Cultivating Happy Habits

Each morning, write down three things that you are grateful for. The key here is to come up with three new things each day. This trains your brain to focus more on the good in your life.
Journal for two minutes a day about one positive experience you’ve had over the past twenty-four hours. Write down all the details you can remember. This helps your brain re-experience the experience, thus doubling its impact.
Meditate daily. This does not have to be complicated. Simply stop all activity, relax, and pay attention to your breath for about two minutes. This helps you to focus your brain on things you want to focus on, and not get distracted by negativity.
Do one random act of kindness every day. This can be as simple as taking two minutes to write an email to someone you know, praising them or thanking them for something they did.
Exercise for fifteen minutes daily. Simply cardio exercises have a powerful antidepressant effect.

The Matrix of the Mind

No matter what you’re struggling with – mastering your mind is the most important thing because without that you’ll get blown by the wind.

The mind affects everything.

Let me explain how you can control your life by understanding this most important concept in life: The Matrix.

If you don’t control your mind, you’ll regress after the first sign of either accomplishment or conflict.

I want to start you off with some mind tools needed so you control what’s happening on the inside to get what you want on the outside. Unfortunately, for most of us, neither our parents nor the public school education system has taught us about how our minds work.

This first mind tool is “The Matrix of the Mind” and how it affects you daily without you even realizing it.

How to control your life by controlling The Matrix

If you understand the Matrix that’s trying to control your life right now you can break out of it and manipulate the game of life to your advantage. Knowing this mind tool can make or break you.

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Does this mean we’re screwed? Absolutely not!

The bad news is that we can’t fully escape from these things completely. They’re beyond us.

The good news is that you can step back and pay attention to what’s happening in each matrix and manipulate it through your awareness.

In other words you can create new rules, objectives, and beliefs. You can jump in and out of matrices as you see fit and you can even create your own matrix with your own rules.

Here’s your homework

Answer these 3 questions to yourself first.
~What are your beliefs?
~What are your values?
~What are your assumptions about life?

Based on those answers, In the comments below describe the matrix you’re living in? Describe the rules and beliefs of the Matrix you’re living in.

Are these answers really serving your long term vision in life? And can you see how it’s controlling you?

Hack Your Brain to Wake Up Early & Effortlessly Every Day with the 3 Step Pavlov Method

America’s standard wake up method sucks. Ugly air raid alarms that slap you in the face can ruin every single morning for the rest of your life. Hitting the snooze for ten minutes only puts you through the mental scarring all over again.

If you can take 45 minutes to plan out a sleep method that pleasantly wakes you up when you want then spend thirty minutes setting it up, you could make every single morning for the rest of your life incredibly better. So you should. Take a Saturday and plan it out.

A place to start is my method. I created it based on what we know about the neuroscience of habit formation and the bits of information science has discovered about circadian rhythms and biological clocks. It’s not the absolute healthiest method of controlling sleep, but it’s the best way I know to sleep effectively and still live in a 9 to 5 work hard and play hard society.

The Pavlov Waking System

Step 1: Decide a reasonable time you could wake up every single day, even on weekends.

Most people immediately shoot for 4:30 am, but make sure you’re willing to go to sleep early enough to get 8 hours of sleep at least 4-5 nights of the week. I go with 7:30am.

Step 2: Pick a no-calorie cold drink you enjoy and leave it on your nightstand every night. Iced coffee, iced tea, and water all work great.

Step 3: Start setting your alarm for the same specific time every single day. When you get up on time, get up and chug down the beverage you left by your bed. If you hit the snooze, don't chug the drink. Since you’ve been sleeping you haven’t had anything to drink, and drinking a big amount of anything when your thirsty will give you a rush of endorphins.

This pleasure rush will lay the groundwork for a subconscious habit. After doing this for a week or two, your body will learn that pleasure is synonymous with waking up at 7:30, not sleeping in. You won’t have to fight yourself to get up any more, you may even have to fight yourself to sleep in.

When you get your “I want to accomplish everything” brain and your “I want to do everything that feels good right this second with no attention to consequences” brain going in the same direction, life gets a lot easier, and often a lot more awesome.

Steroids for the Pavlov Method (make it work faster, better, and stronger)

1. Train yourself outside of your regular sleep schedule. This will speed up the process and allow you to engineer the emotions and fine points of your waking habit more intentionally.

I did this initially to reinforce my habit and leave less room for failure. When you have some spare time during the day and you feel thirsty, you can take ten minutes to reinforce your waking habit. Recreate the environment in your bedroom as much as possible to when you wake up. Put on sleep clothes, turn off lights, get in bed, and set your alarm for three minutes. Close your eyes and rest, when the alarm goes off jump out of bed mimicking the type of mood (keep it realistic) you’d like to have every morning, and chug down your drink. The more you expose yourself to the sensory triggers of the morning, repeat the muscle movements of waking up, and then produce a chemical reward, the stronger and more subconscious your habit will become. Waking up with beaming hope and energy for the day will eventually be like backing your car out of the driveway. Happiness will be on autopilot and your set default.

To boost the chemical reward, fake a beaming smile right after you chug your drink, genuinely congratulate yourself (out loud if your brave enough), and massage your own shoulders and forearms for ten seconds.


2. Make your alarm pleasant and distinct from all other sounds.

Use your cell phone and get a customizable alarm app. There are tons that are all basically the same. I use “Alarm Clock Xtreme Free” for Android. You want several key functionalities. The first is to customize the sound of your alarm. Make it a recording of your mother yelling at you about getting your prostate checked, or the sound of a koala purring, it doesn’t matter as long as you never hear it regularly throughout the day. Making it the same as your ringtone or a song you enjoy or as an alarm you use for other things throughout the day will screw up the Pavlov Method.

