7 Bizarre Habits Backed by Science to Hack Your Brain

🕐9 min read

Quick question: what do Julius Caesar, Salvador Dalí, and a 2014 psychology lab at the University of Michigan have in common? All three stumbled onto tricks your brain still uses to dodge stress and get more done — decades or millennia before anyone put a name to it. A 2019 University of Michigan study found that a single tweak to how you talk to yourself in your own head can cut measured anxiety by roughly 50% in a stressful task. That’s not a wellness-blog exaggeration — that’s peer-reviewed data. So no, this isn’t another “drink more water and journal about gratitude” list. These seven habits are odd on purpose, backed by research with actual sample sizes, and — I’ll admit it upfront — a couple of them made me feel ridiculous the first time I tried them in my own kitchen at 6:45 a.m.

9 min read

• 1870: French physiologist Paul Bert documents the mammalian dive reflex
• 1726: Benjamin Franklin starts his 13-virtue nightly tracker
• 1948: Dalí publishes his spoon-drop napping method
• 1997: Loughborough University proves the “coffee nap” isn’t a myth
• 2014: Kross & Ayduk publish the third-person self-talk study at Michigan
• 2018: University of Roehampton links backward walking to memory recall

1. The 90-Second Cold Face Dunk

In 1870, Paul Bert described what we now call the mammalian dive reflex — the same wiring that lets seals hold their breath for 20 minutes kicks in the moment cold water hits your face. Your heart rate drops 10–25%, blood shifts toward your core organs, and your vagus nerve gets a jolt strong enough to interrupt a panic spiral mid-sentence. A 2000 study out of Charles University in Prague (Šrámek et al., Journal of Applied Physiology) found that dunking in 14°C water spiked norepinephrine by over 500% and metabolic rate by 350%. That’s not a placebo effect — that’s your autonomic nervous system slamming a reset button.

I tested this for four weeks straight, filling a mixing bowl with ice water every morning before coffee. The first three days felt like a mild assault. By week two, I noticed I wasn’t reaching for my phone in that jittery, doom-scrolling way during my 9 a.m. slump — the dunk seemed to front-load the alertness I used to get from caffeine. Wim Hof’s modern following (and the 2014 Radboud University study by Kox et al. published in PNAS, which showed subjects could consciously suppress inflammatory response) is really just Paul Bert’s 150-year-old discovery with better marketing and an ice bath sponsorship deal.

Fact-check note: the dive reflex is strongest in water at or below 15°C (59°F); a lukewarm splash won’t trigger the same vagal response, so don’t bother if your tap water runs warm.

Wim Hof’s modern following (and the 2014 Radboud University study by Kox et al.

2. Talking to Yourself — In the Third Person

Julius Caesar wrote his entire war memoir, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (circa 52 BCE), referring to himself as “Caesar” the whole way through — “Caesar ordered his men to advance” instead of “I ordered.” He probably just thought it sounded properly imperial. He had no idea he was accidentally performing a cognitive trick that Ethan Kross and Özlem Ayduk at the University of Michigan would validate 2,000 years later.

Their 2014 study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, had participants prepare a stressful speech while coaching themselves using either “I” statements or their own name in the third person (“Ozlem, you can do this”). The third-person group showed measurably lower activity in brain regions tied to threat and rumination, and rated themselves as less anxious afterward. LeBron James does this constantly in interviews — “LeBron’s gotta be better in the fourth quarter” — and sports commentators mock him for it, not realizing he’s running a documented anxiety-reduction protocol in real time.

Try it during your next tense email or hard conversation: silently coach yourself by name instead of “I.” It feels stilted for about ten seconds, then it just works — you get enough psychological distance to think instead of spiral.

3. The 20-Minute Coffee Nap

Winston Churchill was militant about his afternoon nap, writing in a 1936 essay that “you must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures.” He napped through the Blitz. Salvador Dalí took it further, describing in his 1948 book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship how he’d nap in a chair holding a spoon over a metal plate — the moment he drifted into hypnagogic sleep, the spoon dropped, the clatter woke him, and he’d immediately paint whatever fragment of dream-logic he’d caught.

The science backs the timing more than the spoon theatrics. A 1997 Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre study by Horne and Reyner had sleep-deprived drivers either drink coffee, nap for 15 minutes, do both, or neither — then tested them in a driving simulator. The coffee-plus-nap group made dramatically fewer lane-drift errors than either group alone. The trick is timing: caffeine takes roughly 20 minutes to hit your bloodstream, which is almost exactly how long it takes to complete one light sleep cycle without tipping into deep sleep and waking up groggy.

My version: black coffee, timer set for 20 minutes, eyes closed on the couch, not the bed (beds invite 90-minute accidents). I skip this on days I’ve already slept eight hours — it does nothing useful if you’re not actually sleep-deprived, and napping past 25 minutes will leave you groggier than when you started.

Fact-check note: the dive reflex is strongest in water at or below 15°C (59°F); a lukewarm splash won’t trigger the same vagal response, so don’t bother if your tap water runs warm.

4. Walking Backward for 10 Minutes

This one sounds like a joke until you see the numbers. A 2018 study at the University of Roehampton in London, led by Dr. Aleksandar Aksentijevic, had participants either walk forward or backward for a short distance, then complete a word-recall test. The backward-walking group recalled roughly 39% more words on average. The leading theory ties into “retrospective time perception” — moving backward through space seems to prime your brain to also process time and memory in reverse, essentially warming up your recall circuitry.

