thinker moments Archives - Amazing Health Advances

3 Tips to Make Your Home a Mental Health Haven

AHA Publisher — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 07:00:58 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #382) and blog, I talk about how to make your home a mental health haven. When the world feels like a mess (a common sentiment these days!), it is important that your home is a haven—a place where you can rest, relax, and feel happy. Thankfully, there are many ways we can create a joyful atmosphere at home, including: 1. Intentionally bonding with your loved ones at home. We are made for deep, meaningful connections. When we feel connected and part of a community, we boost our mental resilience and toughness, as well as our mood. As I point out in my book, 101 Ways to Be Less Stressed, meaningful socialization helps us feel happy and at peace within ourselves, balancing the energy in the brain and helping us build up our cognitive resilience. Some ways I love to bond with my family and friends are: Walks/exercising together. Cooking family meals or baking together. Playing board games like Scrabble or Clue, building puzzles or making up Lego sets. Watching our favorite movie or TV series (we are big Lord of the Rings fans!). Planning and going on trips together. Sitting on the floor in each other’s rooms and chatting about life. Watching funny videos together. Sharing cute pictures of our pets in our group chat. 2. Practicing good mental self-care. Often, we tend to focus on our physical needs, and forget to meet our mental needs! But mental self-care is as important as eating, hydrating and exercising, because we don’t go 3 seconds without thinking! This includes practices like: Self-regulation. As a cognitive neuroscientist, I have found that the most effective way to manage unhappiness in the moment and boost my mood is to practice intentional, directed self-regulation. I do this using my Neurocycle mind-management technique, which I discuss in detail in my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and app Neurocycle. The Neurocycle is a way to harness your thinking power through mind-management that I have developed based on years of research and clinical practice; any task that requires thinking can use it, which means everything can, because you’re always thinking. In fact, this de-stressing, self-regulation technique can really work with any issue, and can be done anywhere, any place and at any time—all you need is you! There are 5 steps in this method: Gather: become aware of how you are feeling emotionally and physically and how you are behaving, as well as your perspective and attitude in the moment. Reflect: ask, answer and discuss in detail what you gathered awareness of in step 1. Ask questions like “What does this mean?”, “When do I feel this way?”, “Is there a common pattern?”, “How do I experience unhappiness?” and “Why was I triggered?”. Write: write down your answers from steps 1 and 2, which will help you organize your thinking and gain more clarity into how you feel and why, so you can take steps to change your thinking and heal what is making you unhappy. Recheck: In this step, do what I call a “mental autopsy”. Recheck what you wrote down, looking for thought patterns and triggers, and think about why you feel the way you do and how you can be happier. Active Reach. Work out an action for the day based on your recheck step, which will help you practice what you learnt about yourself, such as building more fun into your day to help bring some joy back into your life. Maybe take a long hot bubble bath, bake your favorite dessert or watch your favorite feel-good movie. Allow yourself to have fun and be happy! Taking what I call “thinker moments”, where you just let your mind wander and daydream for a few minutes, also helps calm the mind, reboot your thinking and improve your mood. I talked about these in depth on my podcast and in my books Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and Think, Learn, Succeed. Brain-building, which involves deep thinking to learn and build memory. This is a great way to boost your mood by exercising your mind. You can do this with any information, whether you are listening to a podcast, watching a documentary or reading a book or article. The goal is to think deeply about the information in chunks and then teach back what you have learned to yourself or a loved one (or even a stuffed toy!). I talk about this in detail in Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. 3. Bringing the outside in. I am sure by now you have heard of the phrase “plant mom”; these are people that love filling their homes with indoor plants and greenery. But this shouldn’t just be a social media trend. Fresh, living greenery and natural light can have a profoundly positive effect on our mental health, helping us calm down, breathe better and feel more at peace in our living and working environments. To read the original article click here.

