You’re reading 5 Things Productive People Do Every Night, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

Though we often assume that a good night’s sleep starts when we turn off the lights, setting yourself up for a restful seven to eight hours goes far beyond closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths. The routine we follow before we turn down the covers can have a greater impact on our hours of rest than anything that happens overnight, equipping us for a more restful, productive night’s sleep. Start with these five steps to capitalize on that crucial time and improve your odds of waking up feeling truly rested each morning.

Get organized.

You know you have a full schedule tomorrow, and you’re already thinking about it. Rather than letting the next day’s obligations hang over your head as you binge-watch one of your go-to shows, Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and specialist in sleep medicine, says to set aside a few minutes between dinner and bedtime to get organized ahead of your busy day. If bringing running clothes to work with you cuts down on your morning stress and rush, make time to do so. If having a pre-packed lunch keeps you eating healthy, nutritious food (rather than making a regretful stop at the office cafeteria), then pack a bag the night before. Instead of tossing and turning while imagining the amount of tasks awaiting you when the alarm goes off, you’ll be able to fall asleep knowing you’re organized and ready for the day to come.

Unplug.

With the amount of devices at our disposal, it’s not surprising that this is such a difficult task for most of us. However, we now know for a fact that harsh blue light emitted from phone, television, and tablet screens has been proven to alter the body’s natural production of melatonin before bed, confusing our internal clock and making winding down more difficult. The National Sleep Foundation recommends removing electronic devices, especially smartphones, from your bedroom or nightstand to eliminate their impact on your sleep. If you must use a device before bed, switch it to a dimmer, night-specific screen setting, or make it something that you can set up further away from your eyes, like a television instead of a smartphone. If you really want to see a difference, follow the National Sleep Foundation’s suggestion to turn devices off 30 minutes before bedtime to let your mind wind down at its own pace.

Take care of your body.

Though we’d all love to get a massage each evening before bed, for most of us, that’s just not a reality. Instead, one of the easiest ways to take care of your body without adding an extra obligation to your schedule is to invest in a quality mattress. Doing your homework and picking out the right mattress once will ensure that poor support doesn’t impact your quality of rest and your physical well-being over time, making you less productive. Not sure where to start or wondering why your current mattress has never felt right? The average person will spend about 23,000 hours on their mattress over the course of its eight-year lifespan, so do your research to ensure you make a smart, informed investment in a mattress and your overall health.

Read.

For most of us, reading an actual book has sharply fallen to the wayside in favor of quick articles, social media scrolling, and television. However, researchers have repeatedly championed the cognitive benefits that reading can lead to, including improving our empathy and making kids smarter later in life. Better yet, unlike your phone or tablet, a paperback book doesn’t emit a single nanometer of blue light. Try incorporating a few pages of a book into your evening routine, perhaps alongside a steaming mug of (decaf) tea, and relish the chance to engage your imagination and engross yourself in the world between the pages. In time, reading can become a key part of your wind-down routine, signaling to your body that sleep, and relaxation, is near.

Meditate.

This revered wellness practice touts dozens of physical and mental benefits, but trying to empty your mind for twenty minutes right off the bat is enough to make most novice meditators give up. Easing into the practice, either with a few minutes of mindfulness meditation or the structure of a guided practice from an app or video, will help you slowly integrate it into your nightly routine in an accessible way. As an added plus, meditation also acts as a powerful complement to existing physical activities or fitness routines. According to Parinaz Samimi, a health and wellness consultant at MattressFirm.com, “[Meditation] helped me find myself . . . It reminds me not to be so quick to judge new experiences, new people, or even myself.”

Now that you’re armed with these tips, be diligent in keeping your pre-bedtime ritual a part of your everyday thinking. Continue to stay informed, and you’ll soon develop a wind-down routine that’s both practical and productive for your everyday life, and sets you up for the best night’s sleep possible.

