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Howdy !
It's me Scarlett !
This week we have 4 topics.
◈ Well-being : What did you want to be when you grew up?
◈ Education : What Makes an ‘Extreme Learner’?
◈ Leadership : This is what passionate people do differently
◈ Careers : 12 signs you have a work spouse, even if doesn't feel like it
◈ Global Health and Healthcare : 5 rituals that will help your brain stay young
Hope you enjoy the topics.
With luv
Scarlett
What did you want to be when you grew up?
10/14/2015 10:54 am ET | Updated Oct 15, 2015
Jodi Weiss / Career Strategist | Educator | Author | Founder and CEO of EverythingSmart
For the past decade, I’ve interacted with Millennials and Generation Z students in a college classroom setting, which means that twice a week I get to hear their gripes, their joys, what they care about, and I learn quickly the fastest route to boring them: preaching. Like everyone else, college kids do not want to hear me or anyone else preach to them about what they need to be doing, should be doing, or must do. They want to carve their routes and live out their journeys. But so many of them don’t know what they want to do - what major to choose? What career to pursue? What topic to write their papers on? More importantly, they wonder why any of it really matters.
One of the best books that I have read on how our young adults should be approaching their 20’s is Dr. Meg Jay’s The Defining Decade. I have taken to sharing her TED talk “Why 30 Is Not the New 20” (http://on.ted.com/Jay ) with my students, too. Basically, Dr. Meg Jay explains why one’s 20’s are a vital time in a young adult’s life to actively, if not aggressively, discover and pursue all that one seeks in terms of career, family, friends, and relationships. She asserts that our brains rewire themselves in our 20’s, preparing us for adulthood; a reminder that one’s 20’s are a perfect and critical time to set the agenda for one’s life.
The One Life
From the time we are in elementary school, people ask us what we want to be when we grow up. I recently asked my friend’s eight-year old the question and she said, “I’m just a kid; how could I know what I want to be when I’m an adult?” Maybe the questions should be: what do you love to do? What means something to you? What makes you feel happy? What do you care about regardless of any rewards? Maybe if we can implant that train of thought early on, what someone wants to do when they grow up will be less about picking and choosing and more about following one’s innate path.
I believe in the one life - that is, that who you are is imbedded in all you do, whether you are at work, or at home, running a race, or driving a car. The same passion and intensity that you give to the things outside of work are what you need to invest in your career, and if that’s not the case, you need to ask yourself why? Are you in the wrong career? The wrong life? Have you gone on autopilot?
What You Seek
I’m a believer that you first need to define where you wish to arrive before you start your engine to get there. How do you want to spend your days? Do you want to have time to travel? To work remote? To be on a plane throughout the week? Do you want to sit in an office or be outdoors? How do you define success? And how important is success to you? What will you do if you fail? How will you prepare yourself for hardship? Do you like to work 8 hour days or 12 hour days? What is the one activity in your life that if you have to give up more than two days in a row, you would feel miserable about? Is what you want to do tied to your parents/family’s expectations, or is it your personal ambition?
Easy Access: The Pros & The Cons
From my experience, the Millennials and Generation Z students I’ve met in my classroom are a mixed bag of passion, ideas, ennui, and a faint belief that the world of work as older generations may define it, is bullshit. Maybe they’re right. But maybe not. Students of today’s generation have grown up in a world of easy access - cell phones, text messages, email on the go, and the internet to find anything and everything that they seek instantaneously. I am always grateful that I encountered the internet and email and all of our modern day technology when I was already in graduate school. I’m grateful that when I was in college and the start of my graduate career, I still had to visit the library and dig in the card catalogues to find the resources I needed to write a research paper. Why? I loved the synergy I felt when I found the research I needed to prove my case and thus write a stellar paper.
Nowadays, a few clicks, and students find the articles they need. Sure, that’s great and quick and convenient, but I believe that there was something in the hunt - a persistence, a patience, a focus, that was learned. An ability to redefine and re-evaluate ones ideas and routes. And for me, there was something in the trenches of libraries that was magical in the same way it was magical that we made our way to appointments without GPS to guide us to locations - there was a sense of accomplishment, of focus, strategy. Convenience is convenient, but it is often a mindless act, too.
