Psychology Today: 3 Ways to Supercharge Your Brain

Do you understand how your brain really works? Studies suggest that while many of us mistakenly believe our brains are independent, rational, thinking machines, our brains actually have an entirely different purpose.

“The brain’s most important job is to regulate the systems of your body to keep you alive,” explained Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, when we interviewed her recently. “This means that everything else your brain does—seeing, thinking, and feeling—it does in the service of regulating the internal systems of your body to keep your heart beating, your lungs expanding, and quickly getting glucose to your cells. This process is known as allostasis or you can think of it as ‘body budgeting.’”

So how can we help our brains to body-budget wisely?

Be clear on who you want to be

Because we are a social species, we are the caretakers of each other’s brains. This means what you say and how you say it impacts the nervous systems of the people around you. So, what kind of person do you want to be? For example, do you want to be somebody who energizes or drains other people’s body budgets?

Prioritize your productivity

When you make yourself predictable and trustworthy for others—by sharing goals, being respectful, and expressing care for others—working alongside you requires less body-budgeting and this has been found to improve productivity. In addition, when you get enough sleep, drink enough water, prioritize enough exercise, and make time for rest and recovery, your body has more energy to budget and that has also been found to improve productivity.

Be mindful of your social realities

Your brain actively and willingly participates in a socially made-up world each day.

To the best of our knowledge, only human brains co-create social realities in this way because of the brain’s abilities:

• Creativity—the same creativity that enables you to create art and music enables you to decide that certain small pieces of paper will represent “money.”
• Communicate—your ability to learn and share language enables us to efficiently communicate with each other and create a shared social reality.
• Copying—your ability to reliably copy others is how social norms and rules are passed from one person to the next.
• Cooperate—your ability to work alongside others to have a bigger impact than you can alone, makes a shared social reality desirable.
• Compression—your ability to think abstractly and draw on past experiences to create shared meaning with others.

We are often unaware of the shared realities we have created, and yet we uphold these social realities every day through our behaviors. Be mindful of where the social realities in which you are invested are serving you and others well.

Read the full article here!

#Brain #Productivity #Mindfulness