Use this technique to begin ditching your bad habits.

...and start building GOOD ones (yes, it's possible).

Do you smoke, but wish you didn't? Does it seem impossible, no matter how hard you try, to keep your desk or office lean and clean? Or do you wish you read for 30 minutes a day to learn new gardening techniques?

Habits, good or bad, are a major part of our life. Think about it, how many actions or activities do you repeat day in and day out? If you can't think of any, observe yourself today and note which tasks you do daily without a second thought.

The beauty and the curse of habits is they're so thoughtless. But wait! There is usually something that inspires each habit occurring; a meal inspires a cigarette, getting home from work inspires 2 hours in front of the TV, or a meeting means you need a Coke.

Introduce yourself to The Trigger. The Trigger is the specific event, feeling, or activity - the meal, arrival home, or meeting - that triggers a desire in you - the cigarette, TV, or coke. The first key to breaking a bad habit is understanding what triggers it. Once you know that, you may be able to remove your bad habit by removing the trigger. Only smoke cigarettes when you've had a few too many beers? Limit your intoxication by only bringing cash when you socialize and limiting the quantity you bring. No money = no more beers. But don't forget the taxi!

Some triggers can't be removed from daily life. Fact of life. And these bad habits generally bring some sort of pleasure, albeit usually a short-term pleasure. So, your next step is figuring out how you're going to fill the void left by this habit-removal. Now we're starting to understand...

... The Substitute. The Substitute is what replaces your habit in bringing you pleasure. Want to quit taking that Coke to the meeting? Take a smoothie or fruit juice instead. Always need a coffee in the morning? Try replacing it with tea. Although you must be extremely careful with this, you could try a multi-step substitute replacement using progressively better (or less bad) substitutes. This method highlights the fact that, regardless of the 1-step or multi-step, you...

... need A Game Plan. Your Game Plan is your schedule for habit-removal. Set up checkpoints, 30, 90, and 365 day checkpoints seem good (you didn't think you could get by with no record keeping, did you?). Use these check-points to assess how successful you've been. If at Day 30 you're kicking that poor habit, feel good! Give yourself a reward. If you haven't improved much, assess why it is. Did you properly identify The Trigger? Or maybe you don't have...

... High Stakes. Having High Stakes means you get a meaningful reward or a punishment for success or failure. For example, let's say your goal is to work out 4 times per week (here's how to do it). Before starting, give a trustworthy friend $50 to hold onto. If you succeed to you get to use that for a professional massage. If not, they get to keep it (be clear about this and make sure they agree to it). The Stakes are high and in this case could get expensive, so you...

... might as well Maintain Focus. Keep it to one new habit per 30 days. Here's why. One per month means that in one year, you could stop (start) these bad (good) habits:

• Smoking
• Drinking 4 Diet Cokes per day
• Maintain a lean and clean inbox
• Work out 4 times per week
• Read 30 minutes per day
• Stop watching TV completely
• Stop picking your nails
• Keep the litter box clean for your feline friend by cleaning it daily
• Meditate daily
• Eat breakfast every day
• Keep your kitchen clean by scrubbing it down each month
• Stop eating those brownies after every dinner

Not a bad list, eh? I'd call that a pretty good year.

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Four Tips to Keep Your Brain Active and Alert.

Use this list to keep your brain healthy and energized during those marathon work periods.

If you are like most people on this planet, I’d bet you sometimes find yourself feeling like no matter what you do, you can’t get ahead in your work. And when deadlines, overbearing bosses, or family obligations loom over your head, sometimes you are forced to work for extremely long, unhealthy periods of time. However, it is fairly well known that long periods of work and sleep deprivation can alter your mental awareness. Here’s a list of things to do to keep your mind energized and your brain activity high.

1. Meditate – Meditating regularly will recharge your brain and help you refocus your thoughts. It also has great health benefits. When you work without a break for extremely long periods of time, you will begin to find yourself “unable to think about this or that.” If you find yourself thinking this statement, it is a big clue that you need a break. Meditation can help you re-energize your brain.

2. Exercise – The health of your body and mind are interconnected. The status of one will definitely affect the other, so be sure to make exercise a habit and enjoyable. You’ll find that as your physical health increases, so does your mental health. Here’s what a NY Times had this to say about it:

One form of training, however, has been shown to maintain and improve brain health — physical exercise. In humans, exercise improves what scientists call “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.

3. Get Started – Think about it. How many times does the anticipation of your workload actually prevent you from getting started? Your brain experiences a flurry of activity as you prepare for the tasks ahead, and this sometimes causes you to forget to start! Having a plan is important, but don’t get lost in planning. Or sulking because of upcoming work. Just do it. Here’s a few specific tips for overcoming procrastination.

