Fact is: just as we’ve come to realise that we can improve our physical health through diet and workouts, so too can we improve our cognitive health. It’s a matter of committing to adopt healthy brain habits, eliminating toxic mental routines and engaging in the right mental exercises.
Science is showing that unhealthy habits and workplace culture are key culprits for unnecessary cognitive decline, write the academics. These common workplace-driven happenings are definite brain-drainers:
Working in cubicles – they sabotage a quiet personal work environment and kill productivity;
Unproductive meetings – they derail individual workflow and murder motivation;
Too many people in projects – overcrowded projects do not “integrate” everybody, instead they block processes and waste time.
Personal habits also affect brain health, such as
being tethered to technology all the time and constant information overload – healthy brains know what to block out.
Also constant multitasking – a trend scientists call “the asbestos of the brain”.
Unhealthy is also too much focus on memorising and recollecting instead of following creative new paths.
Bad for your cognitive health is constant mental work – the mind needs rest.
To sum it up: too many people stick to the path of the least resistance in every day life and let their thoughts, conversations and experiences become stagnant. The result can be what scientists call a “brain burnout”.
So give your brain the necessary downtime to recover, stop multitasking, perform tasks sequentially. Learn to prioritise, identify the two most important issues on your daily to do list and act accordingly. Stop doing things the same way, every day. Try to revitalise your thoughts and behaviours. For example, after the next meeting, ask yourself: What were the three take-home messages? How can we respond differently to the issues discussed? What are the next best steps?
Find a download of the whole report here:
http://www.techproductupdate.com/resources/download/4217/gotowebinar