How to outsmart your body: Healthy life hacking
Text: Ksenia Bobkova
The human body has great hidden capabilities. which few know about - and these possibilities are fully explained by physiology, psychology and neurobiology. We have collected a few examples of how to outsmart your body and brain and use these features. Most of the tricks described do not harm health, but rather, are aimed at strengthening and improving it. Nevertheless, we recommend readers to take care of themselves: be careful, do not sacrifice sleep, do not starve yourself, and do not ignore pain or stress.
How to cheat a dream
Drink coffee and take a nap
If you need to sleep, but do not have time, drink coffee, and then take a nap for 15 minutes. Thus, you will be invigorated and sleep, and caffeine. This double charge of cheerfulness is possible due to the fact that caffeine begins approximately 20 minutes after it has been consumed, and during such a short sleep the body does not have time to go into the deep sleep phase, only in micro-sleep, which restores a small amount of energy.
Breathe sharper
Try a breathing exercise from the practice of yoga. It is called "Kapalabhati" and is that you take a normal breath and a sharp, stressed exhalation. Repeat this about 10 times. This technique warms, invigorates and acts on the pineal gland, which affects the so-called circadian rhythms (sleep - wakefulness).
Arrange a mini workout
Strange as it may seem, one of the best ways to overcome drowsiness and fatigue is to strain the body a little. You can jump, jump, push. Any exercise with an interval of 20-30 minutes will help to disperse the blood and improve the flow of oxygen to the cells, and therefore, will give additional energy to the body. The ideal option is a short walk. Studies show that 15 minutes of walking gives new strength for two hours of work. Of course, you don’t walk much at night, so you can replace the walk with 100 squats. The main thing here is not to overdo it, otherwise you risk exhausting the body so that it immediately requires rest.
Set the brain against yourself
If you are faced with a reverse problem - that is, your body is excited so much that the necessary sleep does not come, then you should use self-suggestion. In psychology, this effect is known as the "paradox of sleep." It consists of the following: convincing your body that it does not want to sleep, you turn your brain against yourself. He begins to rebel and, like a small child, does exactly the opposite of what you are calling him, that is, he begins to get ready for bed.
How to fool your appetite
Drink, drink and drink again
Drink more fluids. Moreover, any other liquid, except water, which must be consumed in the minimum amount every day. This may be green tea, water with lemon, tomato juice. That is, such a liquid, which for some time will take your digestive tract. As long as the body realizes that it literally and figuratively inflated, you will have time to prepare a healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack.
Eat slowly
Give your body at least 20 minutes to eat. Yes, the rhythm of life, of course, much accelerated in recent years and even decades. However, our body evolves much slower. And so he got used to it - he needs about 20 minutes to eat, and he is not ready for less time. And even if you managed to get enough for 5-10 minutes, your brain still does not keep pace with the stomach, and therefore continues to give "hungry" impulses.
Inhale the aromas
Aromatherapy has a beneficial effect not only on the nervous system. It also helps in cases where the body is in revolt and requires food just because you want it, not because you are hungry. In this case, you should listen to the perfume, light aromatic sticks or smell the rind of citrus fruits, such as grapefruit. Due to the fact that the centers of smell and hunger are located next to each other, smells suppress the feeling of hunger, because our brain switches from one center to another.
How to cheat the nerves
Get ready for the show
What do many of us do before the upcoming public appearance? That's right, survive. And it does not matter how many people you have to speak: it could be your girlfriend, to whom you are going to make an offer, or reading poetry from the stage, or a diploma defense before a commission - in any case, the body will be stressed.
To avoid this excitement, you should take care that there are no mistakes on your part. And they can be avoided by preliminary preparation. And it’s not just about standing in front of a mirror to rehearse your speech and follow the facial expressions and gestures. So you will deceive yourself: you will reassure yourself that you have remembered the words, although you did not prepare the body for the upcoming event at all. Should you go on stage, sit down at a cafe table - and that’s it, your rehearsals cried. And all because the poor body was preparing to act the way it was prepared - standing alone in front of a mirror.
Repeat the same performance, but in a different setting. Imitate the upcoming situation in your apartment. Suppose a public performance: stand on a stand in a corner of the room, arrange chairs and armchairs in front of you, spread toys on them or arrange clothes (yes, you have to use imagination as much as possible), turn on the noise of streets on a computer at low volume ( to accustom yourself to calmly act in the presence of extraneous noise, because no one guarantees that you will be listened to in deathly silence), direct the light of the lamp towards you, put on the clothes in which you will speak. Survive this performance two, three, four times. When the time comes, you will feel not as a beginner, but as a teacher who tells a familiar lecture to another stream of students.
How to trick the body
Soothe the heart
A strong heartbeat can be the result of stress or a pre-stress condition. Fortunately, our body is designed so that many reactions can be stopped with the help of our own body. To calm the heartbeat, sometimes it is enough just to blow on something (it is often advised to blow on the thumb). The fact is that the phases of respiration are closely related to the heart rate. When you inhale, the vagus nerve is inhibited and the heart rhythm accelerates (therefore, during panic attacks, the person begins to inhale the air more often and it is so important that he breathe quickly as possible), while exhaling the nerve is irritated, which leads to a slowdown of the heart activity.
Proper breathing is one of the main ways to introduce yourself into a trance or meditative state. With the help of special breathing techniques, a person can cheer up or, on the contrary, fall asleep, and can practically stop his heart. It is precisely known that fakirs in India have such a trick, who with the help of breathing techniques and self-hypnosis can slow the heartbeat to such a speed that it seems as if it has stopped.
Get rid of side pain
Unfortunately, many of us have encountered such an unpleasant feeling as pain in the right side after walking or jogging. It happens that such a syndrome occurs, even if you follow all the precautions: do not eat two hours before jogging, breathe correctly, do not make abrupt stops while running. The fact is that when we breathe out, stepping on the right leg, the pressure on the liver increases significantly - hence the pain in the side. Therefore, as soon as this unpleasant symptom appears, try to exhale while simultaneously transferring body weight to your left leg - so the liver will put less pressure on the diaphragm, and gradually the pain will pass.
How to trick the memory
Build a palace of memories
Man tends to underestimate himself and his body. Especially often this refers to the mental abilities and strength of our memory. It sometimes seems to us that, having remembered a certain layer of information, we are no longer able to hold more or can not cover several layers simultaneously. The method that proves the opposite is called the Palace of Memory or the Locus Method.
Its essence lies precisely in a kind of soothing deception. You create in your head an image of a palace, house, apartment - any space convenient for you where you place bright things or phenomena-associations. The deception here lies in the fact that the brain does not focus on the fact that we need to remember many new things, but simply endows familiar images and objects with a slightly different meaning. This way you can memorize numbers, names, titles and whole phrases.
Material was first published on Look At Me
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 via Shutterstock