10 Keys to a LIMITLESS Brain | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. I'm your memory coach, Jim Kwik, and let's get started. Now, people often say, Jim, you know, my memory is a challenge. And I always say, you know, if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. And part of it, we know research suggests that only about 1/3 of your memory, for example, is predetermined by genetics and biology, but 2/3 is in your control. Now, for me, that is extraordinary where you have all of this influence. I'm going to share with you the 10 keys for taking care of your brain. You know, we update our other technology more than we update this technology, right? You update your phone, you update your apps, you update your operating system on your computer, but when's the last time you upgraded your memory, right? So this is going to be a big memory upgrade. I'm going to share with you the 10 keys for unlocking what I call your quick recall. Right. And this is to have a limitless brain, taking care of that hardware, this 3-pound matter found between your ears called your, your brain, which controls what? Everything. You change your brain, you change your life. You know, you change your brain, you change the world. And that's what the power is found between your ears. So let's talk about these things. 1/3 genetics, 2/3 In your control. So I'm going to share with you the 10 elements for unlocking this limitless brain. And what I want you to do is I want you to take note, meaning specifically, I want you to rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10. I'm going to share with you these things, and this is the assessment part of it, right? I don't think you're going to debate any of these 10 things, but I want you to rate yourself on a scale of 0 to 10, how much energy and effort and focus attention are you putting towards these 10 things? Okay, so let's begin. Take out your notebook and let's start. So in no specific order, the first thing is a good brain diet. A good brain diet. There are certain foods that are very neuroprotective that really promote your brain to be at its optimal state. And so I want to talk about some of those foods and some of the foods maybe you should mitigate or avoid. Now, you could always talk to a healthcare practitioner. You could always— I would recommend going to a functional medicine doctor and have a food sensitivity test because not everything is for everybody. But I'm going to share with you some of the foods that have research and studies have suggested is good for your cognitive performance, good for your brain health. Okay, so on a scale of 0 to 10, rate yourself. Some of the foods include avocados, blueberries— I like to call them brain berries— broccoli, olive oil, If your diet allows eggs, the choline in eggs is good for your brain. Green leafy vegetables like kale and spinach. If your diet allows also certain fishes, especially the fatty fishes, because your brain is mostly fat. So salmon, wild salmon, sardines. Also, what's good for your brain? I'll throw a kind of fun one in there. Turmeric. Turmeric. In the morning, I'll make like a golden milk with some almond milk, some turmeric, maybe a little pepper. If you put a little honey in it, And so turmeric, it helps to lower inflammation. That is another one that's very powerful. Another one that I enjoy are walnuts. Wonderful to snack on. The vitamin E in walnuts are good for the brain. Almonds are good too. Walnuts also look like the human brain, which is interesting. It looks like the organ that it's supporting. And then probably most people's favorite, dark chocolate. Not milk chocolate, not a lot of sugar, but dark chocolate. Generally, what's good for your mood is going to be good for your mind. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how, how good is your, your good brain diet? The foods to avoid: heavy processed foods, fried foods, not good for your brain. High sugar foods, definitely not good for your brain. So on a scale of 0 to 10, just kind of rate yourself. Are you a 5, a 6, an 8? Because you can't manage something unless you can measure it. All right. Now, the second thing that I want to talk about besides a good brain diet are killing ants. Killing ants has actually clinically proven to be good for your brain. Now I get this term from Dr. Daniel Amen. I highly recommend his work. He wrote Change Your Brain, Change Your Life. He says ants stands for automatic negative thoughts. Automatic negative thoughts. That's the, the negative thoughts that say, I can't do this. I'm not smart enough. I'm just too old. Right? And so here's the thing. Your brain is like a supercomputer. And your self-talk is a program it will run. So if you tell yourself, I'm not good at remembering people's names, you will not remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to. People come to me and they say, Jim, I have a horrible memory. And I say, stop. If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. So you want to keep it positive. You want to keep it encouraging. Even if you say something negative, you know, check yourself. And self-awareness is a superpower. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how good are your thoughts? All right, that's number 2. Number 3, 3rd key for unlocking your limitless brain and your incredible memory or quick recall ability. Number 3, exercise. Remember this, as your body moves, your brain grooves. The primary reason you have a brain is to control your movement, right? But the challenge is sometimes we're very sedentary. We might be sitting on screens all the time. And so not just working out 3 times a week, but how much are you moving throughout the day? Measure it 0 to 10. Just rate yourself. No judgment, but just 0 to 10. How are you the past week? That's number 3. Number 4, brain nutrients. These are your brain nutrients where I would always prefer you get it from food. That's, that's my preference. But I would recommend talk to your practitioner, health practitioner, maybe do a nutrient profile and see what vitamins and minerals, nutrients you may be lacking. And if you're not getting it from your food or able to get it through your food, you have a very busy lifestyle, consider supplementation. We've done multiple interviews on our podcast and in our book talking to world-renowned nutritionists and experts, talking about what they recommend. One of the ones that always comes up— DHA, your omega-3s. I talked about how your brain is mostly fat, and supplementing might be something that you might want to look into. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how do you feel like your nutrition is? The 5th one is very, very important, and it's a positive peer group. Positive peer group. We know that your expression of your mind, a lot of it has to do with the people we spend time with, because who you spend time with is who you become. They say we are the average of the 5 people we spend the most time with. And so we have to choose that wisely, right? A positive peer group. So it's not just your neurological networks or your biological networks. Often it's your social networks, right? Like whether you— somebody smokes or not has less to do with their genetics and more to do with does your friend's friend smoke, as an example. You have these things called mirror neurons, and these mirror neurons, it's what's always imitating your environment. If you ever watch sports or a movie and you could feel what the characters are feeling, right? That's your nervous system turning on, and we start to imitate the people around us. Their habits, their routines, their behaviors, their language, and that affects our brain, certainly. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how good is your positive peer group? You know, are they encouraging? Are they challenging you? Are they cheerleading for you? Because we all need those people. And if you haven't found those people yet, be that person for somebody else. Especially be that person for who? For you. Now, Number 6, the number 6 key is really a clean environment. A clean environment. Your brain loves a clean environment. And you know this, when you clean your room, you clean your desk, you clean your computer, meaning everything is in the right place, don't you have clarity of thought? Right. Because your external world is a reflection of your internal world. Please write that down. Your external world is a reflection of your internal world, and your brain loves cleanliness. And so on a scale of 0 to 10, how clean is your environment? And I don't just mean orderly, but how clean is your environment from the quality of things like the air quality, right? You know, the certain toxins in your environment, scale of 0 to 10, because that could affect how your brain performs. Now, number 7, we're going through this quick, right? Because your time is very valuable. Number 7 is a big one. It is sleep. Now, sleep is so essential to how your brain functions because you know this, when you do not have a good night's sleep, how's your brain performing the next day? How's your focus? How's your ability to concentrate? How's your creativity? How's your ability to solve problems, use critical thinking? How's your memory? And yet a lot of people, they compromise their sleep and they're not able to perform the next day. So on a scale of 0 to 10, how well are you sleeping? Are you falling asleep quickly? Are you able to stay asleep? And it's not just the amount of sleep you're getting, it's the quality of sleep, right? Of your REM sleep, of your deep sleep, where you're restoring your body and you're restoring your mind. And so on a scale of 0 to 10, how well have you been sleeping, let's say this past week? And you can think about when I'm going through these 10 things, How does it apply to your family also as well? Right? So you need to sleep in order to clean out the plaque that leads to brain aging challenges. You need to sleep because that's where you consolidate short to long-term memory. You need to sleep because that's where you dream. And dreaming is a very important process to be able to come up with new ideas, right? To integrate what you've learned throughout that day. 0 to 10, how's your sleep? The 8th key to unlocking your limitless brain is Brain protection. You have to protect your brain. You know, having had 3 traumatic brain injuries before the age of 12, you know, I realized that your brain is very resilient, but it's also very fragile. And a lot of my clients that I work with, they are top athletes and, you know, they suffer from or struggle with concussions. And how much are you protecting your brain? So on a scale of 0 to 10, how well are you protecting your brain? Are you avoiding extreme, you know, Sports or potential accidents? Are you wearing a helmet when you're riding your bicycle and so on? So that's number 8, brain protection. Rate yourself. Remember writing this down, 0 to 10. And then number 9 is a big one. Number 9 is a huge one. New learnings. New learnings. Meaning that when you keep your brain alive by giving it novelty and giving it nutrition, that's how your brain grows. It's just like your physical body. Your body, your muscles grow through novelty and nutrition. You give it novelty 'cause you work it out, and then you feed those muscles so that it could grow strong and you nourish it. Well, your brain needs that also. You need to give it novelty and you need to give it nutrition. Well, we've already talked about nutrition, but where's the novelty? We see dips in people's cognitive performance usually when they graduate school, because some people associate their education, they feel like their education's over, so they stop learning. And when they retire. Sometimes when people retire out of their job or their career, then they also retire their what? Their mind, and then their body is not far behind, right? And so the constant learning and improvement is so important for your brain fitness, right? Because it's use it or what? It's