5 Barriers to Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is essential to using your overall experience, background, common sense and other attributes to become more aware of how your efforts for success are being spent. When you have barriers to the critical thinking process, it can seriously harm your ability to move forward.

 

When you’re aware of these barriers, you can better overcome them and focus your thinking on what’s going to move you forward rather than getting stuck behind a barrier – unable to move forward.

 

Here are five barriers that can impede the critical thinking process:

 

1.  Thinking in Black or White – Some people ignore a situation’s complexities by thinking that there’s only one way to solve a problem. The problem is placed in a category, given a label and that’s the only way that matters. Thinking in black and white comes from our need to have certainty in our lives, but it’s false logic to assume that everything is totally one way.

2.  Thinking with the Ego – Egocentrical thinking is thinking with a lack of understanding others wants and needs. It limits your thinking to only your point of view and doesn’t have room for others’ ideas. This thinking process is deeply embedded in our psyches, and it sometimes takes deliberate effort to overcome it.

3.  Social Thinking – The drone mentality of social thinking only lets us see things in the way of the popular point of view – or the way that our spouse, companions, parents and friends think. Thinking outside the box is almost impossible when you have a barrier of social thinking and it can greatly impede the critical thinking process.

4.  Authoritative Thinking – Just because someone in authority says it’s true doesn’t mean it is. You’ve likely been swayed at one time or another by political leaders who say one thing is true only to find out later that it was a lie or a misleading way of thinking. The authority could be a person, peer group, institution or anything that makes you think that they’re right because they’re in an authoritative position.

5.  Judgmental Thinking – When you judge something or someone based on moral evaluation it’s usually done in haste and based on our past in some way – such as the way we were raised, educated or other values and mores. Judgmental thinking is usually non-rational thinking and can block understanding and insight about a person or an issue.

 

It’s important that we recognize our own barriers to the critical thinking process and replace those barriers with rational and reasoned thinking and then make a concentrated effort to avoid them.

 

Smart Shaming Trend

Trends can be anything you can think of from Cotton ball diets to rainbow-colored hair. Who would have thought that smart-shaming would also be included in the latest list? What’s wrong with being “smart”? Why is smart the new target of bullies? What does it mean to be smart these days? 

 

To answer questions popping in your head right now, indeed, smart shaming is already a trend – people would often comment things like, “Yeah, always the smart one!” in bitter tongues. There are many pseudo-names you should be aware of: The Grammar-Nazi, The Honor Roll and yes – The Smart One!

 

Smart-shaming can be viewed both in a positive and negative light. Focusing on the positive, this trend may mean that with or without the shaming part, “smart” is gaining popularity and getting noticed as a great influence in ones’ whole personality. How? Check the list below: 

 

·    Being smart means you’re not just book-smart but street-smart as well. Street smart is defined as having the ability to cross the street with ease, knowing how to haggle for prices, and surviving the metro (commuting, having your own apartment, paying your bills, etc.) Hence, your chances of surviving this world are higher than most. 

·    Being smart beats out being physically attractive in the long run. How so? Because the fact is we all grow old, and no amount of serum or snail secretions can counter that. The good thing is, being smart is the opposite. Brains grow by the year, meaning, you can get smarter provided that you ‘feed’ it with worthy experiences and new learnings. 

·    Being smart makes you a cool person these days. Why so? Because you can talk about a lot of things – books, experiences, etc. and you sure are not a bore in any gathering. That’s why people would want your company.

 

The list could be longer and there are longer eBooks if you would want a more readings regarding this millennial trend.

 

What If I have Not-So-Smart-Genes?

We will not have a debate as to whether it is true or not, that “smart-o-meter” is in the genes. However, we are to learn a few facts that could help you understand how your brain functions and how you could help it reach its maximum potential. Note though that there are irreversible damages that could be done to the brain like the result of malnutrition. So, the earlier the intervention, the better. Here are some tips you can apply, depending on your current state: 

 

If you are an expecting mother:

 

·    Be sure to follow your doctor’s advice and take folic acid. This is to help in the development of the baby’s brain. 

·    Do not take any medicine without your doctor’s approval. Over-the-counters are a no-no.

·    Never smoke, drink alcohol or take illegal drugs while pregnant. 

·    Try your best to be in a calm and happy state as much as possible.

·    Eat nutritious and whole food.

 

If you are already and adult: 

 

·    First of all, stop thinking that you could do no more. If, unfortunately, there were complications when you were still inside your mother’s womb that could have affected your cognitive capacities today, then keeping a positive mindset is the first step in having a smarter brain. 

