Improving Your Brain Health – I love sharing about how we cultivate brain health because I feel like it relates to everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re 12 years old or if you are an older adult. There’s always something that you can do to help improve how your brain is aging and it’s never too late to do. Good things what we know about Alzheimer’s is that it is currently not curable but it is preventable. So here this is information that relates to that how do you keep your brain healthy. How do you keep it on the right track the first thing we’re going to talk about all evidence-based information.
Resilience
The first thing is resilience and this is a personality or someone who you can learn how to become resilient. But someone who is resilient learns how to bounce back through adversity or after adversity. They build up skills that help them to do that and so they’re never beaten down for long if ever they know how to get back up keep on going. Do the best to improving your brain health!.
Gratitude
Gratitude is another virtue to have. There was this really interesting gratitude study where they had three groups the first group journaled. What they were grateful for the second group journaled things that annoyed or bothered them. And then the third group journaled just what happens to them on a daily basis. What was so interesting to me was that the ones who journaled their what they were grateful for had greater levels of well-being and optimism. But they also had all of these other things. They exercised more they slept better. They woke up more refreshed. They were more likely to help someone with a problem. They had lower blood pressure, less inflammation better immune function and lower levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone set a stress hormone. So it’s clearly being grateful is working on the body and that helps us to help keep our brain healthy and improving your brain health.
The Study Of Gratitude
Related to this is a study by Carl Pillemer of Cornell and he described happy if only versus happy in spite of and when he studied folks of different ages. He found that younger people were more likely to be happy. If only I’ll be happy, I get that job I’ll be happy. I get this new car whereas older people who have been a lot through. A lot of stuff and kind of understand. If you’ve lived a long enough life you understand that stuff happens and so older people were more likely to say: “I’ll be happy in spite of the fact that my knees hurt” or “I’ll be happy in spite of the fact that I’m sick right now”. Because they’ve just learned that through their lives but that helps to keep that gratitude flowing in your life and through your body. The next is stress reduction and I love this because it reminds me of so many older people that I know mostly older people young folks too though. I’ve been through some terrible things in my life some of which actually happened because so many people spend so much time worrying about things that never ever happen.
Dalai Lama
I think this next picture of the Dalai Lama. If you can really live what this next one is saying you can. You have mastered stress so he says
“if you fear, if you have fear of some pain or suffering, you should examine whether there’s anything you can do about it, if you can do something about it there’s no need to worry about it just go do that thing whatever it is, if you cannot do anything then there’s also no need to worry about it because there’s nothing you can do”
Dalai Lama
So the obviously what he’s saying is there’s never a need to worry. Can you have concern can you plan, can you organize, can you get ready. Yes sure you can do that but you don’t have to fear and worry as a part of it.
Finding Purpose And Joy
The next thing is finding purpose and joy, and really what I’m trying to do is just introduce each of these topics to you. So you have an idea of what you might incorporate into either your own life or into a program. If you’re working with some folks like older adults or you work in a group home, how can you be bringing in some of these ideas. So I’m just introducing you to some of these finding purpose and joy is.
Have Your Own Purpose
The next one and so it’s really important to have purpose especially in your life as for in order to create and improving your brain health. So if you have purpose without joy it will stop from feeling purposeful. If you have joy without purpose it will often stop being feeling joyful over time. So some research into a purpose and Alzheimer’s disease they looked at a lot of people who and looked at their sense of purpose and purpose for you is not going to be purpose for someone else. Purpose changes throughout our lives. When we’re younger, it often has to be something really big. I have to cure this or I have to solve that when you’re older it can be. I want to play my purpose is in getting up each day and playing mahjong with the ladies. My sense of purpose comes from having my grandchildren around me. My purpose comes from writing. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it gives you a sense of purpose so we can help people find that purpose in their lives. This study showed that when they examined the brains of these folks after they passed, they found that a lot of them had the markers for Alzheimer’s disease. But if you had a sense of purpose it didn’t show up in your life. You didn’t express or show Alzheimer’s disease in your life that sense of purpose was protective.
