Healthy Habits
1) Exercise: The Body
Exercise causes secretion of chemicals called endorphins. Endorphins can cure your pain (physical or mental), can be very soothing to your nervous sytem and are powerful natural antidepressants. So just go out for a walk or run for a little early in the morning, plus remember to make a break from your computer or desk taking a few minutes to do light yoga or tai-chi exercises at several ocassions in a day (the right way to breath is essential to our wellbeing), all that could be quite effective for your health. Break any sedentary patterns to avoid numbness in your limbs and mid body. Ultimately, sound body exercising will have a positive benefit for your brain.
2) Exercise: The Brain.
The best way to enhance your brain power is to keep it always active and at work. A brain exercise can be anything from reading well-written books (which increases all memory functions), solving a puzzle, memorizing phone numbers, finding deep meanings in a poem, to trying to solve intrincate mathematical formulas within the range of your level of education. And a major tip: Turn off the tv, or if you are too addicted to it (see our page about this), at the very least choose programming that challenges or boosts your intelligence. Watching gossip and trivial programming will downsize your brain functions, slowing down your cognitive capacities.
3) Check Over Your Food Habits
- You need to avoid those food items that can be harmful for your body (or at least reduce their intake as much as possible), mainly starches, sugar, grains and processed foods. Avoid any GM (genetically modified) foods. Nearly all of these foods are GM, and therefore best to avoid:
• Soy
• Corn
• Cottonseed
• Canola
It would also be wise to limit products made from these ingredients, such as vegetable oils, maltodextrin, and high-fructose corn syrup (don't be fooled by the biased 'studies' paid for by the corporated food industry). In fact, because corn and soy are so widely used in processed foods, at least 70 percent of the processed foods at your supermarket contain GM ingredients. That’s seven out of every 10 products!
And since most parts of the world are suffering from soil depletion, vegetables and fruits are lacking of the quality and quantity of the nutrients (vitamins and minerals) that they had a few decades ago.
Data from the US Department of Agriculture as recent as January 2009 documents that trend in vegetables. The average mineral content of vegetables such as cabbage, lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach has declined from 400 mg to less than 50 mg. In other words, to have the same amount of nutritional elements that your parents had in their salad bowl when their were teenagers, your salad bowl today must at least be ten times larger!
The decline in nutritional content is likely due to changes in farming methods that tend to focus heavily on a food's appearance and ability to be transported and stored effectively. Rather than focusing on vitamin content, food producers are more concerned with high yields, visually appealing product and disease resistance. How foods are cooked and processed may also play a role in diminishing nutrient content.
Since food, in the main, is no longer very nutritional, you can only resort to supplement your diets with extra vitamins and minerals. However, there are certain caveats to ensure that what you take is absorbed by your body. Don’t supplement indiscriminately because more isn’t always better; e.g. certain vitamins (vitamin E and A) can be toxic in high levels. An another thing: Don’t rely on the Recommended Daily Allowance. The RDAs are the minimum quantity of nutrient required to maintain metabolic balance or to prevent the development of a vitamin-deficiency disease. This single yardstick doesn’t take account of the needs of different cultural or ethnic groups, individual requirements or daily diets, or biochemical idiosyncrasies.
Check this list to know which are the necessary supplements recommended by nutrionists and food researchers.
4) Drink Enough Water
Our body is about 60% water. Lean muscle tissue contains about 75% water by weight. Blood contains 95% water, body fat contains 14% water and bone has 22% water. Skin also contains much water.
And guess what? The brain consist of 80% of water. And if you come to think about it, it is logic that the brain has such much water; its electric conductivity depends mainly of water.
So, it is just common sense to keep that percentage as balanced as possible. And in order to do that, we should drink enough water.
How much water we should drink? A good estimate is to take your body weight in pounds and divide that number in half. That gives you the number of ounces of water per day that you need to drink. For example, if you weigh 160 pounds, you should drink at least 80 ounces of water per day. If you exercise you should drink another eight ounce glass of water for every 20 minutes you are active. If you drink alcohol, you should drink at least an equal amount of water. When you are traveling on an airplane, it is good to drink eight ounces of water for every hour you are on board the plane. If you live in an arid climate, you should add another two servings per day. As you can see, your daily need for water can add up to quite a lot.
But water could be assimilated by the body not only in its liquid form: it comes from food too. Fruits are rich in water content, although they also have natural sugar.
Sports drinks contain electrolytes and may be beneficial, but just look out for added sugar and calories that you don't really need. And the salts they contained, if taken in excess, could contribute to the formation of kidney calculi in some people.
Juices are good because they have vitamins and nutrients. Caffeinated beverages will also add to your daily water need. Even though caffeine is a diuretic, if you regularly consume caffeine, your body will regulate itself to that diuretic effect.
But stay away from soda pops and soft drinks!
5) Sunlight Exposure
Sunlight baths will help synthesizing vitamins D and K in your body. And why is that so important and what has to do with your brain health?
Researchers from the Peninsula Medical School, the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan, have for the first time identified a relationship between Vitamin D, the "sunshine vitamin", and cognitive impairment in a large-scale study of older people. The importance of these findings lies in the connection between cognitive function and dementia: people who have impaired cognitive function are more likely to develop dementia.
Compared to people with optimum levels of Vitamin D, those with the lowest levels are more than twice as likely to be cognitively impaired. Vitamin D is also important in maintaining bone health, in the absorption of calcium and phosphorus, and in helping our immune system. In humans, Vitamin D comes from three main sources: exposure to sunlight, foods such as oily fish rich in Omega 3, and foods that are fortified with vitamin D (such as milk and organic cereals).
If you live in regions where sunlight is handy, 20 minutes a day of exposing not only face, neck and arms but also the abdomen, represents a energy flow into your body that helps processing hormones and enzimes.
