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"If you correct your mind, the rest of your life will fall into place."
The experience that translates everything is within the mind. The way our mind functions is the ultimate thing the determines the quality of our experience. When the brain works right, you work right. When the brain is troubled, you are much more likely to have trouble in your life.
Our behaviors can accelerate the aging process or decelerate it. You can start to improve your brain health within 2 months of changing to healthier habits and with a better brain, everything in your life is better.
All the things we want the most—calmness, compassion, patience, generosity, happiness. These aren’t factory settings. These are skills that can be trained—You can train your brain and learn how to regulate thoughts, manage emotions, and behave productively, regardless of whatever life may be throwing at you.
No matter what your goals are, having a healthy mind is the key to reaching your greatest potential. Correct your mind, and let the rest of your life fall into place.
It is how people navigate their inner world—their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk—that ultimately determines how successful they will become. The way we respond to these internal experiences drives our actions, careers, relationships, happiness, health—everything that matters in our lives.
Jim Kwik says in 10 Keys to Unlock Your Kwik Brain that, “Common sense isn’t common practice. Rate yourself 1-10. How well am I doing in this area? There’s no magic pill. There are magic processes. You have to do all of these things because that’s what falls within the focal point.”
Become a Jedi — Mind Training Matters
When things are going well, we feel happy. When things are going wrong, the happy feelings disappear. As long as our reasons for why we had a good day are external conditions, then we are not going to have that stable happiness we all want.
The mind translates the outer conditions into happiness and suffering. We can be in a place of paradise and be completely unhappy within. On the opposite end, there are people in very difficult circumstances that manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. The experience that translates everything is within the mind.
How do we create a peaceful, positive state of mind?
We can learn how to cultivate a peaceful, positive state of mind and bring that inner peace with us throughout the day to benefit ourselves and others. There are certain states of mind that are conducive for happiness and others that are adverse.
Anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping; they all leave us in a bad state after we experience it and also detrimental to other’s happiness. The more these thoughts invade the mind, the more we feel miserable or tormented. On the other end, an act of selfless generosity without anyone knowing about it, makes someone happy.
We can learn to train the mind by becoming aware of these thoughts and having antidotes for when negative thoughts appear.
Mind training is the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You can go from love to hate, but you cannot experience both at the same time. You can’t shake a hand and throw a punch. So there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being.
The brain can be trained. Mind training matters. This is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation, but your thoughts about it.
Pic Credit: Headspace
We all know it is important to take good care of our physical health. It impacts every other area of life and it’s not like you can just trade your body in for a new one.
The mind and body have a complex interrelationship. Exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress and even your posture—all influence each other. For example, poor sleep habits lead to a decrease in mental performance, more stress reactive and even lowers your willpower. This creates a negative feedback loop that impacts other areas of your life.
Create a positive feedback loop where the mind and body work together to achieve the best results possible. Keep your body healthy and you’ll be able to get the most from your mind. Keep your mind healthy, and you’ll be able to get the most from your body. Your physical experience is always going to color your emotional experience.
You have your brain primarily to control your body. Research proves that when you move and when you exercise, anything that is good for your heart, is going to be good for your brain. Getting the heart rate up causes the body to release endorphins, or the feel good hormones.
Exercise calms you down and also energizes you. It is one of the best ways to push blood, nutrients, and oxygen into the brain faster, which will help with repair and push waste out of the brain. If it involves a social or physical component, that’s even better. This helps your brain grow and build new neuron connections.
Exercise has been shown to help people learn more efficiently, better deal with stress and drastically reduce anxiety. It improves mood to the point of lifting people out of depression and it strengthens focus to the point that some ADHD patients throw away their medication
"If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed."
Eat Good Brain Food. What you eat matters, especially to your gray matter. A well-nourished body and brain is better able to withstand ongoing stress and recovery from illness, while also preventing the problems from developing in the first place. Nutrients are needed to fuel our brain. If we’re not getting the nutrients in through diet, then both mental & physical health will suffer.
