New Year's Life Hacks

coming of a new year. But now the celebration is behind you. Now you've got a whole year ahead of you. This is like the the early morning period when everything seems possible. You've got a whole year. You could you could just accomplish this about anything if you put your mind to it in the next twelve months. Or it could be the early morning in the cold dawn light and you see the errors of your way and your poor alcohol shrunken brain is screaming for change. Either way,

there's an opportunity here. There's an opportunity to to rebuild, to accomplish great things. And we're not gonna get into a whole bunch of just pie in the sky um, New Years revolutions, because that's always a trap. You say, this is the year I lose two hundred pounds and learn I don't know, uh, Spanish and Hindi great American novel.

You know, you just set yourself up for failure with those and um and by the time this, uh, this particular episode publishes, we should have a really cool article on housetof works dot com about ways to to make New Year's resolutions that you can actually keep some of

the strategies. So along those lines, what we're gonna talk about today are some some simple life hacks, little things, ultimately little things you can do with I won't say minimal effort, but but but it's not gonna take, you know, an enormous amount of effort to apply yourself to one or some of these, but the payoffs can be huge. You can ultimately change who you are, how you're perceived, how your body functions, even just by making some minor

changes in your day to day. Yeah, and uh, you know, normally we do like to go esoteric with topics, but we did try to glean from our research this year some, as you say, are these easy life hacks that are practical but they have a lot of impact. So we'll start with this the first example. And I'm trying to sit very straight as I say this, and um with arms akimbo. And because this is the first one has

to do with posture. Yes, and and it's I should add when I podcast, I actually said on a stool in in this podcasting chamber, because I want to have proper posture on podcasting. You do, You're like totally engaging your core over there. Because the the go to chairs in this podcast chamber are awful. I don't know where they came from. I think they were like salvaged from like a shipwreck. And and if you actually lean back into them, they just it curves your spin into a

question mark. Um. I don't know. Maybe some people can roll with that a little better, but I just I find it tortuous because even then I'm all hunchback in the chair, and I just I don't feel like I'm healthy, I don't feel confident. So if I felt outset on the stool, I feel a lot a lot better. I feel like, all right, I can actually do this. You feel large and in charge exactly. Yeah, And that is really what is at the heart of these postural changes.

Because we're talking about is body language. And there's been a lot of discussion about body language, how you can ascertain certain things from people by the way that they

are giving you nonverbal cues. But someone who's given us a fresh take on this is Harvard psychologist Amy Cutty, and she actually has a great Ted dot com talk which is called your body language Shapes who you are, and she says, it's not just about communicating what you're feeling your emotional states, it's really about changing your biochemistry through this physical movement. Yeah, because the I mean the idea of don't slump set up straight that that's old everyone.

Everyone's heard that their entire life. They're their old video not videos even, but old like educational films. Uh. There's something called posture pals that they famously riffed on the mystery Siense Theater through thousand, where all the children are being told how to how to uh gain their posture

so that they'll be better little children. I think we all know on one level that that there are certain postures that just look better, and you're just gonna look more like you know what you're doing and you're a little more more confident, but Cutty has actually applied the science.

And what I mean one of the sort of really interesting things that you mentioned is that if she refers to it as non verbal expression of power and dominance, so this is taking it out of the whole, you know, your mom's saying, don't slump, set up straight, and putting it in the context of the animal kingdom at large. I mean, it's kind of an overstatement of the obvious.

But the power dynamics of this, the non verbal communication of power, I mean, you see that in dogs, You see that in in cats and snakes, in insects, I mean, you you name it. That animals use their body language to show, hey, I'm the top dog right now, I'm

the one in charge. You need to back down. Well, there was someone I used to work with at the zoo and he was a keeper there and he actually um worked with the gorillas, and he would tell me stories about how when he would go in to clean their cages that the male silverback gorillas would bow up at him as if to say, hey, man, I see you.

You know what are you doing in my space? Which I think is really interesting because, as you say, you can see that in nature Um, So it makes sense that as humans are doing the same thing, just sometimes subconsciously, we don't realize it. And Amy Cutty saw this in the classroom. Um. She went into classrooms full of MBA students, and what she saw is that there is a gender grade gap. Men slightly outperformed women and it's really competitive.

