3 Things to improve your creative mind, happiness, and growth mindset

Sometimes external factors force you to change.

Everything's going your way. You're making plans, the future looks bright.
Suddenly, curveball. You need to drop everything else and deal with it.

And just like that, 3-in-3 changed home. Revue, the service it lived at, is shutting down.

You adjust, reassess, learn. And keep going.

Thing 1 - Unlock your creative mind in 10 min

NSDR stands for Non-Sleep Deep Rest.

Photo by Jaanus Jagomägi

Benefits

1. Improved memory
2. Faster learning
3. Lower stress
4. Higher sleep quality
5. Enhanced focus and mental clarity

In addition to all these, the study Dr. Huberman talks about showed a 65% increase in dopamine release within the brain part involved in creative thinking.
It also showed an increase in theta activity - a pattern of brainwave activity associated with creative states and divergent thinking.

So how hard is this NSDR to do?

So easy you have no excuse not to try it.

It takes 10 min of:

• lying motionless
• breathing in a specific way
• doing a mental body scan

And here's a guided exercise so you can't do it wrong:

Take 10 minutes and get creative 🙃

(source 1, source 2)

Thing 2 - The joy of ditching the long commute

Someone with a one-hour commute in a car needs to earn 40% more to be as happy as someone with a short walk to work.
On the other hand, researchers found that if someone shifts from a long commute to a walk, their happiness increases as much as if they’d fallen in love.

(source) - emphasis mine

Photo by Joseph Chan

This sounds like a lot. Is your experience similar?

Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure.
Happiness is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure.
- Andrew Huberman

These definitions are spot on. Big like.

Combining them with that 40% from the beginning sounds like not spending all that time commuting allows you to find things you like doing instead.

(source)

Thing 3 - The growth mindset: embrace the struggle

People want to skip to the fun part, but in retrospect, the part they wanted to skip was the fun part!

- Dalton Caldwell

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters

There's even an Adam Sandler movie about it. In the movie, he gets a remote control that lets him fast-forward tough or boring parts of life. Guess what happens at the end.

All this has to do with dopamine, which is, as Anna Lembke says, "about wanting, not having".

As you're working towards something, the tougher it is the higher dopamine release - and the higher satisfaction.

Create a growth mindset based on that

Growth mindset is, in the words of Andrew Huberman, the mindset of "I'm not there yet but striving itself is the end goal".

In the moments of the most intense friction, tell yourself you're doing it by choice and you're doing it because you love it.

It doesn't feel like it's true, but it is in a way - because you will love it later. Doing this will help you (with time) enjoy the struggle more.

Yes, I'm still working on it too.

Don't give yourself any other rewards that you need to "earn", learn to get your reward from the effort itself.

Ok, this is hard. But NSDR was easy. Balance 🙂

(source)

Cheers, Zvonimir