You’ve read 5 Things Productive People Do Every Night, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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You’re reading Symbolizing Your Way to Success, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

How tiny objects can have a massive influence on the world

”The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us—when we feel helpless we feel miserable,” writes the author Robert Greene. “No one wants less power; everyone wants more.”

Research shows that feeling powerless or experiencing a lack of control decreases happiness and well-being. By influencing the world around us, we gain a sense of control. We all want to make our own meaningful mark on the world.

On this quest towards influence, something that we often underestimate is our use of symbols.

A symbol is anything that conveys meaning. It’s something that brings to mind associations beyond the definition of the symbol itself. It can trigger mental representations that are far broader than the symbol’s inherent meaning. In that way, symbols are powerful.

Letters and words are symbols of course. But so are the clothes you wear, the car you drive, and the job you have. The twinkle in your eye, the smirk on your face, the timbre of your laugh. What a person says, how they say it, and to whom are all symbols. The same goes for companies—everything it does forms a symphony of symbolism.

We cannot always decide how other people will interpret our symbols. But what we can control is what symbols we use, and how we use them. We can be deliberate about their usage, instead of spraying them around us like a sprinkler.

One of history’s great men can show us how to harness the power of symbols.

The fur cap man

In 1776, the American congress sent Benjamin Franklin to France as special commissioner. His mission was to seal an alliance with the European power, and to secure weapons and financing for the ongoing Revolutionary War.

Franklin knew that this was a delicate, precarious situation. His newly-founded nation was depending on him. Without the support of the French, the United States was destined to be nothing more than a temporary uprising.

Luckily, Franklin was a master of symbols (as well as a master of many other things). He knew that gaining the ear and the trust of the stingy French elite required the right image. His reputation as a simple printer, politician and scientist wasn’t going to cut it. He needed to become the “American version of the French spirit and way of life,” and to appeal “to their notorious narcissism,” as Robert Greene writes.

What symbols did Franklin use to express the right message to the French? The best example was the soften marten fur cap. He had picked up the headpiece several years before during a trip to Canada, and he knew it was the perfect ruse for his new foreign mission. Franklin wore the cap everywhere he went in Paris.

“The cap … served as his badge of homespun purity and New World virtue, just as his ever-present spectacles (also featured in portraits) became an emblem of wisdom,” writes his biographer Walter Isaacson. “It helped him play the part that Paris imagined for him: that of the noble frontier philosopher and simple backwoods sage.”

He struck the perfect balance between deep thinker and exotic influencer — exactly what was needed at the time. Franklin made such an impression that the local ladies even started wearing wigs that looked like his cap. They called the new fashion trend coiffure á la Franklin.

Franklin clearly knew what he was doing. He was deliberate about the symbols he used. “He carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity,” writes Isaacson. “Wherever he went he assumed the look, the outward morals, and the behavior of the culture at hand, so that he could better make his way,” says Greene.

In the end, his mission was a success. Franklin became beloved by the French, secured their financial support, and sealed a vital military alliance. The United States’ success in the Revolutionary War, and the country’s existence, owes much to Franklin’s masterful use of symbols.

Symbolizing yourself

Franklin’s fur cap shows that some objects can have disproportionately large effects on the world around us. On our journey towards influence, leveraging symbols is one of the most powerful tools we can use.

Reflect upon your own symbols, or your company’s use of symbolism:

What are your most important symbols?

What symbols express the wrong message?

What are you not expressing right now? What symbols could you use to get those messages across?

Try as we might, we can’t control how others perceive our symbols. But what we can do is to be more deliberate about the ones we use and how.

A simple starting point is to consider your use of the quintessential symbol: words. “The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning,” says writer Stephen King. “Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?”

Where do your symbols fall short? What are the symbols you really should be using?

Alex Carabi is a brand and leadership consultant and coach, helping people and organizations to rethink reality and bring meaning to what they do.

You’ve read Symbolizing Your Way to Success, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

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