to use this platform and create content frequently on a wide range of topics.  I have been subscribing to many cooking channels, people who post interesting vlogs, cleaning and organizing videos, product management related content, productivity, time management, and much more. When I tried to curb my Instagram consumption last year by bringing it down to 30 min per day, all I was doing was switching over to Youtube for mindless scrolling and content cons...

Last night, I couldn't sleep and was tossing and turning quite a bit. Then a conversation started happening in me that brought a lot of clarity. Let's call the two characters - Logical Anu (LA) and Dreamer Anu (DA) DA: I'm not able to sleep. And I know the reason. I've been hosting these workshops in the past few weeks but there are hardly any signups. Today, I announced the workshop for Saturday and there's only one confirmed registration so far.  LA: Didn't you say it's for parents with children below 5 years age? How is it possible for them to sit through a 2-hour workshop? DA: That's true....I was hoping that the mother and father can take turns and listen to the workshop, take notes and then have a fruitful interaction on how they can implement some of the ideas being shared. LA: Hmm, that's possible but chances of it happening are farfetched. Child Nutrition is still the sole responsibility of the mother in our society. What ot...

  Most of us have become more conscious about what we put in our mouths. We have now reached a stage where we need to become more conscious about what we put in our minds as well. Similar to junk for the body, there is junk for our minds too. Yes, I'm talking about the various forms of content we consume. It is even worse, you know how? Even if you can gobble up a party pack of Lays chips in one go, our stomach would eventually push the Stop button and say, "Enough, I can't take it anymore". But with content, we can keep consuming so much in a single day. Our appetite for new content can never be satisfied unless we end up with eye irritation or headache late in the evening. I love reading and I consume content in all forms - books, videos, articles, blogs, news etc. I used to be active on all social media platforms. I used to "Pocket" so many links, just so that I can read them at a later point of time. I used to open so many tabs in my brows...