10 Ways to a Healthy Brain

Here are 10 ways to look after your brain so that you stay alert, read and understand faster, remember more, think clearly and are more creative:

1.      Avoid stress: Are you in control of your life? Do you plan ahead and make a to-do list every day? An orderly life is the best way to avoid feeling out of control and depressed. Long-term stress, anxiety and depression have been linked with an increased risk of dementia and Alzheimer's disease. After a hard day’s work learn to relax like meditating or doing  Tai Chi.

2.      Sleep: A good night’s sleep refreshes your mind. Lack of sleep ages the brain. According to  lead author Jane Ferrie, Ph.D., senior researcher at University College London Medical School sleep regenerates neurons that enable the brain to function optimally,

3.      Exercise: Avoid a sedentary lifestyle. Doing aerobic exercises daily such as walking and jogging increases more blood supply, more nutrients, and more oxygen to your brain. When you do a workout, you also enjoy the fresh air and sunshine in the great outdoors.

4.      Eat nutritiously: Eat brain-healthy snacks such as dark chocolate and mixed nuts.  Adopt a nutrient-rich diet. Take a multi-vitamin-mineral tablet every day. Ginseng, ginkgo Biloba and green tea are all good for your brain.

5.      Use your brain: Challenge your mind and learn new things. Do reading and learn more about technology.  Solve mathematics problems and play computer games, puzzles, crosswords, riddles, chess, and other board games. Use it or lose it.

6.      Maintain positive emotions: Choose happiness and stay cheerful. Positive emotions are less likely to develop cognitive impairment,

7.      Avoid toxic substances: Avoid smoking and drinking in excess. Get away from the polluted environment.

8.      Water: Water is 85 percent of your brain weight. Lack of water leads to dehydration, making it hard to concentrate. Drink water throughout the day, first thing in the morning when you get up and last thing before you go to sleep.

9.      Healthy relationships: Do you have strong connections socially? Strong relationships have less mental decline. There is mutual support in giving and receiving. 

10.  Avoid head injuries: Accidents do happen. Take care to avoid slips, trips, and falls.

In a nutshell, improve your brain health by doing physical exercise, eating a balanced diet, manage stress, and exercise the brain.

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7 Effective Ways to be Brain Healthy

Brain fitness – 15 Healthy Habits

7 Effective Ways to be Brain Healthy

The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess. It's billions of nerve cells-called neurons-lie in a tangled web that displays cognitive powers far exceeding any of the silicon machines we have built to mimic it. ~ William F. Allman

 This is an extract from the book, Brain Longevity, authored by Dharma Singh Khalsa, M.D. with Cameron Stauth. I have summarized briefly here the 7 important areas to promote a healthy brain: 

1.      Nutrition: As fat and sugar are the average American’s diet, the intake of healthy food has declined. Therefore, Dharma recommends a low-fat diet, high in complex carbohydrates, with adequate protein. He also recommends multiple vitamin/mineral tablet (with magnesium, selenium and zinc), vitamins E, B complex, C, coenzyme Q-10, ginseng, ginkgo biloba, choline-rich lecithin, chlorophyll-based “green drink”. Omega-3 fatty acids are also recommended though it is not mentioned in the book.  Eat less processed foods and red meats and more fruits and vegetables. Sit down, eat slowly and enjoy eating.

2.      Connect: It is stated in the book that the physical effects of stress can be greatly reduced if a person has a social support system—friends or family. So, get connected and join groups and social organizations locally. Do not retire from life, but be more sociable and live life fully.

3.      Physically active: The simplest thing you can do is walk. Dancing is also good for you. One important thing is aerobic exercise; it is to feed the brain with the necessary blood and oxygen and promotes cognitive functions. Do you know why strokes occur? Strokes occur when the supply of blood to an area of the brain is shut off long enough to kill that area. Brain cells are very vulnerable to impaired circulation; they can survive for only one to two minutes without the oxygen and glucose that blood provides.

4.      Spirituality: Meditate, do yoga, Tai Chi, pray or attend regularly a formal place of worship to get peace of mind.

5.      Mental stimulation: Learn a new language, read and write daily, play board games, visit new places, listen to classical music and solve problems.

6.      Manage stress: Learn to relax and slow down. Be in control of your daily life by doing less. According to the book, cortisol is one of the hormones secreted by the adrenal glands. It’s secreted in response to stress. In moderate amounts, cortisol is not harmful. But when produced in excess, day after day—as a result of chronic, unrelenting stress—this hormone is so toxic to the brain that it kills and injures cells by the billions.

 One important brain chemical that is depleted by chronic stress is the stimulating neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which not only helps ‘cement” memory but is also vital in helping you to maintain a positive, happy mood. It is an essential ingredient in your brain’s “pleasure pathway”.

7.      Positive mental attitude: Your thoughts control your endocrine system, and your endocrine system controls your emotions. The endocrine system releases the hormones that excite or depress you, and make you happy, sad, or angry. Always think positively and send positive signals to your brain so that you will be cheerful.   

The brain is the man; its health is essential for normal living; its disorders are surely the most profound of human miseries, and its destruction annihilates a person humanly, however intact his body. ~ H. Chandler Elliott

Brain fitness – 15 Healthy Habits

Your brain is like the CPU of your PC, the more powerful your CPU, the better is the functionality of your PC. Here are the beneficial habits to adopt so that your brain can perform at its peak:


1. Chew your food slowly: According to an expert in Japan when you chew your food, you increase the blood circulation in your brain and excite the brain’s activities.

2. Go under the sun: A Taiwanese doctor suggests that when you are under the sun you stimulate the growth of brain cells like the growth of your hair. The latest study, conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, found that people were almost three times as likely to have impaired cognition after gloomy weather compared to those in sunny climes.

