Becoming a Better Learner
Jim Kwik’s latest book, Limitless, teaches us how to upgrade our brain and learn faster. In it, he shares strategies for improving focus, memory, reading speed, and study habits.
Kwik begins by identifying what he refers to as the four supervillains of learning:
- Digital deluge – the overwhelming amount of information we have access to and how much we consume daily
- Digital distraction – the struggle to stay focused while being constantly connected and distracted by notifications
- Digital dementia – the deterioration of short-term memory as a result of using our devices to remember everything
- Digital deduction – the influence of the Internet over our thinking and decision-making
I must admit I struggle with all four. While I was well aware of how distracted and deluged with information I am, I now see that I no longer need to remember phone numbers or directions, nor think critically on my own. There are plenty of opinions out there with which to simply agree or disagree. I can feel my brain turning to mush!
I’ve started trying out some of the methods Kwik offers for accelerated learning. Here are a few:
- Listening to Baroque music can help you focus.
- Visualization can help you remember. Attach an image to a person’s name. Assign talking points to rooms in your house.
- Avoiding subvocalization, the voice inside your head when you read, can help you read faster.
- Using your finger to read increases your speed because your eye is attracted to motion.
On a more general level, you can use the FASTER method to learn anything quickly.
- F is for forget – Forget what you already know, so your mind will be open to new things, and forget everything around you so that you can focus.
- A is for act – Become more active in your learning, taking notes, highlighting key points.
- S is for state – Learning is influenced by your state of emotions. Choose states of joy, curiosity, and fascination.
- T is for teach – Learn with the intention of teaching the information to someone else.
- E is for enter – Enter learning on your calendar, so you will be sure to spend time on your personal growth.
- R is for review – Spaced repetition is the best way to reduce the effects of the forgetting curve. Reviewing information over multiple, spread-out sessions improves retention.
Kwik believes “If knowledge is power, then learning is a superpower.” Learning how to learn better and faster can help you live an exceptional life.
“It’s not about being time rich, it’s about making the time that we have rich.”
In her book, Happier Hour, UCLA professor Cassie Holmes argues that time is the most important resource for our well-being. One of the best ways to increase joy and meaning is to be deliberate about how we invest our time. For starters, we should track how we currently spend our time and rate how we feel during that time. Holmes suggests doing this in half-hour increments for one or two weeks.
Most people find that the happiest hours of the day are those shared with friends or loved ones. The unhappiest times are typically doing things we feel we have to do, like household chores, or things that feel like a waste of time, like commuting. For many of us work is meaningful, but not fun, watching TV feels fun, but lacks meaning, and social media is neither fun nor meaningful.
The next step is to use time crafting to intentionally plan how you will spend your time to maximize well-being. After identifying the activities that bring you the most joy and fulfillment, you want to make sure to block time each week for those activities. We experience the start of an activity more intensely, so spreading out activities that you enjoy will give you more happy hours to look forward to. Instead of binge-watching TV once a week, plan to watch TV in several one-hour sittings throughout the week.
You will also need to include tasks that you dislike, but that need to be done. Holmes offers suggestions for how we can make our least happy hours more fun and meaningful. One is to bundle things you don’t enjoy or that feel like a waste of time with something that makes you happy. Play your favorite music while washing dishes or listen to a podcast on your commute. Instead of sending an email, meet a colleague in person to make work more social.
Another tip is to increase the meaning of a task by connecting with the why of what you are doing. Remind yourself who benefits from your work. Think of cooking a healthy meal as caring for your loved ones. And just as spreading out happy experiences gives you more occasions to look forward to, consolidating your chores into one block of time will give you fewer beginnings to dread.
A final piece of advice is to reframe your time-spending decisions from questions of whether to questions of when. Consider what you are achieving over a week or a month. You are less likely to feel guilty leaving work early to pick up your child if you consider all the hours you have devoted to work over the past months. Happiness is heightened when we take a broader time perspective. How you spend a single hour doesn’t define your life. You can do it all! Just not in one day.