On that end, I still savor the good old days when I had to wait to get to a movie theater to watch a movie or wait until a movie came out on a VHS cassette to watch it at home. Maybe I am old fashioned, or maybe I like the pause that waiting brought us. The self- reflection; the time to re-evaluate. The floating time that occurred when I wrote a letter, tossed it in the mail, and it made its way to my recipient. To me, that was the time zone of possibility and wonder.
The Evolving Journey
What does anyone want to be when they grow up? Money has its allure, but financial reward only takes one so far in life. A career devoted to helping others is amazing, but not if you never get to help yourself or if you don’t have time to help the people closest to you in your life, such as aging parents or children. If your career is immersed in others, then you need to ask yourself if you are ignoring your own life. Titles and corner offices are great, too, but what does any of that mean in the long- term picture of your life? Does it provide freedom or make you more of a slave to your career?
What do you want to do when you grow up is perhaps one of the most complex questions. What you don’t want to do, is waste your life. Wake up in your later years to realize the things you cared about most were not what you devoted your life to. That you missed your opportunity. That you took short cuts and lived your life taking the easy way versus the way that was right and honest and true for you. Because sometimes it is too late. Sometimes you miss your moment. I hear again and again from folks that when you are 20 you think you have forever, but somewhere along the way, forever diminishes. What you want to be when you grow up is something that only you know, and it’s something that only you can take the time to figure out. It’s something that may evolve throughout your life, but it’s likely that the passion and motivation that leads you in one direction, will come along for all of your journeys and pursuits throughout your life.
Article source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jodi-weiss/what-do-you-want-to-be-wh_4_b_8280212.html
<Questions>
Q1. Did you become what you wanted to be when you grew up? If not, why not?
Q2. What do you want to be after 30 years later?
Q3. What is your definition of being happy? Are you happy now?
Q4. What is your definition of success? Are you living a successful life now?
What Makes an ‘Extreme Learner’?
By Linda Flanagan/ JULY 8, 2014
When Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski was dissecting a sheep’s heart during an eighth-grade science class, she had an epiphany that changed her life. “That heart told the story of anatomy and physiology!” she said.
Realizing that science is best communicated through stories, Cueva-Dabkoski, now just 19 years old, went on to explore beetles in China. She’s now at Johns Hopkins University, and continues to do research during breaks.
Cueva-Dabkoski is considered an “Extreme Learner,” a designation applied to just 12 individuals by the Institute for the Future, for her radical and gutsy approach to learning. Extreme Learners are self-directed, wide-ranging in their interests, comfortable with technology, and adept at building communities around their interests.
“Extreme learners aren’t so different from everybody else,” said Milton Chen, a fellow at the Institute for the Future and advocate for education reform. “We picked people who are extreme in their passion for learning.” They are also willing to go their own way when traditional educational institutions interfere with their pursuits.
Thomas Hunt, for example, another designated “extreme learner,” dropped out of high school when he was 14 to work on cancer research. Always interested in science, he found high school stultifying and needlessly time-consuming. Kids of varied interests were thrown together and taught in “the cookie-cutter method,” he said. After he left, Hunt found like-minded learners when he became one of 20 Thiel Fellows, formerly known as “20 Under 20,” which paid him $100,000 to drop out of school for two years and pursue his studies. “For some kids who have a vision of what they’re interested in, high school is not for them,” he said.
“I’ve recognized that this is what makes me different: I may not know it, but I don’t see it has a barrier.”
This was also true for Marc Roth, another extreme learner who dropped out of high school three times and never finished his community college education. (He earned his high school equivalency degree in three weeks.) Today, Roth is the founder of the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training program that teaches homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills. Roth is 40, and his improbable path to the Learning Shelter included delivering pizzas, programming and consulting in IT, sailing the seas on a cruise ship, and starting his own business. When that business collapsed, and Roth’s net worth fell from $21 million to nothing, he moved to San Francisco and lived in his car. When his car was broken into, Roth decamped to a homeless shelter for five months.
Roth reversed his fortune — and earned his bona fides as an Extreme Learner — when he was broke and living in the shelter. He heard others talking about a nearby TechShop, and decided to scrape up the $59 membership fee and give it a try. TechShops are stand-alone buildings with staffs and million-dollar tools that train high-tech skills to anyone interested and able to afford the modest fee; set up with laser cutters and plastics labs, among other tools, they are meant to promote creativity and skill-development. Roth devoured the learning opportunities at the TechShop in San Francisco, starting with sewing and vinyl cutting, and within two months moved from pupil to teacher. “When I only had pennies to my name, I turned everything I had into education instead of comforts or niceties,” he said.
INSATIABLE NEED FOR LEARNING
It’s the hunger for learning rather than raw intellect that distinguishes Extreme Learners from the gifted. Intensely motivated and harboring a breadth of interests, they also consider ignorance a temporary and reparable condition.
Lenore Edman, for example, who along with her husband designs and produces robotic kits for their company Evil Mad Scientist, is motivated by what she doesn’t know. “I’ve recognized that this is what makes me different: I may not know it, but I don’t see it has a barrier,” she said, reflecting the premise behind the growth mindset disposition. “The most extreme thing is not being afraid to learn new things,” she added.
In her work, Edman erases boundaries between math and food, electricity and paper crafts. Recently, she sewed what she called a “missile command skirt,” styled after a vintage video game, and built a “circuitry snack” out of candy. “It was a fun project because we got to eat the candy at the end,” she said. She’s most interested in what happens when different fields intersect, and looks for ways to take the tools of one field and apply them to another.
What’s the lesson here for schools? In short, standardization, repetition, and rigidity are deadly for the curious. “Nothing bores me more than seeing a list of redundant facts I have to memorize,” Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski said. Biology class dragged for Thomas Hunt, but the school turned him down when he tried to replace a few classes with work in a lab outside school. “High school is a big day care system,” Roth said.
But some schools have figured out how to engage their inquisitive students. Mollie Cueva-Dabkoski attended Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, an arts-based school that rewarded exploration and free choice. “We were given a ridiculous amount of time to read and explore,” she said, which allowed her to discover her genuine interests. The school also encouraged creativity through arts, which Cueva-Dabkoski credits with stimulating her enthusiasm for the Brazilian arts. Outside school, she joined an Afro-Brazilian dance troupe and taught dance to kids in Oakland.
“Of all the places in school, in art kids can create exactly what they want,” she said. And in a conflict between depth and breadth of learning, the school rewarded depth. Rather than memorize the dates and key figures in World War II, for example, students were encouraged to go deep on one particular person or event. Time, freedom, and space to make art crystalized for Cueva-Dabkoski, who is scurrying to publish her extracurricular research on beetles before the summer ends and Johns Hopkins beckons.
“If you put the pieces together, you see a movement,” Chen said. Along with MakerLabs, Maker Faires, and TechShops, all of which foster independent learning and creativity, Extreme Learners have indulged their intellectual passions in their own time and on their own terms. Formal educational institutions have little to do with it.
“The main takeaway for teachers is, give students more flexibility and choice over what they’re working on,” Milton Chen said. “Give kids the tools to identify their interests and gather information. And help them find like-minded people to work with.”
Article source : http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/07/08/what-makes-an-extreme-learner/
<Questions>
Q1. What is the extreme learner?
Q2. According to an article, Extreme Learners are self-directed, wide-ranging in their interests, comfortable with technology, and adept at building communities around their interests. In this perspective, are you an extreme leaner?
Q3. Extreme learners have a tendency to be intensely motivated and harboring a breadth of interests, they also consider ignorance a temporary and reparable condition. Assuming that you are an extreme leaner by this definition, do you have any area you want to challenge or expand your knowledge?
