Limitless

you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

just take a few minutes to think about who your peers are, how much influence they have on your life, and how this affects your desire to unlimit yourself.

Who is someone you need to spend more time with? Reach out and make a date with that person now.

One of the most important things you can do for the health of your brain is to keep learning.

By increasing the ways you use your brain, you increase the capabilities of your brain.

Create an ongoing “To Learn” list. What are some things on that list? Write two down.

Whenever we experience stress, a hormone known as cortisol is released to alleviate the physical rigors of stress on our bodies. If this happens occasionally, it’s not a problem, but if it happens with great regularity, the buildup of cortisol in our brains can lead it to cease functioning properly.

chronic (persistent) stress may actually rewire your brain,”

This is what appears to happen in the brain when it is under continuous stress: it essentially builds up the part of the brain designed to handle threats, and the part of the brain tasked with more complex thought takes a back seat.”

If you want better focus, you need to get good sleep. If you want to be a clearer thinker, you need to get good sleep. If you want to make better decisions or have a better memory, you need to get good sleep.

Quality sleep—and getting enough of it at the right times—is as essential to survival as food and water. Without sleep you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly. Sleep is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other. In fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake.

“When the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn’t have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that’s accumulated throughout the day.”

the effects of exercise on sleep were minimal. But by the end of the 16-week study, the results were considerable

There are varying ideas about how much exercise is necessary to affect sleep, but a commonly stated amount is 2.5 hours a week of aerobic exercise, coupled with some resistance work.

anything that increases your heart rate so that you can still talk while exercising but have to catch your breath every few sentences or so, is considered moderate exercise,”

“training your mind to be aware in the present moment.”

you can choose any time and any place to meditate and that you can feel the benefits from it with as little as three minutes spent with eyes closed, taking deep breaths and then releasing those breaths, counting as you go.

Another tool she advocates is focused attention, a super-simple process of placing all your attention on your breathing. When your mind wanders from your breathing (as it invariably will), just notice this and bring it back.

Few of us are capable of locking our focus on one thing for an extended period, so it’s good to know refocusing is equally valuable.

When you regain your attention on your breathing, Garten says, “you’re exerting an important skill—you’re learning to observe your thinking. You’re not caught up in your thoughts, but you’re in a process of observing that you’re thinking.