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Intrusive Thoughts: What They Are & How to Not Let Them Run Your Life

AHA Publisher — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:00:16 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #366) and blog, I talk about intrusive thoughts, and how to manage them using what I call “thinker moments”. Intrusive thinking is can be defined as uncontrollable, unwanted thoughts that we feel unable to resist. This kind of thinking is often a way of coping with an underlying, unresolved issue. It’s not always the most effective or sustainable way to deal with pain or trauma, but it’s a coping mechanism—a type of distraction you use to try to keep the source of your pain bearable, at least in the short term. If we are constantly trapped in a web of intrusive thinking, it can become a toxic mindset. Whatever we think about the most grows because we give it energy, which, in turn, can impact our ability to think and our overall health. Fortunately, these thoughts can be changed through the process of reconceptualization. And this includes one very powerful tool that is often overlooked: daydreaming! As you have heard me say many times before, the brain is neuroplastic. This means it is constantly changing. We merge with our environments through our choices, including how long we decide to spend on our phone. “Thinker” time is very important because it balances our minds, allowing us to observe our environment before we just let it influence and direct our thinking, as I discuss in detail in my books Think, Learn, Succeed and Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. Contrary to popular belief, the mind does not grind to a halt when you are doing nothing. Spontaneous thought processes, including mind-wandering, creative thinking, and daydreaming, arise when thoughts are relatively free from focused thinking and external influences. This type of internal thinking plays an important role in contributing to the richness of intentional thinking and subsequent learning, adding a powerful creative aspect to our lives. Learning in the “thinker” moments can enhance our success in work, school, and life. Indeed, the process of understanding what allows free thinking, and what allows something to get “stuck in our heads,” is crucial to mental self-care. Analyzing our thoughts in this way gives insight into how we can capture and change toxic and intrusive thoughts that are blocking our success—those things and feelings we just can’t seem to move past, which grow stronger as we think about them. Deliberate, persistent, negative thinking like “I can’t do it” or “This is too hard” can result in harm in the brain and body, setting the stage for future mind and brain issues. These types of thoughts can literally paralyze our imagination, inhibiting success in school, life, and work, and creating negative reinforcing feedback loops. The mind can be hijacked, so to speak, by these thoughts as they move up from our nonconscious mind, unless we learn how to control them. Thankfully, “thinker” moments allow us to manage our mind and regulate these intrusive thoughts. Controlling the mind-wandering “thinker” is actually known as an awake resting state. It activates the coexisting default mode network (DMN) and task positive network (TPN) in the brain in a constructive and healthy way. These networks form the brain’s inner life with the DMN dominating and becoming especially active when the mind is introspective and thinking deeply in a directed rest or idling state. The DMN is a primary network that we switch into when we switch off from the outside world and move into a state of focused mindfulness. It activates to even higher levels when a person is daydreaming, introspecting, or letting his or her mind wander in an organized exploratory way through the endless myriad of thoughts within the deep spiritual nonconscious part of who we are. The TPN, on the other hand, supports the active thinking required for making decisions. So, as we focus our thinking and activate the DMN, at some point in our thinking process we move into active decision making. This activates the TPN, and we experience this as action. Being alone with our thoughts can also provide valuable and potent insight into how we function and can positively influence our judgment and decisions. As Socrates once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Thinker moments allow us to examine our own internal lives and develop our unique imagination. Management of our mind and thinking is the key to success, which is why it is the overriding objective of all my work, research, books, and programs. It is your perceptions of your thoughts, and what you do with your thoughts, that are important. Learning to capture thoughts and evaluate them logically by developing a thinker mindset is one of the most significant parts of any mental self-care regimen, allowing us to become more self-evaluative and self-regulatory. Here are some simple ways to activate your “thinker mindset” and build up your resilience against intrusive thoughts: The average person spends up to eight hours a day using technology. Some of the worst effects of electronic devices seem to be mitigated when devices are used less than two hours a day. Find ways to limit your use of technology throughout the day. Thinker moments aren’t an odd quirk of the mind but are natural and spontaneous. Allocate time, at least sixteen minutes a day, to just thinking and allowing your mind to wander. You can spread this across the day in two or three intervals. As mentioned above, thinker moments teach you how to live the self-examined life. As your mind wanders, think about what you are thinking and your own experiences, perhaps writing about your thoughts in a journal or notepad. During your thinker moments, write down, in a self-reflective way, which thoughts are free-flowing as well as which thoughts get stuck. Track the direction of free-flowing thoughts over time. Schedule in time to work on the thoughts that you feel are keeping you stuck. Evaluate whether your thoughts give you a sense of peace or make you worried. If your thoughts concern you, think differently about the same thing every time that thought pops up. In other words, reconceptualize the disturbing thought. Next, practice developing the newly reconceptualized positive thought daily and automatizing it over time into helpful, useful, and successful memory. For more on this process see Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, my app Neurocycle, and my previous blogs and podcasts. To read the original article click here.

