Ways You Can Strengthen Prefrontal Cortex
1. Resist Instant Gratification
We live in a world where you can easily meet any desire with no money down and no time spent.
This sounds good on the surface, but the reality tells a different story.
Instant gratification rewires the brain to seek rewards immediately, with little or no time in between the initial action performed and the feedback. This decreases your level of patience over time.
Unfortunately, in real life – it doesn’t work that way. Most of the time, you’re not going to get immediate feedback. By the time you see the results, the action was already done. For example, if you go to college for a four year degree – it takes four years for you to see the result of an action that you did in the past.
The biggest sources of instant gratification today is social media. Likes, retweets, messages, all of these are forms of “feedback”. This means you should decrease your time on social media as much as possible.
If you want some proof of this, check out this video on how social media can change your brain.
2. Go Beyond Your Comfort Zone
In order to achieve big things, you need willpower. Willpower originates from the prefrontal cortex. Willpower is like a muscle. You only have a certain amount of it you can use per day. But again, due to the changeable nature of the brain – you can increase your willpower.
The best way to do that is to do something that’s just a bit outside your comfort zone. This could be something like not hitting the “snooze” button when the alarm hits 6:00, going for an extra rep in the gym, or even engaging a stranger while waiting in line at Starbucks.
All of these force you to make decisions in the moment, sometimes in the space of a second. When you do something that you’re not accustomed to, your brain makes new neural connections is that you can be better equipped for it the next time around.
This is also a key part of what is called “deliberate practice“, a large part of what it means to get better at any skill.
3. Learn New Material
Learning engages the brain. Like exercising willpower to go beyond the comfort zone, learning or doing anything new makes new neural connections in this area of the brain.
Reading (especially reading unfamiliar material) is a great way to exercise your brain and prefrontal cortex.
When you read, your brain is trying to piece together the information in the book into a coherent whole to make sense of the parts that you read.
4. Blue Sky Thinking
Exercising the ability to think of the “best case scenario” is a prime function of the prefrontal cortex. It takes willpower and conscious thought of what could go right rather than what could go wrong
Pessimism is the path of least resistance. It takes very little effort to think about why your life sucks, why people suck, and why the world sucks.
Besides, optimism is a much better prescription for health, especially when you consider that optimists live longer on average than pessimists.
