A Simple Hack to Boost Recall & Form New Habits | Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brain. Your question today is, is there a simple trick to be able to boost recall and really help to make habits stick? And I'm gonna be doing this. Actually, let me turn on live also as well. You can stay with me. It helps me to feel like I have a live, live audience here. Okay, so perfect. All right, so you might see my, my eyes dart around a little bit here, but, um, If you're just tuning in, we're going to talk about a mental trick to help boost your recall and help you make memories and your habits really stick. And I'm recording this podcast as a live, and please, if you haven't, if you're not following us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter, please do that. We do a number of live Q&As. This is my birthday week. And in the theme of that, I want to talk about celebration and how you could use the act of celebrating to actually boost your recall and actually help to make your habits and your routines more sticky. And so if you have trouble keeping on a specific track, if you have trouble remembering where you put your keys that day or remembering people's names, this is an episode you won't soon forget, memory pun included. So in the theme of my birthday, I just want to first express gratitude to all of you. I want to thank you all. You know, birthdays are an interesting time to be able to reflect, and I go through a process of gratitude. And I want to thank you for showing— for you showing up for yourself. And, you know, because we're all on this path to reveal and realize our fullest potential. So I appreciate everybody who shows up. I think that's the most— talk about habits— this most important habit is showing up for yourself. And also, thank you for showing up for our mission, the way you connect with our podcast, uh, the way you've made our book Limitless, uh, so, um, so widespread popular. Um, thank you for making it, you know, the bestseller. Thank you for all the ratings and reviews you've made on Amazon. Um, keep them coming, please. It means the world to us because your words change lives, you know, lives that we can't reach, and your stories when you put them on iTunes or, you know, on ratings for our podcast or somewhere else, it means everything. And thank you so much for those of you who also have joined our app. If you haven't joined our app, please go to my Instagram profile and there's a link, or just search Kwik Brain Universe in your app store. And it's absolutely free. And that's where actually I spend less time on social media, more time in our app. You create your profile, connect with other limitless learners, and, and really share best practices and learn from other people from We have students in 195 nations. So there's a lot, there's a big brain trust there. So it really is the universe. And so let's talk about what it takes to really make things sticky. And you've heard me say this, if you're one, if you've been a student of ours, if you've read our book, if you've listened to our podcast, and those are reminders to give you some impetus to be able to do that if you're kind of slacking in those areas, is that all learning is state dependent. All learning, just like life, is state-dependent. And when I say state, I mean your emotional state, you know, the snapshot of your mood, of your mind and your body, you know, and like maybe some people would say it's how they're feeling. And it's, how is this related to your memory and your habits? Well, we're talking about, I'm not gonna go too much into the science and, you know, because our podcast is very short-form, we wanna make it very usable and bite-sized. But when we think about— you think about high school, you learn about our limbic system, and it serves a lot of functions, right? More than previously believed, right? It is thought that the structure's there. It's there to process and regulate emotions, the formation of new memories, arousal, learnings, right? And it's interesting because 2 of the areas that are there are really key to the formation of creating new memories. So think about an area you want to improve your memory. It could be facts, figures, faces, foreign languages, you know, all this stuff that we teach. You have the amygdala, right? And the amygdala, when it's synonymous with memory function— sorry. All right. All right, Chuck. All right. So when you're thinking about your limbic system, this is it. many, many functions here, and it's really key when we're talking about the formation of new memories. The amygdala part, which is part of it, interacts with your hippocampus. Now, amygdala is— we're thinking about emotions, right? When we're thinking about hippocampus, we're thinking about the formation of new memories. And so the amygdala interacts with the hippocampus and by attaching emotional context to memories, if that makes sense. So all learning is is learning is all memory is state-dependent. All life is state-dependent. All habits, a lot of them help. You can actually increase your ability to follow through and help make new habits and help them actually retain it, to help them make them stick by adding emotion. You know, in our memory course, Kwik Recall, which many of you are students of, 30 days to jumpstart your memory, to really make your brain, your memory unstoppable. We talk about there, there are 3 variables in physics, right? There's what? Frequency, there's duration, and there's intensity. And so you think about building a muscle, right? You could use frequency, you could use lots of reps, you could do lots of repetition. Some people use that for memory. They use lots of repetition, they repeat things over and over again. Or there's duration. to get the results, maybe it's not the number of times you're doing something, but maybe it's the length of time. Maybe you're spending more time, duration on that treadmill or more time in that fitness class, right? In memory training, it could be spending more time studying, right? That's duration. Now those are great, but frequency and duration take what? It takes time, right? And in this busy world, You know, our podcast here, Kwik Brains, for their brain hacks or strategies and tools for busy people who don't have a lot of time. So intensity could get that similar result. You get to work out so intensely and not as much time, but some people, they go to the gym and they don't put full intensity in it. So they have to spend more time to get same kind of results, but you can use intensity. And for me, when it comes to memory training, intensity comes in the form of visualization. And a lot of it comes in the form of emotion. And you know this, right? That you think Think about how many of you have a— I'm also looking at Facebook and Instagram here. How many of you have a song that could take you back to when you're a teenager? Because information by itself is forgettable, but information when it's combined with an emotion becomes unforgettable. So I'm going to go through the— you kind of get an idea of what this brain hack is going to be that's going to help to accelerate your habit formation and accelerate your memory.

