This article has some unexpected tips on how to work on improving your memory, like assigning vivid images to things you want to remember and spending 5 minutes before bed reflecting on what happened throughout the day. The one I swear to do more of is to take more pictures on my phone and actually go back and look at them. — CD

Cory Muscara meditated 15 hours a day for 6 months and wrote a list of 36 things he learned. Here’s a few of the insights that stood out to me or made me smile. — CD

• There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience, and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.

• The moment before letting go is often when we grip the hardest.

• There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions; it comes from learning to flow with conditions.

• The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.

• Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. If you want to focus better, become more curious about what's in front of you.

• You cannot practice non-attachment. You can only show your mind the suffering that attachment creates. When it sees this clearly, it will let go.

• Monks love to fart while they meditate. The wisdom of letting go expresses itself in many forms.

“Any habit needs all its parts in order to function. If some parts are missing, the habit is disassembled.” — Carlos Castaneda

This short insight on the structure of a habit has helped me see my patterns differently. If there is something I want to stop doing, I just remove a “part” or step from the process. Lately, it’s been deleting apps and keeping my phone as far away from me as possible so that using it becomes an inconvenience. — CD

Here’s a visualization to help unblock the creative process by Julian Shapiro. He calls it the “Creativity Faucet”:

Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives. … Let’s apply this to creativity: At the beginning of a writing session, write out every bad idea that unavoidably comes to mind. … Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.

Here’s his more thorough explanation of why this works. — CD

This visual on “Where Emotions Are Felt in the Body” reminds me to tune in to my own physicality. I recently did a guided meditation on “grief” for the purpose of inducing tears and was surprised to find that I had a painful pressure in my head more-so than my heart that needed to be unblocked. The visual is part of a longer article on ways to release “trapped” emotions, which is worth the read. — CD

Greg Isenberg says he asked 1 billionaire, 1 PHD math professor and 1 99-year-old man what self-reflection questions they asked themselves and then he shared them in a Twitter thread, as a list of questions to make you feel more fulfilled in life, love & career. The ones I’m pondering are:

• What is it that I can think of, read, watch, listen and talk about for hours on end without tiring of it?

• What would this look like if it was fun?

• How do I want my life to be different in one year?

Here’s a great jumping off point to learn about different types and approaches to psychotherapy. I have been hearing from friends about Family Systems Therapy and looked it up here. I also really appreciate this article on The Elements of Good Therapy, which should be empowering, non-pathologizing and collaborative. — CD

I like this visual reminder I came across on Reddit of “What I can control and what I can’t.” It reminds me to celebrate the wins — I no longer reactively say, “You make me feel this.” I used to have to correct myself to say, “When you do this, it makes me feel this.” But after years of practicing, it’s now become second nature to take responsibility for how I feel. — CD

The best advice I ever got on how to trust my gut and intuition was given to me by a psychotherapist years ago. She suggested whenever I have a gut instinct — good or bad — I should first rate the intensity of my emotions from 1 to 10. If they are on the lower end of the spectrum, I’m more inclined to trust my gut. Emotions — like anger, fear or insecurity — are different from Feelings, because they are usually in reaction to something external and feel like a laser that you want to point at people or things. Feelings — like profound sadness and love — are more of a state of being, and Intuition is an inner knowing. So whenever I have to distinguish one from the other, I first start by rating my emotions. — CD

I stopped using mood tracking apps a while back, because I got better at recognizing slight mood shifts and anticipating my own needs in the moment — whether that’s asking for space, taking a screen break, or hugging my dog. But now I’m back on the mood tracking app bandwagon, because How We Feel is more than just a mood tracker — it’s created by scientists, therapists, designers and engineers, so not only does it help you find the right word for your feelings, it helps you understand the science behind emotions and provides strategies to regulate your mood with elegantly produced videos, and the analytics of your mood over time are displayed in beautifully-designed patterns and colors. It’s free and I believe it’s in beta, so it will only get better. — CD

