Retrain Your Senses To Amplify your Everyday Energy
Feeling tired after hitting 40? Making these easy everyday adjustments can add extra energy to even the most mundane days.
Using your senses to stilumate better energy can leave you feeling energised.
THE BRIEF
Time to read: 3 minutes 50 seconds
Time to action: 5-10 minutes
Mantra: Pushing peak performance for your senses
Main message: Stimulate your senses to push your body and mind further
Stat: Of your 50,000 thoughts per day, only 2,500 are new. Here’s how to increase your averages
You are being influenced all the time. No, not just by Alexa, but by colours, shapes, smells… everything around you has a subtle yet discernible effect on you and your health.
So why not use these old-school, analogue influences to your advantage? You can feel healthier just by feeding sight, sounds, and smell to hit peak performance over the age of 40.
Surround yourself with better
Surrounding yourself with people who do several things better than you will work your body harder.
When people engaged in a vigorous cycling session in a group of very fit people, they worked harder. They maintained 60-70% of their maximum heart rate longer than biking alone or with others who weren’t as fit. Seeing people perform at a higher level is powerful enough to change your emotional state.
A study also found participants who exercised with “exceptional others” (friends or not) had more energy and were calmer after their workouts.
Use symmetry to think faster
Your brain has a natural inclination to enjoy symmetry, and this can be used to boost the speed of your cognitive processing. It takes the brain more time to process disorder, so when things are symmetrical, they are quicker and easier to evaluate.
Even small changes will make a subtle but noticeable difference to how uncluttered it can leave your brain. Arrange your desk ergonomically by creating zones in closest proximity to use. If it’s not too much, create small spaces for each subsection and, as a critical rule, ensure nothing is piled on top of or in front of anything else.
By linking your personal systems with symmetry, you won’t waste processing power on the small stuff – enabling you to give more to what matters.
Use forests to fight fevers
Get into nature. You were built to receive its bounty. Forest bathing trips increase NK cells, the white blood cells that fight viruses and infections.
Exposure to nature leads to a host of health benefits, including reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, premature death, stress, and high blood pressure. It doesn’t have to be a two-day hike; even a 5–10-minute daily stroll in some green spaces (such as a local park) will reset you to full bacteria-fighting force.
And if you can’t find green spaces every day, aim for as much “untamed” nature as you can find nearby.
The salty smell of mental health
Research from Exeter University found those lucky enough to live on coastlines had better physical and mental health than those who don’t.
A key factor is the smell of the sea and its biodiversity, which sets off a vast number of neurotransmitters, stimulating the brain to process more and more quickly. Of course, most of us are landlocked. However, a placebo was found to elicit the same neural activity.
Coffee comes with the social expectation of alertness, which in turn leads to an improvement in performance. Real coffee has more of an effect than instant coffee. This fact shows how you can fool your senses into producing extra energy and focus.
Influencing the influencers
If everything from the air you breathe to the people you see impacts you, living your best life can influence others to do the same.
There are so many psychological benefits of altruism. Kindness towards others elicited the same reward response as eating chocolate and having sex, thanks to the mirror neurons in your body. Essentially, the good stuff other people feel rubs off on you, and you feel better (figuratively speaking, of course – don’t let anyone rub off on you unless you’re both consenting adults!).
Arguably, do-good, feel-good, do-good is biology’s greatest ever virtuous circle and confirms the most wonderful of social thought that there is no such thing as an unselfish act.
So be a good influence. No one will benefit more than you.
ENERGY RABBIT
Not simply a life coach, but an award-winner in the wellness sector with over a decade of experience. Rabbit specialises in the accessibility of information – if there is a theory worth exploring, Rabbit will work out how easily it can be integrated into your everyday life.
