3 Ways To Hack Your Brain’s Performance
How you exercise, do things, and connect with people all affect your performance over the long term so it's up to you to choose to tweak your ways if you want to achieve sustainably better results
This morning I woke to the pitter-patter of the rain on my open window.
I was outstretched on the bed and with my eyes closed, I thought about the water outside.
Knowing that the window was open I thought how lucky I was to have the window only slightly opened throughout the night so the room didn't get too wet. But then I thought again of how fortunate I was to wake to the noise of the rain in the first place.
Then I started thinking of the rain in a whole new way.
Immediately in my mind, the word ‘rain’ vanished as a negative thing for me as I turned it into the word ‘refreshing’ and that made me feel instantly uplifted.
Then I started to reflect on how the rain refreshed the new light of the morning from the darkness of the night before.
I felt it was as good enough a thought to have as I momentarily lay on the pillow and peeped outside to see the leaves of the trees being soaked by the falling water. Yet being drenched was not a bad thing at that moment because I likened it with the cleaning of sorts and a renewal of old with the new.
In that way, I was concentrated on the positives as I started my day.
Tossing things around in your mind is not the only way to make the negative into a more hopeful transition though. As there are other techniques as well.
So here are 3 other ways to hack your brain into performing at the highest level:
1. Avoiding too much long-distance running such as partaking in ultra marathons
Although the modern world has an obesity epidemic going on and exercise and a good diet are all the rage for anyone who wants to listen, you have to be careful in what you do and how you do it.
A German study in the past few years discovered that by pushing yourself through an excessive long-distance race you can shrink your brain by up to 6% in size. Although they couldn’t figure out why that was they did also find that it may take up to 6 months for the participants in the study’s brains to return to their original size.
Of course, that’s not to say that running is not good for your brain because it is.
But running long distances too often is not.
There is a theory out there that by doing excessive amounts of exercise that the brain is being robbed of nourishment and is suffering too much fatigue.
So the question arises then:
How far is excessive running?
Well in that particular study it found that the runners were covering a distance of 2,796 miles in just over two months. And although they completed this study, the same researchers could not claim that doing one long-distance race would produce the same results for all brains.
Yet it does begin to explain how a person who gets too hung up on excessive exercise must be careful and show that moderation and intelligence are required even when things such as running are known to be good for you.
2. Accept that your brain cannot multitask.
Because your brain can only do one thing at a time so it’s impossible to say that it can do multiple things well always. As it is so focused on doing one thing well, productively, and rapidly that it doesn’t have room to switch its concentration onto another task. Yet many people still believe they can do various things at the same time.
When in reality their brain is bouncing from one established focus back to another.
In doing so it can lose its path of concentration and that’s where errors are made. Think of a driver on the phone and although the car is moving along quite smoothly for the most part and the phone conversation is going well within a moment once something changes on the road the driver has to adjust the steering or brake quickly and they disrupt the conversation on the phone by telling the other person what has happened or that they nearly had a mishap. Or if you’ve ever tried to count coins and have another person yell out a series of numbers you’ll know how off-putting that can be!
Either way, distractions are happening in your brain all of the time and so your productivity levels will not maximize by doing multiple things at the same time.
3. Connect with people and not with technology.
Although many people are now digital nomads and have been born into a digital revolution it doesn’t mean they can’t do things the old-fashioned way. Because before computers, telegrams, letters, and telephones came along face to face conversation was the only way to connect with someone.
And the world still turned as a result.
Even though technology does allow us to communicate with people all around the world instantly in doing so we are avoiding communicating with people that are in our lives at present. Because we can only be in one place at one time and truly give one person our full attention at once, therefore, we need to balance the amount of time we use technology to communicate with people with the time we spend in front of someone.
And by doing so we’ll feel happier and more fulfilled as a result of this.
When this happens you’ll be more productive in the long run and maybe then you may reward yourself by staying in bed a little longer in the morning to marvel at how you see things differently than before.
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