Intervention of your choice

INTERVENTION OF CHOICE — Jiaqi Zhao

interventor — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 23:28:08 +0000

For my self intervention of Choice, I have decided to not speak my first language (Chinese) for a week. Because it is thanks-giving week and I am staying at school, I think it is a good opportunity to do this intervention.

It was not that bad at the beginning. I talked with my friends in English and sometimes texted my friends in Chinese. However, It became worse as time went. I felt the deep loneliness and homesick. Since I have been in the United States for 2 years, I haven’t tried to not speak Chinese for 2 days. This is a real challenge. My feeling cannot output correctly and I couldn’t be real me with the language system which I am familiar with. I believe lots of people who has experienced a long -term international travel will feel the similarity. The excitement and “challenge myself feeling ” is faded in time and only unspeakable bitter left. Moreover, I realize how important the healthy communication it is for a mentally healthy human being.

Intervention of choice – Victoria Slaybaugh

interventor — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 21:33:17 +0000

I originally planned to go to my regular grocery store and buy as little plastic as possible. However, I want to try to go absolutely zero waste for a week of grocery shopping and then set achievable goals from there on out that move towards eventual zero (very low) waste. I will shop at the farmers market and SLO food co-op and buy nothing with any kind of waste (plastic, trays, stickers, twist ties, etc). It will be interesting to see if I can find things such as tofu or cheese without any sort of wrapping. I will do my best to explore as many food buying options as possible so that I can find places that will make it easier for me to maintain a low waste lifestyle after the first week. This is something that I have been wanting to do for a while, as I feel (what I believe to be reasonable) guilt when I throw food waste away. Furthermore, I will see what I can do to swap out my toiletry and self care items out as they run out, but this will happen as time goes on (seeing as it makes no sense to throw things away if they aren’t entirely used up).

For my mental health and self awareness I will make a daily effort to meditate. I know based on past experience that meditation provides me with increased awareness of who I am, why I feel what I do, and how I can better understand the people and the world around me. I have the Headspace app and will be using it to encourage this daily meditation and to track my consistency. I notice a significant difference in my well-being and in the way that I treat others with a consistent practice.

Update: This is hard, but I feel good. I went to the co-op and was able to purchase produce and bulk grains without any kind of packaging (instead I bought some reusable cotton produce bags from them) and made a really good dinner out of it. However, things like nut or oat milk are virtually impossible to find without packaging, I really think the only way to make that happen is to make it yourself, which I will definitely give a shot. I couldn’t find any cheese or tofu without plastic so I opted for vegan meals this week and will see what I can find that is low waste (maybe at the SLO farmers market) for the future. It was a challenge but I’m really excited that this intervention gave the push I needed to say no to the typical Trader Joe’s run and instead try something unfamiliar.

I also have been trying to meditate but some mornings find it hard to get up and do it first thing. I think I will explore different times of the morning and see what works best for me. I also purchased a book from HumanKind downtown called How To See by Zen Master Thich Nhat Nahn and have been reading a page every morning which has been a radically better way to start my day than waking up and immediately going on social media or beginning to worry about what the day holds.

Intervention of Choice- Michael Cipolletti

interventor — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 19:45:06 +0000

For my final intervention of choice I decided not to watch any TV or play video games. I don’t play many video games in the first place put I do watch tv at night a lot before I go to bed. Over this last week I had off for Thanksgiving break and put this intervention to the test. It was hard at first when I would walk downstairs for breakfast and my parents would have the TV on. I started eating breakfast in the backyard which I found as a good way to start my morning. It would wake me up a bit more and I could watch the sky light up and listen to the birds chirp. On the other hand, at night i felt almost the need to watch The Office in order to settle down. But i forced myself to read instead. I found that reading puts me to sleep just as fast as watching TV. Sometimes it would cause me to read the same page a few times, through heavy eyelids but I ended up finishing a book over the break and that felt like an accomplishment. In conclusion this was a great intervention and I will implement it more in the future.

Intervention of Choice – Owen Staveland

interventor — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 16:57:08 +0000

For my personal intervention, I decided to call a friend every day who I don’t see very much anymore. For some reason, I feel a bit of a mental block on doing this normally, imaging that it’ll be awkward or something. But it really never is and I always enjoy reconnecting with people. This intervention was very fun and helped me overcome that mental block.

My “global citizen” intervention was to time my showers. Water doesn’t seem like the most important resource that I use, but as a California resident I should definitely have more respect for water as a resource. This intervention helped me become much more aware of my water use. I was imagining it would become this race for me every day to see how quickly I could shower, eventually getting it down to ridiculously low times. However, the pressure of school has been pretty immense for me this quarter and I’ve been kind of depressed, which makes my showers much longer. Maybe I’ll return to this intervention another time and see how low I can get it. Still, now I have a much better idea of how much water I use while showering. Now I should calculate the flow rate of the shower head and see how much water I use by quantity.

