Although meditation was once primarily associated with spiritual or religious practices, there are more modern approaches making waves in neuroscience labs and mental health clinics alike. From the outside it might look like meditating people aim at relaxation or ‘shutting off the mind’. However, meditation resembles a workout for the brain and as it turns out a really tough one. For instance, Mohamed Salah says about his mental training: “It’s tricky, it’s really tricky, trust me. I’ve been doing it for a few years and I’m telling you, just you sit with yourself alone for 15 minutes before you sleep or when you wake up. It’s much more harder than you do the gym every day for 1.5 hours” [2]. Maybe this kind of training is so difficult, because the ‘muscles’ that are being exercised here are specific brain areas associated with emotional regulation, optimal behavioral control, as well as self-reflective processing [3].

Many people who start a meditation session, quickly realize how often their minds wander — lost in daydreams, past memories, or worries about future scenarios that may never occur. While these mental patterns are not inherently bad, they can interfere with performance in sports such as in moments that demand full attention or readiness to cues [4,5].  Meditation is proposed not only as a tool to recognize these mental patterns but also to reshape them and train the mind to gain more control. But what exactly is meditation? Let us look at some examples of common meditation techniques [6].

Since we humans are (neuro)anatomically the same, each of one us is potentially subject to cognitive biases. However, depending on different life situations and professions, it is more relevant for some of us to be aware of cognitive biases. Especially when it comes to important and complex decisions, investors, sports managers, business experts and coaches can make better decisions just by being aware of the different cognitive biases. If you are interested in how you can personally benefit from this knowledge, please feel free to contact us via info@neuro11.de.

The greatest athletes and leaders understand that throughout the course of a lifetime, you cannot be successful at all times. Everyone has positive and negative experiences. However, how one deals with negative situations and experiences is decisive for the subjective feeling of happiness [3] and for long-term success [4]. Do you never recover from a disastrous setback or are you able to develop a growth-oriented mindset in order to learn even from negative experiences? Because, as already explained in our article on goal-oriented thinking, the brain learns to adapt and optimize its behavior through both positive and negative experiences. They are both absolutely necessary and without them, the brain cannot learn at all.

In order to develop a growth mindset, you must first understand the need to constantly improve and develop. This is exactly where we at neuro11 come in to help you. Through us, you will learn how to develop the right mindset in order to cope with anything that life throws at you. You will consequently stay motivated and have a clear focus during training and competition.