The Mindful Mentality

I was reading this blog post by Mikael Cho, and I found it fascinating.

There’s so much rumour and gossip that goes around the interwebs regarding the “flow” and ways to get there effectively, I feel inclined to chip in my two cents. It only takes a cursory introduction to the field of psychology to appreciate the immense power you can gain from hacking your mind. Not movie-hacking, where you slip a trojan in a backdoor or some other bollocks, but the kind of hacking where you figure out how something works and trigger the right stimuli for a particular result. Here are a couple of my stimuli:

Music
An obvious one, but a good one. Drowning out one of your senses and stimulating your blood-flow with a high BPM is a solid way to push your concentration to the limits. The downside being there’s only so many deadmau5 tracks in circulation and hearing the same song twice can be jarring. Also, if you use Spotify like I do, everyone can see that you listened to Pitbull on your Facebook stream.

Not doing what you should be doing
After weeks or months of pushing yourself you can wear yourself out. Fortunately, I believe “work hard, play hard” is a great motto, and going sky-diving or the occasional BNO (Big Night Out) pushes work so far to the back that last week’s frustrating bug is this week’s intriguing puzzle. If you’re passionate about something this can be neglected for far too long.

Share something that makes you smile
Send a funny email around the office and have a laugh with your co-workers. Quick rush of endorphins, brief distraction, more personable atmosphere. This is why they invented team-building exercises.

Have a mantra, and use it
Repetition gets into your head and digs deep. Repetition gets into your head and digs deep. Repetition gets into your head and digs deep. Don’t it. This is my all-time number one. If you’re religious you can roll with that, otherwise it’s still really useful. It can focus you by reminding you of one reason to be doing it. The more situations you use it in, the more of an emotive response you’ll get by doing it. This is one of the biggest gifts I’ve been given.

So there you go.