As respects your question about emotional and impulse control, there are a variety of interesting psychology books on this topic. Controlling your impulses and emotion is a difficult task but a very important one, and doing so is correlated with income, health, etc.
1. One strategy for controlling your emotions is to practice meditation which focuses on blocking out all distractions. Meditation apparently works and is correlated with stress relief and increased concentration. There are books and blogs on meditation and how it can help you.
2. Try reading difficult-but-too-difficult material. Harder stuff than the typical sports and hip hop blogs.
3. Another strategy involves "temptation bundling", which economist Katherine Milkman developed to help herself and others achieve their goals. Read this article entitled, "Using the Hunger Games to Make Healthier Choices".
4. I also subscribe to various psychological tactics to manage my impulses, the majority of these strategies I take from academic studies or books like Thinking Fast and Slow by Israeli psychologist Daniel Kaheman.
For example, When I feel an intense and uncontrollable urge to do something disadvantageous like overeating, I picture my mind as a stove that's hot to the touch. I then imagine myself doing whatever I want to do, and experiencing the pleasure from doing so, and in a way my mind "cools down". I subsequently have less of an interest in sating that urge in real life, likely because I are visualizing what it did for me last time (usually nothing but blind satisfaction). This is a cool strategy for managing your impulses.
5. Another strategy is to research books on impulse and emotional control.
The Marshmallow Test
Mastering Self-Control
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It
6. I surmise the key to improving your mind is to challenge it. The best way to do this is to undertake challenges that are hard enough to make you think but not so hard that you give up. I took up music lessons last year (I bought a cheap flute), which is correlated with increased math understanding, and meditation (download a book torrent), which is connected to stress relief. I also do math, statistics and economics lessons on Khan Academy, which interests me because economics involves predictions and math doesn't come easy to me. I have since re-learnt most of my alegra curriculum and I'm about to enroll in a calculus class at my school. On my downtime I go to Luminosity and play some of their mind games as well.