Q4. What is the pursuit of traditional educational institution? Why do we need those education systems?
Q5. What is the merits and demerits of the traditional education system?
Q6. Article said that standardization, repetition, and rigidity of traditional school system are deadly for the curious. Do you agree with this sentence?
Q7. From this article, Roth founded the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training program that teaches homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills. They teach delivering pizzas, programming and consulting in IT, sailing the seas on a cruise ship, and starting his own business. If learning shelter is opened in your region, which subject would you like to take?
Q8. One day, you feel like to take some lessons related to newly developed conceptual field. However, you can not find anywhere you can take lessons. Then how do you deal with those situations? Have you ever experienced those situations?
This is what passionate people do differently
Written by Travis Bradberry/ President, TalentSmart
Published Friday 29 July 2016
Do you have enough passion in your life? Passion is the difference between playing the piano and being a pianist; it’s who you are, not just what you do. Passion makes you leap out of bed in the morning, eager to start your day.
Dr. Robert Vallerand at the University of Quebec has studied passion more than anyone, and he asserts that passion is self-defining. According to Vallerand, “Passion is a strong inclination towards a self-defining activity that people love, that they consider important, and in which they devote significant amounts of time and energy.”
“Passion is the genesis of genius.” – Galileo
It’s important to note that passion doesn’t require expertise—although there is a correlation, it’s not a given. Vallerand and two other researchers studied 187 musicians and found that those who focused on perfecting their performance—what Vallerand calls “mastery”—developed a higher level of expertise than those who focused on merely being better than other musicians. If passion defines you, it makes sense that your personal best will be about you and no one else.
So what does passion look and feel like? A great way to understand passion is to consider what makes passionate people different from everybody else.
Passionate people are obsessed.
Put simply, passionate people are obsessed with their muse, and I don’t mean that in an unhealthy OCD sort of way. I’m talking about a positive, healthy obsession, the kind that inspired the quote, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” No matter what else is going on, their thoughts keep returning to their passion. Not because they feel burdened and pressured by it, but because they’re just so dang excited about it. They’re obsessed with their muse because it inspires them and makes them happy.
They don’t waste time.
You won’t find passionate people wandering around a park all afternoon playing Pokemon Go. They don’t have time to be bothered with things that don’t matter or things that just kill time. They devote every minute available to their passion, and it’s not a sacrifice, because there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing.
They’re optimistic.
Passionate people are always focused on what can be rather than what is. They’re always chasing their next goal with the unwavering belief that they’ll achieve it. You know how it feels when you’re looking forward to a really special event? Passionate people feel like that every day.
They’re early risers.
Passionate people are far too eager to dive into their days to sleep in. It’s not that they don’t like to sleep; they’d just much rather be pursuing their passion. When the rooster crows, their minds are flooded with ideas and excitement for the day ahead.
They’re willing to take big risks.
How much you want something is reflected in how much you’re willing to risk. Nobody is going to lay it all on the line for something they’re only mildly interested in. Passionate people, on the other hand, are willing to risk it all.
They only have one speed—full tilt.
Passionate people don’t do anything half-heartedly. If they’re going, they’re going full tilt until they cross the finish line or crash. If they’re relaxed and still, they’re relaxed and still. There’s no in between.
They talk about their passions all the time.
Again, we’re talking about people whose passions are inseparable from who they are, and you couldn’t form much of a relationship with them if they couldn’t be real about who they are, right? It’s not that they don’t understand that you don’t share their obsession; they just can’t help themselves. If they acted differently, they’d be playing a role rather than being authentic.
They’re highly excitable.
You know those people who probably wouldn’t get excited if an alien spaceship landed in their front yard? Yeah, that’s not how passionate people operate. It’s not that they’re never calm, or even bored. It’s just that it takes less to get them excited, so they get excited more frequently and stay excited longer. One theory is that they devote their energy to just one or two things, so they make more progress, and that momentum fuels their excitement.
They’re all about their work.