And so she started to say, Okay, we'm gonna take a closer look at this, and she noticed that the women tended to make themselves small and hold their wrists and wrap their arms around themselves, while the guys tended to make themselves bigger. They leaned back, they stretched out, they drink their arms around chairs. And she said, you know, we know from studies to facial feedback that if you smile,

you fake yourself into feeling happier. So what if what if, um, you could do the same thing with body language, if you just physically spread out, would you feel more powerful? That was the thesis of these studies that she conducted.

Now she's talking like actually, because at one point in this description, I'm just imagining like some dudes played out on the couch, and look, there seems like there comes a point where it's no longer I mean, I guess there is a certain communication via the body that says, hey, I'm totally totally carefree, I'm completely in charge. The dudea vibes, you know, But but it seems like there would be a cut off point to where it's like I'm just sit laying on a couch versus I'm setting up straight

and in charge. You know. Well, and it's interesting to talk she does kind of talk about the best ways to use this posture. She's saying that if you want to feel large and in charge, but you're talking to your boss, it's best not to bow up and try to dominate him or her, because I would send the wrong message. Um, you would then seem sort of as though you had some sort of evil agenda right right now.

Just to to to drive home just another another fact about just how key this is to who we are and just how how it's in our genes and in our design um. She points out. Cutting points out that athletes who are blind from birth who say, you know, go through the finish line, finish that race, win the race, They've never seen ore other people do like a you know,

the victory arms in the air head back. They have never seen that, but they do it like it's it's just a natural response to to victory to just go on and just hands, you know, hands held high, headheld high, chest open. It's just a natural response to victory and dominance because they're assuming the power and the glory of that moment. Yeah, which is really I forgot about that point that she makes. It's really interesting. Um, yeah, there are a lot of uh different instances that you can

bring up that really underscore the importance of it. Uh Nalini Ambadi is a researcher at Tufts University and showed that when people watch thirty seconds soundless clips of real physician patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness i you know, say, her body language or um predicts whether or not that physician will be sued. Isn't it interesting? So it's more a questionable lickability in this instance where

they're viewing these interactions as opposed to competence. So the people who are viewing that, they're not even really thinking about competence or liability or assuming this person. They're just thinking whether or not that person looks approachable, seems approachable, and predicts whether or not they're going to get sued. Uh. So let's get to what she was actually doing, though, Cutty when she was trying to do this quick little

life hack with people in their postures. Yeah, of course she's she's interested in the science of this, not just oh, well, you know what's the cause and correlation here, but actually what happens in the body when someone is is puffing up into this dominant stance. And as she found that there are actual hormonal changes in the hormonal profile changes you see higher levels of testosterone and lower levels of cortisol.

And she says that this ratio is really important, and that if you look at a lot of quote unquote effective leaders, that they all have this kind of cocktail of configuration, the leader cocktail. So they wondered, well, if you could have someone assumed the alpha role, could you then game they are hormones to do the very same thing,

And they in fact did that. They had people assume postures of powerfulness, and they had people assume postures of what they call low power, and they found that the low power people were having a higher cortisol incidents as opposed to the people who are the powerful posturers. So so they took the alpha the alpha dogs, and they said, all right, now slump over now, just now, bring your your shoulders up around your ear. Okay, now hold your wrist,

and the chemistry and then changed. The alpha chemistry faded and they took on the beta chemistry, whereas you took the the other betas and you said, all right, I want you to, you know, roll your shoulders back, open your chest, stand up straight, and then the leader cocktail bubbles up inside. Yes, um, you know with in terms of testosterone increases in some cases. And um, the testosterone of course is important because this is that uh, this

is what is giving that air of confidence, right. And the cortisol levels is you know, correlating to your amount of stress. So if it drops, then that's great. You look confident, you look comfortable. And that's what she was trying to do with these people who were of different ages and genders and different positions in their own lives. She wanted to test this across the board and see if she could come up with something cohesive and low

and behold. When they then tested them their hormone levels, they found that it did correspond with the postures that they assumed. And now they were only assuming these postures for two minutes, which is amazing. Beca, it's not like go around like this all the time and your your chemistry will changes. No, you can just go into this, this this dominant posture for a couple of minutes and