Many people set goals for the new year. This makes sense because January 1 is a “temporal landmark,” a day that stands out from other days. This offers us a fresh start. Unfortunately, very few people stick with their resolutions. There are many reasons for this, but one is that people set the wrong kind of goal. You can increase your likelihood of success by choosing an approach goal.
An approach goal is something you want to do, a positive outcome you hope to achieve. An avoidance goal is something you don’t want to do, a negative outcome you want to avoid. Many goals focus on avoiding something, like “stop eating ice cream at night” or “stop wasting time on social media.”
When you frame your goal as something you want to take away, that causes you to focus on what you don’t want to do. If I ask you not to think about a white bear, that’s all you can think about! If your goal is not to eat ice cream, you have to think about eating ice cream. If all you are thinking about is not checking your phone, you become really focused on your phone.
Most avoidance goals can be reframed as an approach goal. “I want to stop being late” can be changed to “I’m going to show up on time.” “I want to lose weight” can be reframed as “I want to get healthy.” Instead of “I want to stop scrolling through my phone at night,” aim for “I’m going to read in bed at night.” “I’m going to stop drinking soda with my lunch” can become “I’m going to drink tea with my lunch.”
Researchers in Sweden found that people who set approach goals were 12% more likely to succeed than those with avoidance goals. So consider framing your New Year’s resolution positively, as something you aspire to do. What would you like to achieve? If you want to eat better in the new year, instead of resolving to eat fewer calories, add something healthy, like aiming to eat 30 different plants each week. The act of adding something positive will help you not feel deprived and set you up for long-term success. What’s a positive habit that you will add to your daily routine to boost your well-being in 2023?
Flexibility Keeps You on Track
Establishing habits is a great way to make healthy behaviors automatic. Habits work well for simple behaviors performed in a stable environment. It’s been easy for me to stick to my habit of doing planks in the morning and at night after I brush my teeth. It’s harder to form habits for complex behaviors in less stable environments. When daily challenges make it difficult to follow through with our plans, flexibility can help us maintain our well-being goals.
In an attempt to help Google employees establish the habit of going to the gym, John Beshears and his colleagues asked half of them to exercise at the same time each day. They asked the other half to exercise the same number of times a week, but on a less consistent schedule. Employees who exercised at the same time went to the gym a little more often at the planned time; however, they were unlikely to go at all if they couldn’t make it to the gym at their regular time. Employees who had established a more flexible schedule ended up with better exercise habits because they worked out more at other times.
Having a rigid, all-or-nothing plan for your well-being goals can backfire when life gets in the way. In my ideal world I would exercise every morning and then spend at least an hour writing. I’d meditate after eating a healthy lunch and go for a walk every evening. In my real world this often isn’t possible, so I opt for consistency over perfection. I remind myself that something is always better than nothing. I ask “What can I do instead?”
If an early meeting means I can’t exercise in the morning, I shift my exercise to the afternoon. Some days a walk is the only way for me to stay consistent with my goal of being active. I might also have to move my scheduled writing time to later in the day. Or maybe I can only write for 30 minutes. It’s harder to be healthy when I eat out, but I try to make smart choices. There are days when I can only meditate for 5 minutes, but I don’t skip it. Staying consistent keeps me on track.
Having routines that help you achieve your well-being goals is essential, but it’s equally important to be flexible when your plans don’t work out. Make choices that will keep you moving in the direction of your goals. Rather than giving up when life interrupts your plan, look for a compromise. Ask yourself what you can do instead to still be physically active or how you can still eat something healthy. Be flexible and make a choice that allows you to pursue your overall health goals in a different way. Consistency, not perfection, is what matters.
The fascinating connection between pain and pleasure in our brains can explain why too much pleasure may be bad for happiness, while experiencing some pain or discomfort may increase happiness.
In her book Dopamine Nation Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke discusses how pleasure and pain are processed in the same part of the brain. It’s like a see-saw; when you experience pain it tips to one side, pleasure the other. Your brain wants the see-saw to be in balance, so when one side goes down, your brain will work hard to try to tip it back to the opposite side.
