Hotel Near FIU - How Our Brains Stop Us From Achieving Our Goals (and How to Fight Back)

Source - http://lifehacker.com/
By - Gregory Ciotti
Category - Hotel Near FIU
Posted By - Homewood Suites Miami

Hotel Near FIU

As admittedly wonderful and fascinating as the human brain is, it can also feel like the brain is out to get us sometimes. In some circumstances, our brain's natural reaction actually does more to sabotage than help. Here,Sparring Mind founder Gregory Ciotti explains how to combat your brain's own brilliance, overcoming the instinctual reactions which often have devastating effects on your long-term goals.

Your brain can hurt your goals by fantasizing too much

Would you believe that fantasizing is the #1 way your brain unintentionally ruins your goals? It seems unlikely, right? The thing is, the proof is in the pudding (or in this case, the research): psychologists have found that while positive thinking about the future is broadly beneficial, too much fantasy can have disastrous results on achieving goals. Researchers tracked the progress of how people cope with four different types of challenges.

• Your brain procrastinates on big projects by visualizing the worst parts

  Procrastination, of all of the things on this list, is likely the most recognizable: everybody realizes that they procrastinate from time to time, and it's something we are forced to battle with every day. How can we fight this persistent opponent?

  • Your brain will "abandon ship" at the first sign of distress

    Anyone who's fought the good fight with dieting will likely recognize this phenomenon. Envision this:
    You're on a diet, and have been doing well for about 2 1/2 weeks, but you know your defenses are at risk. To make matters work, you're having dinner with friends tonight. Instead of the healthy meal you could have made at home, you're forced to use a restaurant menu.

    • Your brain loves mindless busy work disguised as progress

      One of the ways in which your brain continues it's trickery is through busy work: work that gets "something" done, but not something that produces any measurable results.
      In fact, research by John Bargh and colleagues reveals that our brain loves to become robotic and to mimic people out of habit. I shouldn't have to tell you that this is disastrous to achieving long term goals! This busy work is often a mechanism our brain uses in cohesion with avoiding big projects (mentioned above): instead of diving into the difficult tasks we KNOW we should get done, we'll instead float around doing semi-related (read: barely related) menial tasks to make ourselves feel productive without actually getting anything done.

      • Your brain is not good at "winging it" when it comes to planning...ever!

        Every night before I go to sleep, I like to write a simple to-do list that I group into two categories. I put some in category ‘A' (must be done tomorrow) and some in category ‘B' (must be worked on or done in 2-3 days). I do this because when I sit down at the computer without a plan, I tend to fall flat on my face. My so-called "work time" turns into the not-so-productive "check email time" or "browse Reddit" time; nothing of any importance gets done. It seems that I'm not alone!