HEALTH+WELLNESS
Top Tips TO KEEP
Your Brain
IN TIP-TOP SHAPE
Your brain is the most advanced
supercomputer in the known universe; its
capabilities are almost unlimited. However,
if you want to get the best out of it, you
need to look after it.
Dr Jack Lewis
A ground-breaking new book, Sort Your Brain
Out, combines the expertise of one of the world’s
leading motivational speakers and a famous
neuroscientist to help readers unlock the potential
of the most powerful tool they will ever own: their
brain.
Authors of Sort Your Brain Out, Dr Jack Lewis
and Adrian Webster, give us their top tips to help
keep your brain in tip-top condition:
Get some sleep! Giving your brain time to catch
up with desperately needed repair work is vital.
Whilst you’re sleeping your brain is hard at work
– breaking and bolstering connections between
its 86 billion wires, servicing an additional 86
billion support cells and sending test signals along
new circuits. Giving priority to ensuring you get
plenty of sleep is one of the very best things you
can do to promote long-term brain health.
Start the day with a glass of water. Your brain
is 73% water. The efficiency with which it can
send electrical messages around its 100,000
miles of brain wires is greatly hindered when you
are dehydrated. Your lungs need to be kept moist
to get the gases moving in and out of your
bloodstream. Upon every exhalation you release
water vapour 24/7. During the daytime we replace
the lost water whenever eating or drinking, but
at night there are few opportunities to do this.
By morning there is an imbalance to correct.
Challenge it to keep on changing. What sets
your brain apart from manmade computers is
neuroplasticity – its ability to physically change
to meet the demands of new challenges. By
learning new skills we force our brains to
restructure to adapt to those skills, provided that
is, we practise them regularly, intensely and over
long periods.
Take your brain to the gym. As far as brains
are concerned, losing fat and toning up is just a
sideshow compared to the benefits it gets from
you taking regular exercise. The key advantages
being that it instantly gets more blood that is rich
in glucose and, in your memory banks, new brain
cells are born faster.
Avoid sugar overloads. Although it weighs only
2% of your overall body weight, your brain
consumes 20% of the oxygen and glucose
available in your bloodstream, and that’s when
it’s just ticking over! When you’re concentrating
hard on something, its demand for energy
resources from your blood shoots up to 50%.
As a result, people tend to snack on sugary
foods. Sugar-loaded snacks are a nightmare for
your brain. In too big a quantity sugar can quite
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Adrian Webster
literally vandalise your brain’s lines of
communication. Go for slow-release
carbohydrates instead.
Drink tea or coffee. Caffeine in moderate
amounts really does boost your brain’s
performance. By blocking the inhibitory effects
of adenosine it effectively takes the handbrake
off and allows your brain cells to become more
active. There are also often significant long-term
benefits. Three to five cups of coffee per day
appears to reduce the risk of developing
Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In later life, those
who drink up to th ree cups of coffee per day
exhibit significantly delayed cognitive decline than
those who abstain from the magic bean.
Put the brakes on. If we lived to be 150 years
old, as a result of natural brain aging, we’d all
display obvious signs of Age Related Cognitive
Decline; if you stick around long enough ARCD
is an inevitable thing. There are however four
activities associated with slowing the ARCD
process down: playing a musical instrument,
playing chess, dancing, and reading. All fun to
do – and anyone can do them!
Sort Your Brain Out, published by Capstone,
is available from www.wiley.com