Sleep is a top priority for good health. Skimping on sleep not only harms your long-term health, but restructures your brain in a way that’s crucial for how our memory works. While asleep, your brain gets rid of toxic waste, processes information and a good night sleep will have you waking up every morning with a new and improved brain ready to face the challenges ahead.
Studies compare sleep impairment to drunkenness and one study shows that after 4 days on 5 hours of sleep, you’re almost the equivalent of too drunk to drive. It impacts levels of productivity, creativity, patience, communication skills, and even your personality.
Lost sleep results in a less effective brain and less healthy body. A 2007 study conducted by the Military concluded the only way to recover from lost sleep is to sleep, so help your body and brain and learn how to get high-quality sleep.
Stress shrinks and rewires the brain affecting memory, decision-making, the emotional regulatory system. It is a feeling we all experience when we are challenged or overwhelmed. But more than just an emotion, stress is a hard-wired physical response that travels throughout your entire body.
Our hard-wired stress response is designed to give us the quick burst of heightened alertness and energy needed to perform our best. But stress isn’t all good. When activated too long or too often, stress can damage virtually every part of our body.
Your life will always be filled with stressful situations. But what matters to your brain and entire body is how you respond to that stress. If you can view those situations as challenges you can control and master, rather than threats that are insurmountable, you will perform better it the short-run and stay healthy in the long-run.
According to Sydney Youngerman-Cole, RN, BSN, RNC and Katy E. Magee, MA, “Many mental health problems begin when physical stress or emotional stress triggers chemical changes in your brain. The goal of treatment and prevention is to reduce stress and restore normal chemical processes in your brain.”
Coping skills are methods a person uses to deal with stressful situations. Obtaining and maintaining good coping skills takes practice, but utilizing these skills will become easier over time.
These actions offer a temporary relief, if any, from stress. Ignoring or covering up how you feel does not solve the problem and the next time the situation arises, you will still have no way of dealing with it.
"Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important."
Our lives will always be found to be related to our inner state. We are where we are in our lives because of our thoughts. The habits and actions required to accomplish whatever you want to accomplish, all starts with the right thoughts.
There is a reason why this message lies at the foundation of 99% of all self-development books ever published. With the right thoughts you can achieve financial freedom, advance in your career, establish a positive outlook on life, fulfilling relationships, and lasting happiness. Almost anything is possible with the right thoughts.
It’s not just our talent and abilities that bring us success — but whether we utilize a fixed or growth mindset. Those that believe that they ARE great or flawed have a fixed mindset. People that believe their greatness or flaws are a result of action have a growth mindset. People with a Growth Mindset achieve their optimal potential.
Your belief system is the invisible force behind your behavior. Many people have limited beliefs, which will constrain them in some way, and impact their quality of life. Become aware of how your beliefs affect your behavior, and cultivate a belief system that is both real and empowering. Your behavior and your habits will follow.
The distinguishing quality of the world’s happiest, and most fulfilled people is that they all seem to be aligned towards some primary focus of meaning in their life. People with a strong sense of purpose in life tend to fare better on several different measures of mental health, well-being, and even cognitive functioning.
Living a meaningful life takes work. It’s an ongoing process. Happiness comes and goes, says writer Emily Esfahani Smith, but having meaning in life—serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within you—gives you something to hold onto.
There will be around 80,000 hours in your career alone—make the right career, and life choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. In the words of Charles Bukowski “…Find what you love and let it kill you.”
A Harvard study shows that people who have 5 social ties have half the rate of cognitive decline as those who are isolated. People who are more socially connected to family, friends and community are happier, physically healthier, and live longer than those who are less connected.
People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find they are less happy, their health declines earlier in mid-life, their brain function declines sooner and they live shorter lives than the people who are not lonely.
Who you spend time with is who you become. Literally you have mirror neurons—we are always imitating people, their habits, their behaviors, their thought patterns, and everything, so that’s why they say you’re the average of the 5 people you spend time with.
