MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

Four takeaways:

While difficult to do amid the stress of our daily lives, making time for hobbies and activities that bring joy and fulfillment have been shown to reduce stress, prevent burnout, and enhance overall well-being. Long term neglect of these passions, however, may lead to boredom, dissatisfaction, and even depression.

Here are some key tips for making sure you make the time for your passions:

1. Prioritize Your Time– Look at your schedule for spots of 30 extra minutes or small windows where you might be able to fit in some time to read up on or practice your hobby. Look for meetings and weekly tasks that can be grouped or consolidated to free up time in your schedule.
2. Set Realistic Goals– Once you’ve found time in the schedule, do not waste it by setting unachievable goals. Start slow and do not expect yourself to master a hobby or passion overnight. Doing so will negate the positive effects of pursuing the hobby, and make it far more likely that you stop pursuing it in the long term.
3. Combine Your Passions with Other Activities– If your schedule is packed to the point of inflexibility, look for ways to bring your passions into other activities. Listen to audiobooks as you commute or do less mentally strenuous work. Incorporate your hobby into your social life, if possible– scheduling activities like group hikes or knitting circles.
4. Make Your Hobbies Portable– Bring your passion with you wherever you go. If you are an erstwhile writer or poet, bring a notebook with you. If you are a yoga enthusiast, be intentional about bringing your yoga mat with you on business trips, or to and from work– and then find a place to practice is that is easily accessible within your daily routine. This helps you maximize your opportunity to take advantages of small, but important windows in your routine.

Your hobbies and passions are an absolutely essential part of who you are. Making time for them is essential to your selfhood, and will have positive effects on all other aspects of your life.

By by Mindsol
Read the whole story.

Five takeaways:

While New Year’s resolutions are important, it can be equally, if not more important, to sit down and review the things you’ve accomplished throughout a year gone by. What did you achieve? Have you done what you said you were going to do? What are the big and small wins? And most importantly, what have you learned?

Yeong suggests that you ask yourself three questions to adequately assess your year:

1. What went well? – List the things that you’ve accomplished in the past 12 months. Take time to scan your memory, making sure that you remember the small wins you’ve collected. Take a moment to be grateful for all of the good things that have happened.
2. What went wrong (or not as well)? – Explore the year’s setbacks, whether they are work related, relationship based, or based on missed benchmarks– listing them is therapeutic because you are acknowledging them. As you do so, do not forget that you were able to accomplish a lot of great things alongside- or despite– the things that did not to go plan.
3. What needs work? – Honestly answering this question reveals insights from past mistakes and uncover steps you can take to improve next year. This question is not meant to force you to guilt-trip yourself. It is about figuring out how to direct your improvement next year.

Yeong then provides two introspective exercises for assessing your year.

1. Turn your experiences into lessons and principles– Use the lists you’ve created in the first steps to form lessons and principles that guide your path forward. If you learned the previous year that counting calories was an effective weight loss technique for you, write down: “calorie deficit is the key to weight loss.” By turning your learnings into mantras, you make them more likely to sink in.
2. Rate different areas of your life to reveal hidden insights– Yeong breaks life into six components: work, money, fitness, relationships, learning, and hobbies. In this step, he suggests rating each of these areas of your life on a 1 to 10 scale. This provides clarity regarding parts of your life that provide you more satisfaction than others, or areas that need more diligent attention.

Once you’re done reviewing your year, take a few days to let things sink in. Reward yourself with good time off. Reach out to people who have helped you in the past and thank them.

By productivity and psychology expert Dean Yeong
Read the whole story.

Three takeaways:

The piece opens with a reminder of the value of “unanswerable” or philosophical questions to force deep, honest, uncomfortable contemplation– and therefore spur growth.

We often resist deep contemplation because confronting unresolved, complex life questions has been shown to evoke discomfort and dark moods, but research has shown that we should consciously embrace these more difficult or mysterious queries.

A 2012 study asked young adults how often they considered questions such as “Do you ever reflect on your purpose in life?” and “Do you ever think about the human spirit or what happens to life after death?” They found that the people who spent more time on these questions tended to score higher than their peers on a variety of measures defined as spiritual intelligence, critical existential thinking, sense of life’s meaning, curiosity, and well-being.

Anxiety and depression rates have been exploding in the United States, especially among young adults. Brooks argues that this is not because we’re thinking too much about the hard questions of life, but too little. He suggests a three part routine for encouraging oneself to ponder life’s harder, more mysterious questions:

1. Schedule your mental workout – like exercise, an analytical meditation practice becomes easier with discipline and repetition. By keeping an ongoing schedule of reflection and thought, during which devices and other distractions are banned, you will quickly see the practice become pleasant- and then indispensable.
2. Go for a long walk – Research has shown that walking naturally stimulates creative thinking and facilitates the ability to focus without being distracted. Long walks- again, without devices– can increase one’s power to think deeply.
3. Invite boredom – We live in the age of screens and personal devices that make it seem that we are never truly bored. This is not a positive thing. Experiencing boredom is crucial for abstract reasoning and insight, because it stimulates the set of brain regions that becomes active when the outside world does not impinge on our mind’s attention.

By embracing these steps, we put ourselves in a better position to connect with the deeper threads of meaning and foundations of purpose that can so easily become so remote as we go about our busy, distracted days.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
Read the whole story.

Note: At the time of this posting The Atlantic offers five free article views per month.

Takeaways:

A surprisingly effective method can enhance both short-term and long-term memory, benefiting everyone from students to Alzheimer’s patients. The key? Being intentional about giving your brain some down time.

It is easy to assume that working harder guarantees better performance. But studies show that by spending 10-15 minutes in quiet reflection, your memory improves far more than if you had tried to fill that time with intense study.

In 1900, a study showed that after participants learned a list of meaningless syllables, one group took a six-minute break before learning a second list, while the other continued and learned the new list immediately. When tested 90 minutes later, those who had rested remembered nearly 50% of the list, compared to 28% for those who didn’t. The results showed that newly encoded memories are fragile and prone to interference without time for consolidation.

More recently, this study was revisited and applied to those who had suffered a neurological injury, such as a stroke. The results were spectacular. In some cases, amnesic patients showed an 11-fold increase in the information they retained when given a rest during study.

The exact mechanism in the brain that causes this is still unknown, though some clues come from a growing understanding of memory formation. It is now well accepted that once memories are initially encoded, they pass through a period of consolidation that cements them in long-term storage.

The research shows that scheduling regular periods of mental rest, without distraction, could help us all hold onto new material a little more firmly. We live in an age of endless distraction and information overload. It is only natural that our brains benefit when given a chance to recharge.

By David Robson, for The BBC
Read the whole story.