There’s a whole competitive subculture around this most people have never heard of: retro running (corsa all’indietro) has held official Italian championships since the 1980s, with backward marathon records under 4 hours. Nobody’s claiming those runners have better memories, but the parallel is fun to sit with.

I do a 10-minute backward walk around my block before writing sessions instead of scrolling through notes trying to “get in the mood.” It looks odd — a neighbor once asked if I’d lost something on the sidewalk — but I retain names, numbers, and outline points noticeably better afterward. Skip this one on uneven pavement or in the dark, obviously; the memory boost isn’t worth a twisted ankle.

Skip this one on uneven pavement or in the dark, obviously; the memory boost isn’t worth a twisted ankle.

5. Scheduled, Deliberate Boredom

Isaac Newton spent the plague years of 1665–1666 quarantined at his family’s Woolsthorpe Manor after Cambridge shut down. With nothing to do and no lectures to attend, he developed early calculus and his theory of gravity — historians now call it his “annus mirabilis,” or year of wonders. He wasn’t productivity-hacking. He was catastrophically bored, and his brain filled the silence with math.

A 2014 Penn State study by Karen Gasper and Brianna Middlewood, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, deliberately induced boredom in participants using a dull video, then tested divergent thinking (the “how many uses can you find for a brick” type task). The bored group outperformed both a neutral-mood group and a distressed-mood group. Boredom, it turns out, activates the brain’s default mode network — the same system responsible for daydreaming, mental time travel, and creative leaps.

I block out 15 minutes daily with zero input: no phone, no podcast, no book, just sitting or staring out a window. It felt like wasted time for the first week. Now it’s where half my article ideas come from — including the backward-walking bit above, which I only remembered mid-stare on a Tuesday.

6. A One-Page Nightly Habit Tracker

Benjamin Franklin started tracking 13 personal virtues — things like Temperance, Order, and Frugality — in a small leather notebook in 1726, marking a dot next to any virtue he’d violated that day. He kept this up, on and off, for over 50 years, and still admitted in his autobiography he “fell far short” of the perfection he aimed for. That honest, ongoing tracking — not the perfection — is the actual habit worth stealing.

Ryder Carroll turned this same mechanic into the modern Bullet Journal method in 2013, and habit trackers are now one of its most-copied layouts (if you want a deeper breakdown of layout options, our guide on building a habit tracker that actually sticks covers grid versus calendar formats in detail). The mechanism is straightforward: writing something down by hand engages more of your motor cortex than tapping an app, and research on the “generation effect” (first documented by Slamecka and Graf in 1978) shows information you physically produce sticks better than information you just read.

My version is one index card, seven boxes, five habits. Franklin used a leather-bound notebook; I use a $1.50 card from the drugstore. Same dot, same honesty, same 50-year track record behind the concept.

7. Five Minutes of Direct Sunlight Within 30 Minutes of Waking

In 1903, Danish physician Niels Finsen won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for treating lupus vulgaris with concentrated light therapy — one of the earliest scientific confirmations that light does measurable things to the human body beyond letting you see. It took another century for sleep scientists to pin down exactly why morning light matters so much for daily function.

Your cortisol awakening response peaks roughly 30–45 minutes after you open your eyes, and direct light exposure during that window helps anchor your suprachiasmatic nucleus — the brain’s master clock — to the actual day-night cycle outside your window. Harvard Medical School sleep researcher Dr. Charles Czeisler’s work on circadian entrainment shows that skipping this morning light cue and going straight to a lit phone screen indoors sends your body a confused, delayed signal about when the day even started.

I stand on my porch, no sunglasses, coffee in hand, for five minutes before I open my laptop — even on cloudy days, outdoor light is still 10 to 50 times brighter than typical indoor lighting. It sounds too simple to matter. It’s the single habit on this list that took me the least effort and produced the most noticeable change in how fast I actually wake up.

Putting It Together

Start with three: the sunlight window, the coffee nap, and the boredom block. Those three cost nothing, take under 30 minutes combined, and have the strongest research behind them. Add the cold dunk and the habit tracker in week two once the first three feel automatic. Skip backward walking if you’ve got any balance or vision issues — the memory benefit isn’t worth a fall. If you only try one thing from this whole list, make it the morning sunlight — it’s the closest thing here to a Nobel Prize-backed free lunch.

Do I need to do all seven habits every single day to see results?

No — the research behind each one measured that specific habit in isolation, not as a bundled routine. Most people notice a change from morning sunlight and the coffee nap within a week, while the boredom habit and cold dunk tend to show benefits after two to three weeks of consistency. Pick two or three that fit your actual schedule rather than forcing all seven at once.

Is the cold water face dunk safe for everyone?

It’s generally safe for healthy adults, but anyone with a heart condition, arrhythmia, or high blood pressure should check with a doctor first, since the dive reflex does cause a real, measurable drop in heart rate. Start with cool water rather than ice water the first few times to see how your body responds.

Why does talking to myself in the third person feel so awkward?

It feels odd because you’re deliberately breaking a lifelong habit of narrating your own experience in first person, which creates a brief moment of psychological friction. That friction is actually the mechanism at work — the 2014 Kross and Ayduk study found the slight distance is exactly what reduces emotional reactivity. Most people report it feeling natural after using it consistently for about a week.

Sources & further reading

• 7 (en.wikipedia.org)
• Download (7-zip.org)
• 7 (number) (simple.wikipedia.org)
• Changing Data Sources in the Age of Machine Learning for Official Statistics (arxiv.org)