How to Take a Brain Break | Jim Kwik

I'm your brain coach Jim quick and in this lesson I'm going to show you how to give your brain a break because your brain is not built to be going 24 7 all the time without any kind of rest the challenges nowadays as we're behind screens for hours upon hours upon hours we know there's a dip in concentration and focus after about 25 or 30 minutes about the span of a sitcom and they call it the pomodaro technique that if you are studying and you are thinking and you are working it actually helps to take regular interval breaks because it gives your brain a little time to recharge to rejuvenate and also it creates more primacies and recencies Primacy means you tend to remember something in the beginning recency means you tend to remember something at the end so if I give you a list of 30 words you're probably going to remember the first ones Primacy and the last ones recency the challenge is you lose a lot in the middle so the reason why you take breaks is you create more primacies and recencies so you can learn and remember a lot more information now what do you do during these Brain Breaks I recommend after 25 30 minutes you take a little pause and for five minutes you do three things number one in no particular order I want you to breathe because a lot of times if we are fatigued and you have mental fog and you don't have Clarity part of it is your brain is only two percent of your body mass approximately but it requires 20 percent of the nutrients and oxygen and so give yourself the gift of oxygen and deep breathing what else do you want to do during your break I would remind you to hydrate when you are d hydrated and you have more water it actually increases your reaction time and thinking speed about 30 percent what is the third thing you do during this brain break I need you to stand up and move a lot of people they say that sitting is the new smoking we're behind screens all day hours and hours goes by and the primary reason you have a brain is to control your movement as your body moves your brain grooves as your body moves your brain grooves you create brain derived neurotropic factors bdnf which is like fertilizer for your brain when you take long walks we talk about Geniuses and how they come up with creative ideas and they have walking meetings outside in the sunlight and the Clean Air and they're grounded these are very important things to do even when you're listening to an audiobook or a podcast if you are taking a nice walk or you're on an elliptical all or a treadmill and you have that rhythm you're likely to remember the information understand it better now one of the exercise I like to do because there's multiple benefits is juggling did you know jugglers have bigger brains there's a study done at Oxford University that said juggling actually creates more white matter in your brain so in a moment I'm going to show you how to juggle and you can pause this video right now and I want you to get one ball maybe one ball two balls if you've done this before three if you're good at it or a rolled up sock even better than a ball a rolled up sock because it doesn't roll all around when you drop it I actually taught myself how to juggle to actually increase my reading ability so I noticed that train readers when they're reading they don't look at one letter or one word at a time it's not their fobial Vision they're expanding their peripheral vision so they can see more words at the time so they can read faster and I noticed a similarity when I'm juggling I have to relax my sense of sight so I could take more in so I could see the balls because I only have two eyes but if there are three balls I can be following all of them so I expand my peripheral vision so I could take more in so you get the benefits of a bigger brain and it's great training for your reading so let's grab your juggling balls or a sock or a tennis ball right now pause the video and do that now okay do you have something to juggle with I'm not talking about swords and flaming knives but something really simple like a sock and for juggling you have two balls in one hand one in the other now if you are new to juggling just start with one ball But ultimately to give you a picture of what it looks like successfully and again I'm not a professional juggler it's not my backup plan but I learned I taught myself so this is what I feel like juggling looks like are you ready so I'm looking at you and I could see the balls and I'm relaxing my eyes and notice that I dropped the ball now you're thinking Jim did you do that on purpose you probably did or is it maybe it was an accident juggling is a great metaphor for life do you feel like sometimes you're juggling so many things that you have so many roles so many responsibilities when we talk about quick thinking one of the things that keep us from growing and being successful is the expectations of others and the power of mistakes and some people are really fearful that they're going to make a mistake and so I'm going to encourage you to throw the ball up and just let it drop and feel good about it the world did not end and even if people are laughing at you they're not going to be thinking about that a few minutes from now all right so throw up the ball and just drop it right and it's on the ground and you feel like that's okay you don't have to be perfect because it's never about perfection it's about progress and you actually progress faster you fail forward because failure is not the opposite Sid of success failure is part of success so pick up your ball again and let's begin the basics of juggling so what I want you to do quick thinker is take the ball or whatever you're juggling maybe it's a sock and put it in your dominant hand and we're going to start small small simple steps what we're going to do is we're just going to toss it into the other hand that's it just toss it back and forth and it's okay if you drop it all right and when you drop it be happy about it be joyful because here's the thing if you're so stressed out about being perfect you're going to tense up