Stop Your Mind from Aging!

Your biological clock is ticking, whether you are conscious of it or not. Your mortality has been pre-programmed into your biological organisms and you body cells. Theoretically, you may have an indefinite lifespan through their division, rejuvenation, and regeneration—if they are still healthy and functional. Although your genes may have pre-determined the speed of your biological clock, you can still slow down the speed of aging—if you still have good health, especially your mental health. Stop your mind from aging!

Whether you like it or not, your biological clock is ticking, and this will happen to various systems in your body: 

• Your heart will pump less blood, and your arteries will become stiffer and less flexible, resulting in high blood pressure—a health problem that often increases with age.
• With less oxygen and nutrients from the heart, your lungs will become less efficient in distributing oxygen to different organs and membranes of your body.
• Your brain size will gradually reduce by approximately 10 percent between the age of 30 and 70. Loss of short-term memory will become more acute.
• Your bone mass will reduce, making it more brittle and fragile. Your body size will shrink as you lose your muscle mass.

As  you continue to age, your memory brain may be overloaded with past negative emotions, such as anger, hatred, and regret, and among others, that have a negative impact on your brain. Learn to let go of your attachments to the past. It is not easy, but is doable if you use Tao wisdom, the ancient wisdom from China to help you let go of your ego-self in order to let go of you attachments, not just emotional attachments, but also material attachments to the physical world you are living in. Let go to have a healthy mind.

“YOU JUST DON’T DIE!” T

his 155-page book is about how to live your life as if everything is a miracle if you just don’t die in your senior years, despite the many changes and challenges confronting you.

Human existence is meaningless without life purpose and human happiness. The pursuit of longevity has been going on since time immemorial. Consciousness holds the key to the success of this pursuit. Consciousness is wisdom of the mind to understand the self, others, as well as how and why certain things happen. 

The objective of this 155-page book is neither to convince you to crave longevity, nor to show you how to live to one hundred and beyond. It simply presents you with the consciousness of living the rest of your years—if you just don’t die!

Click here to get the digital copy, and here to get the paperback copy.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

How to Have a Photographic Memory

Are you having problems with your memory? As you continue to age, your memory naturally deteriorates. But you can stop your memory loss. As a matter of fact, you can even increase your memory. After all, humans use only a small fraction of their brain cells. Use it or lose it! It’s just that simple! Develop a photographic memory at any age, even as you step into seniority.

Memory has everything to do with awareness and mental associations. You must be able to associate the information and input it in your brain, so that you can retrieve the information later. To facilitate the mental processing of the information, you need to do the following:

Concentration

Try not to do too many things too quickly at the same time. This not only creates time-stress but also disorients the mind. Forget about multi-tasking; most probably, by now, you have passed that age!

Visualization

Visualize the information in your mind's eye, which is essentially the process of remembering. Seeing is believing, and a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can vividly visualize something in your mind's eye, your memory of that becomes more vivid, and that memory will be retained much longer.

Creativity and Imagination

Being creative and imaginative is an indispensable asset in good memory. The explanation is that with a creative mind, you can come up with mental associations that are totally outrageous and therefore unforgetable. The more absurd your mental associations are, the longer they will stick in your memory. You can learn to become more creative and imaginative through more practice. If you can think of something extraordinary, you can create out-of-the-ordinary mental associations that you will not easily forget. For example, when you are introduced to someone by the name of “Dustin”, you can create the image of a dustbin, and associate the features of that person with a dustbin. The more ridiculous that image is, the more you will remember that person’s name.

Repetition

Give the information a sound so that you can hear it as well as see it. Repeat the information as much as possible. For example, if you are introduced to a person, repeat the name of that person several times to register it in your brain. However, the process of repeating and remembering may not be as simple and straightforward as you wish: there may be obstacles to hindering the process. These obstacles may include distraction, lack of focus, inadequate motivation, and a stressful environment.

Compartmentalization

Finally, you need to store the information in an organized and systematic way in a mental folder in your memory. The human mind has a great capacity for storage of information. In fact, you have probably used up only about ten percent of brain storage space. To help you remember all types of information as well as to retrieve  the stored information, you need to think logically and categorize systematically the information in your mind's eye. The brain is like a file cabinet, where you put different types of information according to different categories or headings.

The bottom line: to protect and preserve a photographic memory, you must have a healthy brain.  What is good for the heart is always good for the brain because good blood circulation is essential.  Also, live a stress-free life: read my book No Ego No Stress. 

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau

Is Depression Synonymous With Unhappiness?

“The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.” Fyodor Dostoevsky

Is depression synonymous with unhappiness? Naturally, when you are depressed, you become unhappy. 

Depression is no more than a personal struggle against unattainable happiness, which is the essence of life and living. Therefore, almost everybody is always in quest of happiness. Sadly, to many, the quest for happiness is forever unreachable—just like a carrot-and-stick in front of a mule; the more pain inflicted on the mule by the stick, the more desire the mule demonstrates to reach out for the forever unattainable carrot in front. In many ways, a depressed individual is just like that mule with self-inflicted pain, which is the depression—the more unhappy that individual feels, the more depressed that individual will become, and the longer that vicious cycle of depression will continue, only plunging that depressed individual deeper into a fathomless black hole of despair and hopelessness. Depression is no more than a mental manifestation of the forever unattainable happiness that an individual strives to seek.

But why is human happiness so elusively and evasively unreachable and unattainable? The answer is, surprisingly, quite simple: happiness has to do with one’s perceptions of life experiences, and thus the thinking mind plays a pivotal role in that respect. That is to say, human happiness and the human mind are inter-related; without profound human wisdom, the pursuit of happiness is like wandering in the wilderness without a compass and a road map. Indeed, true human wisdom holds the key to opening the door to understanding true human happiness.

Given the close connection between depression and happiness, understanding true human happiness may help a depressed individual overcome his or her depression.

 TAO is looking at life not as a series of both happy and unhappy episodes, but simply as a journey of self-discovery and self-awakening to the real meaning of life existence. You are defined not by your words and thoughts, but by the ways you act and react, as well as the impact you may have on others around you. You exist not because you are simply here; you are here in this world to love and to learn how to live, as well as to help one another do the same."

To get your Amazon digital copy, click here; to get your paperback copy, click here.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau