Anuradha Sridharan

  For the past few weeks in the Online Minimalism Workshop (OMW) that I'm attending, the topic of discussion is Money. One of the questions that I'm asking myself is " What is my relationship with money? ". I'm grateful that this question was triggered, thanks to OMW. Each individual's relationship with money is influenced by multiple factors - upbringing, childhood experiences, personal values and beliefs, the influence of family, relatives, neighbors and many more. Even when two people, for example, siblings who have experienced similar upbringing and childhood can have different perspectives and a different approach towards money. If they are brought up in an environment where money was less, they can either feel deprived or feel more responsible. The attitude they adopt will decide their relationship with money in their 20s and 30s. For me, my attitude with money is more on the lines of RESPECT and RESPONSIBILITY. Having grown up in a middle-class househol...

    A few weeks back, I ran a Q&A on Insta Stories - " What are the challenges/obstacles you face in achieving your health goals? ".  One of the common challenges mentioned was laziness. I had written a detailed post on 20 ways to overcome laziness . The other important challenge that many had mentioned was " Lack of consistency ". Whenever we fail at being consistent with a habit, we perceive it to be a lack of motivation at a surface level. Yes, motivation is extremely important, especially the intrinsic one, where you feel a strong urge/desire from within to pursue the habit. Apart from intrinsic motivation, there are deeper factors to think about. (1) Not enough clarity on the Why Why do we want to wake up early? Why do we want to work out in the morning hours? Why do we want to quit junk food? Why do we want to sleep on time? The answer is not simply about staying fit and healthy. Go deeper and figure out your reasons. I wrote about my reasons on why I wan...

  Over the past few months, we keep hearing this phrase " dealing with new normal " in various contexts - life as we deal with the ongoing pandemic and post that. As I was ruminating over this phrase, I had an epiphany. The new normal isn't something new to us. We have been facing "new normal"s since the beginning of mankind, with every little change we embrace.  A decade ago, I didn't have a smartphone, but once I embraced it, it became the new normal. Until around three months back, I was using a knife with a 3" long blade for chopping vegetables, but then I shifted to a new one with a 4" long blade . The new knife has become the new normal for me and I find it difficult to use my old knife. Mind you, I had been using the old knife for 5+ years. Every little change we imbibe in our lives sets a new normal. Whether this new normal makes our lives better off or worse off is dependent on multiple factors - some that are under our control, while some...

 In my previous post on The Seeker's journey , I had made this statement - Never take any idea you hear at plain face value. I wanted to explain this statement with an example. I recently completed this course on Coursera - " The Science of well-being ". Brilliant course with a lot of takeaways. One of the points the instructor mentions in the context of happiness at work is that we feel happy when we experience the state of "flow" more often.  "Flow" is this state where we are completely immersed in an activity, we lose track of time and we find the activity itself to be rewarding. Though I'm yet to read the original book - "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I have come across this concept in multiple books and courses in the past few years. I have experienced this state of "Flow" multiple times while I'm putting together a software product plan, reading a good book, writing a blog post...

  Someone had recently posted this very interesting question in a Whatsapp group that I'm part of "How can one slow down?" I responded with this answer - "Becoming clear about my priorities, questioning my ambitions - these have helped me slow down" Priorities and ambitions influence many of our life choices. Let's dive a little deeper into each of these. Priorities : Gaining clarity on this one aspect makes most of our decisions and life choices easier.  Often, I have come across this phrase of juggling multiple balls, in the context of managing multiple aspects of our life - family, health, career, personal growth, spiritual growth etc. When multiple balls are juggled, there will always be a few in the air and chances of them falling are quite high, unless and until you are an expert juggler. Multitasking / wearing the super-woman hat / super productive / doing it all => these are multiple manifestations that highlight our juggling capability. I had suc...

    We have heard of the popular saying - "An idle mind is devil's workshop". Many of us believe in this statement so strongly that we keep ourselves busy every single moment of our waking lives. Whenever we catch a break, we tend to reach out for our distractions, just so that we don't hear our voice inside. The few seconds of idleness, the few minutes of boredom, the few moments of uncomfortable feelings after being triggered by something/someone - we immediately grab our devices to distract our minds.  The problem is not with the idle mind but with the numerous thoughts that come and go inside it. Thoughts cannot be controlled, but how we feel can be. Our minds can never be completely idle. It is always busy processing some thought or another. When we haven't brought a thought to closure, it keeps chewing on it even further. Especially those thoughts that triggered powerful emotional responses from us. That could be the reason why we believe in the saying and g...

  In my previous post , I spoke about the two obstacles we face as we pursue digital minimalism. I shared a few thoughts about one of the obstacles - seeking external validation. In this post, let's talk about the second obstacle - "instant gratification".  Instant gratification , in simple terms, is our expectation that we need to get what we want as and when we want it, at that very instant. The "WANTS" are not only materialistic by the way. They could be anything in this connected world - information, entertainment, recognition/appreciation, completion of work etc. An email arrives, we open it immediately. A WhatsApp group message arrives, we check it immediately. We start reading a book, we share about it on social media right away. As we seek more instant gratification, we lose our ability to stay patient and wait for things to happen. We avoid work that requires perseverance and patience. We get stuck in a world of busyness. To give you an example, I have ...

As we pursue our journey towards digital minimalism, we encounter two key obstacles along the way. External validation Instant gratification Both are related to some extent but there are also subtle differences. In this post, let's focus on the first obstacle - external validation. In simple words, external validation is the feeling we experience because of the reaction we get from others. We feel good when others appreciate our words and actions and we feel bad when others don't approve of it or criticize the same.  While growing up, we experienced external validation in the form of tests, exams and competitions in schools and on occasions when we met our relatives during social gatherings where we were appreciated for our good behavior. Such instances didn't occur every day for most of us growing up in the 70s and 80s. As a result, I notice that most of us born in those decades do not associate our self-esteem strongly with external validation. It is only my general, bias...

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...

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...

"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...