Self-Motivation
David Goggins
Former Navy Seal
Career Development
Bryan Cranston
Actor
Critical Thinking
Liv Boeree
International Poker Champion
Emotional Intelligence
Amaryllis Fox
Former CIA Clandestine Operative
Management
Chris Hadfield
Retired Canadian Astronaut & Author
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Mind hack: 7 secrets to learn any new language
Now is the perfect time to take up a new language. Self-motivation and commitment are key to mastering this fun and useful new skill.
09 May, 2020
- Canadian polyglot Steve Kaufmann has learned parts of 20 languages. He's come up with seven tips to help anyone attempting to learn a new language in their spare time.
- First, you must commit the time and keep motivated. If you don't enjoy the process of learning a language, you probably won't get very far. Maintaining a positive attitude is key.
- The sense of achievement in mastering a language is a profoundly positive experience. Focusing, at first, on vocabulary rather than grammar will help you in the long run.
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Haven’t found your niche? This might be why.
Most people don't know what they're passionate about.
07 May, 2020
- A niche, in terms of the economy and what you do for a living, is often considered a special talent or service that speaks to you on a different, secondary level. Adam Davidson, co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money" argues that when a niche finds an audience and becomes a successful business, it evolves into its own primary economy.
- For most people, finding something you're passionate about can take a long time. The search should happen concurrently with your current job and life, not in place of them.
- It won't be easy and there will have to be sacrifices, Davidson says. But when it's something that you can't live without doing, then it is worth investing the time and effort.
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How to maximize performance and minimize stress during the COVID-19 pandemic
Flow Research Collective COO Rian Doris explains how to harness the power of your nervous system to find your flow during a pandemic.
01 May, 2020
Image by Ridkous Mykhail on Shutterstock
- Knowing the difference between healthy stress (eustress) and unhealthy stress (distress) can help you maximize your performance during difficult times.
- The Flow Research Collective helps to decode the flow states of your mind so you can live (and work) in the zone, even during a pandemic.
- COO of The Flow Research Collective, Rian Doris, explains how to find your maximum potential and harness the power of your nervous system to work for you instead of against you.
<p>Not all forms of stress are bad for you. In fact, some forms of stress can be positive—healthy, even. Positive stress, called eustress, can drive us to be more productive, healthier, more active, and more engaging in our lives. Negative stress, called distress, is what leads to loss of productivity, declining physical and mental health, and exhaustion.</p><p>According to Rian Doris, COO at the <a href="https://www.flowresearchcollective.com/" target="_blank">Flow Research Collective</a>, <em>"There is absolutely nothing wrong with eustress - in fact, it's critical for the vast majority of function within our body and nervous systems. It's what allows us to improve our health, our fitness, our resilience. It's chronic stress that can have a very systemic negative impact on our health long term."</em></p><ul class="ee-ul"></ul>
How to find your flow and maximize your performance during the COVID-19 pandemic
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMzE4MDc3OC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYyNTc3Mzc4Mn0.jWjWzkpW5farRcGt70YCWHtcK-xkLAd_bYDwPmLvP6k/img.png?width=980" id="5bd13" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="b8762aae0f21100b36ee6a7467c0ab42" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="infographic courtesy of the Flow Research Collective finding your state of flow" />Finding your "flow channel" can help you maintain healthy stress and decrease unhealthy stress.
Image by Flow Research Collective
<p><strong></strong><strong>Increasing our capacity: What we perceive as stress goes down when we become more capable of coping with stressful situations.</strong></p><p>When it comes to increasing our capacity for handling negative stress, there are a few ways we can accomplish this - most of them are what are referred to as "bottom-up approaches." </p><p>A bottom-up approach is like piecing together a puzzle made of our various systems to give a more complex and complete picture . We need to ensure all of our systems are working at optimal levels without being too overwhelmed so they can function better together. </p><p><u>Things you can do to achieve this kind of systemic functionality include: </u></p><ul><li>Movement - exercising, running, jogging, or going for a walk.</li><li>Breathing exercises that help us practice mindfulness and achieve a calm state of mind.</li><li>Hot and cold therapy or other types of sensation therapy that can get us more in tune with our bodies. </li></ul><p><strong>Decreasing the impact: Manage how stress impacts our lives so the negative impact doesn't overwhelm our systems. </strong></p><p>While decreasing the impact of <a href="https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/seven-stress-personalities" target="_self">stress</a> is important, it's certainly not an easy thing to accomplish. After all, if we could simply decrease how negative stress impacts us then it would not be so much of a problem. </p><p>Especially in unprecedented times such as when we're dealing with a pandemic, it's not as easy to shield our system from the negative impacts of chronic stress. </p><p>Cognitive reframing is essentially changing the way you look at something, and as a result, changing your experience of it. This can turn a traumatic event (such as experiencing a pandemic or a major trauma in your life) into something that can be a challenge that is eventually overcome—or it can be as simple as depicting a really bad day as a "bump in the road" in your overall happy life. </p><p>Using <a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-reframing-for-stress-management-3144872" target="_blank">certain reframing techniques</a> can actually change how your body responds to negative stress. Your body's stress response is triggered by perceived information around that stress—change the perception, change the response. </p><p><u>The pattern to follow with cognitive reframing is: </u></p><ol><li>Learn about thinking patterns (<a href="https://www.verywellmind.com/about-explanatory-styles-3145110" target="_blank">explanatory styles</a>). </li><li>Notice your own thoughts as they come. </li><li>Challenge negative thoughts and trace them to their origins. </li><li>Replace the root negative thought with a more positive thought. </li></ol><p>Cognitive reframing takes a lot of practice but you can do this as often as you'd like in your daily life and eventually it becomes easier to stop negative thoughts before they become chronic stressors. </p><p><strong>Keep in mind the challenge/skill balance when dealing with stress.</strong></p><p>According to Doris, a flow exists in the sweet spot between challenge and skill. This flow happens when we undertake challenges or goals in life that are optimally challenging for you to complete - not too easy that it requires no effort and not too difficult that it overwhelms your system.</p><p>Keeping this challenge/skill balance in mind for things in our daily lives can help us navigate our stressors, especially during a pandemic <a href="https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/coronavirus-impact-on-economy" target="_self">such as COVID-19</a>. Anything too easy doesn't pose as a challenge and doesn't excite us. However, if the challenge is too difficult, it overwhelms us and becomes a source of unhealthy chronic stress instead of healthy eustress. </p><p><em>"The challenge level for almost everyone has been increased in a systemic way by COVID-19, which means what we should do is decrease the challenge level in our own lives and the things we have control over in order to get us back to that challenge/skill sweet spot." </em></p>
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Here's how long-distance runners are different from the rest of us
Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners.
