change thinking

14 ways to change thinking

1. Exercise – exercise releases endorphins and dopamine and it makes you feel good. When you feel good, you can think better.
2. Put your brain in debugging mode (@naval) – “catch and debug your thoughts as it streams by, catch it when it goes into past regretting or future planning, make it stay in the present”
3. Read unconventionally – multi disciplinary thinking can give us more ideas, like something that works well in medicine can be applied in software engineering etc. Read widely.
4. Follow people who read widely – to get filtered new good reads – like @farnamstreet, @naval, @brainpicker, @morganhousel, @paulg and more
5. Listen to podcasts – for new ideas, for listening to people from different domains - @timferrissShow, @farnamstreet, @Radiolab and more
6. Quit harmful social media – pull the plug and quit facebook, whatsapp groups, occasionally unfollow everyone in twitter and start from scratch, avoid echo chambers where same ideas and ideologies reverberate without anyone challenging it
7. Quit news – cable news and print – there is responsible long form journalism, find some for real nuanced treatment of world events
8. Write – because “Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.”
9. Sleep – because brain under good sleep can create new neural associations and fresh awake brain can think better
10. Eat right – because vitamin deficiencies can amplify anxieties – break the cycle  
11. Break routines, form new habits – change habits, try new routines, change the systems – to trick the brain to let go of some muscle memory and inertia
12. Movies, music and fiction – expose the brain to new visual and auditory experiences, about other people and lives, about sounds and sights other than what we see every day, different languages, cultures, countries – make new favorites
13. Listen deeply – “seek first to understand, than to be understood"
14. Travel - helps to break routines, experience new cultures, new sights and sounds and make new associations