Saturday Insights — a 5-10 min article that simply aims to improve at least one aspect of your life. It's a combination between constant flow of motivation and distilled wisdom that compounds over time.

Every Saturday, you’ll get a new bite of insight that’ll allow you to get consistently better and open a completely new perspective.

Contents

• Mindfulness

• Prime Your Chronobiology For Success

• Objective/Subjective Time

• Takeaway

Hey there subscribers and welcome back.

Always so great to have you joining us every Saturday as we bring you some out-of-the-box insights.

You know it’s amazing how much discipline and determination you put in to realize your dreams. It’s already something that you can pat yourself on the back for.

For the next 5-10 minutes, it’s just you and I — everything else and everyone else can wait, and the entire world can be put on pause. You deserve this time of reflection, and perhaps, you even need it to continue being successful.

Mindfulness

Now we’re about to ready your mind for enlarging today.

No matter if you’re out or sitting peacefully, this exercise is a primer for today’s session and any upcoming challenges.

So, enjoy it…

• Begin by trying to reach the sky with your hands to straighten your spine.

• Then, relax your shoulders and let your arms sit comfortably at your side with your palms moving freely.

• Let’s examine some of that neck tension by moving your head left to right and right to left as well as up and down.

Do this a few times in each direction.

Today, we’re going to do some more space-time bridging — a technique for your cognition. Basically, it’ll allow your mind to swiftly move across spatio-temporal dimensions. Some of them are near and faster, others further and slower.

• For the next 3 breaths, focus your attention on the act of breathing itself.

• You can target the inflate or deflate movement of your chest/belly or just the air entering and leaving your nose and mouth.

• Then, for the next 3 breathes, switch your attention back and forth from your breathing to your body.

• You can look at the palms of your hands or at your feet or wherever you would like on your body.

• Next, choose an object from your surroundings — anything a few feet away and attend to it carefully for a period of another 3 breathes.

• Really try to analyze it visually while also occasionally observing the rhythm of your breathing.

You can’t mess this exercise up. Just keep breathing and moving your attention around effortlessly — that’s all.

• Now, whether inside or outside, for the last part of this exercise, focus your attention on as much of your distant surroundings as possible for another 3 breaths.

Subscribers, after just a few minutes, your mind is just focused and ready to enlarge.

So, let’s move forward…

Master Your Chronobiology

Our topic for today is something that impacts our well-being, productivity, work capacity, and all other aspects necessary for success. 

Imagine getting that big promotion you deserve while being sleep-deprived, anxious, and unable to focus. Or try reaching that athletic milestone when your body feels like it’s going break and motivation hits rock bottoms.

Now, all of these scenarios have to do two things:

1. Biology

2. Time

With chronos meaning time in ancient Greek, chronobiology is the field of the biological sciences that examine timing processes and periodic phenomena in living organisms.

With an emphasis on periodic meaning repeating, chronobiology is all about biological rhythms — and our life is a grand Orchestra with different instruments playing at different rhythms.

Yet, for soul-reaching music to come out, they must sing in sync. 

This session will give you some well-established facts about this topic and some powerful science-based tools for your arsenal — and you’ll be able to use these tools or instruments profitably in many areas of life wherever you want to optimize for success. 

Okay, let’s dive in… 

Objective/Subjective Time

To take in the essentials of these biological mechanisms and use them to perform, it’s important to understand the distinction between objective and subjective time.

Objective time is clock time or the time of physics. It boils down to measuring duration by counting a repeating process. Physicists term these periodic processes as oscillators which are systems that sooner or later will keep running to the same two or more states. 

Every clock you’ve ever seen uses this principle — you count the tick-tick-tick of something to measure time.

However, subjective time is the mines time or the time of the consciousness. It refers to your subjective experience of time passing as you live and do all the amazing things that you’re doing.

Remember the last time you were so immersed in something that hours flew by without you even noticing? And conversely, we all know that endless meeting or lecture when time seems to stand still.

The way we experience the flow of time or the temporality of our consciousness is linked to how we feel, and most importantly, instrumental in how we perform. 

We manipulate subjective time through objective means so that we can be successful. Contemporary neuroscience throws some light on this issue and it’s here where actionable tools are.

It’s known that the brain has many clocks and different ways to tell time.

One such way is by altering the strength of how neurons communicate. By varying how neurons whisper, talk, or shout — the brain can construct temporal sequences. And your brain does all its astonishing feats by means of neurotransmitters, neuromodulators, and hormones which are various substances that alter the way neurons connect.

Neuro cells communicate through synapses and these molecules influence if and how well information travels from one neuron to the other. 

For chronobiology, subjective time, and performance optimization there is a key neurotransmitter — “dopamine” (and a neuromodulatory context around it).

Dopamine is the feel-good molecule that promotes action. Rather than pleasure, dopamine is responsible for motivation. It usually goes hand-in-hand with other neurotransmitters like noradrenaline, cortisol, and acetylcholine which stimulate us to be alert and active. 

Below are the two ideas about dopamine base context that can change your life for the better:...