Everyone has the ability to build mental strength, but most people don’t know how. Mentally strong people have healthy habits. They manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in ways that set them up for success in life.
Anti fragile basically means that something actually gets stronger or better the more it breaks or gets kicked around. These experiences can help you become a resilient person. Realize that “bang-ups and hang-ups” can and will happen. Anticipate them and you will not be shocked when things go wrong.
Life is difficult. One of the biggest truths we will ever have to face. I guarantee you, you will never have a flawless life. On the bright side, you may find your passion or travel the world. On the down side, you may lose a friend or your job. But once we truly understand and accept that life is difficult, then life is no longer difficult.
There is a stimulus which you can’t control and a response which you can control, but we treat the response like we have no control over it. It’s completely automatic for most people. Something bad happens to you, and you automatically get pissed off.
The reality is you don’t have to. You have complete control over your response. Doesn’t matter what type of stimulus you’re presented with. No one can ever take away the ability for you to choose your response in life. Everything can be taken away from you, but, one remaining thing, and that is the freedom to choose.
"The person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle, then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life."
Identify and Learn How to Deal With Negative Emotions
As humans, we are all prone to common hooks—things like self-doubt, shame, sadness, fear, or anger—that can too easily steer us in the wrong direction. There are two kinds of people that do not experience these painful emotions: psychopaths and the dead. Experiencing negative emotions is a good sign, it means you are alive and not on the Michael Myers spectrum.
Negative emotions like loneliness, failure, rejection, rumination, envy or guilt distorts our perceptions and thinking. We all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that get triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.
Emotionally agile people are not immune to stresses and setbacks. The key difference is that they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth.
Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it’s about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward.
"Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life. They're big, flashing signs that something needs to change."
Our Thoughts Are Things. Eliminate Negative Self-Talk.
Killing ANTS (killing automatic negative thoughts.) Fasting for your thoughts. You are literally rewiring your brain to get more of those negative thoughts when you constantly are thinking about negative things. All behaviors are belief driven. So you’re wiring your brains, rehearsing them.
Meditation and mindfulness is just a form of exercise for the brain. It’s a way to not get jerked around by the thoughts in your head. It’s a way to gain control over the worry or endless wanting we allow into our lives, and has shown to change the structure of the brain, improving concentration, decision making, compassion and life satisfaction.
Practicing it won’t make you lose your edge, it will make you sharper and less prone to give in to the distracting and useless thoughts. You’ll have the ability to turn your problem solving mind on when you want it, and turn it off when you just want to relax.
There are various types of meditation but they mostly have one thing in common; they are improving your abilities of awareness and attention. It offers the opportunity to step back, get a different perspective and see that things aren’t always how they appear. We can’t change everything that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it.
Meditation is a great way to deprogram this instant gratification oriented brain. Studies show that regular practice has many health and psychological benefits, including reducing stress and depression, restoring emotional balance and maximizing the experience of living life.
"More than 80% of the world-class performers I've interviewed have some form of meditation or mindfulness practice....it is a meta-skill that improves everything else."
New Learnings & Growth
Understand neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. Neurogenesis means you can create new brain cells until the day you die. Neuroplasticity is saying you can create new connections. The way to improve neurogenesis and neuroplasticity is novelty and nutrition.
Researchers say that novelty and challenge, or growth, is a key element to happiness. Trying a new activity for the first time, or going to a new place, meeting someone new, learning something new, fix something, or helping someone.
Having that creativity in your brain and unlocking those new neurons actually can help your brain be healthier and in turn make you a happier person. So whenever you get down or sad, one of the best things you can do is learn something new.
Studies show that any kind of learning that is mind engaging and interactive is fantastic for you. This could be anything from learning a new language, instrument, chess, video games—whatever you find interesting—and the best part is, you don’t have to actually be good at it.
