🎨 5 Ideas to Improve the Quality of Your Thinking

At a Glance:

Discover 5 powerful tips to enhance your thinking quality, optimize brain power, practice mindfulness, train your brain, and maximize results with coaching. Backed by neuroscience insights.

As some of you know, I’ve been diving deeper into neuroscience, and it’s truly fascinating how powerful our brain is. Its capabilities are endless! If you choose to work with your brain, exploring its potential, you can continually achieve more.

Here are some neuroscience-backed ideas that I’ve found incredibly helpful in daily life, and I want to share them with you:

Idea 1: JOURNAL

When you journal and write down your thoughts or do a brain dump, you create mental space for new ideas.

Start small by developing a simple daily routine. Spend 10 minutes each morning—while having coffee or tea—writing in your journal. Include things you’re grateful for and take a moment to compliment yourself.

In the evening, write down 2-3 things you accomplished that day. They don’t have to be major achievements—even small wins count. Over time, this practice helps shift your mindset from focusing on what’s lacking to appreciating what’s going well.

Before bed, spend a few minutes jotting down all your thoughts, ideas, and worries. This "brain dump" clears mental clutter, reduces anxiety, and enhances clarity, helping you wake up with a fresh perspective and more focused thinking.

Idea 2: PRACTICE MINDFULNESS

Mindfulness practices like meditation help you stay present, reduce anxiety, and build inner calm. A clear and focused mind is more resilient to stress and self-doubt, allowing you to tackle challenges with more confidence and creativity.

Try starting with just 5-10 minutes of meditation or mindfulness each day. Gradually, you'll find that this practice strengthens your ability to focus and improves the quality of your thinking in day-to-day tasks.

Idea 3: MANAGE YOUR BRAIN POWER

To optimize your brain power, here are four neuroscience-backed strategies:

1. Take breaks every 45-60 minutes.Your Prefrontal Cortex (PFC), which handles complex thinking, is small and needs breaks to function at its best.
2. Focus on one task at a time and avoid multitasking!The PFC works in a sequential manner, so multitasking actually reduces efficiency. While multitasking used to be a praised skill, we now know that focusing on one task improves your productivity and thinking quality.
3. Do the most challenging task first thing in the morning.Your PFC is most active and refreshed in the morning after a full night's rest. Tackle your most strenuous tasks early to leverage your brain's optimal energy. Pre Frontal Cortex is metabolically intensive. (Only sleep fuels it up!)
4. Maintain balanced levels of dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin.The PFC is highly sensitive to these chemicals and requires them to be in equilibrium. Too much or too little of any of these can throw off your brain’s ability to think clearly. (It's very fussy!) 

Idea 4: TRAIN YOUR BRAIN

Your brain, like any muscle, needs regular training to stay sharp. Learning new skills and continuously challenging your brain enhances mental fitness, boosts mood, and reduces stress.

Think of it as exercising your brain. The more you train it, the more you can rely on it to help with problem-solving and creative thinking.

Whether it's learning a new language, picking up a new hobby, or simply reading and engaging with new ideas, these activities keep your brain healthy and active.

For more tips on how to continuously stimulate your brain, check out my previous newsletter where I dive into practical techniques to train your brain for lifelong learning.

Idea 5: WORK WITH A COACH

Working with a coach is one of the most effective ways to improve the quality of your thinking.

Why is coaching so powerful? It’s not just about asking insightful questions or learning from someone more experienced. The real value lies in how coaching helps maximize your thinking.

Coaches use tools and frameworks that are designed to make you think better, clearer, and more strategically. This, in turn, improves decision-making and problem-solving skills.

Additionally, here are some interesting ways to learn and memorize things faster:

1. Handwriting (not typing!) your notes.
2. Visualizing concepts by creating mental images.
3. Storytelling or using associations to link ideas together.
4. Repetition, repeating important information to reinforce learning.
5. Emotional engagement—we tend to remember events with strong emotional responses.
6. Teaching others by explaining complex topics in simple terms.
7. Experiencing things firsthand, rather than just reading about them.
8. Doing things you're passionate about, as motivation makes learning faster.

By integrating these simple but powerful strategies into your daily routine, you’ll be able to significantly enhance your brain power, boost your mental clarity, and improve the overall quality of your thinking.