Hello and welcome to PREKURE’s weekly snippet of science, where on a weekly basis we share emergent research related to extending the human healthspan.

MAKING & BREAKING HABITS

 

The excitement of a new year seems to have worn off a little and we are now into the nitty gritty – the doing part of 2022. Do you feel like your motivation is wavering? Are you finding it difficult to stick to those intentions you set in January? Is it feeling like an insurmountable task to break some nasty unhelpful habits? If you answered yes, we hear you, and you are not alone!
    Building habits is hard enough during normal times, add COVID and the additional challenges it brings on top of that and implementing meaningful change can start to feel quite tricky. Maybe you’re trying to get into some good habits with your studying and progress through your courses. Maybe you’re trying to live what you preach and implement the science you are learning into your own life. Maybe you are all set, but your clients seem to be struggling to sustain meaningful change. You’d be pleased to hear that there are some evidence-based things you can do to make things just a little easier. Have you heard of limbic friction? Curious about memory visualisations? Want to understand what task-bracketing is and how you can use it to your advantage? All of these topics, and more, are covered in a recent podcast from Professor Andrew Huberman where he unpacks the science of making and breaking habits.

     

    Prof Huberman provides the following neuroplasticity super protocol. You can use it to power through your online learning and ace your courses.
    Rule 1: Get alert
    Rule 2: Get focused
    Rule 3: Generate repetitions
    Rule 4: Expect and embrace errors
    Rule 5: Insert micro-rest intervals (at random)
    Rule 6: Use random intermittent reward
    Rule 7: Limit learning sessions to 90-minutes
    Rule 8: After a learning bout, do a NSDR protocol
    Rule 9: Prioritise getting quality deep sleep
    Click here to read the full article and unlock your learning superpower.

     

    PREKURE is all about applying cutting-edge, evidence-based science into practice and we hope that by equipping you with new knowledge on a weekly basis you can incorporate this into your own life and share it with your clients when appropriate. Each week will bring with it new and exciting research, however, if there is something you are itching to know more about please email us and we will keep it on our radar as we curate our weekly snippets. 
     
    We will only be sharing open-access, freely available journal articles and blogs with you. However, we wanted to make you aware of the academic workaround for getting your hands on the latest research. When looking for research you might find yourself browsing PUBMED or Google Scholar and happen upon a research article that you want to read, unfortunately, the publishers want you to pay to access it. Oh well, guess you should just keep looking right? Wrong. You can use another website called ResearchGate to access journal articles. Here, researchers create a profile and upload their work. If the PDF you are after isn’t available you can simply click the ‘request PDF’ button and the researcher will email you a copy! As an example, here is our very own Prof Schofield’s ResearchGate profile.