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How to Reduce Stress and Heal Your Body, Prepare For Your Enemies, Silence Critics
Mario Peshev
July 30, 2022
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3 Ideas For Better Habits
1
Writing Reduces Stress and Heals Your Body
Trauma expert and social psychologist Dr. Pennebaker on the healing power of writing:
"What was it about secrets that were so toxic...I developed a working theory that keeping a secret was a form of active inhibition. Concealing or holding back powerful emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, I reasoned, was itself stressful.
If keeping a secret about a trauma was unhealthy, it made sense that having people reveal the secret should improve health.
The first expressive writing experiment was run in the Fall of 1983...we discovered that students randomly assigned to write about traumas for 4 days, 15 minutes a day, ended up going to the student health center over the next 6 months at about half the rate of students in the control condition.
By the mid-1990s, a consistent literature was beginning to emerge in health, clinical, and social psychology that validated the effectiveness of expressive writing in improving health." Source: Expressive Writing in Psychological Science 2
Prepare For Your Enemies
Military strategist Sun Tzu on preparation:
“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”
Source: The Art of War
3
Weak Leaders Silence Critics
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant on strong versus weak leadership:
“We learn more from people who challenge our thought process than those who affirm our conclusions. Strong leaders engage their critics and make themselves stronger. Weak leaders silence their critics and make themselves weaker. This reaction isn’t limited to people in power. Although we might be on board with the principle, in practice we often miss out on the value of a challenge network.”
Source: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
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Brain Food
Today I Learned: A 1975 study discovered that severe burns can be healed by eating 35 eggs per day (Source).
Science: A recent major review of prior studies discovered that there is no clear evidence that serotonin levels are responsible for depression. (Source)
Have a productive week,
The Smarter Brain Team