Passionate people don’t worry about work/life balance. Their work is who they are, and there’s no separating the two. It’s what they breathe, live, and eat, so there’s no such thing as leaving it at the office. Asking them to do that is tantamount to asking them to deny who they are. And they’re OK with that because there’s nothing else they’d rather be doing.
Bringing It All Together
Now that you know what separates passionate people from everybody else, do you think you have enough passion in your life?
Please share your thoughts in the comments section below, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Travis Bradberry is the award-winning co-author of the #1 bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the cofounder of TalentSmart, the world's leading provider of emotional intelligence tests and training, serving more than 75% of Fortune 500 companies. His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Dr. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, TIME, BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, Inc., USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Harvard Business Review.
<Questions>
Q1. Do you think what is the definition of passion?
Q2. Are you a passionate person to reach your goals?
Q3. Are you tenacious enough to keep up with your passion?
Q4. According to an article, passion is a strong inclination towards a self-defining activity that people love, that they consider important, and in which they devote significant amounts of time and energy. Do you think you have those tendencies with you?
Q5. What time do you wake up and go to bed?
Q6. Do you exercise on a regular basis? Which exercise do you enjoy the most?
Q7. What is your job? What are the promising parts in your job?
12 signs you have a work spouse, even if doesn't feel like it
Áine Cain / Jul. 29, 2016, 10:28 AM
Work spouses are great, but having a deep friendship with a coworker can be tricky to navigate.
On the one hand, it's awesome to have someone you can depend upon in the office. You can rely upon this person for emotional and professional support. You're like the dynamic duo (minus the tights and maniacal villains, hopefully).
On the other, your partnership may run the risk verging into more intense, romantic territory. Sometimes that works out. Sometimes it leads to a huge mess.
Either way, it's helpful to know when you and your coworker have ventured past the sunny fields of friendship, into the rocky, winding mountain pass of "work marriage." That way, you can stay mindful of how you really feel (and avoid a complicated "work divorce").
So here are 12 signs that you definitely have a work spouse:
You're inseparable at work ...
At work, you're pretty much joined at the hip. You're grabbing lunch together, visiting each other's desks, saving one other seats at meetings, and going on simultaneous coffee runs.
... and outside in the real world
Your relationship extends beyond the 9-to-5 world. You and your work spouse have also had plenty of adventures outside of the office.
You've got tons of inside jokes
Sometimes, your conversations are so riddled with inside jokes, it's like you're speaking your own language (which probably makes all your coworkers hate you, just saying).
You gossip together
You know someone is your work spouse when you can dish about everything from which intern is the most annoying to what you really think of your boss (after hours, if you're smart).
You go to them first
Whether you received a great promotion or you've just been chewed out by your boss, your work spouse is the first one you tell when something big happens.
You know their secrets — and they know yours
Strong relationships are built upon trust. As a result, if you've got a work spouse, you've likely shared things with them that you wouldn't tell anyone else in the office. And they've returned the favor.
You're real with them
When interacting with office friends, sometimes you have to be a bit fake in order to get along and remain professional. Not with your work spouse, though. You'll call each other out on your nonsense all the time. You can really be yourself around them and shed your workplace persona.
You help each other out
You know you can rely on this one colleague when you're feeling overwhelmed at work. And you'd be happy to return the favor whenever they need assistance.
You stick by them at social events
Happy Hour and holiday parties wouldn't be the same without your office boo.
You think about them a lot outside of work
Obviously, we all think of our friends from time to time. Still, if you're constantly daydreaming about one specific coworker, it's likely that they mean a lot to you.
You're terrified of them meeting your real significant other
The thought alone is horrifying.
If you're truly afraid of worlds colliding, you may need to reevaluate one or both of your relationships.
You talk about them constantly
Sure, maybe your colleague is truly just a fascinating, hilarious person. Alternatively, maybe the reason you're constantly bringing them up to your other friends is because you can't get them off your mind.
