WAEP14 Prime Your Brain

Prime your brain for positive gain!

Priming is the unconscious affect that one stimulus has on our response to another stimulus.

For example: If I prime you with the color yellow, then you're more likely to identify a banana later, because yellow and banana are assoicated in your memory. You'll do this more quickly than if you weren't primed for yellow. 

Words, images, and experiences can be used to prime our brains for future stimulus. 

Our brain focuses on what we tell it to focus on, and it will search for stimulus that supports what we told it to look for. 

If you want to increase your performance during a workout, prime yourself with a short list of words like: agility, strength, endurance, speed, and intensity.

5 Tips for Priming Your Brain: Create word lists Create affirmations Meditate or use some other mindfulness activity (breathing) De-clutter your environment Exercise

BONUS TIP: Turn off your TV and stop news-binging. The media tends to prime us for fear, anger, and sadness.

Here are a few suggestions for word lists:

Success, prosperity, progress, fame, gain

Will power, determined, resolute, backbone, grit

Calm, cool, harmony, tranquil, still

Intelligent, brainy, bright, brilliant, resourceful

Financially secure, firm, in the black, out of the red, debt-free

Achieve, triumph, win, attain, accomplish

4 Simple Steps to Creating Affirmations: Write in the 1st person: I am Write in the positive: I am a healthy person. Include an emotional component: I love the way I feel when I make healthy choices. Write affirmations in the present: I am fit and strong. 

Source: "Affirmations: The Why, What, How, and What if..." Psychology Today, March 12, 2014

Additional sources: "Happy Brain, Happy Life" Psychology Today, Aug. 2, 2011; "How to Hack Your Brain" Lifehacker, Jan. 31, 2011

 

AFFIRMATION APPS:

Affirmable

Positive Affirmations Lite/Postitive Thinking

My Daily Affirmations Free (Search the Google Play store)

Badass Woman in History:

Marie Stopes

Safety Tip of the week:

Make sure you know how to get your car out of sticky situation. Keep a thin board in your trunk.

Stay smart. Stay safe.

Kori