I just read a very interesting article about the human brain here and was really quite struck by two of the points they made:

#2 Take care of your nutrition. Did you know that the brain only weights 2% of body mass but consumes over 20% of the oxygen and nutrients we intake? As a general rule, you don’t need expensive ultra-sophisticated nutritional supplements, just make sure you don’t stuff yourself with the “bad stuff.”

I really had no idea that our brains consume so much more than their fair share of oxygen and nutrients! Pretty amazing… Much like the processors on computers and how they consume the majority of the power as well.

#4 Practice positive, future-oriented thoughts until they become your default mindset and you look forward to every new day in a constructive way. Stress and anxiety, no matter whether induced by external events or by your own thoughts, actually kills neurons and prevent the creation of new ones. You can think of chronic stress as the opposite of exercise: it prevents the creation of new neurons.

The other points were good, too, but this point on stress really struck a chord with me. In the last few years before moving to photography full time, I was in a really stressful medical management position and I remember feeling on many occasions that the stress was affecting my brain’s abilities negatively. Pretty scary!

That’s just one more great reason to love our profession of photography. Unless you photograph school kids for yearbooks day in and day out, there’s really a lot of variety in what we do. Every session, every season, every day really, is different so there’s not a lot of “mindlessness” to it and I really love that.