Refreshing habits(05)

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Everyday life can sometimes flatten into a dull routine. To avoid falling into an energy-draining underachievement, don’t neglect your mind for too long.

Here I have five concrete suggestions on how you can spice up your daily routine.

1.Cold shower-How overcoming adversity revitalizes you.

Surely you have heard that cold showers provide good circulation. Especially your skin is supplied with important nutrients and thus remains supple.

However, the advantage for your mental strength is much more interesting. You consciously decide against something pleasant and choose something unpleasant. Depending on the type, it takes more or less overcoming. Who now thinks that it is a masochistic act, is wrong. As soon as you take a cold shower for more than 60 days, your body reconditions itself. You start to enjoy the refreshment. There is also the option to switch between hot and cold. Be careful not to overdo it. Don’t make any frantic movements after the shower. Protect yourself from a cold draft. I personally got a stiff neck once when I wasn’t paying attention.

It should draw you out of your comfort zone. The cold shower presents a symbol of difficult situation where you remain steadfast. We sometimes have to endure the cold rain to appreciate the warm sunshine. This exercise can increase your discipline to defy temptations (less -sugar, -alcohol, -cigarettes, -media consumption, more -exercise, stairs instead of elevator, -sports, commitment at work …).

If you give the habit a chance, it will enrich your life. It will increase your quality of life. Your friends and acquaintances will think you are crazy. But you will only really know when you have tried it for 60 days in a row. Make up your own mind and take the plunge.

2.Cross your hands

Not to be confused with crossing your fingers. If you’ve really gotten into a rut, and you’re even feeling underworked, try using your weak hand more often. Start small and use your weak hand to brush your teeth. Similar simple motor activities can easily be performed by the weak hand. Then increase more and more in the degree of difficulty. Writing with the weak hand can again show you how, through practice, you are already using complex hand-eye coordination tasks in an automated way. By switching hands, there is more exchange between the two hemispheres of your brain. I will not go into detail about what happens in the brain during this exchange. The positive effects are definitely lasting.

If you have trouble slowing yourself down, this is an ideal exercise. You force yourself to slow down because the task is new to your coordination. It may feel like you’re working less productively at first. This is true. However, you shouldn’t think of yourself as a machine that’s all about increasing existing strengths with small steps.

Sometimes it makes much more sense to develop strengths from your weaknesses. Then you will make progress with big steps. If you do a task a little differently, you will look at it from a different angle.

Never switch off your common sense. In stressful, dangerous or similar situations, you must rely on proven automatisms. You should also consult with your colleagues and not disregard any work regulations.

If the basic conditions are given, however, you will recognize new ways.

3.Train your memory

Have you ever heard about the mnemonics? This technique is known to ancient times and helps you with more or less complex systems to improve your memory significantly. It is especially popular for remembering numbers.

I will list here a few techniques that you can integrate into your everyday life.

Remember numbers by forming them into bundles

2 7 0 8 1 9 270 819

You’ll find it easier to remember two hundred and seventy and eight hundred and nineteen than to remember the numbers one by one.

Another technique is the Pegword System (Number Symbol System).

Here you think about pictures for single numbers. You can get very far with the numbers 0 to 9.

It is important that you think about the images for the numbers themselves. You use the fact that you associate certain numbers with certain pictures.

There are several ways you can build an association with a number.

Objects, animals, other nouns that rhyme with the number: two: shoe, five: knife, night.

Objects, animals, other nouns that look like the number: 2=swan,O=egg, 5=fishhook

Objects, animals, other nouns that appear frequently in corresponding number: 7=dwarves, 9=cones, 11=football players….

Objects, animals, other nouns associated with a particular month of the year: 6 June beetles, August= swimming pool, 1= ski …

I personally use the following pictures:

one=egg (german Ei)

two=twig

three= tricycle

four= square or box

five= hand with five fingers

six= star (Star of David)

seven= dwarf

eight= spider with eight legs

9= cone

0= donut (hole of the donut)

And so I would remember our example is the number 270819:

A twig is lying on the ground, a dwarf picks up the twig and spears a donut with it and gives it to a spider. The spider has eggs (her young babys) and gives a cone of gold full of thanks.

So the number became a story. ,,A dwarf makes a deal with a spider” you could call the title.