If you eat a piece of cake, watch TV, or scroll through your phone you get a tip to the side of pleasure. Lembke explains that your brain will then put a lot of “pain gremlins” onto the other side. It takes time for the gremlins to jump off when the pleasure stops, so the balance leans to the side of pain before returning to equilibrium. This is what makes you want to eat another piece of cake, watch another episode, or keep scrolling.
If you continue to pile things on the pleasure side, your brain gets tired of loading gremlins on the pain side, so it moves the center of the see-saw to permanently tilt the balance toward pain. That’s why addicts need more and more to get the same effect. It may also explain why there is so much unhappiness today. We live in a world of overwhelming abundance with unprecedented access to pleasurable stimuli: drugs, food, shopping, texting, games, social media. In response, our brains are tipping toward pain.
The good news is that the balance can also be tipped the other way. When you have painful experiences, your brain will pile gremlins on the pleasure side of the balance. After you do something uncomfortable, like running in the freezing cold, you get the pleasurable feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment.
This means that doing unpleasant things can increase our happiness. Experiencing some discomfort can prevent our brains from having to continuously tilt the balance toward pain. The “pains” of living life, running errands on a rainy day, solving a hard problem at work, missing a connecting flight, cleaning the house, or having a difficult conversation, all help to keep things in balance.
We can reframe discomfort as a good thing. Experiencing more of it can create a brain that is tipped toward the side of pleasure. You can increase your happiness by renouncing some pleasure and doing some hard things. Try taking a break from social media, saying no to dessert, doing a HIIT workout, or turning off the TV. And when life throws challenges your way, remind yourself that it might actually be making you happier.
Food as Medicine
“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” – Ann Wigmore
Dr. William Li is a physician who studies the causes of disease. In his 2010 TED Talk, he discussed his research looking at how to prevent cancer from growing by preventing blood vessels from feeding cancers. His realization that diet accounts for 30 to 35% of all environmentally caused cancers led him to explore the link between food and disease. Instead of just focusing on what foods we should avoid, Dr. Li also looked at what foods we should add to our diet to boost our health defenses. He shares the findings of his research in his book, Eat to Beat Disease.
Some key lessons from his book include:
- Top foods that prevent cancer by blocking the blood flow that feeds it are soy and broccoli.
- Mushrooms and olive oil strengthen your immune system.
- Foods that support your microbiome include fruit, cheese, and fermented foods. Pomegranates and cranberries are especially powerful.
- Nuts and berries are longevity superfoods that protect your DNA.
- Cocoa boosts stem cell growth which helps your body repair and regenerate itself.
Dr. Li has a great way of explaining things. He compares normal inflammation to a campfire that keeps us warm at night and that we extinguish when we go to bed. Chronic inflammation is like the campfire getting out of control and setting the woods on fire. It has been linked to most major diseases including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, depression, and Alzheimer’s.
On the Healthier Together podcast, host Liz Moody asked Dr. Li to suggest one food to add to your diet and one to remove to prevent specific diseases. Here’s what he said:
- Diabetes – add dietary fibers like nuts, avoid added sugars like cakes and cookies
- Dementia – add coffee, avoid ultra-processed foods
- Chronic inflammation – add foods with vitamin C like strawberries, tomatoes, and broccoli, avoid added sugars (fruit is OK!)
- Longevity – add coffee, avoid ultra-processed foods
- Cancer – add green tea, avoid processed meats (classified as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization)
For details regarding why Dr. Li suggests these foods, listen to the last half of the podcast. And here he explains how a healthy microbiome helps your immune system defend your body against cancer.
Your daily lifestyle choices impact your health. This is especially true of the foods you eat. The good news is that you don’t need to know which foods prevent which disease. All you need to do is eat a wide variety of whole plant-based foods. Eat like your life depends on it . . . because it does!
The Relationships That Matter Most
You probably know that relationships are one of most important factors for well-being. What you might not know is the kind of relationship that matters most for our happiness: friendships!
In his new book, Plays Well With Others, Eric Barker explains why friends are so essential to happiness. Our relationships with our friends are voluntary, which also makes them extremely fragile. There is no contract or bloodline binding us to our friends. We choose our friends precisely because they make us happy. You can stop liking your colleagues, your spouse, or your children. But if you stop liking your friends, you stop seeing them.