·    Have a supply of superfood (acai, chia seeds, kale, beets, berries, etc.). This helps nourish your brain and keep your neurons functioning. 

·    Educate yourself – Do not equate education with age. Learn as much as you can. Even those that you don’t like. You are never too old for a university. It is only attitude that grows old. 

·    Keep your emotions at bay – Remember that your emotions play a big role in the development of your brain as well. And, another thing to stress here is that negative emotions do not make your brain grow. It actually hinders it. 

 

There are still a lot of things you can do to help your brain reach its maximum potential. E-books are readily available for your convenient reading.

 

What are the Five Stages of Grieving?

To know the five steps of grieving is step one. To know what stage you are in is step two. The rest of the steps towards moving always starts with step one. So, here is a short guide, in case you’d want to know where exactly you are in.

Stage one is DENIAL

Another term used for this is the flight stage. At this point, the brain will try to protect you from hurting, thus, it will activate “flight mode.” The tendency during this stage is to make yourself believe that your relationship is still worth saving or that the breakup never really happened. This is the stage where men tend to spend their time at the gym or clubs while girls tend to stalk their exes. It is best to accept this stage but make sure to step up. Give yourself a deadline. 

Stage two is ANGER

This is the stage you usually would want to forget when you’ve moved on. This is the “crazy” stage where you sometimes will try to do things out of this world, out of your emotions. There could be dramatic confrontations, tearful storytelling to friend and a lot of angry text messages or emails that unfortunately were delivered. This is also the time where you start to blame yourself, your parents, your ex, your friends, and even your dog. 

Stage three is BARGAINING

Imagine yourself in a flea market having only three dollars and wanting a 4-dollar item. You will start to haggle with the vendor, right? Same is true in this stage. You will try all you can to bring back what you think you have lost. 

Stage four is DEPRESSION

It is an advantage to be aware that this stage will come, and you will experience it. Knowing this gives you an edge and hopefully, a better way out. Depression symptoms includes feeling sleepy all day, stress-eating, loneliness that won’t go away, etc. 

Stage five is ACCEPTANCE

Hooray! As they say, everything has its end. Hopefully, you won’t repeat the stages and really move on from your bad experience.

 

5 Key Ways To Boost Your Mental Energy

There are two different types of energy that everyone has. There is mental energy and physical energy. Sometimes a day in the office can be more exhausting than a day spent outdoors hiking. This is because you have taxed all of your mental energy resources.

 

How do you renew your mental energy resources?

 

Some people feel like they are only given a certain amount of mental energy to use throughout the day. Once they’ve reached their limit, they are done. So it’s no surprise that many people have researched how to expand mental energy resources. While there are many ways to keep your mind sharp, here are five of the best ways to keep your mental energy pool running deep.

 

1.    Keep a Gratitude Journal

 

A gratitude journal is a journal that you can write in daily to reflect on the things that you’re grateful to have in your life. It is important to keep a gratitude journal because of the effects that gratitude has on mental energy. Gratitude is a positive emotion and can help you view your life in better terms.

 

Life Hack discusses how gratitude can turn even horrible situations into positive experiences. For example, if you are having a difficult time with your boss you can use your gratitude journal to write down all of the things you are grateful for.

 

Things that you only have because of the pay from your job. This changes the mindset and the dialogue about your workplace and can ultimately change your performance and relationships at the office.

 

2.    Read Something You’ve Never Read

 

To enhance the brains neuronal connections, you need to read something you have never read before. Ahealthblog.com highlights the effect that reading has on your ability to empathize with your fellow humans. It stimulates your imagination in ways that television and movies cannot simulate. 

 

Reading will increase your mental energy because it keeps your brain sharp and focused. Reading new material is better because it introduces new ideas and concepts for your brain to work on.

 

3.    Work in a New Location

 

While you may not consider your surroundings very often, they may have more effect on your mental energy than you realize. INC. notes that working in the same location day after day dulls the senses and makes them slow to react. 

 

Picking up and moving to a location that you’ve never been before can get your brain firing because of all the new stimulus. This is a great way to increase your mental energy. It may also be a good pitch for telecommuting.

 

4.    Use Your Energy Wisely

 

We would all like unlimited supplies of mental energy to use throughout the day. Unfortunately, we just don’t have an unlimited supply. Forbes highlights how negative thoughts and attitudes can quickly sap your reserves of mental energy, leaving you with hardly any energy left over for creative endeavors.