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Daydreaming Can Improve Your Mental Health & Cognitive Flexibility

AHA Publisher — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 07:44:21 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – Although it may seem contradictory, letting your mind daydream is actually really good for your mental health! In this podcast (episode #266) and blog, I talk about the many mental and physical health benefits of just letting your mind wander. The mind is always active (even when you are sleeping!), which means that even when you are not thinking about anything in particular, you are still thinking—the mind is still going about its business. Indeed, our minds are always time-travelling from the past to the present and back to the future. The great news is that you can be intentional about turning these “time-travel daydreaming moments” into what I call “thinker moments” – periods of time when you let your mind switch off to the external, switch onto the internal and just wander and daydream. Why do I call these “thinker” moments? This term is based on Auguste Rodin’s famous “The Thinker” sculpture—that incredibly heroic-looking figure with his hand pensively under his chin. When I first saw this statue, it felt almost imposing, and I thought to myself, “How could that act of just sitting there and thinking be so…formidable?”. The reality is that daydreaming, doodling and letting our minds wander is incredibly powerful. It is not what I have heard some people call “nonsense” or “distracted” thinking. When we daydream, we essentially reboot our mind, as I discuss in detail in my latest book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess. This means you can use thinker moments to give your brain a rest and allow it to heal and reenergize, which increases your clarity of thought and organizes the networks of your brain. It does this by increasing and balancing alpha activity, which increases insight into what’s really going on in your mind and helps create an optimal state of relaxation and alertness, bridging the divide between the conscious and nonconscious mind. This puts you in a state of peacefulness, readiness and meditation, and increases delta activity, which helps to bring up suppressed thoughts. Thinker moments also increase beta activity, which is important for processing information, being alert and attentive, working through something challenging, focusing, and developing sustained attention. As a result, this balanced energy increases blood flow to the brain, which helps it function better and helps you deal with mental challenges and manage stress. The opposite happens if you don’t take regular thinker moments. Not giving the mind a rest and letting it daydream can reduce blood flow by up to 80 percent in the front of the brain, which can dramatically affect cognitive fluency and the efficient, associative thinking required at home, school or in the workplace. Cumulatively, this can lead to unprocessed thoughts and nightmares, affecting your overall quality of sleep, performance and mental health. The reality is that you cannot afford not to daydream! Now, you may be thinking, “All this sounds great, but how do I get my mind to just shut off and daydream? Where do I start?” Here’s how: To do a thinker moment, think of yourself as the actor, director, screenwriter and audience of a mental performance – your mental performance. Now, simply close your eyes and let your mind wander. You can start the process by intentionally thinking of something pleasant and meaningful, and then let this lead you into a flow of thoughts. Prompt yourself with topics you’d find rewarding to daydream about, like a pleasant memory, a future accomplishment, or an event you’re looking forward to. Be observant about what you are thinking about. Indeed, as you take a thinker moment, you may be surprised to notice what thoughts and feelings pop up from your nonconscious during these moments. Don’t panic, as this is perfectly normal! Just take note of them and plan to address them later—try to avoid ruminating on them and letting them interrupt your internal rest time. As you daydream, you can listen to some music, take a walk outside, or doodle. These moments can be anything from a short ten seconds to a full hour. Trust that it’s possible to have a good experience if you prime your brain with topics you find pleasant. This is something all of us can do once you have the concept; even a child can do this with instructions! Daydreaming makes sense to us, no matter our age. Lastly, try not to confuse planning things with thinking for pleasure! When I want to have a “thinker moment”, I personally like to just stop and stare out a window for a few seconds. I find this very helpful and invigorating—especially when I am really stressed or anxious, or in the middle of a busy work day. If possible, I also try to go outside; being in nature and getting that Vitamin D really takes that thinker moment to the next level! I really cannot recommend “thinker moments” enough—not just for your mental and physical health, but also your spiritual wellbeing! When you give our mind a rest by letting your mind wander and daydream, you essentially restart your brain and give yourself that edge you need, helping you get in touch with that deeper, nonconscious, almost spiritual part of you. These moments don’t just help improve mental health, they also help you get to know yourself on a deeper level. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

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