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…
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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,…
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The 3 Techniques The US Army Uses To Instill Mental Toughness
a Annie Murphy Paul's very interesting article in Time: 1) "Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist." The program’s key message: Mental toughness comes from thinking like an optimist. “People who don’t give up have a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local and changeable,” notes Penn psychology professor Martin Seligman, describing the intervention in a recent journal article. When such individuals encounter adversity, they think to themselves: “It’s going away quickly; it’s just this one situation, and I…
1 min read
The Fast Way To Make Better Decisions, Backed By Research
ke the perspective of someone else. Think about what your smartest friend might do in that situation. We investigated how perspective-taking might be used to overcome bias and improve advice-based judgments. Decision makers often tend to underweight the opinions of others relative to their own, and thus fail to exploit the wisdom of others. We tested the idea that decision makers taking the perspective of another person engage a less egocentric mode of processing of advisory opinions and thereby improve their…
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The Attractiveness Of Your Real Estate Agent Affects How Much Your House Sells For
nder and attractiveness can affect how much a house sells for and how long it is on the market. Via Marina Adshade: It turns out having a male agent is bad for the selling price of a house. Both male listing agents (those acting on behalf of the seller) and male selling agents (those acting on behalf of the buyer) are associated with lower house prices than their female counterparts. The gender of the agent, however, has no effect on…
1 min read
Do you function better after a Red Bull and vodka vs. just drinking vodka?
, but it will make you think you're functioning better: The consumption of alcohol mixed with energy drinks (AmED) has become a popular and controversial practice among young people. Increased rates of impaired driving and injuries have been associated with AmED consumption. The purpose of this study was to examine if the consumption of AmED alters cognitive processing and subjective measures of intoxication compared with the consumption of alcohol alone. Eighteen participants (nine men and nine women) attended four test…
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