Cognitive Fitness

My secret agenda this lifetime is to sculpt the most amazing makers who could solve wicked problems of our time and move the needle in the right direction for our planet. Like a king maker, a maker maker if you will.

As a simple designer, what could I do sitting in the southern half of India to make makers? I gave it a long and hard thought. In the quest to find the pareto of great makers, I learned as much as possible about the human system. No wonder neuroscience came into my life as such a strong dose. I found what must be done and that is not teaching product design or product management 😜 It is improving their cognitive fitness.

I did a few experiments on these lines on me and some guinea pig maker friends of mine. Here is one thing that proved to be utmost importance for creating the most brilliant problem solvers. Their cognitive fitness! tada 🎉

I am here to share about one idea that enhances your cognitive fitness forever.

Scenario

Are you working too hard? Are you not moving during the day? Is your workload not allowing to even pee? Are you working super long hours? If you nodded more than once than you are working way hard to degrade your cognitive fitness.

The very reason you are paid heavily and respected as a problem solver, you are giving it away slowly. So how could you retain your cognitive fitness of your brain? Let us first understand what happens inside.

Brain Speak

By now you know that your pre frontal cortex is the most important part of your brain that helps you with executive functions. In addition to PFC, I want to introduce you to the memory centre of your brain, the hippocampus. It resides in the temporal lobe. The hippocampus is where all your long lasting memories are stored. Starting from your first kiss, your first baby and all the way to words that hurt you, that abuse etc.

To be an amazing maker, you need the right neurotransmitters firing at the right time to keep your focus, attention, good moods etc. So what should we do to get this going and for a long time?

This means whatever we do, it must give rise to enhanced memory (not to retrieve information but to connect the dots and come up with creative ideas). We need an amazing attention in our PFC.

Why do we care about only these two regions because neuro-degenerative diseases and cognitive decline due to ageing will affect these two areas first and hence causing a loss in cognitive fitness slowly.

Strategy

Workout everyday.

That is it. That is all is your strategy.

A single sweat breaking workout will increase the levels of dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline and that gives you more focus, attention and better mood for at-least two hours.

By enhancing your cardio respiratory function you get cognitive fitness for a long term and damn it is free.

So how much exercise do we need to get these goodness. It is simple. 3X30/7.

3 times, 30 mins, aerobic exercises per week and that is all. A slow jog or a walk in the park or running up stairs or cleaning your home during quarantine is good for your brain.

Exercise is not about physical fitness it is all about cognitive fitness. Hence all my coaching calls are long walks with my mentees 🙌

🥂to cognitive fitness!

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Yo! Thanks for reading. Means a lot to me as attention is the hardest currency 🙏

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