Your Brain at work

Question 1

1.Strategies to stay focused.
How much time is consumed by distraction?
How do we maintain or focus?

Answer 1

one study revealed that over two hours of office workers’ time is consumed by distractions. Another study showed that we spend around 11 minutes on a task before we’re distracted, and don’t return to our work until 25 minutes later.

we have to prevent those distractions from seizing our attention. One way to do this is to develop the habit of vetoing those behaviors that distract us. This requires us to turn off all communication devices whenever we need to do any kind of active thinking.

Question 2

2. Achieve your optimal performance.
   define optimal performance?
   What is a strategy when we are overwhelmed?

Answer 2

The balance of Dopamine(something new unexpected) and norepinephrine(scared)

when you feel you might become over-aroused, try writing down your thoughts to free up your mind, or take a relaxing walk as this tends to generate activity in other parts of the brain.

Question 3

3. Overcoming Mental Blocks

What is the best way to get insight

Answer 3

you could stretch your legs or meditate and allow your mind to wander, which enables your unconscious to process the problem. Or you could voice the problem out loud as hearing yourself speak about it often helps to observe your own thinking more clearly and objectively.

Question 4

4. Achieving better levels of focus through mindfulness.

What is mindfulness and what are benefits ?

Answer 4

Being in the moment.
practicing mindfulness will increase the strength of those areas in your brain that handle mental control and attention switching

Question 5

5.Activate Feelings of uncertainty and control of your Brain.
The process of choosing to interpret a situation differently is called ————-

What are the benefits and provide examples

Answer 5

reappraisal.

one study revealed that people who reappraise more experienced a higher satisfaction with life than those who choose instead to inhibit their emotions

One kind of reappraisal is humor, as it involves a shift in perspective that can transform one’s experience of a situation from gravely serious to funny and lighthearted.

Question 6

6.Regulating your expectations is key to a general feeling of happiness
What is the most effective way to regulate you expectations?

Answer 6

The most effective way to do this is to get into the habit of paying attention to your expectations. This will allow you to consciously adjust and lower them so that you enable your expectations to be exceeded.

Question 7

7The primary rewards for the brain.
What does this mean?
Why is it important to feel connect to others?

Answer 7

a feeling of relatedness to others, and a sense of being treated fairly, are primary rewards for the brain.

When we feel connected to others, able to relate our own thoughts and emotions with theirs, our brain releases oxytocin, a neurochemical that produces a sense of pleasure.

Question 8

8.Trick your brain into a status reward
what is one trick
Provide an example

Answer 8

you can even trick your brain into giving you a status reward by trying to be superior to yourself. This is possible because our self-perception uses the same neural circuitry that the brain uses when perceiving others.

One way to do this is to work at improving your own skills, for instance, your golf handicap, as this provides you with the opportunity to feel a potentially ever-increasing status without being a threat to anyone else.

Question 9

9.Help others arrive at important insights

How?

Answer 9

help people get into a conducive reflective frame of mind. This can be achieved by reducing any anxiety and increasing any positive feelings and sense of autonomy they may have. For instance, if you want to help a coworker with a particular problem, rather than asking them, why did this go wrong? What was the problem? You could reframe the question in a more positive way, like, I’m sure you did your best with this. Let’s just work together and see if we can find a way to rescue the situation

Question 10

Conserve your ability to think well

What does this mean?

Answer 10

your ability to think well is a limited resource, so conserve the resource at every opportunity. We all know what it’s like to burn the midnight oil. The later we work into the night, the less we’re able to think clearly.

Avoid distractions
For example, one study indicated that the constant distraction of emails and phone calls reduces performance in an IQ test by 10 points on average