You may also want to look for the functionality of gradually increasing volume. I use this feature to wake me up more gently. Most full featured apps have the ability to slowly increase your volume from nothing to full blast over the course of a set period of time. I use 1 ½ minutes. This will wake me up more gently, but also not allow me to stay in bed for more than twenty seconds after I wake up.

3. Every single night, set your alarm far enough away from your bed so that your forced to get up to turn it off.

When you wake up in the morning, especially if you didn’t get enough sleep, your lizard brain is in control. Set yourself up with safeguards like these so that you can stick to your plans even if your half asleep and don’t understand the meaning of anything except crushing your alarm and going back to bed. (If I drink too much or stay up too late, I have this problem in a major way. My girlfriend has watched me get up out of bed, with only one eye half open, walk across the room to turn off my alarm, not understand how buttons work as a half asleep zombie, and just start pounding the phone against the wall until it stops, and then stumbling back into bed and going back to sleep. Set yourself up the night before like the person your waking up is not you. They definitely won’t be in the same motivated rationale mindset as you are in the moment.

4. Acknowledge that you’re not Superman and you need sleep.

Waking up at the same time everyday helps you manage your sleep much better if you do it responsibly. On nights that you only get four hours of sleep, you can still wake up on time, not screw up your work schedule or miss appointments, and then either take a nap or go to bed earlier the next night to make up for it. Perfect system. But if you start only getting four hours of sleep every night you’ll crash quickly. Don’t let your hubris allow you to believe you can still get things done without ample sleep. It’s as important to your brain in many ways as food and water. You lose intelligence, decision-making ability, mood control, and impulse control the longer your sleep deprived.

http://superhumanhappiness.blogspot.com/2013/04/hack-your-brain-to-wake-up-early.html

Love on the brain

Four areas of the brain became active, and one area noticeably inactive, when the students had love on their mind. The active areas include one responsible for 'gut' feelings and one that is known to respond to euphoria-inducing drugs. The lights go off however, in the prefrontal cortex, an area that is overactive in depressed patients.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/love/brain.shtml

Don't let your mind stay the same.

How to Hack Your Brain

With a few simple tricks, you can exploit your brain's innate functionality to change just about anything about yourself.

most of what you consider part of your identity is a product of influence.

We have a tendency to think that change is difficult, but it's really just a matter of changing your influence.

While everything stored in your recent memory may not be immediately accessible, all you really need to bring something up is a trigger word.


This is a list of words synonymous with or related to ambition. It's designed to be read aloud to put you in a more ambitious mindset, focusing your thoughts and priming your brain to react ambitiously when these words, or portions of these words, come up later in your day.

-drive
-do
-go
-make
-objective
-important
-create
-commitment
-purpose
-enthusiasm
-eager
-motivation

For more reading on priming, and a look at some really interesting studies, don't forget to check out the references for this article.

Using Your Emotions

If you've ever found yourself making out-of-character decisions based on your emotional state—such as binging on ice cream after a breakup—you know how easily your feelings can overtake your actions. Rather than letting your emotions lead you towards poor judgment and irrational behavior, however, you can learn to compensate for different emotional states and to fabricate emotions to alter your mood. In order to do that you need to, simply put, get in touch with your feelings. The idea isn't so much to cry into a pillow about your wasted childhood, but understand what you're feeling when you're feeling it, what the root cause is, and what you can do about it. We're going to take a look at how you can dissect your emotional state to use it to your advantage, and also look at how you can fabricate emotion to change how you're feeling.

Make Yourself Uncomfortable
Your emotions aren't in full force if you're not really doing anything, so you need to put yourself in uncomfortable situations in order to bring them out. This doesn't mean you should make yourself feel horrible, but that you should go out and do things that you might resist because you're worried about the downsides. Meeting new people is something that makes most people uncomfortable, and it's a great place to start, especially if it's a first date. Try new things that scare you. If you notice you're glued to the couch and don't want to get up, do the opposite. Spend time with people you don't like. Go to a movie you're sure you'll hate. Your experiences won't always be pleasant, but they should incite emotion that you can later analyze and better understand.

Keep Track of How You Feel
Like an abbreviated diary, every time you have an emotional reaction to something, write it down. You don't need much detail, but just a sentence or two noting the emotion you're experiencing and the (possible) cause. For example, I get extremely irritable when I'm hungry. I will lose my temper far more easily when I'm hungry, so whenever I notice myself thinking irrational (and sometimes hateful) things, I always remind myself that I'm just hungry, I'll eat in a minute, and the "asshole" who accidentally missed the garbage can and didn't notice is mostly a result of my frustrated stomach. Until I started to pay attention, I never really noticed that I was a jerk whenever I was hungry. Instead, I just thought I was a jerk. This is a simple example, but the point is this: pay attention to how you feel and the other issues currently present, and you'll find it much easier to manage your negative emotions.

These expressions do surface from genuine emotion, so repeating them can actually make you feel happier/sadder/angrier/etc. through repetition. If you need to change your mood and your mindset, the ability to fake it ‘til you make it is very, very useful.

Always be healthy first before playing mind tricks- taking care of your body and your mind.

http://lifehacker.com/5747213/how-to-hack-your-brain#references

art therapy

Art therapy.. good for the brain

Brain magic