Three keys to survive and thrive on Black Friday
Music can help you handle the madness. Here are some tips.
The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year.
Stores offer steep discounts to get people started on their Christmas shopping, and people use all that turkey-energy from the night before to battle over the limited stock on the shelves.
And to the victors go serious savings!
If I need to buy a TV, I’m saving hundreds of dollars doing it on Black Friday.
And if I wait until Black Friday to buy all my big-box items for the year, I’m now saving into the thousands.
That makes it worth it to figure out how to get this day down right.
Do your research
You gotta know what you want, before you go in.
You gotta know your targets.
Sure, you may have to think on your feet, if you get unlucky.
But Black Friday done right should be just the execution stage of a plan, since the stores tell you the deals way ahead of time.
The tough part is making decisions. What do you need? What do you want?
What is the most I can do with the money I want to spend?
Sorting through all the deals and considering all the possibilities is draining.
It can even feel like doing work after the work day is done.
Brain.fm’s Focus music can help you stave off fatigue and power through.
People love it during the workday, but it can just as well help you do serious deal-hunting.
In fact, the sustained-attention experiments we use to test our music have important similarities to dealhunting online: You have to decide, for a large number of items viewed one by one, if the item is high value or low value, but the task is boring because high value targets are rare (“ ...no, no, no, no, no, no, YES!, no, no, no…”).
Staying on the ball for this kind of task is easier if you have the right kind of music going in the background!
You can read about these studies here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06909
Wake up right
That means on time, refreshed, ready for battle.
Brain.fm can help you with this by using our new ‘Sleep and Wake’ functionality: You just set the number of hours you want to sleep, and instead of an annoying alarm clock, you’ll awake to gentle but energizing music. We think of it as the musical equivalent of an espresso shot.
And this comes after a full course of sleep music, so your sleeping and waking experience lead seamlessly from one to the other.
Unwind afterward
If you’ve done things right you’ve squeezed a ton of good value out of the day, and you had to work hard for it!
So now its time to take a break.
Chill out so you can enjoy your victory.
Brain.fm can help with this too. Our Relax and Meditate functions are designed to ease you out of a tense and wound-up mental state, and settle into something more comfortable.
Unlike most music, which is made to grab you and dominate your attention, Brain.fm does its thing without being annoying or in-your-face.
So I've shown three simple ways music can be used to make life easier, before, during and after Black Friday.
But notice how these things really aren't specific to that day!
1) Doing good work, 2) getting good sleep, and 3) knowing how to unwind.
Black Friday is an extreme day that might require extreme preparedness, but if music can help out there, why not use music that way for the other 364 days of the year?
Written by
Kevin J.P. Woods, Ph.D.
Director of Science, Brain.fm