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 ...