Healthy Brain, Happy Life


Wendy Suzuki - 2015
    Wendy Suzuki one day woke up and realized she didn’t have a life. As an almost-40-year-old award-winning college professor, world-renowned neuroscientist, she had—what many considered—everything: tenure as a professor at New York University; her own very successful neuroscience research lab; prizes for scientific discoveries on cognition and memory; articles published in prestigious scientific journals. As a woman and a scientist, she was the envy of her peers and lauded by her superiors. On paper, she had a stellar career and an impeccable record. What could she possibly be missing? Everything else. Suzuki was overweight. She was tired. She was lonely, had strained work relationships, and for the first time in her life, completely without direction. So she resolved to change her life. The first step--get moving. Everyone knows that exercise makes you feel better—that when you hit the gym despite the dread, you leave in a better mood. Healthy Brain, Happy Life offers the real science of how exercise effects your mind. Using Wendy’s journey from frumpy, fat and frustrated to fit and fabulous as a guide, Healthy Brain offers not just the HOWS of making exercise an important part of life, but the WHYS of the benefits it brings. But movement is just the first step to being Brain Healthy. Once you get your body and mind hooked on exercise, you bring in practices in mindfullness to calm stress and allow your minds to wander to unlock creativity. As your brain begins to change (something called neuroplasticity), the benefits build--you get fitter, improve your memory, increase your ability to work quickly and move from task to task easily. Along with Dr. Suzuki’s 4 minute Brain Hacks, Healthy Brain, Happy Life offers a simple program for changing your life, straight from a leading scientist’s personal experience.

Your Brain: The Missing Manual


Matthew MacDonald - 2008
    More and more people -- Baby Boomers and information workers in particular -- are becoming concerned about their gray matter's ability to function, and with good reason. As this sensible and entertaining guide points out, your brain is easily your most important possession. It deserves proper upkeep.Your Brain: The Missing Manual is a practical look at how to get the most out of your brain -- not just how the brain works, but how you can use it more effectively. What makes this book different than the average self-help guide is that it's grounded in current neuroscience. You get a quick tour of several aspects of the brain, complete with useful advice about:Brain Food: The right fuel for the brain and how the brain commands hunger (including an explanation of the different chemicals that control appetite and cravings)Sleep: The sleep cycle and circadian rhythm, and how to get a good night's sleep (or do the best you can without it)Memory: Techniques for improving your recallReason: Learning to defeat common sense; logical fallacies (including tactics for winning arguments); and good reasons for bad prejudicesCreativity and Problem-Solving: Brainstorming tips and thinking not outside the box, but about the box -- in other words, find the assumptions that limit your ideas so you can break through themUnderstanding Other People's Brains: The battle of the sexes and babies developing brainsLearn about the built-in circuitry that makes office politics seem like a life-or-death struggle, causes you to toss important facts out of your memory if they're not emotionally charged, and encourages you to eat huge amounts of high-calorie snacks. With Your Brain: The Missing Manual you'll discover that, sometimes, you can learn to compensate for your brain or work around its limitations -- or at least to accept its eccentricities. Exploring your brain is the greatest adventure and biggest mystery you'll ever face. This guide has exactly the advice you need.

Effortless Journaling: How to Start a Journal, Make It a Habit, and Find Endless Writing Topics


