Mental Health Blog

5 Brain Hacks to Improve Brain Efficiency

The brain is one of the most important organs in our body and controls our conscious habits. Simulating the brain occasionally will improve its functionality. 

  1. Develop a growth mindset
    • Focus on change and growth instead of your current abilities 
    • Acknowledge skills that you have but you should also believe that you have plenty more to learn and develop new skills every day
    • If you manifest and think that your brain can grow, your actions change in that direction
      • Ex. acknowledge that you’re smart but you have more to offer down the line
  2. Associate memories together
    • Remembering new information would be easier if you associate it with subjective/unique memories – attaching meaning to memories or remembering acronyms or chunking strategy
      • Ex. learning a math formula is hard so you may want to associate it with another number you are familiar with: a date, a birthday, last digits of family’s phone number
  3. Match your environment with your needs
    • The conductivity of the environment is key to better creative thinking
    • We may think that a clean environment is all we need to get in the right headspace
      • But Dr. Gabe says it depends on our needs – certain environments evoke different mentalities of approaching a certain task
        • Ex. pt in a messy room had more novel insights about a product than those in a cleaner space who had conventional ideas
  4. Place objects somewhere unusual to use a cue to remind yourself about a task 
    • Putting objects somewhere you usually don’t see to remind you about something – a cue
    • Unfamiliarity directly  signal to your brain that you should be doing something
      • Ex you can place a toy figure on your work desk to remind you to take 5-minute breaks when you glance at it 
  5. Meditate regularly
    • Meditation can help regulate how information is or is not encoded in our consciousness which goes hand in hand with working memory. 

Rubin, A., Geva, N., Sheintuch, L., & Ziv, Y. (2015). Hippocampal ensemble dynamics timestamp events in long-term memory. Elife, 4, e12247.

Seeman, S. C., Campagnola, L., Davoudian, P. A., Hoggarth, A., Hage, T. A., Bosma-Moody, A., … & Jarsky, T. (2018). Sparse recurrent excitatory connectivity in the microcircuit of the adult mouse and human cortex. Elife, 7, e37349.

Xu, C., Krabbe, S., Gründemann, J., Botta, P., Fadok, J. P., Osakada, F., … & Lüthi, A. (2016). Distinct hippocampal pathways mediate dissociable roles of context in memory retrieval. Cell, 167(4), 961-972.

Note: Everyone’s experience is unique and complex so some strategies/tools might not be relevant to your specific situation. I encourage you to use the content as a guide for improving your mental health. However, it is not a substitution for medical and mental health care. Take care of your mind and body.

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