Running as the Thinking Person’s Sport

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, Dec. 14, 2016

Running seems to require a greater amount of high-level thinking than most of us might imagine. The sport seems to change how the brain works in surprising ways, according to a new report.

The study, published this month in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that the brains of competitive distance runners had different connections in areas known to aid in sophisticated cognition than the brains of healthy but sedentary people. The discovery suggests that there is more to running than mindlessly placing one foot in front of another.

Scientists have known for some time that mastering certain activities demands considerable thought and consequently can alter the workings of the brain. Playing a musical instrument, for instance, requires refining a variety of fine motor skills, while also engaging memory, attention, forward planning and many other executive functions of the brain. So it’s not surprising that past brain-scanning studies have found that expert musicians tend to have greater coordination between areas of the brain associated with different kinds of thinking, as well as sensory processing and motor control, than do people who have never picked up a bassoon or other instrument.

Similarly, in neurological studies of athletes whose sports stress hand-eye coordination, strategizing and mental attention, such as badminton players and gymnasts, the athletes generally displayed greater interplay between parts of the brain devoted to cognition and mental focus than did the nonathletes.

But running is not usually considered to be cerebral. Most of us learned to run as toddlers, perhaps falteringly at first but progressively with more confidence, and afterward mostly stopped thinking about how to run, at least consciously.

So we would probably not, as a rule, expect running to activate parts of the brain that control advanced cognition.

But researchers at the University of Arizona suspected that running might in fact be intellectually demanding and could affect thinking patterns in people who run, even when they are not running.

To test that idea, the scientists recruited 11 competitive, collegiate male runners and another 11 young men who said that they had not exercised in the past year. The researchers used questionnaires and mathematical formulas to quantify the men’s physical activity levels and estimate their aerobic fitness. (They focused on men primarily because it is difficult to control for the effects of the menstrual cycle on the bodies and brains of young women.)

Then they had each volunteer lie quietly for six minutes in an M.R.I. scanner while the machine measured levels of activity in their brains.

The researchers were particularly interested in any coordinated activity between different parts of the brain, as indicated by areas of the brain that were simultaneously lighting up in similar ways. Such synchronized activation is thought to indicate that parts of the brain have developed functional connections, even if they are physically separated from one another.

It turned out that the runners’ brains displayed a number of different connections than did the brains of the sedentary young men, and those connections involved areas of the brain needed for higher-level thought.

In particular, the scientists noted more connectivity in the runners than in the inactive men between parts of the brain that aid in working memory, multitasking, attention, decision-making, and the processing of visual and other sensory information.

There also, interestingly, was less activity among the runners in a part of the brain that tends to indicate lack of focus and mind wandering.

In essence, the runners seemed to have brains in which certain cognitive skills, including multitasking and concentration, were more finely honed than among the inactive men. Earlier studies in older adults have found that similar connections are associated with improved memory and cognition as people age.

“To me, this suggests that running may not be such a simple activity after all,” says Gene E. Alexander, a professor of psychology, neurology and physical sciences at the University of Arizona. He co-led the study in conjunction with David Raichlen, a professor of anthropology at the university.

Instead, running seems to be a kind of mobile math puzzle. “It requires complex navigational skills,” Dr. Alexander says, “plus an ability to plan, monitor and respond to the environment, juggle memories of past runs and current conditions, and also continue with all of the sequential motor activities of running, which are, themselves, very complicated.”

Given running’s mental demands, he was not surprised, he says, that the runners’ brains indicated differing thinking patterns than in the sedentary young men.

Of course, this type of study cannot prove that running actually caused the differences in the men’s thinking, only that runners had certain patterns of thought.

Likewise, it is unclear whether running, alone, has such effects, or if other endurance sports, including cycling and swimming, would be associated with similar brain connections, or whether people who are not college-aged and male would respond in the same ways. The scientists also did not test their volunteers’ cognition, so they could not say whether the differing thinking patterns among the runners were linked with being smarter.

But Dr. Alexander and his colleagues hope to perform experiments in the future that could tell us more about how running and other physical activities actually alter thinking patterns and whether, as we age, we might be able literally to run away from mental decline.