Having a Positive Outlook and Optimism Matters
Having a positive outlook attitude will impact both the mind and body. You will age better, live a longer, healthier life, and a study actually showed those with an optimistic approach to life actually had a neuro protective effect in their brain that was almost like a shield to Alzheimers.
Learned Optimism is basically the idea that you can learn to be optimistic, positive, and happy. You can cultivate these things. Optimists approach problems from a position of empowerment. Some see overcoming adversity as a challenge, one that they will gladly attempt to conquer.
Maintain A Clean Environment
Cleaner the area, and you’ll have clarity of thoughts. Clean air, clean water—there are a lot of pollutants that’s not good for your cognition.
Something like a crowded closet, overflowing inbox or messy room is trivial. Outer order contributes to inner calm more than it should. Theres something about getting control over the stuff of life that makes you feel more in control of your life. If this is an illusion, it’s a healthy illusion.
Practice Gratitude and Be Grateful
Neuroplasticity shows us that when we dwell on the negative, we reinforce those negative brain cell connections, making ourselves more negative. A consistent gratitude exercise works to physically remap the connections among our brain cells to literally reform the subconscious mind.
If you can wake up and be grateful about something, you’re automatically going to be happier. Start your day with positivity, and you’re going to be forcing your brain to think of ways to be happier.
On the other hand, if you wake up with negative thoughts, you’re obviously not even happy at the start of the day, so how are you going to get happier throughout the day? Same can be said before you fall asleep.
Doing a daily gratitude exercise will make you happier, more optimistic, more self-disciplined, more able to achieve your goals, more successful, and even physically healthier. Gratitude frees us from emotional pain.
*Don’t* Expect Gratitude From Other People
It’s human nature for people to forget gratitude. Expecting people to appreciate you 100% of the time will lead you to disappointment and resentment. Gratitude can be taught to people when they’re children, however not everyone is taught to appreciate others. If you give for the inner joy of giving and expect no gratitude in return, you will live a healthier and happier life.
"I am going to meet people today, who talk too much, people who are egotistical, selfish and ungrateful. But I won’t be surprised or disturbed, for I couldn’t imagine a world without such people."
Enjoy the Moment & Be Present
As human beings we have a unique ability to stray our minds away from the present. An ability to focus our attention on something other than the present allows us to learn, plan and reason in unimaginable ways. We can’t change the physical reality in front of us, but we can go anywhere in our minds.
When our minds wander, we are often thinking about unpleasant things — our worries, anxiety, or regrets. Even when people are thinking about something neutral or positive, they are still less happy than when they are not mind wandering at all.
Your past was the present and the future becomes a present, so the present is the only moment in which you can live your life. Make the most of it. Stop thinking over the past and worrying about the future. This doesn’t mean not to learn from your mistakes or plan for the future, but remember to be fully conscious each day.
When each day is the same as the next it is because people fail to recognize the good things that happen in their lives everyday. You never really enjoy the small, happy moments that we have in the present. These moments are supposed to be lived in the present and these are the real treasures in our life.
The Body Shapes the Mind
You can affect your mood and regulate your emotions and happiness by using certain body positions and movements. You can enhance your emotions by doing movements that are associated with specific emotions. You can make yourself happier just by incorporating ‘happy’ movements and avoiding postures and movements that are associated with negative feelings.
The body is always sending signals to the brain about its current condition. Whenever we are in danger, our brain signals the drive to act, to do something to preserve our life.
These signals are presented in the brain in the form of chemical and electrical signals or are our unconscious emotions, which are then translated into conscious feelings.
The feedback that comes from your body to your brain can also shape feelings. Think about when someone tells you to take a deep breath and relax. It’s because the body sends a signal to the brain that breathing is slow and deep which is the breathing pattern associated with being relaxed.
Same goes with movements, certain muscle activation patterns and joint configurations are associated in the brain and enhance the feelings and emotions that are associated with them. This is how our posture and movements can affect our feelings.
