What does it mean to have a healthy brain? It means that you can accomplish what is necessary for your life and work. You can be focused, confident, and in control of your thoughts and emotions. A healthy brain will help you achieve more in less time. Let’s take a look at how to build a healthy brain.
The Brain Is A Super Complex Organ
The human brain is an incredibly complex organ! It consists of about 100 billion brain cells, called neurons. Each neuron is connected to about 10,000 other neurons, resulting in about 100 trillion connections. That’s 1,000 times the amount of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way!
The billions of messages sent between neurons every second produce enough power to charge your cell phone in about 70 hours!
The brain can also store a massive amount of information, about the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of digital storage. This is enough to store about 300 years’ worth of TV shows.
The brain regulates everything we do, that is, all physical, mental, and emotional operations. It handles automatic operations, like regulating your heart rate, as well as conscious operations, like allowing you to think. It also processes external stimuli picked up by your ears, eyes, nose, and tongue to create the world that you experience.
An organ this complex and vital needs special care to ensure that it functions at its best. Here’s how to build a healthy brain.
How To Build A Healthy Brain
Good Blood Circulation Keeps Your Brain Going
Our brains change constantly. Every day we lose neurons to aging, as well as controllable factors, like stress, drugs, and alcohol. We can also lose neurons due to disease.
Luckily our brains create new brain cells through a process called neurogenesis.
Our brains’ neuron connections also change throughout our lives in response to new experiences or thoughts. This is called neuroplasticity.
While our brains only make up 2% of our body weight, it requires about 20% of our blood supply. Blood contains and delivers the essential oxygen and glucose to keep our brains functioning well. Blood circulation also washes away harmful substances, like the protein linked to Alzheimer’s.
Good blood circulation is vital for a healthy, well-functioning brain. If you’re finding it hard to concentrate or think, there’s a good chance that poor blood circulation is the cause.
An easy way to maintain good blood circulation is to go for brisk walks throughout your day.
Berries & Seafood Protect Your Brain
About 10% of people over 65 live with dementia. Currently, that amounts to about 50 million people. Given the lack of effective treatments, prevention is key.
As with so many other diseases, good nutrition goes a long way towards helping to prevent neurological diseases.
Two types of food play a big role in helping to maintain brain health:
- Berries (strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and blackcurrants) are packed with antioxidants that reduce inflammation and cell damage in the central nervous system.
- Oily fish and seafood (salmon, tuna, trout, mussels, oysters, herring, mackerel, and sardines) protect the insulation around nerve fibers that enable neurons to transmit messages quickly and effectively.
Eat at least two servings of berries and seafood every week.
A Well-Hydrated Brain Is A Happy Brain
A happy brain must be well-hydrated.
About 75% of the brain’s weight is made up of water. Losing just 1% of your body weight to water loss is like throwing a handful of sand in the wheels of your brain. Everything just gets jammed up and you end up with fatigue, loss of focus, and slower reaction times.
Mild dehydration causes brain fog and tiredness. Chronic dehydration causes dizziness, short-term memory loss, irritability, splitting headaches, and impaired vision.
How much water should you drink?
- Men should drink about a gallon (3.7 liters) of water per day.
- Women should drink about three-quarters of a gallon (2.7 liters) of water per day.
If you can hit that water-intake target each day, your brain will be smiling at you!
Mental Workouts Make Your Brain More Powerful
While your brain isn’t a muscle, like a muscle, it can be exercised and will become more powerful.
We all have three kinds of intelligence:
- Crystallized intelligence – the accumulation of knowledge and facts.
- Fluid intelligence – the ability to solve unfamiliar problems using reason.
- Emotional intelligence – your ability to navigate social life and interpersonal relationships.
Here’s how to give your brain a workout:
- Reading fiction books boosts all three types of intelligence simultaneously.
- To improve your memory, learn a new word every day.
- To grow new brain cells, get creative. Writing stories, poems, songs, diary entries, etc. challenges your brain to come up with new ideas.
