The Body Body Body Series: Wrap Up
Seven outer doors to change your inner world.
The Body Body Body series intimidated the crap out of me.
I love my brain. I love figuring out how to make it better. Bending Pink Steel and our focus on mental fitness is a byproduct of my own passionate pursuit of the subject.
But the more I learned, the more obvious it became that I've had a massive blind spot. I saw the mind-body connection as a one-way street where I could push my body to do incredible things because of what my mind was capable of. It never occurred to me that the opposite could be true—and even more influential.
Over the last few months and seven articles, I aimed to close that gap. To uncover what I and others miss about this relationship. And to give our community and me concrete ways to improve our brains through physical means.
Our outside world shapes our inside world more profoundly than I could have ever imagined. I know that sounds so…fluffy. But when you really get it, and believe it, everything changes. Because it has to.
What We Learned
Here's a few peeks into the series content:
Why Only The Rested Win: People who sleep well run (mental) circles around those who don't. They have better emotional control, faster memory recall, stronger problem-solving skills, and can flex a broader range of creative muscles. No other strategy, supplement, or habit matters until this one is in place.
The 4 C's to an Easy, Breezy, Confident Brain: Confidence is ability belief, and a deceptively simple way we teach our brains what to believe about ourselves is through the clothes we wear. The solution is simple enough to be captured in four C’s: congruence, consistency, condition, and choice. I even surprised myself by how helpful this article was.
How Posture Unlocks the Mind: The benefits of “good posture” (which we explain in the SOS framework) are legitimately insane. Increased testosterone, increased pain tolerance, increased energy — these are not advertisements for some shady pill. They’re the results of what 1-minute of sitting up straight can do.
The Sweaty Genius Method to Rebuilding Your Brain: Your brain technically only does one thing: transmit information. The how and why and what of it is where all the magic lies. Once you understand this, you'll understand how faulty thinking patterns (like depression and anxiety) take root, and how exercise sorts those buggers out by literally constructing you a new brain.
The Invisible Everything: To some degree, we all know that where we are shapes who we are. But the tricky part is that most of this shaping goes unnoticed (i.e., it's invisible). So, to make our environment advance, rather than hinder, the people we want to become, we have to see what we’ve been missing. Enter the AIA model.
Eating for Thinking: There are chemicals in your brain, but where do they come from? A significant portion are produced by the bacteria in your gut. Yes, your stomach kind of (but also majorly) controls your brain – and there are science-backed methods of making the relationship a better one.
Why Your Brain Needs (Other) Bodies: Finally, we have social brains (even us introverts). But loneliness and our misunderstanding of it handicaps our cognitive performance. We dive into the obvious, albeit complicated, solution of getting around other people: how to give and get what we most need from all 4 levels of human connection.
Body-Mind Time
How can you use your body to shape your brain? That was the question we answered in this series. Now, it’s the challenge I issue to you.
Every physical action you take is a vote for the thoughts you want to think, and ultimately, the life you want to live. So, what kind of brain are you assembling today?
I loved this series! I kid you not, I cleared out a half of my closet because of this article: The 4 C's to an Easy, Breezy, Confident Brain.