Studies show that even two minutes of standing or sitting in a closed posture, which is associated with helplessness or submissiveness, creates not only a feeling of powerless, but also increase levels of the stress hormone, cortisol. Sometimes even watching, or imagining these movements can have negative effects.
You can use movements associated with happiness to increase happiness. (light walking, expanding the body in horizontal and vertical directions/stretching; upward movements like jumping or raising your arms) If you want to be happier, use some happy movements!
"Your body shapes your mind. Your mind shapes your behavior. And your behavior shapes your future."
Understand the Power of Breathe
The way you breathe can play a critical role in improving health, and performance. There is evidence that simply taking air into the mouth, instead of the nose can result in reduced IQ and chronic mouth breathing can lead to cavities, gum disease, lowered immune function, digestive disturbances, poor sleep quality, crooked teeth, and even poorly developed facial structure.
"Mouth-breathing means difficult breathing, and this, in turn, means deficient oxygenation of the tissues, with a resultant lowering of vital activities generally and of the activity of the brain in particular."
Most emotional states are determined by feedback between the brain and the body: your physiology influences emotion. We can turn anything into a source of stress. These sources cause your body to express the physiology of stress which affects your emotional state, which affects your thoughts, which affects your behavior.
At the root of behavior is physiology. If you want to improve your behavior, you need to change how you think, and if you’re in a negative emotional state it’s quite hard to change your thoughts.
If you want to control your behavior, one thing you can do is invest a couple minutes in to controlling your breathing and changing your physiology. When breathing like this, you’re simply destressing yourself and creating the physiology of calmness
When you’re under pressure, your heart rate naturally elevates. This impairs your ability to think clearly and activates your fight-or-flight response. If you slow your breathing down, you will get enough air into the diaphragm to trigger a relaxation response, steady your heart rate and remain mentally sharp.
Create Your Happiness Quadrant
People live secure in the knowledge that the activities that bring them the most enjoyment in the moment will also bring a fulfilling future. One of the paths to a happier and more fulfilled life is to increase the amount of time spent in this Happiness Quadrant.
Write down activities that provide both present benefit (fun to do) and also future benefits (advance you in some way or are important). Keep the list open, and add new activities to the list whenever you think of something new or experience something different that is both fun and constructive.
Once you identify activities that belong in your happiness quadrant, commit to doing them just a little bit more than you did before. As long as you consistently introduce these activities into your life, even if you only engage in them for a short period of time, your happiness levels will increase markedly.
Partner Up With Your Doctor
A good doctor is prevention oriented, not because they’re nice or familiar. You want someone that understands prevention, nutrition, exercise and the interaction between things like supplements and diet.
Limit the Internet/Social Media
Internet addiction is a real phenomenon. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for making you want to do things and is the reason drugs can be so addictive. Drugs cause a huge surge in dopamine and when someone becomes overexposed to dopamine, the dopamine receptors downregulate, meaning more and more dopamine is necessary to get the same amount of motivation.
Being on social media, clicking links is always releasing tiny bits of dopamine, similar to smoking a cigarette. This will desensitize the dopamine receptors and it will be harder to get motivated by activities that aren’t instantly satisfying.
Protect Your Brain
Brain Protection traumatic injuries, concussions etc. The NFL has brought the severity of concussions to new levels. Electromagnetic fields as well. People don’t realize that smart devices and electricity constantly stimulating the brain could influence it.
Avoiding toxic substances that could unknowingly be in your everyday life like toothpaste, shampoos, soap, cleaning products etc.
Everything changes. It’s the fundamental law of the universe. Life is in a constant state of flux, so we must adapt. The quicker we adapt to change, the more satisfied we’ll be.
Most people are fearful of change, both personal and professional, because they don’t have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, what matters most is your attitude. Anticipate, acknowledge, and accept change and it will have a positive impact on your job, your relationships, and every aspect of your life.
Dig into the Mental Fitness Sources to get a better understanding of these core concepts, set goals, polish off your Mind System, and learn about the different tools, tricks, and strategies you can apply to your daily life.