use it or lose it. And it actually helps you to actually live longer also as well. Do you want to live longer? Do you want to live better? I was on the COVID of Time magazine. I don't know if you saw this, but they did this study with a community of nuns. And with these nuns, they wanted to find out how they were living so long, 80, 90, and above. And they found out, because everything was contained, right, they could see their diet and their patterns, that half of their longevity came from their gratitude, their emotional faith, right? The other half though was because they were lifelong learners. They were learning all the time. And Here's the thing. It not only added years to their life, but it also added life to their years. There was a study done, they called it Aging with Grace, Aging with Grace. And so it's beautiful, but how much are you learning new on a regular basis? My favorite learning, by the way, is listening or reading books. You know, I prefer to read because I think reading is to your mind what exercise is to your body. And the big thing, scheduling it every single day. Right? We know leaders are readers. And so I love challenging myself by learning new things and scheduling that reading every single day. You know, at the very least, I read nonfiction during the day sometimes, and I read fiction right before I go to sleep. And I wanna encourage you to read more fiction. For me, for the longest time, I always read just exclusively nonfiction because I wanted to know the ins and outs and reverse engineer what it takes to succeed in these areas and teach that to other people. But I wanna just remind you that fiction reading, which I enjoy a lot more now, is so important. It's been shown to help your EQ, your emotional intelligence, create empathy, boost your creativity, your imagination, and lets you see things from different perceptual positions with storytelling. And that's such important qualities and capabilities to have today, 'cause the future belongs to the creators and the creatives. And so how much are you learning? Scale of 0 to 10, and I, and I hope you're up there, 8, 9, 10, right? And then finally, the 10th element, what we're talking about unlocking and unleashing your limitless brain so you can be a quick recaller, if you will, is what? Stress management. Stress for a lot of people is invisible, but I want to address this because chronic stress has been proven and shown to shrink the human brain. Chronic stress shrinks the human brain, and we live in an environment where we're under stress. It can be financial stress, emotional stress, environmental stress, right? And so what are you doing to cope with that stress? On a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being the best, what are you doing to be able to reduce that stress? Because that chronic stress can make you sick. That overload, you know, building your skills is helping you to reduce stress, right? If you have a better memory, you're going to be— have a— you're going to have less stress. When you have it, when you're forgetful all the time, You're gonna be very stressful. So you're doing it right now, but what else are you doing to be able to manage your stress and mitigate it? For me, some of my favorite activities are just physical activities to get me out of my mind and into my body. Exercise, wonderful way to deal with stress. Meditation. I meditate twice a day, usually for about 20 minutes. And if you're saying, I don't have 20 minutes, I'm so busy, then you probably should— you should probably meditate for an hour if that's That's that case, right? So meditation, sometimes we have to disconnect to reconnect. And meditation is a wonderful way to get in that parasympathetic rest and digest. But it doesn't have to be meditation. What do you do to manage your stress and how well are you dealing with it? You know, especially in today's turbulent times. So rate yourself 0 to 10. Now, when you're done, you have a list of 10 keys for unlocking your limitless brain. And I want you to notice where are you falling short? You know, where are you not? Where if you're in like a five, six, what can you do to make it a seven or eight? Where can you put some time, some some some of your treasure, some of your talent to be able to develop those areas? And it makes you more whole, right? Everyone wants to know what the magic pill is, but there's no magic pill. There's a process, and it involves really maximizing and optimizing these ten areas because again, you could do. Learn how to do things like speed reading or improving your memory, but if you're not sleeping, you're not going to get the best results. And so do this for yourself, and your homework assignment is not only to go and try to gamify it and take your 6s and turn them into 7s, or your 4s and turn them into 6s— you don't have to maximize it to 10, just make small simple steps— but also how can you share this information with the people around you? Your friends, your family, if you're posting on social media, your fans, your followers, and so on. How can you teach them the things that you're learning today? Ask them to rate themselves. Teach them the 10 things and ask them to rate themselves and where can they put their attention because that self-awareness is a superpower. It's a strength and it gives you an advantage, but we can't change things unless we know that it's there. So your homework assignment again, improve those 10 areas, put some time and attention, Schedule it in your calendar and teach it to somebody else. And in the comments, give me some of your feedback. In what areas are you really winning? Which of these 10 are you really winning? Give me the 1, 2, or 3 you're really winning. And what areas do you need improvement? And post it there so we can encourage you, so we could cheerlead for you, so, so you could get the support that you need to get that to the next level. All right, I'm your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and I'll see you in our next lesson.