Self intervention of your choice – Montana Tasker

interventor — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 02:52:36 +0000

For this assignment, I chose to delete all forms of social media on my phone. I had a hard time choosing what I wanted to do for my self intervention, but while I was thinking about it I realized that my phone consumes most of my free time. I decided to do this over thanksgiving break, not knowing how difficult it would be due to the fact that I had so much free time on my hands. At first, I would go on my phone to go open instagram or snapchat and then I would realize that I had deleted the apps – a good reminder of this project. Once a few days had gone by, I stopped thinking about social media as a whole. Never once did I feel like I was missing out. By the time thanksgiving rolled around, I was leaving my phone in my room all day and just enjoying time with family and friends. It was nice to get a break from being attached to a screen all day long, and I found it to be a lot easier than I thought it would be. I think that deleting social media helped me be more in touch with what was going on around me and pay more attention to the people I care about. I definitely would recommend for people to do this, it really clears ones mind and makes you focus on things bigger than social media.

Intervention of Choice- Kanika Chaudhary

interventor — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 18:59:05 +0000

I remember first hearing about the Amazon fire burning rapidly when I was visiting Dubai over the summer. Being so far away from the situation, I felt like I was in a bubble. The people around me were not panicking, the airport traffic was moving slow without much concern about the state of the planet. While I appeared to be calm on the outside, inside I was mad and anxious. What does this mean for our future? What can I do? I thought about everything I did that contributed to my carbon footprint. Flying on a plane was definitely one of them. However, I realized that I could not give that up, how was I supposed to get home or travel to other places in the future? I realized that the things that I could change was my diet and energy usage. So I promised to do anything I could to help on my end. I went vegan. And when people ask why, I always reply for the environment. It was not as difficult of a transition than I thought. I was already a vegetarian (and had been for most of my life) however maintaining it over the last three months was harder than I thought. It took a lot of discipline, especially on the tough days where all I wanted was to eat pizza and ice cream. Explaining to my parents my dietary restrictions was also a very tough transition, they believed that I would not get enough adequate nutrition. Ironically, I found myself eating more vegetables and home cooked meals. I think that looking back in the few months and reevaluating how I wanted to contribute to the world was a great motivation for keeping me on track. This unintentional self-intervention may not help save the amazon, but helps me consciously thinking about the planet and its state. I plan on continuing this intervention for as long as I can. Doing this small step makes me feel better (not completely happy) but in a better state than the alternative.

Intervention Of Choice–Austin Keller

interventor — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 21:15:01 +0000

For my final self-intervention, I chose to go vegetarian for a week. I chose this because I realize the environmental impact of a diet that contains meat, and how removing meat from your diet can help curb carbon emissions related to global warming. I also thought that it might be a move in the healthier direction for myself, because I eat too much meat and not enough veggies, so this intervention would almost force me to eat more vegetables.

This intervention turned out to be a lot harder than I was expecting. Not because it’s hard for me to change my consumption habits, but because it was during thanksgiving break. And I love thanksgiving food–Turkey, gravy, ham. However, I’m proud to say I was able to tough it out and stick to my goal and chose not to eat these foods during thanksgiving dinner. I did get weird looks from my family, mostly because I usually eat these foods (and because they spent a lot of time making them). After explaining to them my self-intervention, they seemed to understand for the most part. After thanksgiving I was tempted to submit and finally eat some meaty leftovers, but I finished the week without them.

This self-intervention taught me that changing your diet can be a challenging experience, but it’s not impossible. It also made me realize how much darn meat I eat. Do I think that I could fully commit to being a vegetarian? Maybe for a year or two if I really tried. But even if it doesn’t become my main diet, I think that at least trying to eat less meat would be a step in the right direction.

Intervention of Choice- Milena Triana

interventor — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 20:55:18 +0000

For this intervention, I had no idea what to choose. Then I realized that one of my roommates recently took a break from social media and I noticed she seemed to be a lot more relaxed. So I decided I was going to take a break from Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn which I now realized, it stresses me out, it’s pretty addicting. It has been 6 days since I have used these social media accounts. I feel better, I am not on my phone as much and I catch myself communicating with people more. I think I am communicating with people more because I am not seeing everything that they are constantly posting, so we tend to talk about more things. I have a lot more free time now, I recently started reading more. I think I get bored when I am around my friends because they are on their phones so I go outside and read my book. Another change I noticed is that I go to bed earlier and I sleep so much better. I used to be on my phone constantly before bed, scrolling and scrolling. Now I read a book before bed and I feel tired around 11 pm before I used to stay up well past midnight. It is definitely hard because everyone is constantly either on social media or talking about it. I think I will probably go back on it but I know now what amount is healthy because of the break I took. I think every now and then I will probably go “off the grid” just to take a second or a week to refresh and re focus.