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To Boost Memory: Study, Wait, Then Exercise

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, July 28, 2016

Learning requires more than the acquisition of unfamiliar knowledge; that new information or know-how, if it’s to be more than ephemeral, must be consolidated and securely stored in long-term memory.

Mental repetition is one way to do that, of course. But mounting scientific evidence suggests that what we do physically also plays an important role in this process. Sleep, for instance, reinforces memory. And recent experiments show that when mice and rats jog on running wheels after acquiring a new skill, they learn much better than sedentary rodents do. Exercise seems to increase the production of biochemicals in the body and brain related to mental function.

Researchers at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior at Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Edinburgh have begun to explore this connection. For a study published this month in Current Biology, 72 healthy adult men and women spent about 40 minutes undergoing a standard test of visual and spatial learning. They observed pictures on a computer screen and then were asked to remember their locations.

Afterward, the subjects all watched nature documentaries. Two-thirds of them also exercised: Half were first put through interval training on exercise bicycles for 35 minutes immediately after completing the test; the others did the same workout four hours after the test.

Two days later, everyone returned to the lab and repeated the original computerized test while an M.R.I. machine scanned their brain activity.

Those who exercised four hours after the test recognized and recreated the picture locations most accurately. Their brain activity was subtly different, too, showing a more consistent pattern of neural activity. The study’s authors suggest that their brains might have been functioning more efficiently because they had learned the patterns so fully. But why delaying exercise for four hours was more effective than an immediate workout remains mysterious. By contrast, rodents do better in many experiments if they work out right after learning.

Eelco van Dongen, the study’s lead author and a former researcher at Radboud University (he is now a policy officer at the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), hopes that future studies will help determine both the optimal time to exercise and the ideal activity to reinforce learning. Workouts that are too strenuous “could be less positive or even detrimental” to acquiring knowledge, Dr. van Dongen says, while gentle exertions–“a short, slow walk,” he adds–might not prompt enough of an increase in the biochemicals needed to influence how the brain learns.

For now, he says, if you are trying to memorize a PowerPoint narrative or teach yourself macroeconomics, it could be beneficial to exercise a few hours after a study session. “Long-term memory is not only influenced by what happens when you learn new things,” he says, “but also by the processes that take place in the hours and days afterward, when new information is stabilized and integrated in your brain.”

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Can Running Make You Smarter?

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, July 13, 2016

To strengthen your mind, you may first want to exert your leg muscles, according to a sophisticated new experiment involving people, mice and monkeys. The study’s results suggest that long-term endurance exercise such as running can alter muscles in ways that then jump-start changes in the brain, helping to fortify learning and memory.

I often have written about the benefits of exercise for the brain and, in particular, how, when lab rodents or other animals exercise, they create extra neurons in their brains, a process known as neurogenesis. These new cells then cluster in portions of the brain critical for thinking and recollection.

Even more telling, other experiments have found that animals living in cages enlivened with colored toys, flavored varieties of water and other enrichments wind up showing greater neurogenesis than animals in drab, standard cages. But animals given access to running wheels, even if they don’t also have all of the toys and other party-cage extras, develop the most new brain cells of all.

These experiments strongly suggest that while mental stimulation is important for brain health, physical stimulation is even more potent.

But so far scientists have not teased out precisely how physical movement remakes the brain, although all agree that the process is bogglingly complex.

Fascinated by that complexity, researchers at the National Institutes of Health recently began to wonder whether some of the necessary steps might be taking place far from the brain itself, and specifically, in the muscles, which are the body part most affected by exercise. Working muscles contract, burn fuel and pump out a wide variety of proteins and other substances.

The N.I.H. researchers suspected that some of those substances migrated from the muscles into the bloodstream and then to the brain, where they most likely contributed to brain health.

But which substances were involved was largely a mystery.

So for the new study, which was published last month in Cell Metabolism, the N.I.H. researchers first isolated muscle cells from mice in petri dishes and doused them with a peptide that affects cell metabolism in ways that mimic aerobic exercise. In effect, they made the cells think that they were running.

Then, using a technique called mass spectrometry, the scientists analyzed the many chemicals that the muscle cells released after their pseudo-workouts, focusing on those few that can cross the blood-brain barrier.