4. Get A Few Hobbies – Hobbies bring joy to your life and keep your brain active. Why find more than 1 hobby? If your brain focuses on performing only a few different activities, it’ll never develop the wide processing power required for true cognitive development. Having a venue for creativity is just pleasant in general, too. That same NY Times article offered this:

That is, practice can certainly make people better at sudoku puzzles or help them remember lists more accurately. The improvement can even last for years. Similarly, people tend to retain skills and knowledge they learned thoroughly when they were younger. Unless the activities span a broad spectrum of abilities, though, there seems to be no benefit to general mental fitness.

Summary

Start with these 4 tips and you’ll be well on your way to a healthier, more active brain that is more capable of lasting through those long work sessions. If you would like even more tips, here are some more ideas for increasing brain activity.

Learn how to develop psychic abilities with the Silva Method.

A new study sheds some light on how your mind combats negative events like death.

A study to be printed in the November issue of Psychological Science says that when faced with negative events (like your own death) the mind automatically triggers happy feelings. This is done as a sort of defense mechanism to keep us from falling into a depression due to the setbacks we encounter in our daily lives.

In the study, students were broken into 2 groups, one asked to contemplate their own death and the other to imagine dental pain. Afterwards, they were put through explicit emotion tests as well as implicit emotional tests. The study found:

There was no difference in scores between the groups on the explicit tests of emotion and affect. But in the implicit tests of nonconscious emotion — the wordplay — researchers found that the students who were preoccupied with death tended to generate significantly more positive-emotion words and word matches than the dental-pain group.

What does this mean? Our mind may just have an immune system that aids us in our psychological battles of facing rejection, aging, and the like. So, as we go through our days and inevitably face our challenges, remember - our mind is trying to help us! Use this fact as your first step towards building a strong positive outlook and getting the most from life. On that note, you should also check out the American Monk - some great (and free) lessons for developing your mind.

(Reference)
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A few tips to becoming a skilled listener.

It's a skill so many talk about, but so few actually have. How well do you listen? Are you actively digesting the information, or are you instead already conjuring up a response? Do you often forget something (like a name) right after someone tells you? If so, try some of these tips to improve your listening skills.

1. Put forth effort in processing the information someone is sharing with you. Listening takes energy, whereas hearing does not. Don't yet begin creating a response or pondering the ramifications; you should be focusing intently on the speaker.

2. Allow the speaker to share their complete thought - do not interrupt them. Interrupting prevents you from receiving the complete picture the speaker is trying to paint. This not only can cause miscommunication, but can also make the speaker angry. No one likes getting interrupted.

3. Repeat back what you heard when possible. This ensures you have properly heard and processed the message from the speaker. Once you have confirmed you properly interpreted the speaker, then you can begin formulating your response.

4. Do not perform other tasks while listening. Performing other tasks will steal the energy you should be putting towards listening. Additionally, it is disrespectful to treat a speaker in such a way, especially when your mind wanders too far and you realize they just asked you a question.

I'll repeat this one again since it is so important - and so common. DO NOT begin formulating a response until AFTER the speaker is done. This prevents you from getting their full message and also, during emotional conversations, helps you be more level-headed.

Mastering these few tips will make you a much better listener. The road to becoming a skilled active listener is not easy, but with consistent effort and determination you can dramatically improve your ability.

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Scientific Researchers are finding - and seeking to replicate - areas of brain stimulation common across all spiritual and faith-based experiences.

Is communion with your God or Spirit merely a figment of your imagination? Or does it make sense that spiritual experiences stimulate specific areas of the brain? This is the question researchers are trying to answer as they study devout worshippers of different faiths, measuring their brain activity as they meditate, pray, or recall powerful experiences.

While interpretation could go either way towards proving or disproving the existence of a higher power, it is logical that a Buddhist in meditation has an active right prefrontal cortex (responsible for attention and planning), given the meditative requirements of intensely focusing on one thought or object. And on the same coin, who'd argue the merits of nuns experiencing an activated caudate nucleus, common when experiencing feelings of love - coinciding with reported feelings of "unconditional love" while in prayer.

So, is science or faith the real player here?

Maybe it's both:

Moreover, no matter what neural correlates scientists may find, the results cannot prove or disprove the existence of God. Although atheists might argue that finding spirituality in the brain implies that religion is nothing more than divine delusion, the nuns were thrilled by their brain scans for precisely the opposite reason: they seemed to provide confirmation of God’s interactions with them.

Either way, mastering the replication techniques described here could provide vast benefits for the general public, like improving immune systems, decreased depression, or just a more happy, healthy person. Faith and Science... maybe they CAN get along.