it'll lift everything up. Yeah. And you know, she put them in a couple of different scenarios to to see how they would perform, so it wasn't just like, hey, let's look at your hormone profile. Now, let's see how you actually perform. And what they did with one group is they had them give a keynote speech and um. Once they did that in front the audience and they had assumed again the high power poses. They came across as much more confident than their peers who had the

low uh posture. And then they did the same thing again, the same assuming of these postures. And they have these people go in for interviews. Now, what's interesting about this is that the interviewer wasn't giving them any sort of facial feedback, completely neutral, and she said that it didn't matter if you had assumed a low or a high posture. You all the people who participated in this hated it

because interviews. You know, there's so much fun anyway, Um, if you couldn't get a clue about how the other person is perceiving you, it's that much more frustrating. But again, um, when they had someone go through coding this because they taped these interviews, coding it to see how the people performed. And again, the coder doesn't know what's going on here, doesn't know anything about the testosterone, doesn't know anything about

the cortisol or the postures. The code ers time and agamp would say this person is doing great, and invariably that person was the person who was arms at kimbo. You know, chest outward looking powerful. You know, it's interesting to think about the I guess like I tend to focus more on the chest outward thing. And and part of that is comes from yoga because that's that's one of the things that's stressed a lot in yoga is

to to you know, to open your chest, open your heart. Uh, not only when you're just setting that in various other poses as well. And my my yoga instructors often brings up examples of this in the say superheroes, because what is the superhero they have that emblem on their chest as if in a way, well, like a superhero with an emblem on their on their chest, but it's Superman or Batman or whatever. It's kind of a body dominance

cod piece of sorts. You know. It's kind of like they're saying, not only is my chest open, it's got this symbol on, it's got a bad on it. Um. It brings to mind han him On, the monkey god out of Hindu legend, who at one point proves his devot ocean to Ram by by ripping open his chest and there's like a he had shows his fiery heart and there's like a miniature Ram and Sita inside there. So that's another example of the the open fiery chest that's just kind of adorable too. Yeah, yeah, is great.

But I'm also can't help but be reminded of a conversation we had with Holly Frey last week, who is of course the co host of Pop Stuff, Pop Stuff Fabulous, how sto Works podcast about all sorts of cool, geeky and pop culture things. But she was talking about getting her photo taken and how like the photographer at first was like, all right, open your chest, you know, don't swump, and then they were telling her don't open your chest.

So too, I wondered, to what extent, because we're talking about the gender dynamics here, to what extent does that play into it? Okay, So I'm glad you brought that up, because I was gonna say, one of the problems here is that just the physicality of it, I think for women, because sometimes if you are to put your shoulders back, well, obviously your breasts are gonna be pushed out much more.

And you know it's going around like that, it looks a bit odd because it seems as though you're trying to um put that forward as the agenda, as opposed to being like, hey, look how powerful I am. So it may be one of the reasons that women do sort of sometimes crouch in. Okay, I was wondering about that. Yeah. Yeah, And it's obviously not true for all women because obviously everybody has different body types. But it was interesting that Holly brought that up, and then I was certainly thinking

about that. Now. One of the iconic poses that Amy Cutty talks about is called the super Woman post that they had everyone do, and in particular, she was interested in doing it with the females because she wanted to see how that would work. But the super Woman pose is you've got your hands on your hips, and you've got your shoulders back, and you've got your feet you know about I don't know, maybe like two ft apart from each other. Okay, so you see wonder One and

in this pose and promotional skills from the old TV show. Yeah, yeah, with a cape floating in the wind behind her um. And so this is what she's talking about. She's talking

about assuming a powerful pose. Now it's kind of hard to do this in your real life, but now she's just that can't that doesn't won't stop you from going into the bathroom before an interview, right, doing it for two minutes, and then coming out and at least having that energy and confidence inside you, even if you're not completely you know, storming into your boss's office with you acting like your supergirl, right, which, hey, I don't know

where you work, but that might that might work. But yeah, I mean she's saying you might return to the waiting room, but now you're going to return to the waiting room, and you're going to be assuming a powerful pose as you sit down and wait, as opposed to crouching together, so very very easy life hack to do. Um and a very interesting talk by her on ted dot com. All right, so there's one little thing that you can

do just tweak your life in the year ahead. Um. But we have a few more to mention, and one that certainly comes to mind, especially in the light of some recent podcasts, is how we deal with what is called the default mode network. Yeah, default mode network, just as a refresher, is a sort of a configuration of the medial prefrontal cortex, the medial parietal cortex in the medial temporal lobes, and these cortical associations between another are