S.J. Scott - 2018
    With journal writing, you can become healthier, happier, smarter, and more self-aware. In fact, there are numerous science-backed benefits of journal writing. For instance, journaling can help: relieve your stress levels, improve your sleep, close those nagging "open loops" in your life, and cope with traumatic events from your past. Although journaling has many benefits, it's also a very challenging habit to build. In fact, there are eight common roadblocks that people experience with journal writing. They say things like: "I need concrete strategies and a step-by-step process for turning journaling into a consistent habit." "Journaling feels overwhelming. I don't know what to do or how to do it." "I've tried so many times before, and I just can't stick with it." "My life is so busy that I can't find the time to journal." "My journal is never around when I need it, so I forget to write." "I have no idea what to write about. Staring at a blank page is intimidating." "I'm afraid someone will read my journal." "I don't know what kind of journal I need—there are so many types out there." If any of these challenges sound familiar, then you should purchase this book: Effortless Journaling -- How to Start a Journal, Make It a Habit, and Find Endless Writing Topics. DOWNLOAD:: Effortless Journaling -- How to Start a Journal, Make It a Habit, and Find Endless Writing Topics Throughout Effortless Journaling, the authors (S.J. Scott & Barrie Davenport) address each of these concerns to help you make the journaling habit a part of your daily routine. In this book, they cover topics like: 15 benefits of journaling (How it positively impacts your physical well-being, mental state, productivity, and personal life); How to combine journaling with the practice of mindfulness; 3 simple tools you need to get started with journaling; 9 popular journaling strategies -- and how to pick the one that's right for you; 8 rules for consistent, daily journaling; How to turn journaling into a sticky, permanent habit. Journaling doesn't have to be a chore. It should be enjoyable, enlightening, and something you look forward to. Would You Like To Know More? Download now to capture those important moments and build a routine, with quiet, self-reflection. Scroll to the top of the page and select the buy now button.

Secrets of Productive People: 50 Techniques To Get Things Done: Teach Yourself


Mark Forster - 2015
    Each chapter outlines one of the 50 ideas and gives three strategies for putting it into practice. Some ideas will surprise you, all will inspire you. Put these simple strategies together and you have a recipe for a better life, a formula that will unlock a more productive you. Whether you want to improve your efficiency, clear your desk, or be on top of your work, this book provides the tools and techniques you need to be more productive. With dedicated sections on having a productive attitude, managing specific projects, aids to productivity and productivity in action, it gives you everything you need to know.

People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts


Robert Bolton - 1979
    Maybe you listen to an argument in which neither party seems to hear the other. Or maybe your mind drifts to other matters when people talk to you. People Skills is a communication skills handbook that can help you eliminate these and other communication problems. Author Robert Bolton describes the twelve most common communication barriers, showing how these “roadblocks” damage relationships by increasing defensiveness, aggressiveness, or dependency. He explains how to acquire the ability to listen, assert yourself, resolve conflicts, and work out problems with others. These are skills that will help you communicate calmly, even in stressful emotionally charged situations. People Skills will show you: · How to get your needs met using simple assertion techniques · How body language often speaks louder than words · How to use silence as a valuable communication tool · How to de-escalate family disputes, lovers' quarrels, and other heated arguments Both thought-provoking and practical, People Skills is filled with workable ideas that you can use to improve your communication in meaningful ways, every day.

How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens


Benedict Carey - 2014
    We’re told that learning is all self-discipline, that we must confine ourselves to designated study areas, turn off the music, and maintain a strict ritual if we want to ace that test, memorize that presentation, or nail that piano recital.   But what if almost everything we were told about learning is wrong? And what if there was a way to achieve more with less effort?   In How We Learn, award-winning science reporter Benedict Carey sifts through decades of education research and landmark studies to uncover the truth about how our brains absorb and retain information. What he discovers is that, from the moment we are born, we are all learning quickly, efficiently, and automatically; but in our zeal to systematize the process we have ignored valuable, naturally enjoyable learning tools like forgetting, sleeping, and daydreaming. Is a dedicated desk in a quiet room really the best way to study? Can altering your routine improve your recall? Are there times when distraction is good? Is repetition necessary? Carey’s search for answers to these questions yields a wealth of strategies that make learning more a part of our everyday lives—and less of a chore.   By road testing many of the counterintuitive techniques described in this book, Carey shows how we can flex the neural muscles that make deep learning possible. Along the way he reveals why teachers should give final exams on the first day of class, why it’s wise to interleave subjects and concepts when learning any new skill, and when it’s smarter to stay up late prepping for that presentation than to rise early for one last cram session. And if this requires some suspension of disbelief, that’s because the research defies what we’ve been told, throughout our lives, about how best to learn.   The brain is not like a muscle, at least not in any straightforward sense. It is something else altogether, sensitive to mood, to timing, to circadian rhythms, as well as to location and environment. It doesn’t take orders well, to put it mildly. If the brain is a learning machine, then it is an eccentric one. In How We Learn, Benedict Carey shows us how to exploit its quirks to our advantage.  Praise for How We Learn“This book is a revelation. I feel as if I’ve owned a brain for fifty-four years and only now discovered the operating manual.”—Mary Roach, bestselling author of Stiff and Gulp“A welcome rejoinder to the faddish notion that learning is all about the hours put in.” —The New York Times Book Review   “A valuable, entertaining tool for educators, students and parents.” —Shelf Awareness   “How We Learn is more than a new approach to learning; it is a guide to making the most out of life. Who wouldn’t be interested in that?” —Scientific American   “I know of no other source that pulls together so much of what we know about the science of memory and couples it with practical, practicable advice.”—Daniel T. Willingham, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension


Andy Clark - 2008
    Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world. The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than brain-bound. The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers


Daniel L. Schacter - 2001
    Schacter explores instances of what we would consider memory failure—absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence—and suggests instead that these miscues are actually indications that memory is functioning as designed. Drawing from vivid scientific research and creative literature, as well as high-profile events in which memory has figured significantly (Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony, for instance), The Seven Sins of Memory provides a more nuanced understanding of how memory and the mind influence each other and shape our lives.

Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain


Ron Hale-Evans - 2006
    This book can make you smarter.Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today's information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you'll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively.Grounded in current research and theory, but offering practical solutions you can apply immediately, Mind Performance Hacks is filled with life hacks that teach you to:Use mnemonic tricks to remember numbers, names, dates, and other flotsam you need to recall. Put down your calculator and perform complex math in your head, with your fingers, or on the back of a napkin. Spark your creativity with innovative brainstorming methods. Use effective systems to capture new ideas before they get away. Communicate in creative new ways-even using artificial languages. Make better decisions by foreseeing problems and finding surprising solutions. Improve your mental fitness with cool tricks and games.While the hugely successful Mind Hacks showed you how your brain works, Mind Performance Hacks shows you how to make it work better.

How to Get Back Up: A Memoir of Failure & Resilience


Neil Pasricha - 2018
    We all fall. We all need to know how to get back up. Few know this better than New York Times best-selling author Neil Pasricha. For the first time, he tells his story and shows you how.Before selling over a million copies of his Book of Awesome series and touring the world to teach Fortune 500 CEOs, Ivy league deans, and members of the royal family how to unlock a positive mind-set, Pasricha's life hit rock bottom.He flamed out of his dream job and then racked up $300,000 of debt as a failed entrepreneur. He lost his best friend to suicide and his wife to divorce - in the same week. And then there were his own demons - the hang-ups, anxieties, and bouts of self-doubts that plagued him from adolescence.And yet, inch by inch, Neil learned how to get back up. And you can, too.

High Performance: Lessons from the Best on Becoming Your Best


Jake Humphrey - 2021
    And in his multi-million download podcast, High Performance, he teams up with Professor Damian Hughes to examine the secrets of the world's highest-performing people.Now, Jake and Damian reveal how we can all become high performers. Drawing on interviews with leading sportspeople and entrepreneurs, they uncover the eight hidden principles that drive high performers to success: from taking absolute responsibility for their situation, to working out their non-negotiable 'trademark behaviours', to getting the very best out of their teammates. And they draw on cutting-edge psychology to reveal how to apply these principles in our day-to-day lives - whether on the pitch, in our careers, or at home.You too can harness the secrets of high performance. This book explains how.Drawing on interviews with: Ben Ainslie | Steven Bartlett | Lily Cole | Tom Daley | Rio Ferdinand | Steven Gerrard | Kelly Holmes | Steph Houghton | Chris Hoy | Eddie Jones | Kelly Jones | Siya Kolisi | Frank Lampard | Jo Malone | Matthew McConaughey | Ant Middleton | Tracey Neville | Phil Neville | Robin Van Persie | Nims Purja | Mauricio Pochettino | Jonny Wilkinson | Clive Woodward | and many more . . .

