Take a Walk Brainhack
The Smile Brainhack: Every mental state has a corresponding physical expression. We smile and laugh when happy, stand tall when confident, and look down and hunch our shoulders when sad. By adopting one of these physical shapes, we can affect our mental state. Laughter therapy has become popular because of this.
Take a Walk Brainhack: When we enter a mental challenge like a study session, our brain chemistry is balanced. Cognitive work throws this out of balance. The good news is that even light aerobic movement like walking rebalances the brain, quickly clearing your head and allowing you to get back to the task refreshed. Many great thinkers take afternoon walks to improve performance.
Exploding Keys Brainhack
Visualization Principle: On some level, your brain can’t tell the difference between what is real and imagined. This is why you can cry at a movie even though you know that broke character on the screen is actually an actor making millions for their role.
To memorize an item’s location, try the Exploding Keys Brainhack: Imagine something crazy happening to it as you set it down. It can grow tall, come to life, be frozen in a block of ice, or—the author’s favorite—explode. He tested this at McGill University (in association with the National Research Council of Canada) in a double-blind neuroscience study. It showed near-perfect recall among the group that used the technique properly. So, if you love it, blow it up.
Push Away Pain Brainhack
Push Away Pain Brainhack is a visualization trick meant to fool the senses. All you need to do is imagine the area in pain; let your mind tell you what the pain looks like; breathe deeply and imagine the breath is a wind blowing at it; relax and let it go.
Future Visualization Brainhack
Future Visualization Brainhack may seem simple, but what makes this different (and powerful) is that you are asking questions. Meditate and open your mind to possibilities. Get curious about what your future holds and ask your powerful brain what is likely to happen if you take each choice. You’ll be glad you did.
Mini Rarity Brainhacks
Tiger in the Jungle: This is the principle that we have evolved to pay attention to things that stand out from the crowd. Knowing this, we can better understand how we interact with the world and what we remember.
Stop Thinking and Visualize: The most common reason a person forgets a link is distraction. When you memorize something, stop your train of thought, and visualize the link as clearly as you can.
Practice Clarity: People aren’t used to visualizing information, so you will start with a faded image. Keep trying, and it will become clearer.
Put Yourself in the Image: People who can’t seem to visualize overcome it by putting themselves in the image, like imagining their own hand wrapping an item around the desk lamp in the Journey Brainhack. Imagining themselves in first person or third person works equally well.
Habit Trigger Hack
Fixed vs. Growth Mindset: We can choose to look at life as fixed and limited. That all that is wrong cannot change. Or we can look at life as growing and reaching new levels and over time improving in big and small ways. The data supports the second view.
Using the Habit Trigger Hack, you can replace bad habits and form new ones by figuring out the components of the trigger; counting each trigger and trying to perform new actions; and getting the reward each time, as long as the new habit makes the reward as good as what it’s replacing.
The Hand Guide Hack
Though we don’t usually think of it this way, our eyes are a ball in a socket pulled on by small muscles. Like other socket joints, the eye does not like to move back and forth in the same direction. It resists this movement—it’s designed to catch the movement of predators in the wild, not to move horizontally across a page. However, when we give the eye movement to focus on, it follows it smoothly, making reading easier, healthier, and faster.
Don’t Let Labels Stick Hack
The popular concept of learning styles is flawed, restricting people to one method and one sense. In reality, we all use each of these strategies and styles in different situations. Instead, these are the three main learning strategies people fall back on:
1.Global (big picture): Getting a clear picture of the entire process. Look at it from twenty thousand feet. Then, zoom in to learn the details. Limitation: You can miss details and think you know more than you do.
2.Linear (sequential or step-by-step instructions): The fastest way between two points is a straight line, and duplicating others’ instructions is the fastest way to perform an established task. Limitation: This is not helpful with new discoveries or subjects with multiple results.
3.Kinesthetic (trial and error): Jumping in to work on a project without learning the basics or hearing instructions is unwise for a math test. But learning by doing so has yielded nearly every major discovery in science and engineering. Limitation: You can waste a lot of time doing the wrong thing. New startups call this process, “fail fast, and fail often.”
Thermostat Hack
The Mental Thermostat Concept states that there is a force in our nervous system that uses chemical rewards and punishments to motivate us to stick within a predetermined status range. Things like how much money we can make, how much love and support we can accept, and more are all determined by this mechanism that dates back nearly half a billion years in our history. We can’t stop this reward system, but we can change the setting.
The mental thermostat is so powerful it will make us ruin our lives if we come into a windfall. The majority of people who win money or get major sports contracts are broke within three years due to this problem. Giving others money will not help improve lives unless their brain believes they deserve it.
To change your thermostat setting, visualize the person you want to be over and over. The thermostat also reacts to social cues so imagine your friends, family, and even strangers rooting for you in these images. Then repeat this a lot. We get so many negative messages thrown at us regularly that we need a lot to counter them.
All Good Things Come to an End
Luck is not just about randomness. It’s also more than where you are born or what DNA you have. Counting cards showed me that luck can be influenced by strategy. Define a win; don’t be a perfectionist. You don’t need to reach twenty-one, you just need to beat the dealer.
Try to rush, and you’ll make mistakes. Hacking timing often means waiting for the right time to strike. If you want to achieve something, look to others who have done it. It seems the more we learn, the luckier we get. Get where you want to go by giving others what they want, but make sure your skills and what you offer are what people want.
Play with scale. Try things on a small scale with little risk; then, if it goes well, scale up. We think “win-win” means both sides win if a project is a success, but if you want to succeed, make plans that benefit you if they succeed or fail. The best way to plan ahead is to extend current trends. To do this we need to avoid ideological thinking and just read the data.
