MIND YOUR BRAIN UNTIL IT STILL MINDS YOU.
Mind your brain, indeed. You’re still alive because of it. At least medically speaking.
I was doing some research for my writing piece and I came across this wonderful book that just made me realize lots of important things that I often neglect paying attention to. And most of you might be able to relate to this, more so guilty as I am. I’m fascinated by how Dr. John Medina expressed his writing as fun and understandable by everyone as it can be. Transpired in his book, BRAIN RULES: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (Pear Press/ Perseus Books Group; March 18, 2008), are ways how the mind reacts and organizes information. I cannot help but share these amazing tricks that will surely benefit particularly this community of working professionals.
We are constantly going by the hustle and bustle of life: work, further studies, love or businesses. We live like we all have time often reserved for us. But our brain chooses to ignore the reality that we cannot control our timeline nor know its limit. We’re always living like we all have more time to do things later. But eventually, we’d realize it’s too late for us. Some sticks to the noble principle that tied oneself up to that only to suffer for long. Once judgment was uttered about you with firm conviction, open your eyes that it won’t change no matter how you try to repair it. May it be with work or love life. You will consistently battle and live through that shadow of other’s opinion about you especially if one compared you to others. Too many times we have heard, choose your battle wisely as it will drain us of good energy, at some point, we have to concede in order to grow. Accept defeat and sorrow, cry if you must but get back up. I don’t know about you, but this universe has its way of redirecting us to our true destiny and just as you’d realize why no matter how hard you fight for what you want, how badly you try to fit in, it’s not working out as it simply isn’t for us. Give yourself a break. Giving up something or someone isn’t totally failure, sometimes it can be a calling to look further ahead towards a happier career or a healthier heart where you can feel safe and secured.
According to the Rule#8: Our brain is built to deal with stress that lasts about 30 seconds. The brain is not designed for long term stress when we feel like we have no control. The saber-toothed tiger ate us or we ran away but it was all over in less than a minute. If we have a bad boss, the saber-toothed tiger can be at our door for years, and we begin to deregulate. If we are in a bad marriage, the saber-toothed tiger can be in our bed for years, and the same thing occurs. We can actually watch the brain shrink. Stress damages virtually every kind of cognition that exists. It damages memory and executive function. It can hurt our motor skills. When we are stressed out over a long period of time it disrupts our immune response. We get sicker more often. It disrupts our ability to sleep. We get depressed a lot. The emotional stability of the home is the single greatest predictor of academic success. If we want our kid to get into Harvard, go home and love our wives or husbands. We have one brain. The same brain we have at home is the same brain we have at work or school. The stress we are experiencing at home will affect our performance at work, and vice versa (Medina, J. 2018).
In terms of survival, he talked about the human brain evolved too in Rule#2. That it is the survival organ designed to solve problems related to surviving in an unstable outdoor environment and to do so in nearly constant motion (to keep you alive long enough to pass your genes on). We were not the strongest on the planet but we developed the strongest brains, the key to our survival. The strongest brains survive, not the strongest bodies. Our ability to solve problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other people helps us survive. We took over the world by learning to cooperate and forming teams with our neighbors. Our ability to understand each other is our chief survival tool. Relationships helped us survive in the jungle and are critical to surviving at work and school today. If someone does not feel safe with a teacher or boss, he or she may not perform as well (Medina, J. 2018).
If that certain connection and understanding was not built or got destroyed, we become isolated even to a point, dysfunctional. So we have to make sure that our brain is strong. Weak brain dictates body weakness followed by illness or deterioration. We must give it some sort of booster shots. Exercise boosts brain power per Rule#1. He said there’s a direct link between exercise and brain power that even couch potatoes who fidget show increased benefit over those who do not. Our brains perform at their best when we are in motion. Exercise improves “executive function”: solving problems, maintaining attention, and inhibiting emotional impulses. All it takes for our brain to benefit is aerobic exercise 2-3 times a week. Sitting is not “brain friendly.” For millions of years, we walked 12 miles a day. Today we sit in cars, couches, cubicles, and classrooms. We think best when we are moving. The greatest predictor of successful aging is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle. Exercise improves cardiovascular fitness, which reduces the risk of diseases like heart attacks and stroke. It improves your strength and balance, reduces your risk for many types of cancer, bolsters your immune system, and buffers against toxic effects of stress. It’s time to integrate exercise into our 8 hours at work or school. Take a call while walking, hold a walking meeting, or go for a walk at lunch.
I like how Steve Jobs said: “The products suck. There’s no sex in them anymore!” and “I want to put a ding in the universe.” We all at some point in our lives, desire to leave a significant mark in our existence. We can try our best and persevere yet let’s be alive, alive enough to see grandchildren throw the sweetest smile on their faces. While we can be so busy with work, business and personal affairs, we should set our priorities. If we are a businessman and a father who decided at first to commit to a woman then later on realized we can’t take her on with our lives, we should’ve just stuck to doing the business and fathering our child than embarking to a journey we can’t fully commit with and leaving the other compromised. The same thing with accepting a contract at work, faced with a few bumps along the way, quitting without even meeting halfway with your boss. Setting our priorities is very important, even Alibaba founder Jack Ma greatly supports a ‘Marriage KPIs’ in his company that celebrates staff’s mass wedding which takes place every year on May 10th in Hangzhou, China. “The first KPI of marriage is to have results. There must be products. What is the product? Have children”, Ma said. “Marriage is not for the purpose of accumulating wealth, not for buying a house, not for buying a car, but for having a child together”, he added. This year, Jack offered lighthearted life and marital advice to 102 newlywed couples, saying "that the key to a successful marriage is to forget the negatives and embrace the positives of each other and that the value of love, unlike coding, can't be measured or calculated". No wonder how he became so successful despite his busy workloads, he managed to prioritize his family over everything else sharing the same principle and practice towards his employees making his company more and more productive.