 

Your best bet is to stop focusing on things that are outside of your control. There is no point to wasting your mental energy on problems that you cannot solve. When you find yourself focusing on problems outside of your ability or control, redirect your energy towards more productive activities.

 

5.    Reflect

 

If you’re trying to increase your mental energy, the best thing that you can do is reflect on your daily progress. The Huffington post notes that it’s many people don’t quite have enough time for reflection. Carving out time at the end of the day to reflect on your emotions, behavior, and things you’ve learned will allow you to assess your use of mental energy in better ways.

 

Getting into the habit of daily reflecting will take practice, you can even turn this practice into a progress journal. Seeing written proof of how far you’ve come in your mental energy journey can be highly motivational.

 

While it may take daily practice, you can find ways to increase and conserve your mental energy. Once you find what works for you and what doesn’t, you will be better equipped to tackle the mental challenges you face every day.

 

Recreation—An Elusive Thing that You Have to Grab Hold of

In today’s hasty world, one thing that most of us have forgotten is that the human body needs to relax. We need to take time out for ourselves. Our bodies are more complicated than any machine man has ever devised. Even the best of machines requires to be energized in some way or the other and they need to rest if they have to work for a long time. But, with our own bodies—these amazing machines that nature has provided us with—we are completely laidback. We don’t realize the need of rest for our body machines. And therein lies a major problem.

 

Today, most people flinch at the prospect of rest. There is so much work everyone has taken up that resting seems like a taboo. It is something you should not speak of. It is something for the lazy people who can do nothing good in their lives… that’s the sorry impression we have about rest and recreation.

 

But this attitude can only take us faster to our graves. If our body doesn’t get the chance to recharge itself, how will it be able to continue functioning normally? How do you hope to make your body more productive the next day if you don’t rest today?

 

Rest is one thing; recreation is another. When we are resting, we are just shutting ourselves off from the world for a while. But when we are recreating, we do something that we enjoy. We enrich our minds when we recreate and at the same time our brain is happy because we are doing something that we love. It releases more endorphins and that’s the reason our entire body attains a state of natural felicity. This is a factor that can enhance our health in great measure.

 

However, the important thing is that recreation isn’t something that comes naturally to us. We have to take it. Like for hunger or thirst, we don’t have an instinct for recreation. That’s the reason we don’t ‘feel’ the need to recreate, but this is definitely something that we should do.

 

Whatever it is that we like to do—go for a walk, watch a movie, listen to a song, read a book, write something, talk with our friends, take the dog out, play with our children—we should do. We should spend time doing that for at least a few minutes every day. This makes our mind richer and our bodies fitter. If we want to make a well-oiled, productive machine out of our bodies, then we must not forget to give it its dose of recreation each day of our lives. 

 

Growing Veggies

I can hear you thinking that you have no clue about growing veggies. The truth is that you will be able to easily learn enough to be growing useful crops really quickly, and every session spent in your garden teaches you even more. You'll learn much that's unique to your own spot, like local soil conditions, your specific aspect in relation to the sun, and oddities that relate to your local microclimate. You'll learn most of this by getting out and giving it a go.

 

The taste of home-grown veggies is immensely superior to that of the commercially grown produce. Have you heard individuals complain that tomatoes no longer have any taste? They'll have when you grow your own - you'll never taste better. The lack of taste with the commercial crop isn't all the fault of the growers, as they're under pressure to produce a crop, of unvarying size and color, to the schedule of the wholesale market, and finally the supermarket. You set your own schedule.

 

The freshness of your own crop is a huge plus. Veggies I've bought from the supermarket, and stored in the refrigerator, have started to become inedible after a couple of days. I've had home grown produce still fresh in the refrigerator after two weeks! 

 

Commonly, your home garden will produce a generous yield, and may readily help pay for the cost of growing them. You are able to effectively end up having free veggies. Summertime, particularly, is usually a time of abundance, even glut, as loved ones and friends leave your place with possibly more produce than they had expected to see. A tip - when giving away fresh produce, try to limit your generosity - it's better to give a little amount to many rather than to give to the few more than they may really use.

 

Among the turn-offs to trying something you have not done before is the intimidating flood of information (and misinformation) you'll receive.

If you're browsing one of the major bookshops, you might find 100s of books on the topic - which do you purchase? To begin with, seek the simple, basic info. Don't bother with those full of jargon - you'll learn the technical terms as you go.

