Here’s The Secret To Persistence, According To Research
en challenged, focus on "getting better" -- not doing well or looking good. Get-better goals increase motivation, make tasks more interesting and replenish energy. This effect even carries over to subsequent tasks. Via Nine Things Successful People Do Differently: Get-better goals, on the other hand, are practically bulletproof. When we think about what we are doing in terms of learning and mastering, accepting that we may make some mistakes along the way, we stay motivated despite the setbacks that might…
2 minutes
4 Secrets To Becoming Luckier, According To Research
open to more opportunities, interact with a large network of people, break routines and keep a relaxed attitude toward life. Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries: ...lucky people pay more attention to what’s going on around them than unlucky people. It’s more nuanced than that. Here’s where being open to meeting, interacting with, and learning from different types of people comes in. Wiseman found that lucky people tend to be open to opportunities (or insights)…
3 minutes
Here’s Why Stupid People Don’t Realize They’re Stupid
know how skilled you are at something, you need to watch yourself, watch others and compare. If you don't have the experience (or the mental firepower) to do this effectively, your judgements won't be accurate. To oversimplify it a tad -- stupid people may be too stupid to realize they're stupid: Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their…
3 minutes
When an expert speaks does your ability to think for yourself literally shut down?
s. "Fascinatingly, the fMRI showed that in the face of “expert” advice (even though it actually wasn’t particularly good advice), the parts of the volunteers’ brains involved in considering alternatives became almost completely inactive." Via Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy: In a 2009 study, Emory University School of Medicine scientists led by Gregory Berns, MD, a professor of neuroeconomics and psychiatry at Emory, found that people will actually stop thinking for themselves…
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15 Research Based Secrets To Bulletproof Willpower
ed willpower right now? Clench your fists, cross your arms, tense your muscles, and stand up straight. (Improving your posture can improve your self control.) Mental control is important too. A wandering mind is not a happy mind. Meditation can improve this. Just making too many decisions can leave you depleted and burned out. To reduce this, build good habits and automate behavior as much as possible. Want to eat less at a meal? Wear a tight shirt. Context is…
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When you’re exhausted should you concentrate harder or just trust your gut?
with your gut: Recent studies showed that a period of unconscious thought can help when making complex decisions. Under some circumstances, unconscious thought improves decisions even more than conscious thought. Executive functioning depends on energy provided by glucose, and we know from previous research that the performance of various conscious processes deteriorates when energy is low. Unconscious processes require less energy and may operate unhampered when energy is low. Therefore, we propose that whereas low blood glucose levels impair…
1 min read
Here’s The Secret To Amazing Naps
re are 5 ways to improve your naps: If you're a morning person, the best time to nap is around 1 or 1:30PM. If you're a night owl, nap later, around 2:30 or 3PM. The best naps are under 45 mins or 90-120 mins. Anything in between is likely to give you that groggy feeling. Naps don't mean you're lazy: A NASA study showed that in-flight naps improved subsequent performance by 34% and overall alertness by 54%. To make sure…
1 min read
This Body Language Means You’re About To Be Cheated
a Wray Herbert, author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits: Then they isolated the specific cluster of cues that were actually present when volunteers successfully detected others’ self-serving intentions. Again and again, it was a cluster of four cues: hand touching, face touching, crossing arms, and leaning away. None of these cues foretold deceit by itself, but together they transformed into a highly accurate signal. And the more often the participants used this particular cluster of gestures,…
1 min read