Scientific American::Searching for God in the Brain

The Top Productivity Blogs Collected by Social Rankings!

An incredible new website, Productivity Zen, identifies the top 15 productivity stories and blogs of the day by monitoring the buzz of the productivity blog community.

The developers of the site use a software called SocialRank to monitor each of the best productivity sites and determine the day's hottest articles and bloggers in the field.

According to the SocialRank team:

This is done by analyzing how sites and users link, connect, and discuss each other's content. Add a touch of math and what we have is a powerful filter into the hottest stories of the day.

Now you can find better productivity stories, learn more, and get updated... much faster and easier than before.

So far great sites like Zen Habits, Life Optimizer, Matt Idea, and Lifehack have been showing up on the top rankings for the site. But also some new faces that I urge all your productivity junkies to go check out!

It's so nice to be able to find stuff from within the longtail without having to deal with the complications of technorati and the sheer bias some some social networking sites.

Want to know more about these great sites? Visit the links below:

SocialRank
Productivity Zen

Zen Habits offers 10 steps to a life of Simplicity. Then we weigh in with a few of our own Zenny Tips.

 You wake up every morning and wonder how you're going to tackle the surmountable task of Getting Through The Day. Your brain is so cluttered with preparation for the Daily Grind (tell Hubby to pick up the kids - you've got a meeting with the VP, grab wine for the neighbor's party you're stopping at tomorrow, make sure hubby picked up kids, order groceries online, have them delivered on Friday, make sure Danny ACTUALLY went to school this time, etc etc etc) you need a checklist just to get from the Bed to the Kitchen Stage of your routine. You get to work and realize the note you wrote yourself yesterday is now lost in Ground Zero of your war-torn desk. The painters knocked over the largest of your three family photos, leaving a cracked picture and shards under your dusty out/in/pending/? piles of "papers."

Sound familiar at all? To a greater or lesser extent, this description not only describes our morning routine, but also extrapolates to our entire lives. We get so much on our plate that we have no time for the little things, many of which greatly influence the quality of our lives.

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Lucky for us, there's a little Zen to help us out. Zen Habits has 10 things you can do to simplify your life. Check them out, and pick your favorite to do today. Our favorites are:

3. Purge a drawer
7. Clear your desk
8. Clear out your email inbox

We read this list (and accompanying advice) and were so inspired we came up with a few of our own. Read at your own risk.

1. Install an Idea Parking Lot - If you're like me, you probably come up with random, potentially good ideas throughout the day. Usually they don't pertain the task at hand, but you don't want to forget them? What do you do? Park them. In the Lot. Have a designated piece of paper, section of your whiteboard, or a voice recorder and jot down the essence of the idea. Then get back to the task at hand. Have a designated time to distribute the ideas to their proper projects. Every Monday, clear out last weeks ideas, I have 4 categories - Delete, Act on it Now, Pending (requires something else first), Forward to someone else. After 15 minutes my Parking Lot only has pending items.

How Zen of me.

2. The Lunch Iron Curtain - I love this one. Establish with your boss, coworkers, and water boy that your Lunch Hour is just that. From 12pm - 1pm every day you are unavailable for comment. Use that time to do Zenny things, like eating in peace. Think about something else for a while, call your mom, or just close your eyes and taste your food. This will do wonders. Give yourself something to look forward to - establish at least 2 Iron Curtain days.

3. Web Browser Tyranny - Focus solely on your task at hand, be it email, design, or whatever. Close all browser windows not pertaining to this. Check out Tab Mixer Plus if you want to save browsing sessions.

4. Blue Light Special in the Fridge - Go to your fridge. Cringe. Now that that's out of the way, pull out any sort of leftover food item. Anything you won't eat in the next 48 hours should be pawned off to your friend Hungry Adam, composted, or thrown away (sigh).j

5. The "Library" Break-up - So where is your stack of "I'm going to read these soon" books? Pick out The One you NEED TO READ NOW OR THE KARMA POLICE ARE COMING and give all the others away. Lend them, maybe your friend who actually reads will inspire you through her book review. Make reading pleasurable, and then you'll actually do it.j

6. Unsubscribe from mailing lists and newsletters if you haven't read the last 2 editions. That one's easy.

We'll our additions short; a long list wouldn't be very simple of us. So now you have some ideas to start cutting away the fat and clutter of your daily life. Don't try to slay the Giant in one swipe, pick one or two and incorporate them in to your routine. Once they become habit, pick one or two more. Continue this process until you feel yourself getting some serious Zen on.