really helping to shape, um, this concept of ourselves. Yeah, it's it's basically the neuroscientific understanding of vehgoic mind, of that of that meani me voice inside our heads about you know, it's it's that it's that voice. When you you're you're not busy with something, your mind busies itself by thinking about the past and worrying about the future and and just gnawing on itself like a like a

dog dealing with an each on its butt. Yes, as you have pointed out before, looking it to the point where it's now making a wound out of it. I mean when you stop to think about it, when you actually stop and become conscious of this, this the cycle in your head. I mean, it's it's ridiculous, sympathetic as a dog chewing its own thought because you're you're stop and you think this is doing no good, absolutely doing

no good. Well, the point of this whole um cortical association is to maintain a balanced sense of consciousness and your ego. But as you say, sometimes you can chew on those thoughts a bit too much. And uh, it's this sort of hyperactivity in this region that you see in people who are clinically depressed. All right, so that's

where the problems come online. And you know, we should say this is kind of obvious, but everybody deals with depression at some point in their life, either throughout their life or different spots. So no doubt you guys listening out there know what that feels like to be over consumed in that part of your mind. So, uh, what is important to hear about this is that, as we pointed out before, we spend half of our life day dreaming.

And when we're day dreaming, no doubt we are thinking about ourselves and all of our problems and what we're going to do about those, um So in order to try to quiet this part of the mind, meditation, it turns out, is one of the most effective things that you can do. Uh. Dr Jasin Brewer, who is the medical director of the Yale Therapeutic Neuroscience Clinic and his colleagues as ten experienced meditators and thirteen people with no

meditation experience to practice meditation techniques. And he found out a lot of interesting things about this by using fm R I to look at their brains, and uh, the experienced meditators had decreased activity in that default mode network. And even when the meditators weren't meditating, this region of their brain was much quieter than the inexperienced counterparts. So

what's this telling us? Is telling us that a practice of I mean something, even like I think that was a twelve minute practice or a fifteen minute practice a day, can actually change your brain. It can sort of uh tamp down all the wildness of the mind, uh to the point where you know someone may suffer from that wildness. Yeah, and you may be thinking, well, how do I how

do I start meditating? Right? I mean, you may think, oh, I don't even know if there's a place in my area that has meditation, and my schedule so busy, But it's as simple as when you wake up in the morning, before you do anything, or after you're taking a shower. I don't know. I'm not gonna play in your day for you, but it is best to do it right

then because that you get it done right right right. Yeah, okay, So let's say, first thing, you get up, go to a room in your house where there's not a TV on, where there's not another person stirring, whether there's not a cat or a dog, you know, playing for your affections.

Take your phone with you, set the timer for ten minutes, twelve minutes, something like that, and then just set there and just and and think about your breath, you know, think of like put yourself in your breath, breathing in, breathing out. Doing a alternate nostril breathing is a great way to do this too, where you're closing closing one nostril and then the other, breathing in through one side

and out through the other. You end up focusing on that and then and then instead of worrying about what the rest of your day is going to consist of what you need to be doing at this moment. You're just in that moment, experiencing that moment for say, ten minutes, without even thinking. Like certainly don't have the clock out where you can watch it tick either, just because the idea too is not to be worried about how much

time is passing. And am I through with this meditation yet? Okay, so I'm a lazy meditator and I've been doing it the last couple of weeks. So that's really something I want to do in this coming year is to have a regular practice. And I will tell you that I don't even get out of bed. I just sit in an upright position and then I meditate and then when I thought comes in, I call it. I call it

a thought, and I let it go. And so for me, the goal is just to get a quiet moment, even if that quiet moment is as short as five seconds, and I do it for as long as I can, meaning either the cat comes in and starts to harass me or my daughter comes in the room. And sometimes that's ten minutes and sometimes that's thirty minutes. But um, the point is is that making it as easy as it can be for you is a way to accomplish it, at least for me. Um, I really, I mean I

roll over and I start meditating. Yeah. And even if you, as we mentioned the previous podcast about this, even if you're not actually bringing the fight to the default mode network with meditation or what have you, just being conscious of it can be a huge victory on just a daily basis if you can actually stop and realize, WHOA, this is just my default mode network gnawing a little bit too much. I'm behind her. I let this go.

