Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,51
making excuses as you read that last paragraph: Exercise is boring. You don’t have time for it. You can’t afford a gym membership. But the simple fact is that exercise is enormously valuable if you want to unshackle your brain. Think about it: When you’re active and moving, you feel sharper, right? Some of us even need to move around in order to get our brains operating at top efficiency. That’s because there’s a direct correlation between exercise and brain function. And you don’t need to become an Olympic athlete in order to keep your brain sharp. There’s lots of evidence to show that even 10 minutes of aerobic exercise a day can have enormous benefits.
As your body moves, your brain grooves. Check out a few of my favorite exercise videos at www.LimitlessBook.com/resources.
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Set your phone alarm to remind yourself to move for a few minutes every hour.
4. KILLING ANTS
Dr. Daniel Amen, a clinical neuroscientist, author of the bestseller Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, and a frequent guest of ours, came home one night after a particularly bad day at the office dealing with suicide risks, angst-ridden teens, and dysfunctional couples to find thousands of ants in his kitchen. “It was gross,” he wrote. “As I started to clean them up, the acronym came to me. I thought of my patients from that day—like my infested kitchen, my patients’ brains were also infested by the negative thoughts that were robbing them of their joy and stealing their happiness. The next day, I brought a can of ant spray to work as a visual aid and have been working diligently ever since to help my patients eradicate their ANTs.”6
ANTs are “automatic negative thoughts” and, if you’re like most people, you place limitations on yourself in the form of these thoughts at least some of the time. Maybe you tell yourself that you aren’t smart enough to learn a skill that you’d really like to have. Or perhaps you repeat on an endless loop how pushing yourself to accomplish something is only going to lead to disappointment.
ANTs are everywhere, and there isn’t enough ant spray in the world to get rid of all of them. But eliminating them from your life is an essential part of unlimiting your brain. The reason for this is simple: If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you regularly tell yourself that you can’t do something, or that you’re too old to do something, or that you don’t have the smarts to do something, you won’t do that thing. Only when you move on from this kind of destructive self-talk can you truly accomplish what you want to accomplish.
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What is your biggest ANT? What could you replace it with?
5. A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT
A 2018 piece in the medical journal The Lancet identified that “air pollution might cause 30 percent of all strokes and thus might be one of the leading contributors of the global stroke burden.” It went on: “Given the strong association between stroke, vascular risk factors, and dementia, the suggested link between air pollution and dementia is to be expected.”7 The air you breathe is critical to the way your brain functions. If you’ve ever been stuck in a room with a smoker, you know how hard it is to even think while you’re breathing that toxic air. Conversely, if you’re hiking in the mountains and take a deep breath from the crisp, clean atmosphere, you can feel your senses thriving.
If you live in a factory town or a big city with pollutants everywhere, there isn’t a lot you can do about the air around you. Fortunately, there are devices available to clean the air in your home and in your office, and you can make an increased effort to get to cleaner spaces more frequently.
A clean environment goes beyond air quality. Removing clutter and distractions from your surroundings will make you feel lighter and improve your ability to focus, so take time to Marie Kondo your mind and remove any unnecessary stuff.
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What is one thing you can do today to clean your environment?
6. A POSITIVE PEER GROUP
Your brain potential is not just related to your biological networks or your neurological networks; it is also related to your social networks. Who you spend time with is who you become. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn says that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Whether you believe that or not, I don’t think