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Leverage Mind-Body Connection For Productivity
“Happier thoughts lead to essentially a happier biochemistry. A happier, healthier body. Negative thoughts and stress have been shown to seriously degrade the body and the functioning of the brain, because it’s our thoughts and emotions that are continuously reassembling, reorganizing, recreating our body.” (Dr. John Hagelin)
For peak mental functioning, we can take advantage of one strategy: leveraging the immediate effects of physical activity and food to improve our mental functioning.
Our physical states influence our mental states is at once obvious and revolutionary. On one hand, it is obvious because almost everyone has experienced, at some point, how our minds feel sharper when we feel physically great or pretty foggy when we are sick (or when we’re suffering from a food coma). These are the effects of what’s happening in our bodies on our capacity to think.
On the other hand, it is revolutionary because we seldom act on this intuitive knowledge. That’s likely because the idea of the body and the mind influencing each other flies in the face of age-old assumptions in Western thought. For a long time, the mind was treated as though it were independent of the body — and the body was treated perhaps as only a life support system for the mind.¹ No wonder we expected people to function equally well all day long…
