Neuroplastic Design: How to Design Your Life for Beneficial Stimuli

You are what you think. Just as we pay attention to the food we eat, should we also pay attention to the stimuli we consume? Here is a framework to get started.

Apr 14, 2025

At your deepest, most essential core, you are your mind: your thoughts, your memories, your understanding of the world. You are what you think.

And yet our minds constantly change: the neuroplasticity of the brain means that as we experience stimuli our brain responds by making, reenforcing or weakening connections.

We reinforce existing connections compounding the new stimuli with the old. We let unused connections fade. We connect new ideas to old. In short, all stimuli change our brains~~and by extension our biology~~even if by just a little bit.

This is a wild idea. What we experience in the world changes us physically. Some of those experiences we can’t control. Others we can.

We tell ourselves that we are some how separate from our experiences and that we can manage to stay unchanged by the stimuli we take in. And while we can take steps to resist outside influence, we cannot totally prevent outside stimuli from ever so slightly changing us. We change as we experience the world. So what kind of experiences do we need to have to change for the better?

I wrote about this idea a few newsletters ago, but I wanted to revisit it.

So just as we try to pay attention to the food we eat for the health of our bodies, should we also pay attention to the stimuli we consume? Should we strive to experience stimuli that improve us?

Should we strive to offer others stimuli (data, stories, text, paintings, dance, food) that helps them as well? Do we have a responsibility to surround ourselves with beneficial stimuli? Do we have a responsibility to examine the stimuli we produce to ensure it’s beneficial to all who consume it? Or does the responsibility stay with the consumer? Or somehow both?

What would beneficial even mean? Is it different for everyone?

Beautiful?
Complex?
Meaningful?
Elucidating?
Funny?
Poignant?

What type of stimuli is most beneficial? And how might we seek and receive more of it? How might we as artists, designers, and writers create more of it for others?

How can we cultivate our ability to take note of it when we find it? How might we strive to create more of it?

We can strive to create story, art, and design that helps more than it hurts; to share ideas that broaden and unlock the minds of others and equip them to solve problems, uncover truth, or feel deeply.

With this goal in mind, I gathered some resources (see Science appendix) and then synthesized a framework to help you attempt to have more beneficial stimuli in your life.

Beneficial Stimuli Framework

Notice: Identify Beneficial Stimuli – Choose consciously.
Keep: Intentional Reinforcement – Deepen neural pathways.
Reduce: Intentional Reduction — choose which areas to spend less time
Joypower vs Willpower: Actively choose beneficial alternatives to detrimental experiences.
Augment: Strengthen the experience. Connect the dots.
Environment: – Engender and beneficial environment.
Assess & Adjust: – Adapt and improve your strategy.

Notice

Start by identifying moments where you sense you’ve experienced beneficial stimuli. Take note of it. Do the same for moments when you experience something that you sense is not beneficial stimuli. It could be social, educational, physical, environmental, or anything else. Start by noticing.

Keep

Periodically go through the moments where you felt the experience provided beneficial stimuli and mentally place that in a “keep pile” in your mind. Then, start to imagine how you can have more of those experiences in your life.

Reduce

Conversely, for the detrimental stimuli, try to find ways to spend less time exposed to the stimuli. Try to design ways to reduce the magnitude or duration of the stimuli. Design a list of techniques you can draw upon when the detrimental stimuli is unavoidable. Options: disarm, deflect, disavow, or simply decrease. For instance, if watching garbage TV leaves you feeling numb or sad, reduce the time you spend doing it. If you notice you have a name for a detrimental activity (like “doomscrolling”) then give yourself an alternative that you can do instead. So, instead of saying “don’t doomscroll” say “do read a book”

I call this technique Joypower.

Joypower vs. Willpower

Actively choose beneficial alternatives to detrimental experiences. Don’t try to rely of willpower. Instead, harness an even great power: Joypower! to pick something that you love doing or that you’ve noticed is beneficial.

Augment

When you find yourself experiencing something beneficial, make the most of it. Intentionally try to remember the feelings you are having and tell yourself, “remember how good this makes you feel” to strengthen the pathways. Search your mind for connections between this beneficial stimuli and other experiences in your life, no matter how weird or distant. Connect as many dots as you can. Relate this experience to as many other experiences as you can. Strengthen the position of this experience so it both generalizes and expands as builds influences over your mind.

