Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 189-190 | Added on Saturday, 5 March 2022 22:09:09
which faecal material from one individual is transferred to the gut of another, often through an enema or sometimes orally,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 480-481 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 01:12:52
My favourite suggestion is to use nut butters such as almond
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 497-498 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 01:21:49
flavonoids that are present in berries, cocoa and spices
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 498-499 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 01:21:57
Recent research has found that women who eat a lot of these are at lower risk of depression.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 521-522 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 01:25:54
have discovered an important role for insulin in the brain too. We now know it has two key roles: influencing how much food we eat, and regulating brain signalling and cognitive functions.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 695-697 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 22:10:11
In one study participants had to perform a learning task as the smell of roses was wafted around them. If they were then exposed to the same smell during slow-wave sleep, it gave their memory a boost – they were better at remembering what they had learned the next day. The presence of the smell seemed to turbocharge memory consolidation. Other experiments have performed similar tricks with sounds.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1057-1057 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 17:53:31
If you must nap, limit it to twenty minutes, to avoid sleep inertia, and don’t nap fewer than six hours before bedtime.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1051-1052 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 21:27:23
There’s a simple way to find out if you’re getting enough sleep for you: don’t set an alarm, and just wake up naturally
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1278-1281 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 22:54:47
That means that while ‘good’ genes can help keep your brain young, you need to make the right lifestyle choices, such as diet and exercise, to see the effects. On the flip side, the same lifestyle choices are likely to have much less of an effect in people who don’t have the right genetic makeup.96
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1284-1285 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 22:55:49
The hippocampus is key to learning, emotions and memory,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1318-1318 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 22:59:01
Hearing loss is closely linked to cognitive decline,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1319-1320 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 22:59:25
Mediterranean diet has the potential to help prevent dementia, and certainly won’t do any harm.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1352-1353 | Added on Wednesday, 23 March 2022 14:38:55
One line of thinking, backed up by several studies, is that aerobic exercise leads to the development of new blood vessels in the brain and promotes the growth of new neurons,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1381-1383 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:24:19
resistance training – where your muscles are working against a counterweight – seems to be a good choice for staying sharp. As well as promoting BDNF,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1394-1396 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:25:18
How much exercise is enough to train the brain? One compelling review looking at studies of older adults found that exercise lasting for forty-five minutes to an hour, over a period of at least six months,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1396-1397 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:25:45
it should last for between eleven and twenty minutes – doing any extra didn’t seem to increase the effect.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1411-1412 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:28:27
While this is the best advice we have for now, in reality we don’t yet know the best ‘dose’ of exercise for the mind, so these findings should be taken with a small pinch of salt.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1473-1473 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 16:17:28
In fact, here too, exercise has been shown to be at least as effective, if not more so, than standard care anxiety treatments.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1503-1504 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 16:22:01
The social side of team sports could also help to reduce the social withdrawal and feelings of isolation that often go hand in hand with depression and other mental-health issues.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1528-1529 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 18:06:10
those taking the hot baths had a six-point reduction in their depression scores on average, compared to three points for those who were exercising.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1680-1682 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 22:59:19
Most of the research is on mindfulness in particular, and the most common adverse effects were anxiety and depression, with suicidal behaviours occurring the least frequently.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1745-1747 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 23:10:20
Remarkably, her team found new brain cells in everyone they looked at, regardless of age. Those in their eighties were as capable of making new neurons as a teenager
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1749-1749 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 23:10:44
Alzheimer’s disease, however, they found that the number of new brain cells dropped off dramatically
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1789-1791 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 09:40:35
Crucially, those who were more educated had much more severe damage. Rather than conclude that education damages the brain, Stern realized that education might somehow be protecting the brains of these patients, so that despite such high levels of damage their symptoms were comparable to people whose brains were much healthier, and therefore at earlier stages of the disease.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1896-1898 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 20:51:29
Disappointingly, however, several scientists have more recently tried to replicate Bialystok’s study and failed to get the same results. This has led to a heated debate about the brain-boosting abilities of bilingualism, and whether we should believe the hype.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1921-1923 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 20:54:09
they found that bilinguals had symptoms that started around four and a half years later than monolinguals156 – almost exactly the same finding as Bialystok’s work in Toronto.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1931-1931 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 20:55:36
More languages don’t necessarily mean a bigger boost.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 1965-1967 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 22:16:16
the musicians did better in the cognitive tests, and the more musical training they had, the better they scored: the professional musicians were better than amateurs,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2022-2024 | Added on Saturday, 26 March 2022 22:28:13
One experiment tested a range of noises on people’s creativity and found that the type of sound didn’t matter, but it shouldn’t be too soft or too loud – probably because that volume heightens your arousal levels just the right amount.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2030-2032 | Added on Sunday, 27 March 2022 08:08:32
research showing that just four months of weekly dance classes improves both motor and non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Intriguingly, the biggest improvement seen was in those who had prior dance experience,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2038-2039 | Added on Sunday, 27 March 2022 08:59:38
Because music instantly gets the brain making predictions, it can have this calming and comforting effect.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2042-2043 | Added on Sunday, 27 March 2022 09:01:18
That reward activation is probably also linked to the predictive nature of music – being able to accurately forecast what comes next gives your brain a buzz.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2296-2296 | Added on Tuesday, 29 March 2022 23:48:02
Pets aren’t simply a poor substitute for human company; they have their unique qualities, too.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2346-2347 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:15:14
But astonishingly, it wasn’t until 1999 that Russell Foster at the University of Oxford and his colleagues discovered a whole new set of sensors, behind the rods and cones, whose job it is to measure light and synchronize our body clocks to our environment.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2347-2348 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:15:35
Incidentally, this is how people who are blind can still maintain their circadian rhythm even though their rods and cones aren’t
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2350-2351 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:16:12
This third kind of receptor, helpfully named the ‘intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells’, or ipRGCs for short,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2358-2360 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:22:01