Or one method that Akartole brings up is if you're having some sort of thought that you don't like in your head, you know, they saying, ah, you suck or oh you're really screwed up last night, think to yourself, I wonder what my next thought will be. And it's it's it's almost magical in the way that it sort of clears the deck. Well, and that's that that's interrupting

that feedback loop. Right. We've talked about this before, and um, when we've talked about different instances when you're trying to acknowledge anger, which we'll talk about two Um, it's important to be able to get to that space. And here's the thing about meditation is that the more you do it, the more when you're not meditating, he'll be able to

interrupt those thoughts or observe your own thoughts. And doing that makes you sort of like, uh, I don't know how to say this the programmer of the matrix, because all of a sudden you're standing outside of your own brain and you're deciding what the next move is going to be as opposed to your automated self. Um. Now, if that's not enough of a reason to meditate, we should probably also mentioned that you can actually increase your telomerase.

Now telmo raise is an enzyme and it's really important, um for something called telomeres, which are sequences of DNA at the end of chromosomes that tend to get shorter every time a cell divides. So we talked about telomeres. Um. I think we've talked about probably in the context of the Fountain of Youth before. They're kind of the shoe strings that are unraveling on our life. Yeah, and so you know when when they unraveled to a certain point, then you begin to see disease introduced and so on

and so forth. So it really is important to try to build for them as much as possible, and the way to do that is with telomerase, this enzyme that can rebuild in lengthen telomeres. Now. Tanya Jacob, she's a scientist at you see David Center for Mind and Brain, reported in the journal psycho neuroendo Chronology that meditators show improved psychological well being and that these improvements lead to biochemical changes associated to resistance to aging at the cellular level.

So what she is talking about here is that these meditators white blood showed a thirty percent increase in telomerase, which is um is pretty significant in here because again we're talking about this enzyme that is essential to long term health of the body's chromosomes and cells and not to get to uh steady heavy. But I did want to mention one other aspect of meditation and the genetic

level here, and I'm talking about Helen Lavretsky. She's a professor of psychiatry at u c L, a semial Institute for neuroscience and Human behavior, and she used dementia caregivers as her subjects in order to test meditation and stress and the reason why she used them is because they have very high stressed jobs and there's a high incidence of clinical depression among those caregivers. And she had forty five caregivers, half of whom were given a daily twelve

minute meditation routine that they practiced for eight weeks. The other half were given a twelve minute place to sit and be quiet and listen to soothing music and again they did this for eight weeks UM. They took blood stain pulse before an effort after in each group to examine their gene expression and the results were that those who had been doing the meditation exercises had modified gene expressions.

So what they found is that sixty eight genes were found to be different after the meditation, and the modified genes involved the body's inflammation response and the ability to fight off bacterial and viral infections. So the story here is that at this genetic level, they're gaming the body to have less inflammation, um less illness, and again in people who are having pretty stressful days, a lot of stress responses and by simply doing this twelve minute meditation

they're able to vanquish the UH stress genes here. Yeah, it's getting down to the epigenetic change is actually shutting off harmful genes. So it's it's and again and all comes down to meditation. Another aspect of meditation is pretty cool tension. I feel like most of us feel like we could maybe be a little more attentive in our lives. Uh. And indeed, there's another study from University of California at Davis, the Samantha Project, enrolled sixty experienced meditators in a three

month study. Half of these they selected to receive intensive training and practice in meditation over the spring months of two thousand seven. So they carried this out and at the end of it, they found that those who intensively practiced meditation got better at visual perception and as a result,

experienced also improved attention. That's so cool because we always talk about how much we don't see in our daily lives that surround us, that you can't take in all the data, but this seems to suggest that you could take in more data if you just couldn't um sending yourself a little bit more. Yeah, I mean, it reminds us again of the whole, the whole idea that that adults see the world with flashlight vision, and children see

it with lantern vision. And to a certain extent, meditation is about taking your flashlight vision UH and dimming it out and expanding it into more of a lamp vision of at least your immediate surroundings. And it made immediate experience of the world, So attention increases. Obviously, we're taking that's that's a little higher up on the tree for picking,

