BBC Psychology wrote:Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology at Princeton, explains what happens when we worry about not having enough of something..
BBC Psychology delivers "Why worrying about the present could affect your future" in three minutes. In this video Professor Eldar Shafir explains that working hard to solve specific problems also narrows our focus, makes us dumber, forgetful, and causes us to underperform.
BBC 2 Twinstitute Episode 1 (minute 12 to minute 17) demonstrates the impact that intense focus has on memory. The TV show split many identical twins into two opposing teams. Both groups had the same total time to memorise the information, but only one group needed to complete all their preparation in a single intense cramming session. The more relaxed group demonstrated 40% memory performance increase over their siblings.
Both videos are available online, and both suggest you can be smarter and more successful by planning ahead and staying relaxed. Does that mean eating chocolate can make us smarter?
There might be other ways to becoming smarter. Travis Bradbury says you can be smarter by wearing spectacles as this impacts the cognitive bias of others, but I am not sure this is clinically proven.