The Snooze Button Damages Your Heart, How to Choose What to Read, Become A Better Person

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 mins

3 Ideas For Better Habits

1

The Snooze Button Damages Your Heart

Neuroscientist and sleep expert Professor Matthew Walker on the dangers of using the snooze button on alarm clocks:

"If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time.

Repeating this at least five days a week in your working life, can cause multiplicative abuse to your heart and nervous system.

If you use an alarm clock, do away with the snooze function and get in the habit of waking up once to spare your heart the repeated shock." Source: ​Never Hit the Snooze Button​ 2

How to Choose What Books to Read

Novelist Doris Lessing on how to choose what to read:

"There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you."

Source: ​The Golden Notebook​

3

Eliminate the Cost of Mistakes to Make Better Decisions

Computer programmer Ward Cunningham on how to avoid making bad decisions:

"I can't tell you how much time is spent worrying about decisions that don't matter. To just be able to make a decision and see what happens is tremendously empowering, but that means you have to set up the situation such that when something does go wrong, you can fix it. When something does go wrong, it doesn't cost you...an exorbitant amount. It isn't ridiculously expensive. When you get in situations where you cannot afford to make a mistake, it's very hard to do the right thing. So if you're trying to do the right thing, the right thing might be to eliminate the cost of making a mistake rather than try to guess what's right."

Source: ​Collective Ownership of Code and Text​

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Brain Food

Today I Learned: MISIMPROVE (v.) means to make something worse while attempting to make it better.

Science: Sleeping fewer than six hours for three consecutive nights can lead to an increase in feelings of anger, loneliness, frustration, and gastrointestinal problems. (​Source​)

Have a productive week,

The Smarter Brain Team