Intervention of Choice – Rohan Pujara

interventor — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 08:00:03 +0000

For my final self-intervention, I wanted to not just focus on my personal goals to live healthier and be more productive, but also on adjusting my lifestyle to have less of a negative impact on our planet.

One of the lifestyle improvements I have been wanting to make for a long time is going to the gym every single night. So for this intervention, I created a weekly workout plan that involves going to the on campus recreation center every night. I followed this plan for three weeks and am glad to report that I am and will be continuing this for the foreseeable future. Another personal change I wanted to make is not having my phone with me while doing homework or studying, so that I can be more productive with my time and subsequently have more time to focus on my health. This worked great for me for two weeks, however I eventually realized that there are certain times when I absolutely need to have my phone on hand. Despite this, I plan on continuing to at least work without the distraction of my phone whenever possible. This allowed me to focus more on things like eating three meals a day, which is very important to getting enough nutrients on a regular basis.

When it comes to reducing my negative environmental impacts, I focused on driving less and eating less meat. I realized that the emissions of my gas-vehicle are significant and I often abuse the fact that I own a car by driving even for short distances and driving to school despite living under 20 minutes away by foot. Also, I know that the impact mass meat farming on the environment is alarmingly bad and I wanted to support that as little as possible. I made it a point to only drive for things that were more than a 20 minute walk away and to only walk to and from school. These changes were also beneficial for my health, as I became more active. I hope to minimize my unnecessary driving in the future as much as possible. In addition, I tried to incorporate as much plant-based food as I could into my diet to phase out things like beef and chicken. I hope to continue this by finding alternative sources of protein, as that is still very important for my body.

Intervention of Choice – Sarah Macias

interventor — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 23:58:00 +0000

It was difficult for me to come up with something good to do for the final intervention, because I already do some of the examples like I hardly drive my car and I’ve been a vegetarian for over 10 years and end up eating vegan a lot of the time. Also everything I was thinking of didn’t seem “big” enough and seemed a little selfish since the changes would benefit me and not so much the environment. In the end I decided to combine a few ideas. So for my final intervention, for a week I decided to walk home from school everyday, workout everyday (no matter how brief it would have to be), dance a little everyday, and not used any plastic baggies.

The walking, working out, and no baggies were all things I originally thought about when brainstorming for this final intervention but the dancing everyday for a week came about on its own. One morning I had a little extra time to get ready so I played some music and danced around. It gave me energy and I felt happier after so I thought that would be a perfect thing to add to my daily routine in order to better my life through this intervention.

Walking home from school everyday was nice. I always enjoy walking home for the exercise and fresh air, but it definitely was harder to make sure that I did it everyday. I have tried to walk home instead of taking the bus as much as possible before but sometimes I’d be too tired or it’d feel too cold. I was glad that I was able to stick to walking. I think the walking benefited myself and the environment because I was not taking part in the emissions produced by my car or the bus.

Working out everyday is something that I’ve wanted to do again for awhile but I haven’t been able to find the time to put myself first. For the most part, my workouts for the week were in my house but I still definitely enjoyed them. It felt good to get a little extra movement going to break up doing all the school work I’ve had lately. Also it was fun to use the new exercise bands I got. I’m glad I had to make some time for myself to get moving more.

Not using plastic baggies for a week wan’t very hard to actually do but it did take additional time and thought. Whenever I take snacks to campus for the day I just toss them in plastic baggies without much thought. Instead, I had to find the right tupperware to put everything in, including a sandwich which a little more difficult with the options I had to choose from. It wasn’t fun having my backpacked stuffed more than usually with the containers but in the end I think it was worth it to make that change. It isn’t too much to ask in order to reduce the amount of plastic waste I create.

Overall, I think the minor changes I came up with resulted in a positive intervention outcome. I enjoyed doing all of them and felt like I was living a better and happier life as well as doing a little bit to help improve the environment as well. Although I don’t think I’ll have much time these next few weeks to continue working out everyday and I don’t really want to walk half an hour in the rain, I will try to continue my intervention activities as much as possible, especially not using plastic baggies. I also want to keep up the random dancing because it never hurts to have a little extra burst of happiness in my life.