When I sailed alone for the first time, I discovered that poseidon doesn’t care about my feelings. He’s just chilling and its heartbreaking and freeing.

There’s this raw, punch-in-the-gut moment in solo sailing when you realize you’re completely responsible for your survival. No shortcuts, no excuses—just consequence following action with merciless precision. Newton must have loved not only his apple but also the sea. So crispy clear the Cause Effect Correlation. Lord’s sexiest axiom playground? Yesterday, I started time tracking my work hours, and this crispy Newton hit me with clarity. The numbers don’t lie. Newton doesn’t like Liers. He also don’t care about my stories of productivity or feelings or busyness.

Like sailing alone in open water, time tracking rips away the protective layer of self-deception I’ve carefully cultivated. Like accidental waxing or the top onion layer which makes you cry but gives you clear eyes afterwards.

Your Brain the Rubber Band

Remember that lemon face experiment I mentioned yesterday? I recently tried holding a grimacing “I just bit into a lemon” expression for as long as possible. At first, it’s automatic—your face scrunches involuntarily like the Scrunch of time effortlessly scrunches Layers of thousand mountains and thousand waters in an instant like an old mans face in surprise. Your body reacts to an invisible sourness. But after about 30 seconds, maintaining that expression requires conscious effort. When you finally release it, there’s this surprising flood of relaxation that washes through your entire face similar to when you take a lot of acid and the sparkeling stars come raining down on your face like a summer shower.

What I didn’t realize was this stupid little experiment accidentally tapped into something neuroscientists at Harvard have been studying for decades: the identical physiological signatures of fear and excitement. They are identical twins, have the same fingerprint but mysteriously grew up to appear like Opposites.

In the lab, researchers literally cannot tell the difference between a person experiencing fear and one experiencing excitement. The physiological signatures—increased heart rate, pupil dilation, adrenaline release—are nearly identical. The only difference is the cognitive label we slap on the experience a few hundred milliseconds later in our prefrontal cortex.

This isn’t just some obscure self-help bullshit (even though Moons are also very at home in Horoscope Magazines) about “reframing”—it’s hardwired neurobiology. Olympic coaches train athletes to label pre-competition jitters as “launch energy” rather than the bitter precognition of a nervous breakdown. Alison Wood Brooks’ research at Harvard shows that simply saying “I am excited” (rather than “I am nervous”) before a challenging task improves performance by 15-30%. Your limbic system gets the same activation either way.

It’s not about denying the butterflies; But please don’t try to make butter fly. Connect the semantic dots. Dot Dot Dot.

Two Sides of the Same Moon

This reminds me of the moon—how it shows completely different faces depending on perspective. The Earth-facing side is lush with familiar seas and craters we’ve named and mapped. The far side remained completely unknown until 1959 when Luna 3 finally photographed it—revealing a barren, cratered landscape so different it might as well be another celestial body.

Yet it’s one object.

Fear and excitement are like this—same physiological moon, completely different landscapes depending on which side you’re viewing. The challenge isn’t eliminating the sensation; it’s changing which side of the moon you’re looking at.

This morning, I woke up thinking about a friend calling me a “dream dancer” a while back. When I made rap music, listeners described it as “a mix between fever dream and compelling storytelling.” Maybe this is why that lemon face experiment feels so important—it’s that magical moment where discomfort transforms into creative fuel.

The Vipassana Effect of Time Tracking

Back to time tracking. Yuval Noah Harari—the historian who wrote Sapiens—spends two hours daily in Vipassana meditation. He calls it “observing reality as it is” rather than escaping it. This practice is why he attributes his success as a writer who can spot patterns others miss.

Time tracking creates the same uncomfortable confrontation with reality.

When I looked at yesterday’s tracked hours, I gotta repeat the gut-punchy verbal imagery I used ealier in this article. The gap between perceived productivity and actual focused work felt like that moment at sea when you realize the shore is much farther than it appeared. The research backs this up—studies show we consistently misestimate our time use. Most people overestimate work hours by 5-10% and underreport social media by over an hour daily.

Like sailing, you can’t argue with reality. The sea doesn’t care about your confidence; the clock doesn’t care about your elaborate busyness narratives.

What’s fascinating is that ancient cultures built entire technologies around time awareness—from Persian water clocks to Japanese seasonal timepieces that adjusted hour length with daylight changes. These weren’t about squeezing more productivity; they were consciousness tools to sync human experience with cosmic reality.

The Dopamine Budget and Silent Oceans

Tim Ferriss introduced me to the concept of an “information diet”—treating information consumption with the same intentionality as food intake. This connects to what neuroscientists call your “dopamine budget”—a concept that, while simplified, captures something vital about attention management.

Last night, I spent an hour mindlessly scrolling Instagram, feeling nauseous and depleted afterward. It’s like dining exclusively on sugar—a temporary high followed by a cognitive crash that left me feeling hollow.

This made me think about whales and cruise ships. Whales evolved exquisite communication systems that can travel hundreds of miles through ocean water. But now, commercial shipping noise is so pervasive it’s like living in a perpetual rock concert—they literally can’t hear each other or navigate properly.

Our brains face the same challenge. The constant noise of notifications, feeds, and infinite scrolling creates an environment where the subtle signals of intuition and creativity can’t travel through the internal waters of consciousness.

I need silent ocean spaces in my mind where the whales of insight can still be heard.

The Birkenbihl Method: ABC Lists as Subconscious Unlocking

This morning I tried something called the Birkenbihl ABC List method. It’s stupidly simple: you write the alphabet vertically down a page, set a 90-second timer, and fill in words or phrases related to your topic, jumping randomly between letters.

What happens is fascinating—the alphabet forces you to access unusual “addresses” in your brain’s semantic network instead of following well-worn associative paths. The neuroscience shows this combines the default mode network (where creative wandering happens) with just enough structure from the frontoparietal control network to stay on topic.

I did one for “FLOW” and discovered connections between seemingly unrelated concepts—like how “laying low” and forgetting oneself connects to both meditative flow and addictive gaming flow, yet they’re fundamentally different experiences. One expands consciousness, while the other narrows it to a pinpoint.

The method is like installing a Trojan horse in your own mind—the alphabet structure tricks your conscious editor into letting wilder associations through the gate.

Navigating the Moon’s Dark Side

What’s emerging for me is a framework for transformation—learning to navigate between these dual faces of experience:

• The tension-release cycle of the lemon face
• The fear-excitement flip of physiological arousal
• The near side-far side perspective of the moon
• The noise-silence balance of the whale’s ocean

These aren’t separate phenomena—they’re the same principle playing out across different domains. In each case, the raw experience stays constant, but our relationship to it transforms.

This is why I’m becoming fascinated by these moments of transformation—when tension becomes potential energy, when fear becomes excitement. Creating spaces where these transformations happen reliably isn’t just a personal experiment anymore; it’s becoming central to how I think about helping people navigate decisions with more agency and less paralysis.

Tonight’s Subconscious Question

Before sleep tonight, I’m placing this question in my subconscious: How might I transform the necessary friction of time tracking into a flow-inducing rather than flow-blocking experience?

Your Tiny Experiment for Today

Want to try your own consciousness-expanding experiment? Grab a paper, write A-Z down the left side, choose a problem you’re stuck on, and set a 90-second timer. Fill in words or concepts related to your problem, letting the alphabet guide you to unexpected connections. Circle anything that feels surprising or slightly uncomfortable—that’s your subconscious voting.

Let me know what unexpected territories you discover on the far side of your own moon.

Tomorrow: What happens when fever becomes a creative ally?