This Book May Save Your Life: Everyday Health Hacks to Worry Less and Live Better

by Karan Rajan

Multitasking erodes your productivity and task efficiency. It results in an increased error rate and higher levels of inaccuracies.

one limited study from the University of Sussex looked at the MRI scans of individuals who multitasked (texted and watched TV). It found a reduced density in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain involved in empathy and emotional regulation.

constant shifting attention from one thing to another results in the prefrontal cortex and striatum burning rapidly through oxygenated glucose. This can leave you feeling exhausted after even short bursts of multitasking because you’ve literally depleted your brain’s energy reserves.

Because the fact is that taste isn’t really down to your tongue. Even without it, you’d still be able to taste most of what you eat, and that’s because your sense of smell accounts for 80 per cent of the perception of flavour.

You can boost your taste by holding your food in your mouth for a bit longer and breathe out through your nose so the aromas percolate through these internal nostrils for longer.

Charles Spence did not stop with his Pringles experiment. He’s conducted many world-changing tests, proving – among other things – that strawberry mousse tastes sweeter when eaten from a white container versus a black one; that coffee taste less sweet when drunk from a white mug as opposed to a clear one; and that soup served from blue containers makes it seem significantly saltier.

Our brains are wired to associate colours with flavours: green for bitter, yellow for sour, brown for savoury and red for sweet.

This inclination to be asleep (or wide awake) at a certain time of day is known as a chronotype. It’s largely shaped by your genetic and clock genes, and governs many aspects of your physiology.

If you must drink caffeine to function, limit your last cup of coffee to no later than 2pm. Anything after that time means you increase the risk of your sleep pressure not adequately building up to drive your body’s urge to sleep.

There are some appreciable benefits for a twenty-minute nap. This is long enough to allow you to put your brain into reset mode and feel a sense of rejuvenation. Additionally, you are less likely to drift into deeper, slow wave sleep stages that could risk you feeling ‘sleep drunk’ when you surface.

Longer naps, say ninety minutes (which is my preference) are associated with improvements in performance as well as reduced sleepiness than shorter naps. As you cover one entire sleep cycle, both REM and NREM, you stand to gain improvements in both procedural and emotional memory. The ninety-minute nap technically covers an entire sleep cycle so you should awaken from a lighter stage and thus avoid sleep inertia woes entirely.