because this is intense meditation, but again low pickings easily obtainable. UH. Is the idea that just ten, twelve, twenty minutes a day can actually improve your life, so right at at the genetic level and various other levels. So it's pretty cool. It's definitely a return on investment. UH. Should we take a break here, We should take a break. We'll take a quick break, and when we come back, we have a few more little life packs you can throw at

your and better yourselves without breaking the back. All right, we're back. We've talked about how little meditation can make a big difference in your life. We've talked a little bit too, about how just a little more awareness of your posture can make a big difference in how you feel, how confident you feel and how confident you seem to those around you, and both of these are again things. So it's just twenty minutes here, twenty minutes there with

huge effects. So next on the list, we're gonna talk about an old friend of IRUs here from another topic we've covered before in the past, and I've had a lot of fun with that being decision fatigue. Now decision fatigue, just to refresh everyone's mind is it's the the concept that the more little decisions you make during the day, or even big decisions, but the more decisions your brain has to make, um it has a toll, there's a there's a limit. It ultimately ends up an ego depletion.

So if you wake up in the morning and you and the first thing you have to do, you have to decide what you're having for breakfast. Then you have to decide how are you're gonna get to work or I'm gonna take the train? Am I gonna drive? And I do I dare take the interstate? Or should I take one of the back ways secret routes that I know to get there? And then when I when I actually get to work, should I have some of the cake that's out there for Anne's birthday, or should I

abstain from it? And then you're worrying about, oh, we should I work on this project or this one? And what am I gonna do for lunch? And then by the time mid afternoon rolls around, you're done. You have like, you have no more decision making process. So someone comes up and ask you something really important. You know, your wife that calls up and says, hey, should we buy this house? And you just have no clue. You can't say yeah, absolutely, yeah, let's let's do it, okay, And

then later on you're like, how did that happen? I didn't even ask how much it was? Um, so yeah. I mean, what it points to is that we have a finite store of mental energy for exercising self control. And this was found out by a number of social psychologists, but one in particular by the name of Roy Baumeister, and uh he says, this is the reason why otherwise reasonable people do illogical things is because of this constant niddling all these sorts of little, tiny decisions that we

have to make. And they found this out through a series of studies, but one of my favorite ones, I believe It was a graduate student under Baumleinster who was getting married and had to go and what do you call it? When you go and you register for gifts, give you a little gun and you shoot, you shoot, you try to figure out And she realized that she was completely um sacked by the whole process. I mean, she was just it took all of her mental stores

of energy. And so she did something very similar with a group. And I won't go into that um into that study. You can if you were interested, and you can check out our Decision Fatigue podcast. But the point is is that it underscored that there's just only so much attention that we can give to every little thing in our lives. But here's the cool thing about it. It is food, in particular glucose that can help us

with this mental state. Yeah. It turns out even even the smartest people, even like just the sharpest tools and drawer, if they don't have enough gluecose in the system, if they're not well rested as well, they will not make those good decisions. Yeah. Baumeister looked at judges on an Israel parole board, and uh, these judges and all their decisions were studied to see if there was any pattern

of granting parole. Now, after looking at something like eleven hundred decisions with the researchers found as the day war on is that inmates were denied parole more often. So prisoners who appeared early in the morning received parole about seventy percent of the time, while those who appeared late in the day were paroled less than ten percent at

the time. UM, and what they see here is that those judges were having a mid morning snack, usually a little bit before ten thirty, and then they would take a break, they'd have their snack, and then they'd come back, and then those prisoners who appeared just before the break had only about a chance of getting parole, but right after their break they had a sixty five percent chance.

So they're looking at this data again, these eleven d decisions, and they're correlating it with when the judges are getting these hits of glucose to their brains via food and figuring out that what the judges are doing when they're hungry or when they're when they've got a glucose depletion in their system is that they're taking shortcuts and decision making. UM. The reason why they're denying parole is because that's just

deferring the decision that they have to make. So they're saying, okay, fine, I'm not saying yes or no. Here, Um, I'm gonna bear on the side of not yea, of not granting parole because you know in six months, three months, eight months, this is going to come back and we'll review it again then. Because the mind actually knows when it is running out of energy, it will begin to batten down the hatches in these ways in which we'll try to

avoid decision making. So basically, the people in the study, they were just unfortunate enough to have their earl here and take place during naptime and during snack time. These judges basically needed a nap and a muffin, but to actually think about the and actually um actually study the case before them. So yeah, and bal Muster has said, your brain does not stopped working when glucose is low.