Examples:

I felt great when I was well prepared. What else can I prepare in advance?
I did really well at work today, what was different? Ahh I got great sleep last night…. How can I get great sleep again tonight?
I love the complex patterns in this ceiling tile. I’m going to look for other complex patterns in my environment. Pretty soon, I’ll start noticing these little mathematical poems everywhere.
Riding this horse makes me feel like I’m flying, or swining on vines through a dense but beautiful jungle.

Environment

Look for ways to design your environment to engender and augment beneficial stimuli. What do you need to change about your space?

Examples:

Feeling bad about over mindless eating —> remove snacks from cupboard, replace with books.
Feel mad at night after reading the news —> no news after dinner, leave devices in another room. Replace with music or drawing or calling a friend or books.
Feel sad about wasted potential —> clear away your desk. Make room for new ideas. Take one small (concrete) step towards something good.

Asses & Adjust

Just as your brain constantly changes, so do your requirements. So constantly pay attention, make note of what’s happening, and adjust.

A few to get you started.

Read a book
Go to a museum
Listen to new music
Print out a musical score and try to follow along, even if you can’t read music. Just try to follow the patterns and shapes.
Draw a picture
Call a friend
Give your self a writing challenge:
1. Describe a person without using adjectives
2. Write a cogent email without using the letters “e” or “i” or “k”
3. Listen to a dull conversation in a work meeting and try to pick words that rhyme with each word the dull person is saying. Try to choose words that also add up to a cogent sentence. This alone will strain your attention. The speaker will notice, and get happy, because someone is finally paying very close attention.
4. Write with both hands. One at the start of a sentence, the other at the end. Meet in the middle. Two pencils, one sheet of paper. Much delightful difficulty.
Go for a walk
Go for a run
Stretch or lift weights or work on your posture.
Challenge yourself to cook something humble, but do it WONDERFULLY.
Do your best to find out something interesting from someone you initially found dull or boring or unpleasant. Sometimes the right questions will unlock something interesting.
Design an unpractical object
Create a poster for a movie only your spouse or partner or closest friend would actually, authentically enjoy. Think hard about what they like.
Draw a shoe that tells the world what to think about you.
Invent a map of an imaginary world.
Study a new language. Take it seriously. Pretend you are a spy leaving for that country in two days.
Study a new area of math or science just for fun. Strive to apply it to something you are doing at work.
Assign musical notes to words and see if you can get your colleagues to play yankee doodle or Beethoven’s 5th without knowing it.
Tell your children a wonderful imaginary story.
Tell your spouse or partner a wonderful imaginary story. Strive to make them deeply happy.
Read a news article about something in which you are not an expert, try to distill an irreducible truth from the content and then apply it to something you do know.
Identify a new skill you’d like to learn, and learn it.
Build something
Cook with your kids.
Take a nonsense idea very seriously. I just dropped off my son for piano lessons, we were 7 mins early, so we filled the seven minutes with a bonkers, ridiculous, but very serious what-would-happen-if conversation. Ours was about what happens to air when you “stop time” can you move through the stopped air? Can you throw a baseball? Can you breathe? How does time not stop for you but for everything else. What is the limit of you-ness. etc. Seven minutes of laughter and fun. As he got out of the car he walked off super cool, then FROZE in mid-stride pretending to have been stopped in time, then cracked himself up as he walked in. We could have sat there disgruntled, but instead we went full joypower.

Your Turn

How about you? What do you want to try next? How will you attempt to design your life for more beneficial stimuli? Reply and let me know.

Science

Wait any science? Or just “claims” Here is a list of sources.

1. Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (2007)

An exploration of neuroplasticity through case studies demonstrating the brain’s ability to adapt and change.
Read online

2. Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (2013)

Discusses methods to harness neuroplasticity for cultivating lasting happiness by internalizing positive experiences.
Presentation slides

3. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990)

Introduces the concept of “flow,” a state of deep immersion and optimal performance in activities.
Read online

4. Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative (2017)

Investigates the positive effects of nature on human well-being and cognitive function.
Summary PDF

5. Rosenzweig, M.R., & Bennett, E.L. (1996). “Psychobiology of plasticity: Effects of training and experience on brain and behavior.” Behavioural Brain Research.

Examines how environmental enrichment influences brain plasticity and behavior.
Abstract

More sources:

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