and that's going to limit your performance you want to do this in relaxed State and I'm doing this also because we have so many people who we've taught how to juggle and they're able to do it and it's a nice way of breaking your belief that you can learn something brand new and so you're going back and forth and it's okay you don't have to get this perfect and it's not about catching it better it's getting that toss getting that Arc and you could keep it to about the top of your head if you like and it varies right wherever you're comfortable you're just going back and forth and you're getting good and maybe you're doing this for like your break you know doing it for a few days doing it for a week you don't even have to add a second ball and when you do have two this is what it looks like you have one in each hand and here's what you do not want to do what some people will do is they'll throw them at the same time but what happens they hit each other right so you do not throw them at the same time this is what other people do that's also not correct they're not actually juggling they're just passing it over do you see that I'm just handing it into another hand so in order to juggle both balls have to go up in the air so you're not passing it like this what you're doing is you're imagining you're throwing this ball up to this peak and the other ball goes up to this peak because if you had the same point then they're going to collide and the goal is once this ball hits its peak that's your signal or trigger to throw the other ball up so it looks like this you see that it doesn't have to be perfect at all now three balls look like this you have two in your dominant hand and it's actually for me easier than two balls because there's no pause you just again you go for imagine a box like this a box you're keeping the balls in this box and there's a point here and a point here this is what it looks like now I don't have control over physics so I can't slow this down because there's gravity but you see the two points and you notice how I can look at you right because my peripheral vision could pull in the information here so it's a nice way of learning how to relax your vision so you could see more because if I'm so narrow focused I won't be able to see where the ball is and so that is juggling now you could go on YouTube and search for Great jugglers and get great instruction on how to juggle the reason I bring this up for you is it's a fun way to kind of break up the monotony of something you might be studying and also you're giving your brain a break plus it creates more white matter in your brain and it's a great metaphor for life and it can help potentially with your reading ability so what else can you do besides juggling the goal is to get movement in your body you could do jumping jacks you could do burpees you could do some calisthenics some push-ups sit-ups anything that moves the blood around so generally what's good for your heart it's going to be good for your head so you get your heart beating creates more blood flow to the brain which means you have more oxygen in your brain so the goal is to move but here's some things you can do that could help you potentially improve your your brain function and they call them cross laterals cross laterals and this is where we're going along the midline when you're crossing the midline and potentially what has the ability to do is we know the left side of your brain controls the right side of your body and that the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body right but it's not just a mind-body connection there's a body mind connection so what you're going to do is you're going to take one hand go to the opposite knee and you're just going to connect them and then vice versa you're going to go back and forth now depending on your flexibility and what you're wearing instead of your hand you could use your elbow right and you don't have to touch it but just come close these are cross laterals this is where the left side of your brain and the right side of your brain it is split by this thing called the Corpus colossum which is like a bridging station how they communicate and potentially with some research suggests is that by using your body in certain ways especially crossing the midline helps you to create connections here and even if that's not the case you're moving right and using conscious effort into your moving one of the great exercises to learn is to dance right ballroom dancing amazing for your brain table tennis amazing for your brain what's something else you could do you could put your mind into your muscle so how about this there's something called Super Brain yoga you can look it up super brain yoga how do you do it I want you to take one hand and massage your opposite earlobe and then the other hand a massage the other earlobe and as you're massaging it just squat down and then squat up so what's the major message out of this lesson is take time to move it's not just doing your Pilates three times a week or doing your yoga twice a week or running twice a week it's about making movement part of your daily routine every half an hour or an hour just going for a walk and moving and if you want to do something more challenging take on one of the exercises that I share with you today now in the comments what I want you to do is what's your brain break when you start taking your brain break after 25 30 minutes the Pomodoro Technique what are some of the things that you want to do to be able to just be physical and get inside your body share it in the comments so we could all learn from each other I'm your brain coach Jim quick and I'll see you in our next lesson

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 2,201,320

Keywords: jim kwik, brain health, how to take a brain break, jim kwik productivity, brain power, how to juggle, juggling for brain health, brain exercises, kwik learning, kwik brain, super brain yoga, jim kwik super brain, mindvalley super brain

Id: 30IpveNICwU

Length: 12min 34sec (754 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022