Here’s something they don’t teach you in school: the idea that you can hack your mind. Sure I always knew that the brain was malleable with neuroplasticity allowing for our adult minds to learn new tricks or recover from injury. But the idea of Mind Hacking goes far beyond mere plasticity. Rather, it points to programming. To the idea that we can actively hack our minds the way a computer programmer hacks software to effect real change.
To keep the computer programming analogy going consider the fact that our minds generally want to keep us in “user mode”. That’s why we’re generally along for the ride, letting life happen to us, rather than driving the car ourselves. There’s obviously a pretty good reason for this. There’s just no way we could manage everything on our own. That’s why we have involuntary actions like breathing and blinking and why we really don’t have to actively think about how to walk while going for a stroll. Simply put parts of our operating system is off limits to us. The same way your company’s IT administrator has locked you out of parts of your computer. But what if there was a way to gain access to the entire control panel? A way to actively take control of your life? To reprogram you weaknesses to turn them into strengths? Well, that’s actually possible. Welcome to the world of Mind Hacking.
To fully understand what Mind Hacking is all about I highly recommend that you read the book Mind Hacking by Sir John Hargraves which has quickly become one of my favorite books of all-time. Not only will you learn how to take control of your life but you’ll also learn interesting tidbits after the lives of famous people ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Tim Berners-Lee. For the time being I’ll try to share some of the insights that I picked up from the book:
- Simply smiling daily will make you feel happier.
- If you are older imagining yourself younger will make you feel younger.
- If you need to accomplish something run mental simulations – not just picturing yourself achieving your goal but also overcoming all of the obstacles you’ll encounter along the way; imagine yourself putting in the work and then succeeding.
- Willpower is a kind of energy – needs to be recharged.
- Thoughts creating feelings and loops create your thoughts – so to feel better reprogram the way you think and drill on it repetitively.
- Your attention is a limited resource. It is constantly being depleted without your knowledge. Be careful how you spend it.
- Mastery is one of the great motivators in life.
- Your mind is constantly either projecting into the future (plans, dreams, fears) or reminiscing about the past (memories, regrets, nostalgia).
- Your mind craves information. It’s what it eats.
- Need to practice building up your concentration to get better at it.
- Same for your imagination. Spend time working at it.
- Create a series of virtues like Benjamin Franklin and track your progress towards achieving them daily.
- Writing about your best possible future self makes you happier.
- Keeping a food diary helps you lose weight.
- Optimistic people perceive reality differently – literally have a wider field of perception.
- Sharing your goals will make you more likely to achieve them.
- The best way to learn is to teach.
- Create tiny goals to help you incrementally achieve larger goals.
- Go meta when problem solving. Don’t just think about solving the problem but then what you would need to implement it and manage it as well.
There are other insights and other ways to go about mind hacking that the book covers but those were the ones that resonated the most with me. But the one thing that resonated with me the most was the idea of Mind Hacking itself. The meta idea of thinking about thinking. However we choose to go about it just knowing that it’s possible is a total game-changer right from the start. Never again do we have to go through life reactively. Just letting life happen to us. Instead if we want a better life we can imagine it and then set out to achieve it. Hacking our minds to change our lives. It won’t happen overnight but slowly but surely it will happen. And it all starts with us. Within us. One step at a time.
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