It stopped doing some things and starts doing others. It responds more strongly to immediate rewards and pays less attention to long term prospects. And granting parole is a long term prospect, right, because you really have to think about how that's a long term impact on that individual. So what is that? What's the takeaway for us? You need to eat the little snacks. I mean that sounds ridiculous.

It sounds like like we're all just a bunch of toddlers sitting around, But that is what it boils down to. I mean, think about it. When when you're in a state when you're feeling tired or confused, Um, it's usually correlated with having to eat something and get a little shot of glucose to your brain. Yeah, I mean basically, have some granola bars around, or some snack mix or something or or or an apple or two, and you might be wondering, well, how do I how do I

actually use this to gain my life? You know, what little rules can I make for myself? In Like one concept that comes to mind is do not go onto Amazon or whatever your shopping side happens to be, or do not go shopping unless you have had a granola bar. You know, make sure that you're going because otherwise you're going into a decision making. There are a series of decisions with without the mental faculties to really think about it,

and you're gonna you're just gonna bomb it. Eventually you're like, I've got to get my mom a birthday gift. I'll just get her some perfume, you know, don't you Just you just point at something and shoot just to get

it done. I'm glad that you bring that up, because I think it's important to you, um, underscore that the sort of life that we're leading now, where in by nine o'clock in the morning, if you get up stay at seven, you have already made hundreds of choices, particularly if you're working on the computer and you're using the Internet, and you're just not thinking of them as choices, right. Um, But in even the pop up at that come up,

all these sorts of things are choices. Um, you know something that you have to do and respond to all that stimuli. Yeah, Like I really like a persuasive ad. You see it and you're like, oh, I wonder, I wonder if I should buy that. No, of course they shouldn't buy that. That's a decision right there. You just

use a little juice on that. Or um, you see a sign, um, you know at the train station that says don't get too close to the train when it's moving, or you know whatever, even that you might think yourself, Oh, I wonder if I get too close to the train when I when it's moving, and then bam, I've used some more mental energy. So this is another case where

just mere awareness is good. Just knowing that you only have so many choices and so much choice juice in that brain of yours, so limit where you squander it and know when to when to schedule your big decisions, like if you're gonna if you're gonna have to go in and meet with contractors for a house or something, you know, some some work to your house or what have you. If you're going in to get legal advice, do it in the morning, or do it after you've had a granola bar. Just just try and push the

advantage back in your favorite. If you're going to buy a car, do it the first thing in the morning, because the sales strategy that all of UM the salesforce has been trained in is to wear you down with choices.

That's why they begin to ask you a million different questions about what kind of the car do you have, and they start giving you so many different choices that by the time that you're actually signing the paperwork, UM, you have been worn down so that you began to accept whatever thing they put in front of you, like, oh, it's gonna be eight hundred dollars to have windshield wiper,

but dazzling done? Is that good? Yeah? Okay? Great? Yeah, if you've got a lot of choices to do, Also, know what sandwich you're getting and don't go to a place where we have to build your own. Know what your coffee drink is? Better yet, go to a place be a regular so they know what your coffee drink is.

So even if you you were thinking about changing your ways and wondering, is this the day that I get a cappuccino instead of of an Americana, No, it's not going to be in the realm of possibility because they've already made it the second you walk in. All right, So I think that gives you, guys a good idea of a couple of things you can do to um life hack a little bit easy life hacks to try out, and we'll take you out with a couple of other

ideas here. One is to bolster your creativity thought experiments. We've talked about this before. Try to figure out a problem or some sort of scenario and don't try to solve it, just try to come up with as many crazy lines of thinking as possible. Um. This is actually known as good duncan experiment. Okay in German of course. Um, And it is really important. A lot of really important thinkers have have done this and had breakthroughs, creative breakthroughs.

Another one is anger. Yeah, this one was really surprising because you brought this up just yesterday and it basically boils down to a certain amount of anger, when used properly, is good for creativity and leads to positive creative output.