There’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t listen to my Meditative Mind: Music & Sleep app. There are hundreds and hundreds of soothing and immersive soundscapes, chants, mantras, nature sounds and world music to choose from. I use it when I need to focus, meditate or sleep. The app is free to download and try out, but I happily pay the $38 annual subscription for access to their full library, unlimited downloads and an ad-free experience. There is also a YouTube channel with lots of long-format music tracks added almost daily. — CD

I cut back on the number of newsletters I subscribe too, but one that I am keeping is the weekly Brain Food from Farnam Street. It dispenses pithy — and sound — advice about living. In two minutes I get a refreshing reminder of age old wisdom. Free. — KK

I am very excited about this concept of pivoting from affirmations to iffirmations. Instead of saying to yourself something like “I am confident and strong” you ask yourself “What if I am confident and strong?” And by asking it in the form of a question forces your brain to search for evidence that this might be true. For me, this works because it conjures images and examples of ways I could be confident or strong or have been in the past, which then elicits positive and encouraging emotions. A lot more effective that affirmations. — CD

This 5-minute test asks 15 questions to measure your empathy, open-mindedness, flexibility and intellectual curiosity and visualizes your thinking using floating color blob. Your personality-color blob starts off as white but as you progress through the questions, you see it add and subtract colors and change in brightness and dullness. The test is called “Thinking in colour” and that’s exactly what it inspires me to do. — CD

I remember reading somewhere that customer service desks often times have a mirror mounted behind them so that customers can keep their cool when complaining. I thought of that when I read this quote from by Thich Nhat Hanh from Taming the Tiger Within: Meditations on Transforming Difficult Emotions:

Whenever anger comes up, take out a mirror and look at yourself. When you are angry, you are not very beautiful, you are not presentable. Hundreds of muscles on your face become very tense. Your face looks like a bomb ready to explode.

I don’t really pull out a mirror, but when I begin to feel my face get tense I immediately remind myself to relax my jaw and muscles and it helps to temper the hot emotions. — CD

This article in Greater Good Magazine tells you five ways to clear brain fog. Three things that can cause brain fog are isolation, stress and uncertainty. For me, walking my dog and using my rowing machine help me to clear out my head, but when that doesn’t work, self-compassion always does. — CD

Here is a very simple and effective three-second brain exercise for finding joy — recognize “thin slices of joy” throughout the day.

“Notice the joyful moments in your day, however small, however fleeting. Notice how good it feels to have that first sip of your drink. Or how tasty that first bite of food is. The pleasurable feeling of your skin in warm water when you wash your hands or take a shower. The moment of delight and comfort when you see your friend. These thin slices of joy only last a few seconds but they add up! The more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy in your life.”

That’s advice by an ex-Google engineer who wrote the book Joy on Demand. He shares more short and simple “joy” exercises here. — CD

The Mental Health Update is one of my favorite weekly newsletters in my inbox. There’s always a tool or article that widens my perspective. The most recent issue turned me on to Orai, an AI-powered app to help you improve your public speaking skills. Each issue has actionable strategies to improve your mental health. The newsletter was created by Jordan Brown, a social worker who started blogging because he couldn’t find the kind of mental health content online that he wanted to read. I’m always surprised by his articles and what he covers, so I am grateful. — CD

Just a fun, single purpose website. Click to relax and listen to ethereal sound of water and music. Zone out on the ripples. It is definitely relaxing. — CD

Stanford creativity expert Sarah Stein Greenberg contributed this short write-up on brain exercises to flex your creative muscles. What stood out to me was Seeing where she suggests finding a photograph capturing scenes of life with multiple subjects and lots of details and answer the following questions: What’s going on in the picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What else do you see? What do you see that makes you say that? — and then repeat, over and over again form multiple perspectives. The other 2 exercises are Shadowing and Studying the solution that already exists. Read the full article here. — CD