Let’s talk about rule#4: Medina said we pay attention to things like emotions, threats, and sex. Regardless of who you are, the brain pays a great deal of attention to these questions: Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I mate with it? Will it mate with me? Have I seen it before? The brain is not capable of multi-tasking. We can talk and breathe, but when it comes to higher level tasks, we just can’t do it. Driving while talking on a cell phone is like driving drunk. The brain is a sequential processor and large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. This is why cell-phone talkers are a half-second slower to hit the brakes and get in more wrecks. Workplaces and schools actually encourage this type of multi-tasking. Walk into any office and you’ll see people sending e-mail, answering their phones, Instant Messaging, and on Myspace—all at the same time. Research shows your error rate goes up to 50% and it takes us twice as long to do things. Multi-tasking is a myth as it’s claimed here. We can’t just deal with 3 or more businesses at the same time especially if you’re a struggling CEO. Focus on one line of business, make it stable then we can move on to venture with the next without sacrificing our family and marriage. Why do you think it’s very common for famous and successful people to end up in a divorce? Or even an ordinary married couple or partners ending up a relationship to a waste?
With Medina’s rule#11, men and women process certain emotions differently. Emotions are useful. They make the brain pay attention. These differences are a product of complex interactions between nature and nurture. You will ask, what’s the difference? Mental health professionals have known for years about sex-based differences in the type and severity of psychiatric disorders. Males are more severely afflicted by schizophrenia than females. By more than 2 to 1, women are more likely to get depressed than men, a figure that shows up just after puberty and remains stable for the next 50 years. Males exhibit more antisocial behavior. Females have more anxiety. Most alcoholics and drug addicts are male. Most anorexics are female. Men and women handle acute stress differently. When researcher Larry Cahill showed them Slasher films, men fired up the amygdala in their brain’s right hemisphere, which is responsible for the gist of an event. Their left was comparatively silent. Women lit up their left amygdala, the one responsible for details. Having a team that simultaneously understood the gist and details of a given stressful situation helped us conquer the world.
I admire how #The Gates, #Bill, and #Melinda managed their romance and fondness towards each other evident in one of her recent book tours featuring Barack Obama conniving with her husband for his planned surprise. Although our human brain, male and female per se are different, they were able to obviously deal with each other’s differences and I can see endearing support and love for one another. I’m not talking as if I have known them for long nor have I ever been with them, (they didn’t even know I exist, although I’d love the privilege to be able to ask them ‘how?’) but when Bill tearfully introduced her up on stage saying, “So my gift to Melinda’s simply to tell her the moment we met, was my moment of lift”, which was greatly applauded by the audience. I think everyone can agree that this sincerely just melts us away. What an inspiring scene!
Two more rules I want to share with are rule#7: Sleep and rule#12: Exploration. Medina also concluded that, when we’re asleep, the brain is not resting at all. It is almost unbelievably active! It’s possible that the reason we need to sleep is so that we can learn. Sleep well, think well. Sleep must be important because we spend 1/3 of our lives doing it! Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity. We still don’t know how much we need! It changes with age, gender, pregnancy, puberty, and so much more. Napping is normal. Ever feel tired at 3 PM? That’s because your brain really wants to take a nap. There's a battle raging in your head between two armies. Each army is made of legions of brain cells and biochemical – one desperately trying to keep you awake, the other desperately trying to force you to sleep. At 3 PM, 12 hours after the midpoint of your sleep, all your brain wants to do is a nap. Taking a nap at 3 PM might make you more productive. In one study, a 26-minute nap improved NASA pilots’ performance by 34 percent. Don’t schedule important meetings at 3 pm. It just doesn’t make sense. And he said we are powerful and natural explorers. The desire to explore never leaves us despite the classrooms and cubicles we are stuffed into. Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. Babies methodically do experiments on objects, for example, to see what they will do. Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.”
Let's definitely mind our brain as we age. Happiness isn't a destination nor should be dependent on others, it should come from within us. Our brain regulates the happy hormones: Oxytocin, Dopamine, and Serotonin and these cause us to feel a surge of positive emotion. Although, women may have 'bad and moody days' as when low hormones hit us whether we like it or not. Our brain stimulates low levels of estrogen and progesterone specifically during the first phase of our menstrual cycle. Throughout this routine, we can only deviate our attention to any forms of diversion like yoga and exercise. Medina also promoted that "Optimistic people live almost eight years longer than the glass half- empties do". On his other book, Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina, he discussed Gratitude as being thankful will make you happy! Check out his video to find out the techniques and right combinations on how to be happy.
I talked only 7 out of Medina’s 12 Brain Rules:
Rule 1: Exercise
Rule 2: Survival
Rule 4: Attention
Rule 7: Sleep
Rule 8: Stress
Rule 11: Gender
Rule 12: Exploration
It’s worth grabbing his book for the complete and exciting details of further knowing our brain potential. Visit www.brainrules.net
References:
https://www.brainrules.net/pdf/mediakit.pdf
https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6532670851073007616
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Audio Video and Video Conferencing Sales Professional | Account Manager | Content Creator, Work Hard, Give Back, Be Kind
5 年Great post and very relatable.