Awesome.

You could use frequency, duration, and intensity to marketing. Some of you are in the, in the sales business or business development or in marketing. You could do frequency, lots of ads, right? Or lots of sales calls. You can do duration, longer sales videos or infomercials or presentations, right? Or you could also do intensity. Something could be so intense you see on social media and you just think it touches you emotionally. You just have to go and buy it because we are not logical. We are biological, right? There's this phrase in sales that said people don't buy logically, they buy emotionally, right? And they justify logically because we are biological. You think about dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. We are this chemical soup, right, of emotions. And we do things emotionally. And so when you take information and you attach an emotion to it, it becomes more of a long-term memory. Same thing with habits. There's somebody we've interviewed a number of times on our podcast, a good friend of mine. We also cite his work in Limitless on habits, right? Many of you know it's Dr. BJ Fogg of Stanford University. And he runs a laboratory there all around behavioral psychology and why we do what we do and what takes— what does it really take to create a new habit and actually break old habits? You know, and he'll talk about like summarizing his, whole work and habits into 3 words. He says emotions create habits. Emotions create habits. And I would say emotions help create memories. And that's really— we have habits of, of thoughts. We have habits of feelings. We have habits of action also as well. But memories are a habit because you do not have a memory. You do a memory. You do not have a memory. It's a process. What's the process? 3 things, encoding, storing, and retrieval, right? And you learn that in Psych 101, right? There's 3 stages of a memory. It is first encoding, then storing, and then retrieving that information. And you wanna get all 3 down because that's what will help you to have what I call quick recall, right? This limitless ability to learn information. And really it's about, what is it? First, retrieval is about association, right? So we talk about association. Storage is about location. And many of you know, in the location methods that we teach in the book or in our podcasts, including the memory palace as another one. And when you're talking about encoding, for me, a big part of encoding is emotion. So you have emotion, location, and what? Association. Those are 3 real big pillars. If I was to add another one in there, part of The encoding part is not just emotions, it's visualization. Visualization, imagination helps you to remember something. In fact, the 2 questions I ask myself when I want to remember something is, what do I see? How does it make me feel? Because usually a lot of things we need to remember are things we hear. You heard it on YouTube, and I encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube. That's where we put the extended version of our podcast. And so make sure— we have, we have well over 600,000 subscribers there. Make sure you could watch it there on video also as well. or bookmark it for future, be able to learning occasion. And so in there, we will talk about be able to adding emotion and visualization to help you to be able to learn something. And so I ask myself, what do I, 'cause I'm already hearing it in a podcast or on a video or maybe on audiobook or maybe in a conversation, you hear somebody's name, you hear a meeting or a lecture if you're a student, What do I see? How does it make me feel? That way you could hear it, see it, and feel it, right? So you're using all of these different learning styles, right? Some of you have preferences where you prefer to learn something by seeing it. Other people prefer to learn something maybe by listening to