And if you live in regions of the world with few sunny days, other than flying ASAP to the Caribbean, you can buy full spectrum light bulbs, but make sure that the spectrum covers also UVB light emissions (not UV).
Also keep in mind that sunlight, when going through a window's glass, gets the beneficial UVB frequency filtered, while leaving the UV emissions untouched. So take, your towel and sunglasses, and go out and let the sunshine in.
6) Smile
When you are stressed out or depressed, it is difficult to smile; but you can do it by simply reminding yourself to smile. Smiling can make you happy. When your face imitate any expression, the corresponding emotion arises in your brain. This is known as the James Lange Technique of controlling emotions and it is quite simple:
When you are sad, just mimic the body language that you show when you are really happy. Your body will detect these body changes and will become happy... instantly! Here is a list of them:
7) Laughter
Like smiling, you can program yourself to laugh. Watching a good comedy in the movies or in TV will certainly make you laugh, but the trick is, once the laugh has started, do not to stop it soon, continue and make it bigger and louder.
Laughing can make a lot of chemical changes in our body that include increased production of happiness amines like dopamine in our brain.
8) A Good Night Sleep
There is a strong relation between sleep and brain health. But a good night sleep is not a matter of quantity or how much you sleep: it is related to how do you sleep. Sleep consist of two parts; the REM (characterized by quick or rapid movements of the eyes during sleep, which is what gave this stage its name) and NREM sleep.
During REM, the activity of the brain's neurons is quite similar to that during waking hours; for this reason, the sleep stage is often called paradoxical sleep. This means that there are no dominating brain waves during REM sleep.
REM sleep is physiologically different from the other phases of sleep, which are collectively referred to as non-REM sleep (NREM). Vividly recalled dreams mostly occur during REM sleep, It is generally thought that REM-associated muscle paralysis is meant to keep the body from acting out the dreams that occur during this intensely cerebral stage. The first period of REM typically lasts 10 minutes, with each recurring REM stage lengthening, and the final one lasting an hour.
Many scientific studies have shown brainwave entrainment to be incredibly effective with sleep disorders. The most obvious benefit is that it can help your mind into the Theta state, or light sleep. Although life-long chronic insomniacs tend to responde much better to SMR brainwave training or Theta.
Curiously enough, individuals relaxed by brainwave entrainment sessions, though tending to experience shorter sleep duration, do report reduced need for sleep and that they wake up highly refreshed and invigorated.
9) Meditation (or prayer if you are a religious person)
First, to meditate or pray is a wonderful way to go to sleep.
By simply adopting a peaceful breathing rythm, the body responds almost instantly to the intention in mind, as shown by scientific studies which also shows meditation to be a wakeful state accompanied by a decreased metabolism. This generalized decrease in body metabolism manifests through the decreased breathing pattern, decreasing the heart rate and blood pressure as well.
There is also, of course, a marked decrease in the level of oxygen utilization and carbon dioxide elimination by the muscle system. These findings have been verified by an impressive number of studies.
The relative amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood is called the respiratory quotient. During normal respiratory processes, this quotient remains constant. Wallace et al (1971) found that during meditation the amount of carbon dioxide elimination drops in proportion to the amount of oxygen consumed; therefore, the respiratory quotient remains constant. In conclusion, the metabolic changes of meditation arise from a natural reduction in metabolic activity at the cellular level, not from a forced reduction of breathing.
And there is the fact that circulation, especially in muscle and brain, is closely related to the metabolic requirements of tissues, and is very sensitive and consistent in its response to behavior. A study by Jevning et al (1996) illustrates an interesting redistribution in the blood flow of meditators. Blood flow to the kidneys and liver declined in practitioners of meditation, with a surprising increase in cardiac output.
There is a pronounced redistribution of blood flow during meditation. It is believed that most of the distributed circulation must be go the brain, a hypothesis that has been supported by direct estimation of increased relative cerebral blood flow (Herzog et al 1990, Jevning et al 1992, 1996).
10) Do Something For Someone Else
To feel as you are the center of the Universe actually shrinks your brain.
Why? For many years, totally neglecting what Ramon y Cajal proposed since 1892, old school phsychiatrists and early neurologist believed that the brain was something like a solid, rigid device, as a computer. But the fact is that the brain has something called "neuroplasticity" or "brain plasticity"; in other words, the brain resembles much more a muscle than a bone. And same as with muscles, if you don't use it you loose it.
Long years of research have now shown that substantial changes occur in the lowest neocortical processing areas. These changes can profoundly alter the pattern of neuronal activation in response to experience. According to the theory of neuroplasticity, thinking, learning and acting actually change both the brain's physical structure and functional organization from top to bottom.
Neuroscientists are presently engaged in a reconciliation of critical period studies demonstrating the immutability of the brain after development with the new findings on neuroplasticity, which reveal the mutability of both structural and functional aspects.
When you live and feel outside the box of your ego, you are expanding your mind and your brain. Caring about others, profound things start to happen in your brain. New neuronal paths are open, you move from a self-centered reduced awareness to a more rich universal life-centered awareness, which is a much greater perspective for your mind.
When you begin to realize that you are part of a much greater awareness, some of your personal challenges instantly look smaller. This way of thinking, by itself, diminishes depression and anxiety at a very fast pace.
Many times in life, people focus way too much on themselves and not on the needs of others. If you fall in this patter of behavior, you will end isolated and letting no one into your life.
By fully focusing on what you are doing for others, you will find that both, the inner you as well as your personality (the external you), grow and fluorish in astounding and positive new ways.
We strongly suggest you to give a close look to our articles that include valuable tips to increase your brain activity in the most positive ways so you regain control of your mind.