These cells also talk directly to areas of the brain involved in controlling our emotions, and so the concern is that interfering with their signalling could play a role in mood disorders.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2408-2411 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:55:51
it found that people who were exposed to bright light between the hours of eight in the morning and twelve noon took on average eighteen minutes to fall asleep at night, compared to forty-five minutes for those exposed to low light levels. They also slept for twenty minutes longer,200 and other studies show that exposure to bright light in the day leads to less disrupted and fragmented sleep at night.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2415-2416 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 10:56:39
Another useful but underappreciated advantage to getting a hit of light early on in the day is that it could buffer against the effects of exposure to blue light at the wrong time.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2434-2436 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 11:02:50
Aside from shifting melatonin production, and therefore our body clock, light from phones and tablets affects slow-wave sleep, which we know is the deep restorative kind. It also impacts on growth hormones, so children who look at screens before bed could see a change in their growth and brain development.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2482-2482 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 11:49:55
the health benefits of time in nature kick in after about two hours a week,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2566-2567 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 18:10:35
There are other, much more simple ways to protect our brain as we age too, and we explore two of these in this section. One is dental hygiene.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2567-2568 | Added on Friday, 1 April 2022 18:11:56
And while you’re at it, take care of your hearing.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2801-2802 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:13:23
Early signs that you have hearing loss due to damage to the hair cells in your ears include trouble detecting high-pitched sounds, such as children’s voices,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2801-2803 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:13:35
Early signs that you have hearing loss due to damage to the hair cells in your ears include trouble detecting high-pitched sounds, such as children’s voices, or soft sounds like a conversation over the phone.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2819-2820 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:15:54
slate, an idea that has survived into scientific
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2882-2884 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:24:08
this type of perfectionism doesn’t just leave people at risk of depression, but people with depression are also at risk of developing this kind of perfectionism where they feel pressure to be perfect in the eyes of others.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2894-2895 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:25:42
After being made to taste one of the five different tastes – sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami – those who had tasted something sour took bigger risks in a computer simulation directly afterwards.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2918-2918 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:28:33
One of these is to identify specific behaviours that reflect the personality change you’d like to see in yourself.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2920-2921 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:29:11
The technique did not work when people wrote down vague goals like ‘I will be more organized’,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2920-2920 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:29:17
The technique did not work when people wrote down vague goals
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2929-2929 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:30:48
Overly punitive parenting seems to lead to perfectionist traits,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2937-2938 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 15:38:46
Overall, people who took part in the study found it easier to make a positive shift towards adopting a new personality trait, rather than reducing their levels of traits they didn’t like,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 2998-2999 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:46:49
Scientists have been keen to understand why some people fare better when they are stressed, otherwise known as resilience,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3002-3002 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:47:00
Part of the answer comes down to early life experiences.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3003-3004 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:47:48
how early-life hardship can impact on the brain in this important period for forming new connections, leaving people at higher risk of PTSD and depression later in life.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3015-3017 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:51:21
Humour is a particularly appealing method of countering stress because it not only protects against its negative effects, but has been proven to have lots of positive effects on our wellbeing, too.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3020-3022 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:52:17
Another recent study found the frequency of laughter in our lives is more important than the intensity when it comes to buffering against stress. 247
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3024-3025 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:53:57
While there’s incontrovertible evidence that stress, especially chronic, prolonged stress, can be bad for body and mind, whether it is bad for you or not could have a lot to do with how you think about it.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3037-3038 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:59:38
On top of that, even long-term stress can have surprisingly positive effects on the body.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3040-3040 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 21:59:44
Studies in mice found that stress boosted neurogenesis in the hippocampus and improved cognitive skills.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3041-3041 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:00:01
in healthy children with supportive parents, some stress early in life can be good for a child’s brain development.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3044-3045 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:00:25
What should we make of this apparent ‘stress paradox’? The simple answer is, focus on the good stuff.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3045-3046 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:01:16
The more people adopt a mindset that stress can be beneficial, the less negative effects of stress they tend to experience, and the
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3045-3046 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:01:21
The more people adopt a mindset that stress can be beneficial, the less negative effects of stress they tend to experience, and the more benefits stress brings.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3060-3061 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:03:27
Crum says that there are three simple steps we can take to turn stress to our advantage. The first is to name it
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3062-3063 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:03:46
Naming your stress is useful because it moves the reaction in your brain from the amygdala, which is more emotive and reactionary, to the prefrontal cortex involved in more deliberate thinking and planning,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3136-3138 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:17:50
the resolve needed to get there. A better approach is to think about a worst-case scenario – not fitting into that expensive wedding dress, say – a way of thinking known as ‘defensive pessimism’, to keep the mission on track.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3136-3138 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:17:54
A better approach is to think about a worst-case scenario – not fitting into that expensive wedding dress, say – a way of thinking known as ‘defensive pessimism’, to keep the mission on track.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3149-3150 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:20:34
‘If I go to the kitchen, I will drink a glass of water,’ for example. This helps to make the behaviour automatic, and bypass the need for conscious thought and self-control.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3155-3155 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:24:23
That said, morning might turn out to be the ideal time to form a new habit,
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3169-3169 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:27:22
Importantly, the odd slip-up didn’t seem to matter.
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Brain Power (Catherine de Lange)
- Your Highlight at location 3190-3191 | Added on Sunday, 3 April 2022 22:33:43
keep a diary of all the times you do this negative thing. This accountability will help to bring that unconscious action into the forefront of your thinking mind, helping your prefrontal cortex back to exert more control over your actions.
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