Eric Barker's Blog, page 6

This Is How To Keep Your Brain Sharp As You Age: 5 Secrets From Research

Aging isn’t always so fun. Your body starts making sounds like a settling old house. One day you’re in your prime, and the next, you’re googling whether “senior moment” is a medically recognized condition.

The thing about aging is that it’s sneaky, like a ninja with joint pain. You try to recall a name, and your brain’s like, “We have names in here somewhere, but we’re going to need to file a request for that. Check back in two to five business days.”

And everybody is scared that this means Al...

New Research Reveals 8 Secrets That Will Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Succeed

A study by Richard Wiseman, a psychology professor at University of Hertfordshire, found 88% of people fail to achieve their New Year’s Resolutions. Yeah, almost nine out of ten.

Cynically, you could see these resolutions as a yearly exercise in self-delusion. The tradition where we all collectively decide to lie to ourselves in a more structured format. Often, they’re like annual subscriptions we buy for a better version of ourselves… only to realize we’re more into the free trial.

Why do the...

This Is The Simple Way To Achieve Your Goals: 3 Secrets From Research

Strategy. It’s treated with a reverence usually reserved for sacred relics or the last slice of pizza.

I love reading corporate strategy because I’m a big fan of fiction. Typically, it’s a phrasebook of jargon that could make a dictionary weep. It says nothing, offends no one, has no clear actions, and makes no hard decisions. It’s all “blue sky” vision. Rarely are challenges mentioned or any insight provided. It’s all mission, values, and lots of vague goals.

And when we talk about “life stra...

This Is The Emotionally Intelligent Way To Communicate With Kids

Parenting can feel like an inescapable theme park of chaos. Truth is, you’re not simply a parent, but a negotiator, a janitor, a superhero, and the prime suspect in the mysterious case of the missing sanity. It’s a job as exhausting as it is exhilarating, as thankless as it is rewarding.

Little kids are certainly a challenge. They think mud is a food group and possess the lung capacity of a blue whale. To a small child, a closed bathroom door is an open invitation to barge in and begin an in-d...

This Is How To Make Emotionally Intelligent Friendships: 8 Secrets

Emotional intelligence. That elusive, ethereal quality that some people seem to have in spades, while the rest of us are left scrabbling around in the social dirt like confused, charmless mole people.

EI is complex, but one of the best ways to increase it is simple: learn how to be a good listener. Listening is the golden ticket, the unsung hero of the social Olympics.

Problem is, these days listening is about as popular as a landline. Everyone wants to be the podcast; nobody wants to be the a...

This Is How To Overcome Fear: 4 Secrets From Research

Ah, Halloween. The time of year when you can paint your face green, throw on some horns, and traipse around the neighborhood begging for candy without ending up in an intervention. The only thing scarier than the ghouls and goblins is the calorie count.

The emotion du jour? Fear. If fear were a person, I wouldn’t invite it to my birthday party. Outside of Halloween, we generally prefer not to be afraid in life. And that’s fear’s purpose: to keep us safe. It’s like the world’s most irritating b...

This Will Make You Feel More Positive: 11 Secrets From Research

Sometimes the pressure to be positive can get really annoying. The slogans, jeez, the slogans. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” That’s all very noble, but I can barely be the change I want to see in my living room. The propaganda of positivity forever bleating its mantra of happiness until you wish you could cram it into a cannon and fire it into the sun.

But you know what? It works. Just ask yourself, “What’s going well right now?” and I bet you feel a little better. And, no, thi...

This Is The Best Way To Get Big Projects Done: 5 Secrets From Research

Many consider the Sydney Opera House and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao to be the greatest architectural masterpieces of the past century. But how the two got constructed are very, very different stories…

The Guggenheim Bilbao came in on time and under budget. It turned Frank Gehry into one of the most esteemed living architects.

Meanwhile, constructing the Sydney Opera House was a comedy of errors. It was scheduled to take five years to build. It took fourteen. It went 1400 percent over budget....

This Is How To Survive Disaster: 6 Secrets From Research

You woke up expecting another weekend of binge-watching Netflix and arguing with strangers on the internet. Instead, you were greeted by a massive earthquake. Or a flood. Hurricane. Zombie apocalypse. Or your Roomba stopped humping the sofa leg and led an AI overthrow of humanity.

One thing is for certain: you’re not ready for this. Yesterday your biggest fear was sending a text to your boss and having “meeting” autocorrected to “mating.” Now you gotta find water and locate food? Cub Scouts wa...

How To Get The Best Sleep Of Your Life: Six Secrets From Research

Ah, sleep. That miniature coma we indulge in when reality becomes too tiresome to endure. It’s essentially the “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” of life.

The health negatives of not getting enough sleep are serious. Research has found risk associations between short sleep and hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and dementia. Sleeping less than six hours a night is associated with a 20% higher chance of heart attack.

Research shows two weeks of sleeping six hour...