Article source : http://www.businessinsider.com/subtle-signs-you-have-a-work-spouse-2016-7?utm_content=buffer2bef8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
<Questions>
Q1. Have you ever heard about the word 'work spouse'? What is the definition of it?
Q2. Do you have work spouse in your office?
Q3. Do you think what are the merits and demerits of having a 'work spouse'?
Q4. If you knew that your spouse has a work spouse, how would you feel about that and react to it?
5 rituals that will help your brain stay young
Written by Vivian Giang/ Published Thursday 3 March 2016
Thanks to improvements in medicine, more of us are living longer. That means we have a heightened investment in making sure our brains stay in shape as we age, too. While an increased life expectancy will not necessarily lead to a higher incidence of cognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s alone is expected to affect over seven million American seniors by 2025.
Lucky for us, advanced technologies have enabled researchers to understand how the brain works, what it responds to, and even how to retrain it. For instance, we know our brains prefer foods with high levels of antioxidants, including blueberries, kale, and nuts. We know that a Mediterranean diet, which is largely plant-based and rich in whole grain, fish, fruits, and red wine, can lead to higher brain functions. And we know that smiling can retrain our brains to look for positive possibilities rather than negative ones.
Source: World Alzheimers Report 2015
Whether you’re 25 or 65, consider adopting these five simple rituals that cognitive scientists say can help your brain grow new cells, form new neural pathways, improve cognition, and keep your outlook positive and sharp.
Congratulate yourself for small wins
The frequency of success matters more than the size of success, so don’t wait until the big wins to congratulate yourself, says B.J. Fogg, director of the Persuasive Tech Lab at Stanford University. Instead, come up with daily celebrations for yourself; your brain doesn’t know the difference between progress and perceived progress.
Both progress and setbacks are said to greatly influence our emotions. So the earlier in the day you can feel successful, the better—feelings of excitement help fuel behaviors that will set you up for successes. For instance, a productive morning routine can be used to motivate you through the rest of the day. We feel happier and encouraged as our energy levels increase, and feel anxiety or even depression as our energy levels go down.
Keep your body active
According to neurologist Etienne van der Walt, keeping active is one of the best ways to improve brain health. As he told Quartz earlier this year, “Specific forms of exercises have been shown to be very beneficial for … brain growth.”
Simply speaking, when we exercise, our heart rate increases, oxygen is pumped to the brain at a much faster rate, and new brain cells develop more quickly. The more brain cells we create, the easier it is for cells to communicate with one another, developing new neural pathways. Ultimately, our brains become more efficient and plastic, which means better cognitive performance.
A 2014 study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that children who regularly exercised had higher “attentional inhibition,” defined by The New York Times as “the ability to block out irrelevant information and concentrate on the task at hand.” The Times article also noted that study participants ended the with “heightened abilities to toggle between cognitive tasks.” It doesn’t even take that much sweat to keep your brain in good shape.
It doesn’t even take that much sweat to keep your brain in good shape. A study conductedby the department of exercise science at the University of Georgia in 2003 found that an exercise bout of just 20 minutes is enough to change the brain’s information processing and memory functions.
Bottom line: however you decide to keep active, just keep moving.
Stretch your brain muscles
Like other muscles in your body, if you don’t use the brain, you’ll eventually lose it. This means it’s crucial to exercise your brain and keep it stimulated.
Tara Swart, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, notes that it’s especially important to target areas of your brain that you use less frequently. Good suggestions for stretching your brain muscles include learning to speak a new language, learning to play a new instrument, or even learning to juggle.
To enhance his own cognitive prowess, author James Altucher tries to come up with new ideas every day. He writes about his daily system:
Take a waiter’s pad. Go to a local cafe. Maybe read an inspirational book for 10 to 20 minutes. Then start writing down ideas. The key here is, write 10 ideas … a waiter’s pad is too small to write a whole novel or even a paragraph. In fact, it’s specifically made to make a list. And that’s all you want, a list of ideas.