According to Barker, the two keys to maintaining a friendship are time and vulnerability.
- Time is scarce. When you make time for someone, it sends a big signal that they mean something to you. Recent research involving nearly 6,000 participants found that people underestimated how much reaching out to a friend would be appreciated. A quick call or text to say hello means more than we think. Notre Dame researchers analyzed over 8 million phone calls and concluded that a relationship was more likely to persist when a friend’s call was returned within two weeks.
- Vulnerability is opening up by sharing your fears and concerns. Talking about your weaknesses, what you are struggling with, and what you are afraid of builds trust. It’s how you really get to know each other. Feeling that you’re known is the foundation of a satisfying relationship. And the better you understand someone, the more you can support them.
Friends aren’t only important for our happiness; they are also good for our health. Oxford professor Robin Dunbar discovered two factors that predict if you will be alive one year after a heart attack: whether you smoke and how many friends you have. Another study by researchers at Duke University Medical Center found that patients with heart disease who had fewer than four friends were more than twice as likely to die.
It may surprise you that friends matter more for your happiness and health than your spouse. But it turns out that friendship is the most critical part of a marriage. Gallup researchers concluded that friendship quality accounts for 70% of marriage satisfaction.
Having friends is important, but having a community is even better. People feel more support from friends who are connected to one another. We belong to fewer communities today than in the past. One way to build a community is to introduce your friends to each other. You could host a gathering at your home or organize a book club.
It takes work to maintain friendships. You must make the time, reach out, and be vulnerable, but it’s worth the effort! In his book about regrets, Dan Pink reports that one of the top regrets is letting good friends drift away by not staying in touch. Working to build and sustain friendships will benefit your health and your happiness.
How I Work to be Well
Your happiness and health are determined to a great extent by lifestyle choices. Nearly half of all premature deaths in the U.S. are due to behaviors that can be changed. It takes work to be well, but small, daily well-being practices can help you live a longer, healthier, happier life.
There is agreement among different disciplines including positive psychology, functional medicine, and Blue zones findings that the following 6 lifestyle factors have the biggest impact on your mental and physical well-being: 1) good nutrition, 2) movement, 3) sleep, 4) stress management, 5) social connection, and 6) purpose.
Choosing daily behaviors that address these factors can drastically improve your life. Eat a handful of blueberries. Play your favorite song and dance around the house. Choose not to watch another episode and head to bed instead. Take a few minutes to stop what you’re doing, put your phone away, and sit quietly to still your mind. Send a quick text to a friend. Have coffee with a colleague you’ve been mentoring.
The best way to make sure you’re addressing all 6 lifestyle factors every day is to establish routines. Different well-being practices work for different people, so you need to identify things that you’ll be able to stick with. To give you some examples, here are the routines that I try to follow as I work to build greater physical and mental well-being:
Daily
- Do 5 minutes of planks and stretches after brushing my teeth in the morning and at night (movement)
- Complete 5 to 10 minutes of Duolingo language lessons (purpose) while making my coffee (nutrition)
- Get at least 7,000 steps in 2 walks (movement & stress)
- Eat the following foods: berries, leafy greens, legumes, whole grains, nuts & seeds, olive oil, green tea, fermented food, dark chocolate (nutrition)
- Connect with friends and family in person, on the phone, or via text (social)
- Get at least 8 hours of sleep by going to bed at the same time every night in a cold, dark, quiet room with my cell phone downstairs (sleep)
5 days a week
- Do a Peloton ride or practice yoga (movement & stress)
- Meditate for 30 minutes (stress)
- Eat all my meals in an 8-hour window (nutrition)
- Learn more about well-being through reading and listening to podcasts; share what I’ve learned via social media and blogs (purpose)
Weekly
- Eat 30 different plants; count plants not calories! (nutrition)
- Work in the garden or yard (movement & stress)
What are some routines that you could adopt to build your well-being? It takes work to be well, but you can make it easier with small, daily behaviors!
