When you think of reaching your “peak potential,” career ambitions, financial goals, athletic accomplishments, or educational achievements probably come to mind. Often, we only consider these kinds of external attributes — meeting goals and building a successful life materially — when thinking about peak potential. But unless you are able to attain your full potential internally, you’re more than likely going to struggle to reach it externally.
If you’re an athlete, I’m sure you already know that your overall performance is just as much mental as physical. The same is true for busy moms, hustling entrepreneurs, dedicated students, hard working executives, and everybody else. Your life is a reflection of how well your brain is working. If your brain isn’t in top condition, your body won’t be at its best and neither will your life.
At Grey Matters, we define peak potential as your brain’s ability to reach a higher level of operation that gives you the clarity, productivity, and motivation to be mentally healthy and actively pursue your life goals. Because your brain influences literally everything in your life, when it’s functioning at maximum potential, all other areas of your life — relationships, career, health — run more smoothly.
It’s simple. When your brain works better, your life works better.
This Is How To Use 100% of Your Brain
Guess what? You already do.
Scans show activity buzzing through your entire brain all of the time, even when you’re resting or sleeping. Not all 86 billion neurons are firing at once, of course, but they exist in a constant state of resting potential, electrically charged, ready to act if called upon.
Contrary to a popular myth that claims we only use ten percent of our brains, science shows that you use virtually every part of your brain and that most of it is active most of the time. So, it really becomes a question of how to maximize your brain function and get it performing optimally.
Easy.
Your brain’s performance depends on its health which is largely the product of your daily habits and how you challenge and support it. To optimize your brain, you have to have to live your life in a way that encourages it to function at its full potential.
Ways to Optimize Your Brain’s Performance
When people refer to “brain hacks,” they typically mean techniques or strategies to enhance cognitive function, improve productivity, and reach full potential. It’s important to clarify that while there is no single shortcut to unlock your brain’s full potential, there are several evidence-based strategies that can help you optimize cognitive function and improve productivity. When used in conjunction with each other, they can provide a potent support system to boost your brain power.
Get More Sleep
Sleep is one of the biggest determinants of the health and function of your brain. In fact, science has proven that skimping on sleep, over time, can make you sick, overweight, and stupid. After a single night of reduced sleep, reaction times, glucose levels, mood, memory, and hormone balances can be negatively affected. Getting sufficient sleep improves memory and learning. You want to aim for seven to nine hours of quality sleep per night.
Eat a Brain-Healthy Diet
An easy way to rapidly improve your brain’s health and performance is to support it with a brain-healthy diet. Feeding your brain well will not only help your overall health but also improve brain health and cognitive function. You have a “second brain,” called the enteric nervous system, in your gut which communicates directly with the brain in your head. What you put in your mouth directly impacts what goes on in your brain and can contribute to a clear mind or a foggy one. To get the most brain power out of your diet, you will want to include healthy fats, foods with probiotics, whole grains, leafy greens, high-fiber foods, and lots of lean protein. Hydration is also key.
Exercise Regularly
Exercise has tremendous brain benefits because it oxygenates your brain and increases blood flow. Research shows that physical exercise improves memory and thinking skills, mood and creativity, and learning while reducing depression, age-related decline, and the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s. One study found that exercising at a moderate intensity for just two hours per week increased volume in the parts of the brain that control memory and thinking.
Activity that combines thinking with movement, like ballroom dancing or tennis, is going to be of the most benefit to your brain. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines recommend 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week.
Challenge Your Brain
Your brain needs novelty to grow and stay sharp. When you do something new, you’re asking your brain to think, pay attention, and stay alert. It’s important to move your brain out of its comfort zone, where it doesn’t have to think, into the enhancement zone often by doing things that are unfamiliar and mentally challenging. Stepping out of your routine forces your brain to grow and make new neural connections.
You want to push your brain with things like learning new skills, hobbies, or sports, continuing to educate your mind, putting yourself in new social situations, and traveling to new locations. It could also be something as simple as driving a different way to work or eating a meal with your non-dominant hand. The point is to mix things up and make your brain work!
Train Your Brain
There is one type of brain training that is scientifically proven to work: neurofeedback. Neurofeedback is a non-invasive and painless practice that guides and teaches a person’s brain healthier functioning through real-time monitoring of brainwave patterns and positive reinforcement. The brain actually learns, through operant conditioning, to perform at optimal levels and continues to self-regulate at these levels after training.
The goal of peak performance training is to guide brain function to allow you to reach full potential. Because neurofeedback fine tunes the brain, it can be a proven tool for a student, musician, athlete, executive, or anyone to achieve optimal performance mentally and physically. Neurofeedback can help a person heighten their focus, attention, creativity, and concentration and increase alertness, reaction time, motor skills, and bodily control. Whatever you want to get better at, neurofeedback can bring out the best in your brain.
Stop Trying to Multitask
The idea of multitasking was originally used to describe a computer’s parallel processing capabilities and has become shorthand for our brains attempting to do many things simultaneously. However, your brain doesn’t work that way. Even when you think you’re multitasking, you’re not. Your brain is a sequential processor. It is biologically incapable of processing more than one attention requiring input at a time. What’s really happening when you think you’re multitasking is you’re shifting attention back and forth between tasks quickly utilizing short-term memory. Studies show that when your brain is constantly switching tasks, you are less efficient and more likely to make mistakes.
Practice Mindfulness
Practices like mindfulness and meditation can reduce stress and anxiety and enhance attention and memory. The opposite of an unfocused mind is an awake, mindful one. Very simply, mindfulness is a way of thinking. It is a mind that is aware and aware of its awareness. Mindfulness is a practice in which you train your brain to focus and notice what’s happening as it’s happening. It’s learning to direct your attention to your present experience.
Mindfulness is not a spiritual concept. It’s an active mental health practice. In your brain, mindfulness asks you to deliberately shift control of your thoughts and actions from your limbic system, the ancient instinctual, emotional brain, to the conscious awareness of your thinking brain, the frontal lobe. The frontal lobe of your brain is where your more complex cognitive processes take place. Over time, practicing mindfulness actually builds executive skills.
Reading
Learning to read physically changes your brain’s form and function. Reading regularly can improve brain and memory function and keep your brain operating more effectively as you age. Reading also enhances connectivity in the brain, reduces stress, promotes relaxation, improves sleep, and decreases the chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
Plus, it’s fun! I read somewhere that the average American reads a book a year. In comparison, the CEO of a company averages around 60 books a year. For the most brain benefits, science says to read fiction from an old-fashioned physical book — not electronically.
Conclusion
In today’s world, it seems like we are all trying to do more, do better, and get ahead. People are always looking for ways to enhance their brains’ performance and productivity while pushing their cognitive limits to get more done each day. The way to hack into your brain’s full potential is to support and care for it with a healthy lifestyle, including the tips above. Healthy habits are the foundation of being able to perform at your best and achieve your goals in the short and long term.
When your brain works better, your life works better.
At Grey Matters, we are passionate about helping people live their best lives, including optimizing their brain’s health and function through neurofeedback training. Neurofeedback has been scientifically proven to help many conditions, including anxiety, depression, autism, apraxia, ADD and ADHD, concussion and brain injuries, OCD, stroke recovery, PTSD, addictions, seizure disorders, migraines, chronic pain, and more. Give us a call at (317) 215-7208 or send us a message today to talk about how we can help you reach your brain’s full potential.
Second image source: Image by timolina on Freepik
Third image source: Image by pressfoto on Freepik
