Chris Loper has been writing about self-improvement and helping busy adults with habit formation since 2017. He also writes an education blog for parents and students for Northwest Educational Services. Along with Greg Smith, Chris is the cocreator of Parenting for Academic Success, a series of transformative classes that create empowered parents, confident students, and harmonious families. His most recent endeavor combines his academic and habit-formation expertise to help students thrive in college. Visit SmartCollegeHabits.com to learn more. In 2021, Chris published a humorous memoir titled Wood Floats and Other Brilliant Observations, a book that blends crazy stories with practical life lessons. He lives in Issaquah, WA where he is the owner of South Cove Tutoring.
“Wait. You do what?!” “I tape my mouth shut at night.” “Why?!” Great question. I’ll tell you why. Breathing: The Lost Fundamental “We can live without food for weeks and water for days, but air for just a few brief minutes. While we spend a great deal of time and attention on what we eat and drink, we pay practically no attention to the air we breathe.” –Patrick McKeown1 Long-time… Read More »The Benefits of Taping Your Mouth Shut at Night
In my breakdown of willpower, I discussed “The Great Willpower Debate” – an ongoing disagreement among psychologists about the nature of willpower. Long story short: Some researchers have found that willpower is a finite resource that gets depleted as you use it. If you use willpower for one task, you’ll have less for the next task.1 Meanwhile, other researchers have found that using willpower for one task can actually boost… Read More »Warming Up Your Willpower Muscle
“The fact that some choice is good doesn’t necessarily mean that more choice is better.” –Barry Schwartz1 Many people believe that creativity flourishes under absolute freedom. Arguing that constraints limit the possibility of ideas. They bring up the Soviet Union, which placed strict limits on expression, and rightly point out that creativity was impoverished artistically, technologically, and economically. But there is another line of thinking, less popular, that argues in… Read More »Constraints Help Creativity
“Flow is an optimal state of consciousness, a peak state where we both feel our best and perform our best. It is a transformation available to anyone, anywhere, provided that certain initial conditions are met. Everyone from assembly-line workers in Detroit to jazz musicians in Algeria to software designers in Mumbai rely on flow to drive performance and accelerate innovation. And it’s quite a driver. Researchers now believe flow sits… Read More »How to Get Into Flow at Work and at Home