You see here that you should choose pictures that you like to imagine. With your building blocks you can then make up crazy stories. So crazy that you can remember them well. By the way, it’s perfectly possible to have multiple pictures for one number. I could also take a swimming pool (August summer in germany) for eight. Then the story would change as follows:

A twig is lying on the ground, a dwarf picks it up and spears a donut with it. He happily lies down in his swimming pool, a friend throws an egg at his head and asks him if he would like to go bowling with him.

270819

The longer the number line, the longer your stories will be. It’s a good visualization exercise and also certainly stimulates your imagination.

However, there is a more effective number mark system.

The Major System was introduced to the public in 1825 by Aimee Paris.

Before you can use it, however, you need to invest time in learning the rules. In the table below are consonants with which you will associate numbers in the future.

Check out the following table at my blog article.

number	Letter	Memory aid
0	s, z	Coca Cola Zero, s sounds similar
1	t, d	t looks like 1 , d sounds similar
2	n	n has two legs
3	m	m has tree legs
4	r	Four and with r
5	l	Roman fifty,
6	Sch, ch, j	Jungle, chilli, jaguar =6 letter
7	g, k	Luck game l= 7 is the number of gambling
8	F, v,w,	V 8 engine from VW, f sounds similar to v
9	b, p	Upside down it looks like a nine

As an example:

sea stands for 0

As you can see, vocal are not considered

Let’s assume you want to remember a date of birth of a friend:

26.06 n ch s ch

now you have to fill the gaps with vowels:

For example After search

I now imagine how I search for my friend

Already I have the number 2606 in my head

You still have to keep in mind that double consonants count as one number:

For example, lollipop would be a word for 55

avenue would be a word for 5

As with the Pegword System, you can create your own personal list with the Major System. It’s a lot better if you make your own associations. A slightly different way to check your vocabulary.

Now it’s up to you to try out these systems for your everyday life. A good tool works best when you use it skillfully. The more proficient you are with it, the more help it will give you. Don’t expect miracles right at the beginning. Steady use will develop it into an automatism. Then you’ll be linking numbers to images in no time. A 5G network right in your head.

4.Use a foreign language you have learned. Can you speak german,spain french, or portugues please?

It is above all language that has fascinated and defined mankind since time immemorial. The more global the world grows together, the more the use of other languages increases. Translation apps like google translate and co offer pretty good possibilities when it comes to the exchange between cultures.

However, you should not let your learned knowledge gather dust and use it. A foreign language acts like a door to another world. If you already have your foot in it, don’t pull it out again. Open the door to a new world. Learn other ways of looking at life. You may even discover advantages and disadvantages of your own language.

What possibilities do you have to integrate a foreign language into your everyday life?

Plan your day in the morning in writing with the foreign language. What are your tasks and goals for today? This way you kill two birds with one stone.

Convince your significant other to switch to the foreign language for an hour. You can also try it out with friends. Why not? Nowadays many students go abroad for a year as an au pair, work and travel or other. With the reason to improve a foreign language. So why always choose the comfortable mother tongue?

In your professional life the possibilities will be very individual.

You can always ask yourself mentally how you would rewrite your job in a foreign language. Mentally retrace your previous steps when you have waiting times.

5. Small challenges

Have you ever honestly asked yourself what you are capable of?

How do you rate your creativity, skill and physical strength?

Challenging yourself again and again can be really invigorating.

However, it is the passive consumption of media that leads to inertia. You don’t have to start a successful business to prove yourself.

You can set yourself very simple goals that make your life more exciting.

It is always a matter of taste and depends on your current mood.

Here are a few suggestions:

Teach yourself to juggle
Train for a marathon
Train for a sports badge
Beat your personal chin-up record
Learn a hand/headstand or something similar
Climb the nearest mountains in your area
Try a new sport
Learn a new language
Play a new musical instrument
Write a book or a blog

Quintessence

Basically, these are just suggestions and you should choose the most interesting for you. You should not let anyone tell you how to organize your everyday life. Suggestions should serve and not command.

Personally, I was amazed at the positive effects the individual points had on me. Try not to try everything at once. I have integrated the individual suggestions in listed order 1-4 one after the other into my life.

Point 5 could alternatively stand as the title of this blog. It should show you that there are far more ways to refresh your daily life. In order not to inflate the blog unnecessarily, I have only added further suggestions in bullet point form.

Now it’s your turn 🙂

Your thoughts are welcome in the comments section

What crazy habits have you gotten into?

Please write it in the comments.

Book recommendation

The book ,,The Power of Habits” by Charles Duhigg inspired me for this blog.

Here is the amazon link