Unrested brains work less efficiently and contribute to emotional issues such as ongoing stress and difficulty thinking straight. The book ‘Get Productive’ by neuroscientist Magdalena Bak-Maier offers some fascinating insights into how you can get your emotions back on track by resting your brain properly.
- Periodically close your eyes, as visual stimulation such as Twitter, Facebook or TV is a major energy drain on your brain. The visual cortex, the part of your brain devoted to processing visual stimuli, is the largest chunk of brain real estate. As long as your eyes are open, the information bombardment is constant.
- Switch between different activities as prolonged multitasking and intense focus stress your brain. Thinking engages specific brains cells to fire together. Prolonged and intense thinking causes more and more cells to join in but excited cells can have a difficult time switching off. The longer you work, the more the brain heats up with activity. Without a break to stop some cells from being ‘on’, other cells can’t get effectively engaged.
- Get a regular 7-8 hours’ sleep as lack of sleep prevents your mind from creating order and logic. Imagine your mind as a giant world library of ideas, reflections, inspiration and information. To be efficient, it requires a cataloguing system so thoughts are found quickly. During sleep, your brain creates order by processing and integrating memories and experiences to produce meaning and continuity. Insufficient sleep disrupts this healthy process, creating havoc.
- Arrange your work area to soothe your brain as physical environments affect brain function. Your brain draws information from all sorts of cues including auditory, olfactory, visual and other sensory information. Certain sounds and environments stimulate a feeling of safety in which the brain can perform and focus better, while others can create anxiety and extra stress or distraction.
- Rediscover the art of heart-led letter writing or journaling as emptying thoughts and feelings helps the brain order your thoughts. Your brain carries a massive amount of information about the state of your body, different experiences and feelings, a lifetime of memories and beliefs. This can resemble a massive jungle that, at times, needs a machete to clear new paths. Writing is one of the most effective ways of emptying and processing information, especially when performed in free flow without censoring yourself. This process helps the mind work its magic, making important associations or simply healing itself.
- Draw to recover clarity. Given the massive amount of information and intensity of your work and focus, thoughts can become lost or displaced so the overall logic that thinking should create is compromised. Drawing helps the brain process, order and evaluate its thinking by providing it with an external parking space. Once an idea is captured and represented, your mind can begin to see it anew, evaluate it, test it and improve it.
- Track your progress with tools that relieve unnecessary brainpower. Your brain is a natural synthesiser of information and meaning. To do this, the brain is always ‘on’. But some of the work and energy needed to keep on top of progress, important birthdays, or series of phone numbers is tiring and takes unnecessary energy. Often mental overwhelm can result from apparent chaos of thoughts. Using tools and frameworks such as to-do lists and mnemonic reminders, based on conscious awareness of facts, helps the brain function at its best.
- Get Joggy or Get Jiggy with physical exercise or bedroom activity to help the brain heal. One of the reasons why yoga is so relaxing for the brain is that most balancing poses require such high level of focus that all other thought activity in effect goes on pause. This is restful to the brain as it stops the massive storm of thoughts that are normally flooding through. Exercise and sex both achieve something similar in creating a state in which the brain switches off. In addition the extra hormones that bathe the brain cells afterwards help them to recover.
- Drink an espresso to keep your brain cells primed for action. Several studies show that regular and moderate intake of caffeine supports memory retention in older people, and reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Caffeine creates brain cell activation in parts of the prefrontal lobe involved in attention, concentration, planning and monitoring. In other words, a small dose of caffeine primes cells but a massive intake exhausts them; so don’t overdo it.
- Talk it out to heal and realign inner conflicts that dampen and limit full brain function. Most people have different voices within them. The two are the logic-driven, rational voice and the heart-driven, emotional or intuitive voice. Often these two want different things and seem to tear the person apart. This is tiring for the brain as emotional and rational circuits fire and produce different patterns. Without a way to find a blend between these two aspects of your mind, you can feel drained, exhausted and at war with your own thoughts. Talking things out with a trained professional realigns them and helps your mind rest and rebalance.
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