The Adventure of Fundraising, Emodiversity and TMS
Happy Friday!
As you probably know, I work as copywriter for a charity - The Bike Project. Their aim is simple: to get refugees cycling by fixing up old bikes and giving them away. It's an incredibly efficient way of helping out a marginalised and hard-up segment of our society. Over 20,000 bikes are abandoned every year in London alone - plenty to give a few away to refugees scraping by on £36 a week.
As well as bikes, The Bike Project (TBP) need cash to pay for mechanics, electricity, rent and spare parts (including mercenaries like me). I recently wrote a new page for their website inviting cyclists to pledge their charity rides and fundraise for us. Fundraising always brings up that super awkward question:
Why would *I* donate money to celebrate *you* doing something fun that you wanted to do anyway? Selfish *****.
So I was grateful to read a blog post by professional adventurer Bex Band about why she pretty much always pairs her adventures with charity fundraising:
I can imagine the groans from my friends and family. Perhaps even a few eye rolls; There she is again, expecting us to put our hands deep in our pockets. Each time I send out a message asking for charity sponsorship in support of my next adventure, I know that I will get less than the time before. That I will need to start thinking outside the box to raise the money in other ways. That it will stress me out and frustrate me.
Still, I continue to do it.
Fundraising is not an easy thing. But adventuring isn’t either. In fact, it’s because it’s hard that we take on challenges it in the first place. We know the benefits will outweigh the struggles.
That awkwardness you feel when you ask people to give on your behalf? That's the challenge, that's why you're doing this ride, that's why you need to fundraise. If you believe in your cause, you can easily 10x the impact of your challenge by getting other people involved. It's hard. It's meant to be hard. Now get over it and get out there.
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THREE VIDEOS THIS WEEK
1. How to light a fire without matches or a lighter. 45-second video showing you how, from Alastair Humphreys and Nick Weston.
2. 40 hours of relaxing sights and sounds from Planet Earth II. I mean this is outrageous. This is a link to Mountains, but there's also Grasslands, Islands, Deserts and Jungles. That's 40 hours of beauty inside your laptop - one for every hour you're at work.
3. For those of you with less time, here's three minutes of footage from Italy of one tree filmed over the course of one year. If you like badgers, bears and boars, you'll love this.
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FOILED
Has finished! :(
On the up side, what this means is you can binge listen to all the eps in one go! But be quick - the first will go offline on Sunday.
Episode 1: Everything's Kings (only 3 days left to listen!)
Episode 2: Everything's Baguettes (10 days left)
Episode 3: Everything's Glitter (17 days left)
Episode 4: Everything's Games (24 days left)
If you enjoy the series it would mean the absolute world to us if you would share it - on Twitter (#foiled) or Facebook or wherever. Kind of hate to ask that, but it really helps.
THANK YOU for listening - it's been an honour. Thank you for supporting, thank you for sharing, thank you. We hope to return...!
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SOUNDTRACK TO WRITING THIS EMAIL
It could only be Test Match Special
As a bonus: future Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn sending a 60th birthday message to TMS
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SCIENCE OF THE WEEK
Ong, Anthony D., et al. “Emodiversity and Biomarkers of Inflammation.” Emotion, 2017.
"Using diary data from 175 adults aged 40 to 65 who provided end-of-day reports of their positive and negative emotions over 30 days, we found that greater diversity in day-to-day positive emotions was associated with lower circulating levels of inflammation... No significant associations were observed between global or negative emodiversity and inflammation."
And low levels of inflammation are hella good.
"heightened systemic inflammation has been shown to contribute to poor health (e.g., atherosclerosis, Type II diabetes, rheumatoid disease, osteoporosis) and to elicit a number of pathogenic processes (e.g., oxidative stress, insulin resistance, plaque rupture, endothelial pathology) that play a major role in the risk of premature mortality"
So let's all feel loads of different positive emotions, yeah?
TRY THIS AT HOME
At bedtime every day for a month, rate the extent to which you experienced the following positive emotions on a scale of 1 (very slightly or not at all) to 5 (extremely):
enthusiastic
interested
determined
excited
amused
inspired
alert
active
strong
proud
attentive
happy
relaxed
cheerful
at ease
calm
You're looking for diversity of positive emotion, not necessarily intensity of any one particular emotion or even total positive emotion.
I'll share my results in a month - let me know how you get on!
p.s. And remember this is more fun than science - unless you want to take an inflammation blood test.
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Have a good weekend. I'll be mostly writing copy for the sparkly new Bike Project website and enjoying my home-made maize tortillas.
May you have many positive emotions,
- dc
p.s. Life To The Lees: Cycling Around Britain is still merrily asale.
p.p.s. Oh, nice! You can forward this email to a friend!
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