it. Some people like to read a book, some people like to listen to the book. Some people like, okay, let's roll up our sleeves and let's get into that book club, right? And they learn it by doing it. That's why we created the book club in our app actually, where people are sharing, they have learning buddies there in our app. Again, the Kwik Brain University. And we're going through each of the chapters, and you can learn and share best ideas and practices, and people hold you accountable, and people are like challenge each other to memory games that are in there, all the quick starts that are in Limitless, right? That's why we make it available. But going back to this, those three stages: you encode it, you store it, and then you retrieve it. And so what is the the brain hack, if you will, or the tool, the tip? You know, hack just another word for like maybe a little bit of a shortcut using just the basis of of of your positive psychology and neuroscience, I would say, is adding emotion. Adding emotion will greatly intensify a memory, and adding emotion will help you to help make habits stick more long-term. And so for emotion to rewire your brain, you must feel that emotion while you're— and here's the thing, the emotion— I'll give you 3 areas. So we want to remember things. You want to remember it You want to feel the emotion and you remember, do not have emotions. You what? You do emotions. We take nouns and we turn them into verbs. You do not have the emotion of love. You do love. You do not have the emotion of frustration. You do frustration, right? You do not have the emotion of confidence. You do confidence. Just like you do not have focus. You're like, Jim, yes. That's why I listen to your podcast. Cause I do not have focus. You do focus. You do not have motivation. You do motivation. And when you take a noun and turn into a verb, it gives you your power back because then you don't have to just rely on, oh, I hope I have these things today. Right. It's actually, you do it. And then that gives you your agency back. So when you want to do it, you add the emotion 3 different areas. When you remember something, let's take habits. Okay. When you remember to remember someone's name, not even actually remember the person's name, but you're meeting somebody and you just remember that you should remember the person's name. then you wanna reinforce that. Remember this, whatever you reinforce or you reward, you're gonna do more of, right? For you and the people around you. So when you do something, most of us are so good at putting ourselves down, at criticizing ourselves. Somebody gives you a compliment even, you know, like, wow, that's really great that you were able to run that, you know, around the track a couple of times. And we'll mitigate it, oh, it was only a couple of times, right? You know, like, or it's congratulations, you did, you got that promotion. It's like, ah, yeah, it was no big deal. So we're really good sometimes, and I'm guilty of this also as well, and sometimes we mitigate ourselves, right? That we're really good at pointing out where we do things wrong or focus on what we did wrong, but we're not really good at celebrating the things that we do right. And so I would say is whatever you reinforce, even the littlest things, you'll get more of. Because think about it, when we're talking about these are these molecules of motivation, Right? There are molecules to motivation. When we're thinking about dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, like dopamine is the molecule of more. You want more of it. So when you reward yourself and not wait for somebody else to reward you, like you remember to remember, then just give yourself, like give yourself a little buzz. You say, and what does it look like? Right? Really simple. Right? You could say yes. Right? You could, you could just go like, yes, victory.

Right?

