Most of us are guilty of wasting our lunch breaks. We’ll wolf down some fast food, as we woke up too late to make a packed lunch again. Then we’ll spend the remainder of the hour scrolling through social media, or watching cat videos on YouTube. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, lots of us do it, but have you ever stopped to think about how much you could achieve with an extra hour each day? Making sure you’re fed and watered is obviously the most important thing to accomplish, but you ought to have a little time left over after that. Why not spend it bettering yourself, giving your brain an extra boost? We’ll explain how here.
Become a Better Decision Maker
All of us could do with becoming better decision-makers in one way or another. Some of us are quick to make a decision but often get it wrong, others generally make the right decision but ponder over it for far too long. Finding the middle ground, or ideally taking the best of both requires skill and therefore, practice. There are lots of ways that you can improve your decision making, but perhaps the most accessible, are card games. Poker can often be a fun place to start because it’s easy to learn and requires you to make decisions based on how it will impact your hand and how quickly the game progresses.
In order to fit poker into your lunch break, unless you want to get the whole office on board, the easiest way is probably to play on one of the best online casinos. Vegas Slots Online has compiled a list of UK-based casinos that are all offering deals for customers that newly sign-up. This means that it won’t have to cost you a lot of money, or in some cases, anything at all, to begin practising your new skills. If you’re the kind of person that likes to be able to really see your progress then you could even try a free poker tracking app. If you notice your results are improving, then you’re clearly finding a good mix of quick and correct decision making.
Learn a New Skill
One of the reasons we start to forget things as we get older and one of the reasons that we soak information up like sponges when we’re younger, is that as we age, we get out of practice. During our school years, we are always learning new things, but by the time we graduate and get into the workplace, we are learning less and less new information. Perhaps the most effective way to keep your brain sharp into old age is to learn new things as often as you can. Some people enjoy learning a language and it’s very effective, but one of the most useful languages as the world becomes ever more internet-based is code.
Code is used for all kinds of things, from creating websites to programming apps and whilst it may seem daunting to learn, that’s half the fun of it. Challenge yourself to learn a certain type of code in your first 6 months of brain-boosting lunch breaks. Once you’ve got the basics covered, you’ll find that there are plenty of tools to improve your coding. Not only will learning to code help to keep your brain sharp and focused, but it could also even become the start of a new career for you. Coders are more in demand than ever, so it could lead to your lunch breaks taking place at a whole new job if you really take to it.
Make Time to Meditate
Whilst the last two tips focus on learning specific skills, this tip will help more generally with having a healthy, happy brain. If you ever feel bogged down by your work, then take your lunch break as an opportunity to properly unwind. Though meditation is something of a buzzword at the moment, there’s a good reason, for most people it really works. If you’re a little apprehensive about getting started learning how to meditate then there are plenty of simple guides that you can choose. Don’t try to spend your whole lunch hour meditating at first, go for five minutes and gradually build it up. For many, around ten to fifteen minutes of focused meditation can have a dramatic impact on mood for the entire remainder of the day.