And initially I just completely rebelled against this idea because for the most part of my own experience, I think of times where I've been angry at someone or something or situation, and I tend to end up end up going into that agoic mind area where I'm just brooding over that that thing that made me angry and not getting anything done because I'm just setting there going, oh oh boy, that person was a jerk to me, and

I really wish this wasn't the case. Why is it raining and and all that, and so it just becomes this inner dialoge. But but as as as you discovered, when you utilize just right when to take a play from the The Emperor Palpatine playbook, When you use your anger, Um, you can actually achieve great things. Yeah, I mean if you know that you're angry and you can try to take that moment again. This is where meditation comes into play. Or it doesn't have to, but it's helpful because it

allows you to observe your thoughts. One of the things you can do in that moment of anger is figure out why you're really angry, because oftentimes it's not really the reason you think it is. The second thing is it's motivating. It's a motivating factor for you to find solutions for that thing not to happen again. Right. Um, And this has been seen. Uh, This, this anger and this utilizing of anger has been seen in several studies

and it really is a key hallmark of creative brainstorming. Uh. This was found by researchers Mathish Boss Carson did throw and Bernard and stad and Uh, the participants were actually made you feel angry and we're able to do some

novel thinking as a result. So you can actually use this for good, this anger, if you know how to game it, it's long, it doesn't become rage because if you some people might other know what happens if you put up the dishes, if you unload the dishwasher while angry, what happens You end breaking a dish, or you chip a dish, or you stab yourself on some forks when

you're going after the the utensils. Uh. And then also you don't want it to turn into sullenness where you're just you get so you're just so angry and wound up, it just turns into depression. But if you were able to calmly utilize it and say, hey, why am I? Why am I angry? And what can where can I focus this anger in a constructive way, then you you

can achieve really cool stuff. The more I thought about this, I did think of a few cases where I had a certain amount of anger over I think in both cases it was something it was like a very broad anger, like I was I was angry at trends that I saw in in in culture, or or or something disturbing in history that was really bothering me. There's more like humanity at the large scale. Yeah, Like in one case

that we had to do with insogyny. In another case it had to do with with with racism, and it's just kind of stuff where if I just sit there and I just brood over and I'm like, oh man, people are really awful and and you know, then you end up you're angry and then you're selling about it. So instead I'm like, all right, well, what can I do creatively? Well, you know, let me there's gotta be

a short story here or something. So in both cases I was able to write on it and try to create something, uh in fiction that use that anger in a creative direction. And then after I finished those they the sullenness and the anger inside me had resided. So yeah, because it really can be a catalyst anger for something again, as long as you don't you know, start doing something crazy like just going out in the streets and being a general marauder. But again control. Yeah, and now also

sometimes it boils down to food. Again, we've talked about being hungry um and I won't go into detail, but there's a study about tripp to fan in serotonin and anger and the way that serotonin regulates parts of your brain in the prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of reason with you magdala, which is where we process um

emotions like anger. And it turns out that people who had been induced to have low levels of tripp to fan in a study in in the brain, they had a harder time with serotonin since tripped fan is a building block of serotonin and regulating their anger. So sometimes it just spoils down to diet. Right, Yeah, So I would challenge everyone if you find yourself in those moments where you're feeling angry, first of all, try breathing a little bit, just breathing and out for you know, ten

fifteen counts. Consider having a granola bar, and then ask yourself, if it's a persistent thing where you just keep feeling angry about something, ask yourself, what can I do with this anger? Is there something in my life, in my my hobby, my my work, or something that I just

haven't even tried my hand out. Is there something I can I can level, I can fuel this anger into that can actually, if not actually make a difference, Because certainly there are cases where if you're angry about an injustice in the world, there are often ways that you can utilize that energy to address those problems. Well, and this is this is then the point where you dawn your superwoman's stance and put on your cape. Yeah, get confident, feel confident in mind and body, and uh go out

there and see if you can make it. Difference is the year it can happen in your cap here. Yeah, all right, well, there you go. There are some uh, some excellent suggestions on ways that you can tweak your and sort of game it a little more in your favor in minded body. If you would like to reach out to us throughout the new year with your thoughts on these tactics, with your experiences trying to use them, your success stories, your your your failures, even we'd love

to hear about hear from you. You can find us on Facebook, and you can find us on Twitter, and you can find us on tumbler. On Facebook and Tumbler, we are stuff to blow your mind. On Twitter, we go by the handle blow the Mind and you can always drop us a line at blow the Mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how Stuff Works dot com