You could do whatever you want to feel good. What you would do when you normally celebrate. Like if you were at a basketball game and they called you out at halftime to throw the free throw for charity, if you get it in there, you get a car, you get, you know, $10,000 or whatever, right? Imagine you go out hesitant, maybe you get called down, right? First of all, you're really nervous and you would just be like, they give you the ball and you're holding the ball in your hand. You could feel it, right? And you hear everyone kind of cheering for you, but you have this doubt and everything else, but you do the shot and just imagine it going in. What are you going to do? how good are you going to feel, right? And it wasn't that external world that actually triggers you to feel that way. That was the rules you had, but you created it to yourself, right? So whatever move you would do, praise, whatever accomplishment, you could just say like, wow, I'm incredible, right? And I'll just say that, say I am incredible. I am limitless. I am amazing, right? I am awesome, right? Whatever you do to reinforce it, where you want to reinforce it, 3 different areas. When you remember to remember, First of all, feel feel good. Like congratulate yourself, celebrate yourself, right? And then when you're actually in the act of doing it, then just give yourself some praise also as well. Give yourself some praise. Like wow, that's amazing! I'm actually doing it also because again, whatever you reinforce, you get more of. Because again, this is it's interesting because this is my my birthday week. It's we celebrate when do we celebrate? We celebrate like our birthday. We might celebrate an anniversary. We might celebrate a graduation. You know, we have like very infrequent times once two three times a year. year, you have permission to celebrate, you know. And so what if you brought celebration into your learning? What if you brought your celebration into your routines, right? And where do you want to celebrate? 3 places. You want to celebrate when you remember something, right? Because you're going to— when you remember to remember where you put your keys, celebrate that. When you remember to remember where you parked your car, to take a moment instead of having been distracted, your mind is different places, then celebrate that. Just like, yeah, wow, I remembered to remember. Because you're really good at beating yourself up when you forget something. Or, oh, it's on the tip of my tongue. Or where did I put it? Oh, I'm so nervous about what I need to say, right? I studied all this time. And you're really good at pointing out, maybe not you, but maybe someone you know intimately. But we all agree with that. So all I'm saying is just balance it out. All right? So you reward yourself and celebrate when you remember to remember, when you're actually remembering, and then afterwards. After you've successfully retrieved it, you know that person's name, or you remember where you put the keys, or whatever that habit happened to be. It could be for working out, right? You remember to work out, cheer yourself on, right? Victory, yes, whatever you do when you get that basket in there, you know, or you got that great job or anything else, you know what you do inherently. It's different for each person. It's something you say, something you see in your mind, something that you physically do, some movement or celebration, right? And then you're actually working out, celebrate that. And then afterwards, then most people like, well, if they do reward themselves, they reward after the fact. And I'm just saying, in terms of how your brain works, you'll get even greater retention if you do it in the process instead of you doing something, accomplishing something, and then a day or two later, you reward yourself with some food or some kind of pleasurable activity, right? And so remember to remember because that's really what celebrating is all about. Actually, when we're talking about celebrating, because we always celebrate what— we don't celebrate what we did as much as we You know, punish ourselves for the things that we we don't don't do, right? In in Latin, celebratus it means um it means to assemble, to honor, right? To sing praises of, to it's demonstrations. You know what it is? One of the definitions I liked: it's demonstrations of joy, demonstrations of joy. How can you demonstrate joy and praise for yourself when you're doing something right? Specifically celebrating when you when You remember to remember something. Celebrate that, and when you're actually going through the process of remembering it, studying it, or using one of dozens of different techniques we teach in our courses and our book LimitlessBook.com, and also finally when you're when you finish, when you've successfully completed the habit of journaling or meditating or remembering that if you're maybe doing the the In our app, we have a number of people are doing 10 words a day, remembering the definitions of 10 words a day. When you successfully retrieve them or you memorize that deck of cards or remember those people's names on that next Zoom meeting, then you can celebrate that also as well. But those are the 3 areas. Does that make sense? Let me check in also with Instagram. Does that make sense, everybody on Instagram? You know, that's the thing because that's what people struggle with sometimes with What is it like imposter syndrome, right? Many of you are familiar with it. Basically, these feelings talk about feelings and emotions and memory of inadequacy. You know, even though those feelings might be completely unjustified, you know where we mitigate ourselves. And so what I'm