30 April, 2020
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For many, running a marathon is seen as the ultimate amateur athletic achievement; for others, it's just the start. Ultramarathon runners often take on courses of incredibly impressive length, running 50 or 100 kilometres at one time or over several days.
<p>Clearly this is physically demanding, and only those in seriously good shape will be able to take on such challenges — ultramarathon running involves stress on muscles and bones, blisters, dehydration, sleep deprivation and mental and physical fatigue, so it's really not for the faint of heart.</p><p>But what about the psychological traits that make someone suitable for long-distance running? What kind of person can withstand this kind of physical stress, and how? A <a href="https://aps.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajpy.12287?af=R" target="_blank">new study</a> in the <em>Australian Journal of Psychology</em> takes a look.</p>
<p>Gregory Roebuck from Monash University and colleagues recruited 20 ultrarunners and 20 control participants aged between 18 and 70; runners were matched with non-runners by gender and age. Participants were asked about their exercise behaviours and running experiences before completing a number of questionnaires. These included a 25-item scale designed to measure resilience (with participants rating how much they agreed with statements such as "I am able to adapt when changes occur"), and two questionnaires that looked at emotion regulation — the ways a person moderates or expresses their emotion. Finally, a 155-item questionnaire looked at a range of personality traits across domains like well-being, achievement, stress reaction, and, aggression.</p><p>Next, participants took part in an emotion regulation task, viewing 36 neutral images (e.g. a sofa or chair) and 36 negative images (e.g. a bloody medical scene). Before viewing each image, participants were asked to either respond naturally to it (a "look" trial) or attempt to not have a negative reaction to it (a "decrease" trial), before rating the strength of their emotional response. Heart rate and skin conductance were measured during this section of the experiment.</p><p>Ultrarunners scored significantly higher on the resilience questionnaire than non-runners, and were more likely to indicate they used positive reappraisal when regulating their emotions — in other words, they were better able to reframe a situation with a positive angle. This may be down to the need to maintain high levels of motivation during races, <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/06/29/a-mental-technique-calledcognitive-reappraisal-makes-long-distance-running-feel-easier" target="_blank">attaching positive meaning to negative events in order to keep running</a>.</p>
<p>There was also a physiological difference between ultrarunners and non-runners in the emotion regulation task, with ultrarunners showing reduced skin conductance and heart rate even when viewing unpleasant images. However, they didn't show any differences in their ability to decrease their response to negative images.</p><p>There was one measure on which ultrarunners scored lower, however — affiliative extraversion, which measures how socially warm people are, which the team puts down to the high levels of solitude involved in long-distance running. There was no significant difference in any of the other measures.</p><p>The results suggest that ultrarunners are pretty similar to the rest of us — with some important differences. While it's clear that ultrarunners are indeed more resilient than non-runners, and use different emotion regulation strategies, the direction of those relationships is not yet clear. It could be that training for ultramarathons makes people more resilient, or, on the other hand, it could be that people with higher levels of resilience are more likely to be attracted to the pastime.</p><p>It would be interesting to further explore how ultrarunners motivate themselves through many hours of pain and effort. Because even though most of us will never run 100 kilometres in one go (and may have no desire to, either), understanding how to tolerate pain, and cope with physical and mental fatigue, is a lesson we all could benefit from.</p><p>– <a href="https://aps.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajpy.12287?af=R" target="_blank">Psychological characteristics associated with ultra‐marathon running: An exploratory self‐report and psychophysiological study</a></p><p><a href="http://emilyoliviareynolds.com/" target="_blank">Emily Reynolds</a> is a staff writer at <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">BPS Research Digest</a></p><p>Reprinted with permission of <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">The British Psychological Society</a>. Read the <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/04/24/why-do-people-with-depression-like-listening-to-sad-music/" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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Finding your purpose: A less intimidating approach
Removing the pressure of finding your "dying passion" makes it easier to connect with the "why" of your work.
27 April, 2020
- Do you know your purpose in life? If not, London Business School professor Dan Cable says that's OK. It's normal, even.
- Many people have trouble finding their purpose because the task itself is too demanding. One way to solve this problem is by connecting with the end user of your work.
- For example, Microsoft will take its teams on site to interview clients and find solutions. Programmers understand who's using their products by hearing it straight from the source, and this gives more meaning to their work.
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