Cause and effect

Cause and effect

I punch you you punch me back. It looks like my first punch caused you to punch me back. This is cause and effect in action. It can be simple or it can be a complicated cascade of events that lead to chaos theory – a butterfly flaps its wings on the other side of the world and sets off a stream of events that ripple through out the world.

Some of these patterns are easy to see immediately and to work with them is obvious; if I don’t want you to punch me again I should refrain from punching you at the outset.

Others are less obvious.

Look at all the stuff written about obesity it’s an industry in itself and we could argue for weeks about causes and effects about who or what is responsible.

At a core cause and effect level, we get fatter if we eat more calories than we burn. But other factors, such as hormones, genes, diets, exercise regimens make the Cause-and-Effect pattern creating obesity less clear than many of us would like.

Everything from comfort eating, stress relief eating, less muscle, less exercise, and poor nutritional choices all combine to reduce muscle, increase fat and make it harder for us to maintain an ideal weight. These patterns and alternative or contributory elements can confuse us and take us away from the central cause and effect.

For most people –

Eating more calories than we burn will create a growth in fat.

Unless you have other factors involved we can use this basic cause and effect to change our body weight up or down.

Getting lost in the patterns is about concentrating on the wrong things.

We need to know how to use the patterns if we are going to use cause and effect to get better results.

This is about understanding enough about the cause and effect patterns that surround us to be able to use them to get ‘more of what we want more of or less of what we want less of’.

Cause and Effect is a key part of your model of the world.

Your Model of the World is your idea of how you think things work. It’s the basis on which you choose your actions, how you set the balls running, how you nudge things along, how you choose what to do and when to have the life you want. If there’s a problem with your understanding of cause and effect it messes with everything you do.

For this reason we think its worth having focussed ‘me time’ every now and again to study the patterns you experience and find ways to use them to your benefit.

Recommended Short stories:

• Haamid’s House
• Patricia