In my last post, I wrote about how your mindset regarding stress determines its impacts on you. Your mindset shapes your health and well-being in many profound ways. In her recent book, Breaking the Age Code, Yale professor Becca Levy discusses her research showing that your beliefs about aging determine how long and how well you live.
Her most surprising study tracked middle-aged adults for 20 years and found that those with a positive perception of aging lived 7.5 years longer on average than those with negative beliefs about aging. In another study Levy and her colleagues followed hundreds of adults for 38 years. Those with the most positive views of aging had an 80 percent lower risk of heart attack.
Levy has also shown that among people who have the gene variant which puts them at high risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease, those with positive age beliefs were 50 percent less likely to develop dementia than those with negative views. This means someone with the variant who has a positive perception of aging has the same risk of developing Alzheimer’s as someone without it. Positive age beliefs are associated with better memory, better hearing, and faster recovery from accidents.
How is it that our beliefs regarding aging can have such a powerful impact on our health and longevity? One reason is that people who have a positive view of aging are more likely to do things that are good for them, like exercising, eating healthy diets, and following their doctors’ advice. Another reason is that the cortisol levels of people who have positive views of aging decrease by 10 percent from age 50 to age 80, while cortisol levels rise about 40 percent over the same period for people who have negative attitudes. Their negative beliefs about growing old are stressing them out. Chronic stress can trigger chronic inflammation, which causes all sorts of diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.
Sadly, American society has negative stereotypes about aging. There is ageism in hiring. Advertising bombards us with negative messages. Companies present aging as something scary that we should try to avoid so we buy more anti-aging products. Social media is also full of negative messaging about aging.
The good news is that changing your beliefs is relatively simple. The key is to increase awareness. One exercise, called age belief journaling, starts with writing down any portrayals of aging that you notice in advertising, on shows, in conversations, etc. After one week, you count how many examples are positive and how many are negative. For the negative portrayals see if you can come up with a way the image could have been more positive. Another exercise is to create a portfolio of positive examples of aging, like someone in your family or a character in a book. This can help make images of positive aging more salient in your mind. You want to focus on the positive aspects of aging, of which there are many!
A Meaningful Life is Stressful
According to David Robson, author of The Expectation Effect, the phrase “stressed-out” started being used in 1983 after a Time cover story declared that people’s fast-paced lives were emerging as a major source of illness. By 2014, a survey showed that 75% of Americans believed that stress had a negative impact on family life, 74% reported it negatively affected work, and 70% said stress hurt their health. While it’s true that chronic stress caused by job demands, long commutes, social media, and constant distractions can be bad for us, our expectation that being stressed-out is hurting us may be an even bigger problem.
Research shows that stress is bad for you if you believe it’s bad for you. A study that followed over 28,000 people for eight years found that high levels of anxiety increased mortality by 43%. But that was only for the people who believed their stress was harming them. Those who experienced high levels of stress but didn’t believe it impacted their health had even lower mortality rates than participants who experienced very little stress. Our mindset about stress determines how it impacts us.
Fortunately, we can reduce the negative effects of stress by reframing how we think about it. “Eustress” is good stress. It’s the energizing, beneficial feeling that comes from taking on challenges. It can lead to growth and resilience. It can focus your attention and increase motivation.
Stress is an inevitable part of goal pursuit. It signals you care about something. A study of almost 400 adults found that every measure of stress, including having experienced more stressful events in the past, currently being under a lot of stress, and stressing about the future, was related to a greater sense of meaning in life.
Viewing stress as an integral part of a meaningful life helps me to reframe it as good. I remind myself that I can choose to feel burdened by everyday hassles, or to see them as a sign of a full life. If I feel stressed because of a deadline, I make a mental note to be grateful for work that I enjoy. When having to find time to get to the grocery store and cook dinner causes stress, I think about how important it is for my health and the health of my family. Preparing for a trip is less stressful when I remind myself how fortunate I am to have a reason to travel.
The next time you feel stressed, try connecting the source of your stress to your values. Why are you doing whatever it is that’s stressing you out? This can help you see how the stress you are experiencing is contributing to a full and meaningful life.