saying here is that emotion has a is a very substantial influence on cognitive processing, right for human beings, right including perception, including attention, including learning, including memory, including reasoning, including problem solving. And so how can you? Add more emotions to your memories and add more emotions to the things, the habits. Remember, first you create your habits, then your habits what create you. First you create your habits, then your habits create you. And when you add emotions, right, to it helps to facilitate that encoding part. It helps to facilitate the retrieval of information more efficiently, right? And so emotion is immense influence again on your motivation, on your attention, on all of your behavior. And so that is. the mental trick. How at any given time can you add more joy, more celebration, more self-praise? And I know it's sometimes awkward to be able to do that because you may be humble or you don't want to be selfish. But if you— when you add emotion into your learning, into your memory, into the things that you want to remember— and habits are just memories, right? And so how can you add those memories? Sometimes all you need is a shot of positive emotion. You know, you have Add a dose of awe, add a dose of praise, add a dose of celebration, and it could reinforce those small little changes. And remember, inch by inch, it's a cinch, right? Little by little, a little becomes a lot. So where today, over the next few days, can you add a little bit emotion to your memory? Because all learning is state dependent. Just like life. Remember Maya Angelou said, people will forget what you say, they'll forget what you did, but they'll always remember how you made them feel. They'll always remember how you made them feel because we're not logical. We are what? We are biological. All right? So how can you just have victory? Celebrate your wins more. Whenever you do something right, don't even wait till you do something right. When you remember to do something and you're actually doing it, and afterwards you certainly can reward yourself. Because whatever you reinforce and you reward, you're going to get more of. And this, you could be thinking about how this could apply towards your children, towards the people in your family, towards your work associate, towards your customers, right? You know, celebrating the things that you know are good for them and they're going to do it more often, right? When you point out what they're doing that's good, then you give them like a jolt of celebration, they're more likely to do that in the future as opposed to Like, let's say they, they don't call you, right? And you're really upset because they don't call you, but then they call you. Don't beat them up. Give them joy and celebrate them, because then they're going to associate that level of positivity, right, that dopamine, which is the molecule again of more, and they're going to be able to do more of that to be able to get that same kind of feeling. So where can you reinforce good behavior for yourself and also Good behavior for them also as well for the people around you. Maybe you're a teacher and you want to do that with students. So, you know, as through the process when they remember to do something, reward that, right? You know, just celebrate. So a pat on the back, a bit, you know, maybe a smile, positive reinforcement that they could see, some kind words when they're actually doing that thing. Praise them when they're cleaning their room, when they're actually studying. And then also afterwards, you could reward them also as well. All right, does that make sense? Celebrate. Make sure— that's the big thing. Don't wait for a birthday to celebrate, right? You can celebrate every single day, and when you do, it'll improve your memory, it'll improve your life. And again, if your life is worth living, it's certainly worth remembering. This is your brain coach, Jim Kwik. If you got value out of this, I challenge you right now, take a simple, simple act. Take a screenshot of this. Share one thing that you learned in this conversation, or just link it to something that we do. Tag us in it so I get to see it. I'll repost some of my favorites. And this week we'll actually gift more copies as we do. A lot of times when I repost pictures of books, a lot of times those are people that commented on our information, they shared it somewhere else, and our team reached out to you to be able to get your mailing address to send you a copy of our book. But that, that's how we want to be able to do this. You know, I feel like I want to celebrate you, celebrate you for showing up, also playing full out, because it's important. If you don't remember to do it, it won't work. All right, so give yourself some joy. This is your brain coach, Jim Kwik, and we'll see you in our next lesson.

Hi, Kwik Brain, it's your brain coach. I want to thank you so much for watching this video. 3 things to do. Number 1, make Make sure you share this because when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well. Number two, make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing. Because if you miss a video, you miss a lot. And finally, make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out when we put out the latest and the greatest. One extra thing: if you want really close attention, then text me. Here is my phone number: three.

310-299-9362.

Did you remember that number?

310-299-9362.

Shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch. Ask me your burning question, and I wish your days be full of lots of life, lots of love, lots of laughter, and always lots of learning. I'll see you in our next video.