 

You’ll hear folklore from the family, like “Uncle Henry forever put ... (you name it) ... on his ... (name it again)”. Folklore is part of our heritage, but there's no guarantee of its usefulness. You'll hear from the office genius, who has done nothing, but still knows all the answers - nod wisely, and then ignore him.

Plants evolved millions of years before mankind, and they actually wish to grow. It has been said that in a lot of cases plants grow despite what we do to help them. If you supply the basics, and these are reasonable nutrition and regular watering, Mother Nature does the rest - let her work for you.

 

Meat Tradition

How did our family traditions get centered on consuming meat? Consider it. When we consider Thanksgiving, we consider turkey. If we consume pork, then New Year’s celebrations frequently revolve around pork and sauerkraut. At Christian Easter, the traditional meal is ham. And in the summertime, we wait for that 1st hamburger or steak on the grill. 

 

How did that occur to a species that was designed to eat veggies and fruits, nuts, berries and legumes? 

 

We may imagine that eating meat was at the start an opportunistic event, born of the need to survive. The taste of cooked meat, plus the prolonged energy that came from eating high-fat meat products made primitive sense even to earlier man.

 

At the start, finding cooked animal meat, from a forest fire, would have been cause for jubilation. It’s something everybody in a clan would have participated in consuming together. When man learned to hunt and moved to a hunting preference, instead of a hunter-gatherer orientation, he would have done this in groups. They'd have had to hunt in teams, and killing an animal for nutrients would have been a group attempt. Hunting and killing an animal meant food not simply for the individual, but for the clan, and would have been cause for festivity when the hunters brought the food home. 

 

If they fetched the animal back to the clan, it would have taken a group effort to skin the animal and tear or cut the meat from the carcass. Everybody would have taken part in this, and subsequently, shared in the payoffs of their work. 

 

It’s simple to see how, once we didn’t have to hunt for meat, but could buy it, the need for gathering and festivity was deeply ingrained in our natures. We observe the seasons and life’s events with loved ones and friends, and as those early celebrations involved eating meat, that tradition has kept going to modern times.

 

Hints for a Vegetarian Thanksgiving Day

If you’re hosting Thanksgiving Day at your home and are expecting vegetarian guests this year, don’t fret about preparing one large meat-eating meal, and a different separate vegetarian meal. Most vegetarians don't require a ‘meat equivalent’ at Thanksgiving. Yes, traditionally Thanksgiving Day has largely been about the food. But more significantly it’s about loved ones, togetherness, happiness and serenity. And if this is your 1st Thanksgiving Day after transitioning to a vegetarian life-style, try a few of these ideas to incorporate healthy food preparation into your meal that your vegetarian guests, and you as host, will be grateful for this Thanksgiving: 

 

Ø  Bake a little stuffing outside of the turkey. 

Ø  Make a little portion of vegetarian gravy. 

Ø  Keep cooking utensils separate to forestall "cross-contamination" between meat foods and vegetarian foods. 

Ø  When recipes are adaptable, utilize substitutions like vegetarian broth, soy margarine (the preparations without whey are suitable for vegans), soya milk, and kosher marshmallows which are made without gelatin. 

Ø  Utilize vegetable oils rather than animal fats for frying, and veggie shortening like Crisco for pie crust. 

Ø  Read ingredients lists cautiously on pre-packed foods, being aware of terms like gelatin, whey, and "natural flavors" that may be animal-derived. 

Ø  Fix plenty of veggie and fruit side dishes, but leave them plain. 

Ø  Provide plenty of breads, beverages, fresh fruits, and non-gelatin desserts, which are appropriate without modification for most vegetarians. 

Ø  Invite your vegetarian guest to cook a “Tofurky” or vegetarian ‘turkey equivalent’ entrée to share with you the rest of your guests, or if you’re hosting Thanksgiving Day, fix a small one. Your meat-eating guests may just be curious enough to wish to try it! 

Ø  Ask your vegetarian guest for assistance, tips, or recipes that would complement their vegetarian choice. You might find that your guest offers to help out in the kitchen or bring a dish from home. Please don't take a dish from home as an insult to your cooking; take it as a want to share traditions at Thanksgiving Day. Even meat-eating homes put up benefit from a healthy, nutrient-dense vegetarian recipe idea any time of the year! 

Ø  First and foremost - make gobs of new, delicious (not overly cooked) veggies that are perfectly in season like squashes, sweet potatoes, and green beans, and so forth.