The Ultra Mind Solution: Automatically Boost Your Brain Power, Improve Your Mood and Optimize Your Memory


Mark Hyman - 2007
    The invisible epidemic has led to the suffering of millions who spend billions on drugs, only to find they don't work. This is an epidemic of broken brains."Broken brains" go by many names -- depression, anxiety, memory loss, brain fog, attention deficit disorder, autism, and dementia, to name a few -- and show up in radically different ways from person to person, making each seem like a separate problem.But the truth is that these "diagnoses" are all the result of a few basic problems with our biology. Pinpoint these biological problems, fix them, and let your body's natural healing intelligence take over to repair your brain. Now you can experience an UltraMind -- one that is highly focused and able to pay attention at will, with a strong, reliable memory and a mood that is calm, confident, in control, and in good spirits.We have all heard of the mind-body connection or how our thoughts affect the health of our body. But the reverse is far more powerful: what you do to your body, your basic biology, has a profound effect on your brain.Have you ever experienced instant clarity after exercise? Alertness after drinking coffee? A mental crash after popping candy? Does your brain inexplicably slow down during stress, while multitasking, or when meeting a deadline? Each is an example of how what we do to our bodies -- whether through nutrition, sleep, exercise, or stress -- has a dramatic effect on our brains.Conventional treatments don't help, or provide only slight benefit, because they just manage symptoms rather than deal with -- and heal -- the underlying problem. And just as brain problems all stem from the same root causes, they all have the same solution -- The UltraMind Solution.Our ancient genes interact with our environment to create systemic imbalances that affect our brains. Correct those imbalances -- most caused by nutritional deficiencies, allergens, infections, toxins, and stress -- and you can achieve optimum mental health without drugs or psychotherapy.The UltraMind Solution is the future of medicine, the culmination of the last twenty years of research on what makes the brain happy, focused, and calm; research that has uncovered a few simple factors that explain why things go wrong and how to fix them.Don't wait for this revolution in medicine to trickle into your doctor's office: it usually takes research twenty years to move from the lab to the patient. The answers are here, right now, in The UltraMind Solution.

The Good Creative: 18 ways to make better art


Paul Jarvis - 2014
    You dream and plan and make stuff – all the time. And whether that “stuff” is a book, a startup, or abstract crayon art on the bathroom wall, you have a nagging feeling that you could take your work further. Do it better. Become more successful. In The Good Creative, I outline the 18 habits of the world’s most respected artists. It’s a concise, invigorating manifesto for creative pursuits of every kind. Unlike the get-rich-while-you-meditate programs and e-courses that seem to multiply by the day, there offers no guarantees here. None. These 18 principles might not fund your early retirement, but when applied consistently with a healthy dose of hard work, they will help you to make better, more meaningful art. Now that’s a promise you can take to the bank (or at least to Twitter). You’ll learn how to: Promote yourself without feeling like a used car salesman Hug your critics, embrace failure and reinvent your work Launch small and build a larger, more engaged audience Share your process and break the rules You will NOT learn how to: Take over the world from your bathtub Win the Sundance Grand Jury prize Earn six figures, yesterday Make an age-defying green smoothie (but you might learn how to attract more fans and readers for your recipe books)

The Lifetime Learner's Guide to Reading and Learning


Gary Hoover - 2017
    Few people have “consumed” or learned from and remembered as many books. In The Lifetime Learner’s Guide to Reading and Learning, Gary lays out his method for capturing important ideas contained in books in 30 minutes (or less) without speed-reading. The book contains a multitude of tips about how to learn efficiently, how to find and buy books, and an annotated list of 160 books for expanding your knowledge – from history and geography to entrepreneurship and architecture. The book concludes with an extensive section on how to think creatively and see things that others do not, and how to separate the wheat from the chaff and see the forest beyond the trees.

You Can Have an Amazing Memory: Learn Life-Changing Techniques and Tips from the Memory Maestro


Dominic O'Brien - 1999
    Here, for the first time, he reveals his secrets for memory mastery. Follow his brain-boosting techniques and turn your mind into a super-powered computer that will recall PIN numbers with ease, remember directions, and help bring you success in business, leisure, and relationships.