Hey, are you up?
Our minds are built in a manner that allows us to grow smarter throughout our lives – you can help this process along by fighting the urge to do too much business as usual.
“Yaaawn…”
My alarm clock went off significantly earlier than usual that school morning because Magnus was out of town and would be for the following three days.
On a typical day I’ll sleepwalk through the classic morning stages of a family with school kids: Get the kids up (and yourself), get the kids dressed (and yourself, preferably), feed the kids (this you can and probably will postpone for yourself) and get the kids the school.
I usually take care of the homebound stages of the morning while Magnus gets ready and then comes down when it’s time to take the kids to get to school. Upon his returning, we’ll leave the house together to go to the office.
That morning I had to do it all alone, and man was I focused! Taking it all in on the way to school as if I was on an excursion in a strange city at an odd hour.
So, how did it go?
The kids made it to school on time, I missed breakfast, but gained a spiffy conversation with my 8-year old about why Greenland is called Greenland (don’t ask – I’m still not sure). And on the way home, I was overwhelmed with joy over the feeling of the chilly morning air on my tired face. And intrigued by watching people’s faces as they went by me on their bicycles and in their cars.
Nothing was as it usually is.
I had to pay attention to everything to get the job done - and hence I took in a lot of information from the world. And I had to make sense of that information to see if things were going in the right direction as for the aim: get the kids to school in time and preferably on happy feet.
Now – onwards to you (you knew this was coming).
We build habits. We’re designed to. It’s a matter of efficiency and resources of the brain.
The human mind is, amongst other things, characterized by the ability to grow new connections throughout our entire lives (neuroplasticity) and even new neurons (neurogenesis). Earlier on, scientists thought we were born with a set number of neurons, and we’d be ‘using’ them up throughout our lifetime. Today we know that this is not so.
We know that we continue to build on our experiences. Linking new information with information we’ve already gathered – and coming up with new perspectives, ideas, and learnings from this. Always. Every day. But although we’re build to go through life getting smarter, we have to do our bit to really enable this process.
One of these things is that we have to fight sleepwalking.
Sleepwalking equals going about business as always. Do the same stuff as always and doing it in the same manner. Hence your behavior becomes more or less hardwired, and you act without giving it a second thought.
To fight this, you have to break the script. You have to wake up to focus.
Break the script of the day and – if you’d like to add power to this exercise – break the script of how you see yourself (because this by large steers which actions you’ll take throughout the day).
You say:
• “I’m not the sort of person who goes to a movie by myself” – go to a movie by yourself!
• “I’m not the sort of person who chats someone up on the street” – smile and say hello to a lucky bypasser on the street.
• “I don’t have the patience to read a book” – yeah, you guessed it.
New experiences, severely breaking the script, will make your head spin and infuse energy and courage into you!
Now, you can use this knowledge regarding the time you spend on Jigidi. Do you have a particular manner in which you enjoy your Jigidi time? (unless you’re not human just nod).
We have set Jigidi up so that you can stretch the legs you’d like, and on the scale, you prefer.
We facilitate human connection across physical and mental borders, de-stressing, cognitive training, creative and intellectual stretching (acquisition of new knowledge and skills and using this while getting feedback from others).
This scalability means that you can make Jigidi work for you on different levels as far as brain training goes. Make good of that!
Do you always solve puzzles? Maybe you’d consider stretching your expressive legs and create a puzzle for your fellow puzzlers?
Do you typically upload puzzles of a specific sort found online? Perhaps you’d consider grabbing a camera and taking a picture you’d like to share with the rest of us?
Or how about leaving that kind and clever comment for your favorite puzzler that you’ve been contemplating?
You get the gist of it, I’m sure.
I’ll leave you with a quote from an expert on brain health, John Arden, Ph.D. from his book ‘The Brain Bible’ (once you’ve overcome the title the book makes for a beautiful read):
“Mature brains tend to be far denser in the number of connections between neurons, which means they are capable of greater complexity of thought. Instead of being a young tree with few branches, they have interlocking branches that make the accumulated knowledge possible.”
Maybe go add a few more branches before this day is over and reap the benefits of novelty? ♥
With lots of love, Jigidi
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