Great Links That Will Guarantee a Good Night's Sleep  and Make Sure You're Fresh and On Time in the Morning

We want to let you in on a cool resource that will serve you so well in life. If you haven't come across wikiHow yet you've been missing out. If you ever have a problem of how to do something or find yourself in a sticky, precarious situation look no further.

below: a screenshot of wikiHow

WikiHow Defined:

"wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. With your edits, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people by offering solutions to the problems of everyday life. wikiHow currently contains 22,479 articles written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers. Please join us by writing on a topic not yet covered, or editing a page that someone else has started."

We use it and have seen it been put into action:

At a party a few weeks back my friend managed to get locked out of her room. After exhausting every possibility we could think of, she didn't know where to turn.

After disappearing for 10 mins she appeared from the shadows and unlocked the door, but HOW?!!!!!

The Answer:

How to Open a Door with a Knife

Here, at Self Pursuit, we'd like to show you the value of this resource and give you some great advice on getting the best night's sleep and wake up feeling right as rain!

Find out:

How to Find Places to Sleep in the Cold

How to Go to Bed Early

How to Rest With Your Eyes Open

How to Wake up Peacefully

How to Wake up a Person

How to Sleep Better

How to Wake up for Class

How to Wake Up On Time

How to Wake Up Without an Alarm Clock

How to Make Breakfast in Bed

What do you think of wikiHow? We're intrigued to hear your feedback.

PS - Which priceless 'How Tos' have you discovered?

Interesting Articles

18 Wonders of the Human Body

5 Battles To Overcome Procrastination

The Road to Success

Problem Solving Tools and Techniques

See How Easily you can Overcome Procrastination by Conquering These 5 Battles

Are you struggling to overcome procrastination?

Do you find yourself festering and stewing without getting anything done?

Procrastinators and Procrastination fit into 3 types:

• arousal types, or thrill-seekers, who wait to the last minute for the euphoric rush.
• avoiders, who may be avoiding fear of failure or even fear of success, but in either case are very concerned with what others think of them; they would rather have others think they lack effort than ability.
• decisional procrastinators, who cannot make a decision. Not making a decision absolves procrastinators of responsibility for the outcome of events.

Which type are you? . . . whichever type you are, you can overcome procrastination if you conquer these 5 battles:

5 Battles to Overcome Procrastination

1. Chore versus Pleasure

A phrase I like to use when I've seen somebody for the first time in a long time that I've enjoyed is . . .

"Always a pleasure, never a chore"

This rings so true when it comes to overcoming procrastination. If you adopt the mindset that a task you're about to do is a "pleasure" for you, you'll be more likely to do something about it and get it done with passion and purpose.

2. Finishing versus Beginning

Many procrastinators find themselves overwhelmed with information that they find hard to process and simply see a task as being impossible. You don't have to finish tasks in one breath or stretch; if you start a task you're more likely to pick up the pace as you go along.

3. Perfectionist versus Productivist

One common trait of procrastinators is that they are perfectionists. If you look above this means they'll often fit into the 'avoiders' category. So many tasks that need to be done simply don't require perfection and should only be given the time and effort they deserve.

I might have made up a word here in 'productivist', it basically means someone who is productive and gets things done. They don't see too much importance in basic or minor tasks. If something isn't crucial then don't strive for perfection - aim to get things done. 

4. 'Time is my Master' versus 'Master of Time'

Don't be a slave to your watch. Don't feel constrained by time. A clear mind is essential when it comes to completing tasks. It's natural that your attention wanes after about an hour of solid concentration. Take a break! Have a coffee, a bath, a walk, anything that will clear your mind and let you refocus.

5. Eating a Whole Horse versus Bite-Sized-Pieces

As hungry as I get at times, the thought of eating a whole horse is quite daunting. If you've got a monster of a task or project don't try and tackle the beast in one go. If you divide the task into smaller bite-sized-pieces and goals they will be a lot easier to digest.

This method is a great means to an ends to pursue a task. In no time big tasks will not seem so overwhelming and you'll change your mindset to that of 'everything is possible'.

Are you a prolific procrastinator? Get the lowdown on everything you can imagine on procrastination with 10 Things You Need To Know About Procrastination

Read some of our featured articles:

The Science Behind Love

18 Wonders of the Human Body

Increase Your Brain Activity with 15 Ways

Are We Living The Fast Life or the Good Life? 

Just think how hectic modern life has become, the hustle and bustle of city life and the rat race has never been more chaotic. We are vastly living in a society that revolves around time and time's running out!

BUT . . . have you ever thought that this pace of life is damaging your health, relationships, love life and your recognition of the finer things in life?

I'm showcasing for you another great TED talk from Canadian journalist, Carl Honore who is a stern advocate of the slow movement.

"These days instant gratification now even takes too long" - Postcards from the Edge

Take Heed of this Great Video

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Carl Honore >>

Carl Honore Bio >>