Mental- Health

Have you trained your brain today?

05/06/22

The brain is our most important organ, which allows us to interact with our environment. It regulates the psychological processes such as memory, attention, perception, emotion, language, thought, and learning.

Therefore, training our brain daily is essential, and there are different strategies to boost its performance.

Practicing new activities such as learning a new language, studying, or reading a book allows our brain to remain active and dynamic, which makes this new approach stimulate its function.

Another strategy is to exercise. Just as the body training to tone a muscle, in the same way doing physical activity stimulates our brain. When exercising, hormones such as dopamine, endorphin, oxytocin, and serotonin are released. They are responsible for sensations such as feeling pleasure or happiness. Hence exercise contributes not just to our physical health but also, it’s essential to our mental health.

Doing meditation and mindfulness is another way to keep the brain sharp. Seeking a state of consciousness and focusing our mind on the here and now facilitate reaching a complete state of concentration, stimulating attention, memory, perception, or thought abilities.

Establishing healthy relationships is essential to training the brain. We say that toxic relationships are not beneficial for our mental health. For that reason, it is vital to build networks that generate emotional stability. These relationships are not only about our close contacts with family, friends, or co-workers. It is when we consult information such as social networks. All extrinsic stimuli influence how our brain processes, internalize and subsequently extracts information.

Another way to keep our brain sharp is by doing puzzles, word searches, crosswords, sudoku, and other challenging activities that get the brain active. These hobbies are exceptionally functional for the elderly because they aim to train their brains in abilities such as memory. It is also a way to invest time in entertaining and stimulating activities.

Finally, having a healthy diet keeps our brain active and improves our internal processes such as memory and emotion regulation; thus, foods rich in vitamins or minerals help boost our mental skills.

Therefore, to train our brain, we can rely on different strategies and daily habits which aim at our physical and mental well-being. But is there a specific formula? My answer is negative; the important thing is finding the best strategy that helps each person to find their biopsychosocial well-being and balance.

DARR.

knowledge, Mental- Health, Personal Development, Self-Help, self-improvement, Success, Wellness

No Time, No Money

24/01/21

When people want to reach a goal or they have the expectations to do something important many times I’ve heard that the main pretext to achieve something is the lack of time or money. Actually, from my experience I’ve had to wait or postpone something for those two reasons and I know, not always it’s the precise time to do something that we want.

However, those words: time and money, can be a barrier and a mental pretext that humans create because in many occasions to leave the comfort zone is a risk that many of us want to avoid. We want to be comfortable with a known environment, the stimuli and resources and doing a step forward is a challenge because we don’t know if to take that risk will be the best decision but, in my country, we say: “El que no arriesga un huevo no gana un pollo” or in other words “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”. In many situations to face the unknown can have awards in the future.

Regarding the absence of time, it is very important to organize it and at the same time to have strategies to optimize and take advantage of every moment. Procrastination is a bad habit as the laziness or invention of excuses. Sometimes it is because we don’t know the tools to organize our schedule but there are many options which can help you to be productive and the use of them depends on if you’re a conventional or practical person. Some of those can be: Google calendar, agendas, alarms, time planners or reminders. Here is an interesting article about this topic and I think it’s very useful as a complement of this important theme: https://www.spica.com/blog/best-time-management-tools

About the money, this is an important point and more now that we’re in a time of pandemic many companies went bankrupt or they are dealing with the economy and many people have had to change their jobs, many of them were laid off and therefore the financial situation can be a huge problem. Nevertheless, in many cases the lack of money is because people don’t have financial culture and they prefer to live in the moment- the here and now, forgetting their future and everything that involves retirement and having a livelihood for tomorrow. In many situations people spend more money than they have and the credit system is the way to deal with that but sometimes this issue becomes a nightmare where people are living to pay debts and this failure obscures the possibility of a promising future. Thus, my advice to go swimmingly financially is using some strategies like: saving money, spending less money than you earn, investing or creating simple and achievable business that help you to earn some extra income. 

So, the absence of money and time have a common element which is organization and discipline, where people can use some resources and habits which can help them to fulfill their goal. The most important thing is if you have an objective you should have the mindset and commitment to do it. I always write about the importance of our mindset and attitude but those elements move people. I am completely aware about the external factors and stimuli which influence our days and decisions but the message that I want to leave in this writing is when something depends on your actions and way to see the world then try to be assertive and use your time and money in the best way.  

DARR.