- To boost your attention span, solve jigsaw puzzles and sudoku puzzles that require concentration over a period of time.
Breathing That Lowers Your Stress Levels
While stress is a normal response to pressure and danger, too much stress is a danger to your health. It wears down your brain and robs you of the thinking tools you need to master challenges.
Regular stress, like working hard to meet a deadline, takes its toll on your brain, but it doesn’t make the wheels fall off. Chronic stress can however make the wheels come off.
Neurologically, stress is a killer! It stops the growth of new brain cells, destroys existing neurons, and shrinks gray matter. In the short term, it stops your ability to think. In the long run, it increases your chances for neurological diseases, like dementia.
Stress is also a vicious circle. The amygdala is the small part of the brain that responds to stress by secreting cortisol, the stress hormone. Cortisol increases the size of the amygdala, making it capable of secreting even more cortisol, thereby creating a vicious circle.
There is a way to escape this vicious circle – deep breathing. It lowers cortisol levels and brings down your heart rate and blood pressure, taking you from crisis to calm in seconds.
Here’s a breathing technique that can reduce your stress levels quickly:
- Close your eyes and put one hand on your stomach and the other over your heart.
- Take a deep breath through your nose into your stomach for six seconds.
- Hold your breath for three seconds.
- Exhale slowly through your mouth for six seconds.
- Repeat this 5-10 times.
When you’re done with this exercise, your stress levels ought to be much lower.
Negative Thoughts Alter Your Brain For The Worse
We have around 60,000 thoughts per day. Studies have shown that 60-90% of them are negative. That’s a lot of negative thinking and it is bad for our mental and neurological health.
Every thought creates new neural pathways. Negative thoughts create negative pathways. This enlarges the amygdala, resulting in more experiences being stored as bad memories. In turn, this causes us to become fearful and stressed in more situations.
Negative thinking has been linked to the shortening of the protective caps at the end of chromosomes. The shorter this cap, the faster cells age.
Negative thinking also has profound psychological effects, leaving us very likely to make bad situations worse.
How can you fix this?
- Keep a journal of your thoughts, especially those that cause a change in your mood. Practicing mindfulness can be very helpful in keeping track of your thoughts.
- After a week, reread your journal and look for patterns.
- Once you’ve identified a recurring negative thought, write down all the reasons it might be true.
- Then list all the evidence you can find that it may be wrong.
When you approach your negative thoughts in this rational way, they lose their sting. You find that it’s not reality, but an emotional overreaction. The next time that thought comes up, remind yourself of this fact. You’ll start feeling a lot more positive about things.
Summary – How To Build A Healthy Brain
To bring it all together, here’s how to build a healthy brain:
- The brain is an extremely complex organ that needs special care to ensure that it functions at its best.
- The brain is dependent on good blood circulation. Take regular brisk walks to ensure good circulation.
- Berries and seafood help to protect the brain. Eat at least two servings of berries and seafood every week.
- The brain must be well-hydrated to function well. Men should drink a gallon of water per day and women should drink three-quarters of a gallon of water each day.
- The brain can be worked out like a muscle. Read fiction books, learn a new word every day, get creative by writing stories or poems, etc., and solve jigsaw puzzles and sudoku puzzles.
- Breathing can calm your stressed brain down quickly. Inhale for six seconds through your nose, hold for three seconds, exhale for six seconds, and hold for three seconds. Repeat 5-10 times.
- Negative thoughts can be destructive to the brain. Identify them by keeping a thought journal, and explore their causes. They are usually emotional overreactions.
Now you know how to build a healthy brain that serves you well for a lifetime.
Do you have any experiences to share related to how to build a healthy brain? Please tell us about it in the comments.
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This post is based on the book, Biohack Your Brain by neuroscientist Dr. Kristen Willeumier. If you’re interested in reading the book, you can get it on Amazon*. You can also get the summarized version at Blinkist*.
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