Abundance week#50

Dear Abundance seekers and my dear readers,

Today I encourage you to take off sometime from your daily life and invest that in learning a new skill. It could be as simple of using cut paste shortcuts or learn how to paint on you-tube. The idea is to take break from the mundane and do something different each day. You may set a reminder or alarm for yourself for around 30 minutes at your convenient time of the day daily and cultivate this concept. Now that you understand how this can be achieved you need to know why you should be doing this.

The 3 most important reasons learning something new each day is important.

Your brain chemistry changes.

The white matter in your brain is called myelin, and it helps improve performance on a number of tasks. The more people practice a new skill they are learning, the more dense the myelin in their brains becomes, which helps them learn even better.

Your learning speed increases.

Learning a new skill helps you learn things faster over time. By stimulating neurons in the brain, more neural pathways are formed and electrical impulses travel faster across them as you attempt to process new information. The more pathways that are formed, the faster impulses can travel.

You could stave off dementia.

People who learn a new skill are less likely to develop dementia, which has been linked to demyelination of your brain. People who actively learn new skills don’t give their brains a chance to demyelinate, and their neural pathways are ready for new impulses to travel along them.

Perhaps the most important reason of all though is this….

Learning something new will make you happier

According to an article in Psychologies, I quote

‘It’s actually a core need for psychological wellbeing. Learning can help us build confidence and a sense of self-efficacy.

It can also be a way of connecting with others too,’ says Vanessa King, positive psychology expert at Action for Happiness. ‘As human beings, we have a natural desire to learn and progress. Psychologists call it mastery.’

There is evidence to suggest that adult learning seems to have its most positive impact on self-esteem and self-efficacy when the learning provided meets the needs of the learner, and when the learner is at a stage in their life when they are ready and receptive to benefit from it.

‘Learning also fuels our creativity. Ideas can come from making connections between seemingly unrelated things,’ says King.

‘Learning something new in one area of our lives can trigger ideas in another. So curiosity and creative thinking go hand-in-hand.’

This can also help with creating what psychologists call ‘flow’ or ‘being in the zone’ – when we’re so absorbed in what we’re doing, we lose sense of time and of ourselves.

‘It’s not passive, like when watching TV – it’s active,’ explains King. When we’re in flow, the level of challenge in the activity just exceeds our level of skill.

Close your eyes and imagine the joy on a child’s face when he first learns to take a step and walk. Stay with the feeling and let it sink into you. Feel his emotions, how it is motivating him to take another step into unknown territories and how this feeling overpowers his fear of falling and risk in life.

I am certain you do not need any more reasons to why you should be learning something new each day.

Happiness and sunshine

Niddhi

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