Amu

I started journaling in primary school when our teacher made us write about our day, our feelings or any conflicts we were facing on a daily basis in our handbook. This became a habit which continued through secondary school and junior college, but stopped in university. I’ve recently picked it up again and am realizing how much this does for the brain.

Journaling boosts memory and comprehension, it also increases working memory capacity, which may reflect improved cognitive processing. More importantly, it helps with emotional processing.

Being an entrepreneur in a husband-and-wife team is like signing up for a subscription of daily roller coaster rides with no breaks in between. As exciting as it sounds, your emotions and thoughts run at break-neck speed and quite honestly, if one does not put in a stop break in between to process them, they pile up and leave you feeling disconnected, overwhelmed and in the worst case, broken. It may sound silly, but words align your thoughts, feelings and emotions. There is research to show that increased immunity and lower stress levels result from journaling.

Sometimes, the idea of journaling is daunting, you may ask yourself, what do I write about? How do I start? Will I open a can of worms? The idea is to write without censorship so that it feels like you can create a safe space for yourself. It needs to be something you upkeep on a daily basis – it may be difficult to do so, but just even a few lines help. I start sometimes with what I am grateful for and it gets the ball rolling.

If you want to kickstart this habit and feel stuck, try asking yourself these questions:

1. What would you tell your teenage self? Your 30/40-year-old self?

2. What would you like to tell your future self?

3. Do you have any regrets?

4. How has your life experience differed from what you envisioned on the cusp of adulthood?

5. What did you learn from your biggest mistakes?

6. What is the best advice you ever received?

Deep, yes; necessary for your mental health, also yes. If you want to give it a go, get yourself some nice stationery to feel inspired and give it a go!

PLAY. Play, play, play, for heaven's sake, play, like your life depends on it! Because to an increasing extent, it does.

Our brain is organised such that we get information from our environment through our senses. For this, we need to be involved in our environment. When babies are born, they explore the environment with their mouths and then their limbs when they have gained enough strength. This feedback from the environment expands the neural connections between the different categories of information we are storing (schemas), causing a creation and strengthening of new and existing neural networks. The denser and richer your neural networks, the faster your speed of processing and learning.

We stop using our hands like we did when we grow older. We stop using our feet like we did when we grow older. If you think about it, we are hurting the brain by depriving it of the things it needed to build itself up for optimal learning and growing. Of course, I'm not asking you to crawl on all fours and regress into being a child again (although that sense of curiosity gives new perspective). What you can do is scout out sensorial activities that you can do once or twice a week to enliven your senses intentionally and focus during these activities. With a habit like that, you will see, surprisingly that your creativity and innovation index will increase. Plus, you have an element of wonder added to your life when scouting for your next activity!

Did you know that smiling can trick your mind into being more positive?

And it's not like might trick me once, won't let you trick me twice.

It works like this - "when your muscles say you are happy, you are more likely to see the world around you in a positive way (Dr. Marmolejo-Ramos)"

Is this fake it till you believe it? Well not exactly. Research shows that when you forcefully practice smiling, you activate the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, which then releases happy chemicals like endorphins into your body system elevating your mood into a positive state.

So what happens when you are the cause to make someone smile? In the realm of positive psychology, this would make you feel accomplished and fulfilled, while igniting the reward systems in your brain that get excited by the social reward of a smile - remember we are all social creatures.

So both you and the person you brought a smile to benefit when one of you takes an effort to do this consistently, appropriately and earnestly.

Now, isn't that a conscious way to brighten someone else's day, especially in gloomy times like this? Give it a go and relish the results!

We are social creatures. We are suffering now because of our lockdown and restricted movement situations all over the world.

(As I typed the above, my son has said "hi" and "I love you" 5 times in the span of seconds, so social creatures, hell yes!)

Social media has become a brain hack to feel like you are socially connected even when you have never met the person in PERSON.

Our brain has reward-pathways, which govern how we feel when we achieve something, feel fulfilled, experience pleasure, etc. It craves more of such instances. The neurotransmitter, dopamine has been implicated in this and the structure that supports this is the mesolimbic dopamine system. It has connections to our emotions.

Research has shown that getting likes and comments on social media triggers the mesolimbic dopamine system. Overdoing the need to keep the system on a high causes addiction. If we went cold turkey on social interaction, being the social creatures we are, we get lonely and depressed. Prolonged depression may lead to suicidal thoughts.

Sounds like a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation, doesn't it? 😂

So what do we do then? I say, everything in balance and moderation! A healthy balance of online and offline interaction would take care of our basic desire to be social creatures. 😉

Have you tried meditating? I never believed in meditation until a couple of years ago when I realised there was too much anxiety, uncertainty, unhappiness and a lack of clarity in my life. I systematically isolated myself and disconnected to go into preservation mode. I wasn't thriving, I was just surviving.

I was introduced to Dr. Joe Dispenza's work and he made sense to me as he came from a neuroscience perspective.

When you meditate, you engage yourself in focus. Meditation involves attentional regulation and may lead to increased activity in brain regions associated with attention such as dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). A study published in an issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for 30 minutes each day for eight weeks had increased grey matter density in the areas of their brains responsible for memory, empathy, sense of self, and stress management.

In the lives we lead today, there is little time for us to be quiet. Being quiet requires intentional effort and meditation can be a platform for that. With so many benefits from meditation, I was sold to try it and I wholeheartedly admit that life has become way better since. It is a positive psychology intervention that bolsters our sense of self-concept and the self-concept is core to how we present ourselves to the world.

If you haven't given it a try, why don't you have a go at it this weekend? Pick one guided meditation video from an online resource that resonates with you and see what magic unfolds a month from now!

Have a great start to the week everyone! I snapped this after stopping by the road while driving, wound down the window and a beautiful capture of the sky at about 6.45pm in the evening yesterday. All safely done.

Did you know this about dyslexia?
There is a common misconception with this on seeing letters backwards when most of it has to do with our mapping.

The perennial Nature VS Nurture debate! Here is some insight, and then there is epigenetics too, but that's for another day. 😄

It is about the richness and interconnectivity of your neural networks, friends!

For anyone who still believes in the left-brain, right-brain lateralisation for learning and abilities, please note this. 🧠

Amu updated their business hours.