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The power of the pause
A brief pause between stimulus and response can create space for clarity.
Mario Peshev
May 14, 2025
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Welcome to The Smarter Brain, a curation of thought-provoking ideas and actionable reads to help you build better habits and become more productive.
Happy reading - See you on Sunday!
Cheers,
The Smarter Brain Team
Estimated Reading Time: 2 mins
3 Ideas for Better Habits
The Power of the Pause
Mindfulness advocate, Chade-Meng Tan, on cultivating emotional intelligence for lasting inner peace and leadership clarity.
“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”
Source: Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace)
Call It Out to Calm It Down
Vulnerability researcher, Brené Brown, on the courage to connect through authentic emotion and wholehearted living.
“In fact, research shows that the process of labeling emotional experience is related to greater emotion regulation and psychosocial well-being.”
Don’t Fight the Feeling
Emotional intelligence scientist, Marc Brackett, on unlocking the power of emotions to transform learning, relationships, and well-being.
“Emotion regulation is not about not feeling. Neither is it exerting tight control over what we feel. And it’s not about banishing negative emotions and feeling only positive ones. Rather, emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings—all of them.”
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Productivity Tools and Resources
The Science Behind Collaborative Productivity
Forbes examines the scientific reasons why collaborative environments can significantly enhance productivity by reducing wasted time and increasing the quality of the outputs.
Cultivating Self-Improvement in High-Performing Teams
Opteamize delves into strategies for fostering culture of continuous improvement within teams to drive performance.
What We're Reading
If you enjoy the content we share here, you’ll probably love this too: Brain Food, a 5-minute Sunday newsletter packed with timeless lessons on work and life. We read it weekly, it’s sharp, thoughtful, and completely free. Highly recommend.
Brain Food
Today I Learned: Emotional regulation engages the prefrontal cortex and reduces amygdala activity. (Source)
Science: Studies in emotional neuroscience suggest that naming a feeling can help regulate it. This supports the concept of Affect Labeling, where verbalizing emotions engages the prefrontal cortex and reduces emotional reactivity. (Source)
Have a productive rest of your week,
The Smarter Brain Team
Resource Spotlight
Monthly Experiments, Visual Explainers, Tangible Impact
Monthly dispatches unpack real‑world behavioral experiments, visual explainers, and handy frameworks, equipping designers, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to translate cognitive science into nudges, habit loops, and measurable social impact without academic jargon.
Start turning research into real‑world impact
Where Psychiatry, Statistics, and Storytelling Collide
Deep‑dive essays blending psychiatry, numbers, and cultural critique challenge complacent narratives, test prevailing statistics, and invite readers into a lively commentariat wrestling skeptically with evidence, uncertainty, and the ethics of rational discourse.
Turn Curiosity into Charts
A quick Wednesday missive delivering five unusual, open datasets plus clever context, turning curiosity into actionable analysis and sparking data‑driven storytelling ideas you can remix for research, journalism, or classroom adventures.
Dive straight into the latest edition here
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