Really fascinating being social helps. Your brain having relationships in decreases the risk of dementia. It improves your physical health and your immune system. It increases capillary formation and new neuronal growth in the brain. It decreases depression and decreases stress and then there is so much research on hearing aids that says or hearing having your hearing at a good level. If you don’t it leads to cognitive decline and to loss of relationships and if you think about it. If you can’t hear and you’re sitting in a group of people you’re not processing anything. You’re thinking your own thoughts maybe, but you’re not able to really listen to what is said and then process that and come back with an answer or your own comment. So it’s really really important to get hearing aids when you need them.
Learning and Learning
The next thing is learning and learning helps to build cognitive reserve. The bigger cognitive reserve you have, then the better you are to stave off cognitive decline. How do you develop a cognitive reserve, well you can start early and you can get. You know go as far as you can in your education or you can have later in life. You can have a job that really challenges you. You can take up filmmaking. You can do whatever interests you and it has to be something that is really new learning. So that was really gonna challenge the brain. If you do the same thing every day that’s not necessarily gonna challenge your brain.
So let’s say if you’re a knitter then just sitting there and knitting. You know how some knitters are so good at it, that they can just knit mindlessly. It’s just an automatic thing that they’re doing. That’s great but it’s not necessarily building cognitive reserve getting a new pattern and having to figure that out and set up the stitches and all of that or even if you just then that’s new learning or even if I’m like. If you’re running a group with some folks you might have somebody teach something new that. With the express purpose of I’m not expecting you to continue this, but we’re gonna learn how to knit. This person here who knits really well is gonna teach us how to knit during this hour and then tomorrow this person is going to teach us how to read blueprints. You know just make it up here but whatever it is it’s just. It’s the new thing whether you keep that going. They don’t have to become a knitter. It would be about the fun of learning that new task. That’s going to build that cognitive reserve and then that cognitive reserve becomes protective then there’s exercise.
Exercise
Exercise is so great anything that we all know. Exercise helps the heart anything. That helps the heart anything. That helps the heart is going to improving your brain. Because it’s the brain is it, has lots of vascularization. If we can keep that healthy then that’s awesome for the brain. So exercise has to be somewhat aerobic. It can’t just be simply stretching there has to be some of anaerobic component involved. The research on exercise and memory is really fascinating to me so exercise really helps with the part of the brain that is very involved in memory and that’s at the hippocampus. It can actually reverse shrinkage of the hippocampus. Again this stuff I get excited about this stuff anyway. But to me that is just shocking and that’s so exciting that we can again. We can start at any time in our lives and see these positive results and have a positive impact on our brain.
Eat Well
The last thing that I’m going to talk about here is eat well. We know that we can reverse heart disease and diabetes through diet that again game-changing. Eating to ward off Alzheimer’s again, it’s thought to be incurable, but it’s preventable through dietary and lifestyle changes now!. There might come a time where we say it’s curable as well but for right now we have to make dietary. Changes some of the some will talk about and then lifestyle changes some of the things that. I’ve already mentioned and there are guidelines for the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease in the Journal of Neurobiology of Aging in 2014. They recommend vegetables legumes fruits whole grains that should replace meats and dairy products as the primary staples. Pretty much a vegetarian diet this is a great resource for that for a vegetarian diet how not to die and what dr. Michael Greger goes through is the top. I believe it’s 15 ways that we tend to die would have top ways things that kill us and he goes through. What the research again sticking really with research that says that will prevent those things from happening. So stroke is in there and heart disease is in there and so how do you eat to prevent those things and both of those are gonna be helpful for brain health. So, just another good resource for you to go and check in.
I hope that you have fun with this and create some great groups and different things for people to do. Change the way that you operate in your own life however old you are or young you are to make positive changes in your life long term, thank you so much.
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