3. Eat your breakfast: After sleeping for a night your blood sugar is at its lowest level. Take breakfast to restore the blood sugar level to allow your brain to function effectively.

4. Safety belt and crash helmet: To avoid damage to your brain, wear your seatbelt when you are driving and when you are riding a motorcycle wear your crash helmet.

5. Drink more water: 85% of your brain weight consists of water. Insufficient intake of water disrupts the thinking process.

6. Try new things: Do something new every day to excite your short-term memory.

7. Brisk walking: When you are active physically every day your brain will be more alert and function better.

8. Deep breathing: Deep breathing calms your mind so that you can think clearly.

9. Watch less TV: You don’t use your brain when you watch TV. Researchers in Australian have found out that those with better memory watch less than one hour of TV every day.

10. Avoid processed food: Eating too much-processed food upsets brain chemistry. Your brain needs real food – fruits, vegetable nuts, fish, and eggs.

11. Give up smoking: Scientists report that smoking damages and shrinks the brain

12. Avoid polluted environment: A study carried out in Germany on women who had lived at the same address for at least 20 years found those near busy roads were more likely to show signs of mild cognitive impairment, early memory problems that may lead to dementia.


13. Sleep and rest: Our brain is like a piece of machine. It cannot function continuously. Lack of sleep will accelerate the permanent death of brain cells. Taking breaks from time to time is necessary to rest your brain and clear its clutter.

14. Think: This is what your brain is meant for. The more you use it the better it is. Don’t allow your brain to shrink without stimulating thoughts

15. Conversation: Strike an interesting and intellectual conversation with someone often to make your brain function efficiently.


Your brain is like your car, it is meant to be driven and not to be kept at home, use it regularly to maintain your mental sharpness and. nourish your brain for peak performance.

7 Tips to Keep Your Brain Young

Brain

The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.     

Daniel Goleman

Contrary to popular belief, brainpower does not diminish as you grow older. In fact, you can be mentally alert by using your brain more often and creatively. Here are some of the ways to maintain your mental faculty:


1. Use your brain: Use it or lose it. The more you use it the better it is. Participate in intellectual activities such as learning new words, playing challenging games (Scrabble, bridge, chess, crossword puzzles, and jigsaw puzzles), reading, taking up a musical instrument. repairing something and solving complex problems. According to scientists from UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, anything that is intellectually challenging can serve as a kind of stimulus to growing dendrites and making connections.

2. Chewing gum: When you are chewing you increase the blood flow to your brain. According to research the blood flow to the brain between senior citizens with a full set of teeth and toothless is 30%

3. Things to avoid: To protect your brainpower do not cut short on your sleep. Avoid polluted environment, stress, sedentary lifestyle, too much alcohol and tobacco, social isolation, and watching too much TV.

4. Exercise: Physical exercise or just walking for half an hour three times a week can improve your concentration, learning abilities, and abstract reasoning by 15 %. Aerobic exercise forces extra oxygen into the brain which boosts mental powers and promotes the growth of new brain cells

5. Smart ways to use your brain: Actively engaging your brain. Better memory can be achieved when you pay attention and making an effort to remember something especially things that you are interested in. As an example, reading and listening are passive in nature; we have to take notes, write brief summaries, and organize key ideas in order to remember.

6. Use your hands: According to research when you are active manually, it stimulates blood flow to your brain. It is beneficial to comprehension, memory, and thinking process. One such activity is to close your eyes and manipulate some control buttons.

7. Food to boost your brainpower: Eat a high carbohydrate breakfast to supply energy to your brain. Include fish in your diet. Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables. Antioxidants found in fruits and vegetables help neutralize free radicals, molecules that can damage brain cells. Consume food rich in iron such as lean meats and beans. Iron helps transport oxygen to brain cells.

Do the right things to stimulate your brain for optimal mental performance.

Baby Boomers – Tips for Brain Fitness

Baby Boomers

According to an article in the New Sunday Times, there are ways to maintain your mental agility at old age. Here are the findings:


• A panel of 30 experts from the United States and Europe recently issued a consensus statement on what we do know about maintaining brain fitness (which includes not only memory but also reasoning, attention, and speed of processing). The verdict was that three things are crucial: physical exercise, mental challenges, and good health habits in general.

• A trail in the journal Nature by Dr. Arthur Kramer, a neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found not just slower declines but actual improvements in working memory, attention, and executive skills in older adults (average age 72) after six months of aerobic exercise programs – specifically, 45 minutes to an hour of walking, three times a week

• Exercise increases blood flow, encourages the formation of new synapses, and reverses some of the age-related declines in brain volume.

• As neuroscientists like to say, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain. That would include maintaining healthy blood sugar and blood pressure levels. A study last December in the Annals of Neurology showed that controlling blood sugar, even in non-diabetic adults, can help prevent deterioration in a part of the brain that’s necessary for memory formation

• Another paper published in the Archives of Neurology in February by scientists a Columbia University found that eating a heart-healthy Mediterranean diet – rich in fish, vegetables, whole grains fruits, legumes, and unsaturated fats – lowered the risk of mild cognitive impairment over 4 1/2 years by as much as 28 percent.

• The brain is a use-it-or-lose I type of organ. Synaptic connections that aren’t firing will weaken. “If you want lots of improvement, you have to do mental cross-training,” said Dr. K. Warner Schaie, a professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. In short, engage in many types of mental activity. Do crosswords, Sudoku, acrostics, play bridge, read books, join clubs, get into debates – anything to keep the mind alive and engaged in new and interesting tasks. If the activity includes social interaction, so much the better. Or take up a new hobby, a new language, or a new instrument that will challenge the brain in an entirely different way, preferably for years.


How about participating in a Tai Chi group and joining a Chinese language class?


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