Mid-way through the exercise, Altucher says his brain will actually start to “hurt.” Whether he ends up using the ideas or throwing them away is not the point. But it is important to vary your routine. Harvard psychologist Shelley H. Carson, author of Your Creative Brain, also believes that mixing things up and even allowing yourself to become distracted can be an important cognitive tool.
Sit upright
Mothers everywhere were really onto something when they instructed their children to sit up straight. Not only is an upright position found to increase energy levels and enhance our overall mood, it’s also been shown to increase our confidence, as in this 2013 preliminary researchconducted by Harvard Business professor Amy Cuddy and her colleague, Maarten W. Bos.
Positioning yourself in a powerless, crouched position can make your brain more predisposed towards hopelessness. In the study, the researchers found that people who sit in collapsed positions—usually adopted to look at small wireless devices like smartphones and tablets—were less likely to stand up for themselves. Participants with bad posture were also the slowest to ask if they could leave when the experiment had been declared over. On the other hand, participants who were randomly assigned larger devices, like laptops and desktops, were more likely to sit upright and be assertive in asking if they could leave.
From a purely cognitive perspective, positioning yourself in a powerless, crouched position can make your brain more predisposed towards hopelessness, as well as more likely to recall depressive memories and thoughts. Researchers say this phenomenon is ingrained in our biology and traces back to how body language is “closely tied to dominance across the animal kingdom,” as Cuddy writes in her new book, Presence.
So what’s the best way to ensure you feel powerful in both body and mind? Erik Peper, a professor who studies psychophysiology at San Francisco State University, advises checking your posture every hour to make sure you’re not in the iHunch, or iPosture, position. He also advises bringing smaller devices up to your face while in use instead of forcing yourself to look downward at them in a collapsed position.
Sleep with your phone away from your head
There’s a lot of myths and half truths out there about how—and if—your smartphone may be affecting the brain. While there is still a lot of research that needs to be done on the topic of wireless devices, there does seem to be a link between blue light—emitted by electronic screens including those of smartphones—and sleep. Interrupting or changing our sleep patterns is bad for a lot of reasons. For example, lack of enough deep sleep could be preventing us from flushing harmful beta-amyloid from our brains.
According to Tara Swart, a senior lecturer at MIT specializing in sleep and the brain, our brains’ natural cleansing system requires six to eight hours of sleep. Without it, brains eventually encounter major build-ups of beta-amyloid, a neurotoxin found in clumps in the brains of people with neurological disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
While scientists have always known that the brain cleanses wastes, much like the body, the sophistication of this cleansing system wasinvestigated in 2013 by Maiken Nedergaard of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester. This study found “hidden caves” that open up in our brains when we’re in a deep enough sleep. This liquid cleaning system, dubbed the “glymphatic system,” enables copious amounts of neurotoxins to be pushed through the spinal column.
So, exactly how far away do you need to keep your smart devices? We’re not completely sure, but Swart says it’s a good idea to not sleep with it next to your head. Ultimately, keeping our brains healthy takes willpower and resilience, just like with any other part of our bodies. But as research shows, staying sound of body and mind as we age is certainly possible—with a little effort.
Correction: A previous version of this piece cited research regarding the effects of Wi-Fi on sleep patterns that was inconclusive. It has been updated with research regarding the effects of blue light on sleep patterns.
Article source : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/5-rituals-that-will-help-your-brain-stay-young?utm_content=buffer8114e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
<Questions>
Q1. Do you have your ways to improve your brain functioning?
Q2. According to an article, a Mediterranean diet, which is largely plant-based and rich in whole grain, fish, fruits, and red wine, can lead to higher brain functions. Do you think you have well balanced eating habit for your brain?
Q3. Do you do any activities to protect yourself from dementia? According to an article, there are some rituals that help your brain grow new cells, form new neural pathways, improve cognition, and keep your outlook positive and sharp. Which ritual would you like to do among below 5 items?
- Congratulate yourself for small wins
- Keep your body active
- Stretch your brain muscles
- Sit upright
- Sleep with your phone away from your head
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