They zeroed in on one substance in particular, a protein called cathepsin B. The protein is known to help sore muscles recover, in part by helping to clear away cellular debris, but it had not previously been considered part of the chain linking exercise to brain health.

To determine whether cathepsin B might, in fact, be involved in brain health, the researchers added a little of the protein to living neurons in other petri dishes. They found that those brain cells started making more proteins related to neurogenesis.

Cathepsin B also proved to be abundant in the bloodstreams of mice, monkeys and people who took up running, the scientists found. In experiments undertaken in collaboration with colleagues in Germany, the researchers had mice run for several weeks, while rhesus monkeys and young men and women took to treadmills for four months, exercising vigorously about three times a week for approximately an hour or sometimes longer.

During that time, the concentrations of cathepsin B in the jogging animals and people steadily rose, the researchers found, and all of the runners began to perform better on various tests of memory and thinking.

Most striking, in the human volunteers, the men and women whose fitness had increased the most–suggesting that they had run particularly intensely–not only had the highest levels of cathepsin B in their blood but also the most-improved test scores.

Finally, because there’s nothing like removing something from the body to underscore how important it may be, the scientists bred mice without the ability to create cathepsin B, including after exercise. The researchers had those mice and other, normal animals run for a week, then taxed their ability to learn and retain information.

After running, the normal mice learned more rapidly than they had before and also held on to those new memories well. But the animals that could not produce cathepsin B learned haltingly and soon forgot their new skills. Running had not helped them to become smarter.

The lesson of these experiments is that our brains appear to function better when they are awash in cathepsin B and we make more cathepsin B when we exercise, says Henriette van Praag, an investigator at the National Institute on Aging at the N.I.H. who oversaw this study.

Of course, increases in cathepsin B explain only part of the benefits of exercise for the brain, she said. She and her colleagues plan to continue looking for other mechanisms in future studies.

They also hope to learn more about how much exercise is necessary to gain brain benefits. The regimen that the human runners followed in this study was “fairly intensive,” she said, but it’s possible that lighter workouts would be almost as effective.

“There is good reason to think,” she said, “that any amount of exercise is going to be better than none” for brain health.

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Complaining Is Terrible for You, According to Science

By Jessica Stillman, Inc.com, Feb. 29, 2016:

Why do people complain? Not to torture others with their negativity, surely. When most of us indulge in a bit of a moan, the idea is to “vent.” By getting our emotions out, we reason, we’ll feel better.

But science suggests there are a few serious flaws in that reasoning. One, not only does expressing negativity tend not to make us feel better, it’s also catching, making listeners feel worse. “People don’t break wind in elevators more than they have to. Venting anger is…similar to emotional farting in a closed area. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s dead wrong,” psychologist Jeffrey Lohr, who has studied venting, memorably explained.

OK, so complaining is bad for your mood and the mood of your friends and colleagues, but that’s not all that’s wrong with frequent negativity. Apparently, it’s also bad for your brain and your health. Yes, really.

On Psych Pedia, Steven Parton, an author and student of human nature, explains how complaining not only alters your brain for the worse but also has serious negative repercussions for your mental health. In fact, he goes so far as to say complaining can literally kill you. Here are three of the ways he claims that complaining harms your health:

1. “Synapses that fire together wire together.” This is one of the first lessons neuroscience students learn, according to Parton. “Throughout your brain there is a collection of synapses separated by empty space called the synaptic cleft. Whenever you have a thought, one synapse shoots a chemical across the cleft to another synapse, thus building a bridge over which an electric signal can cross, carrying along its charge the relevant information you’re thinking about,” Parton explains.

“Here’s the kicker,” he continues. “Every time this electrical charge is triggered, the synapses grow closer together in order to decrease the distance the electrical charge has to cross…. The brain is rewiring its own circuitry, physically changing itself, to make it easier and more likely that the proper synapses will share the chemical link and thus spark together–in essence, making it easier for the thought to trigger.”

So let’s boil that down–having a thought makes it easier for you to have that thought again. That’s not good news for the perpetually gloomy (though happily, it seems gratitude, can work the opposite way, building up your positivity muscles). It gets worse, too. Not only do repeated negative thoughts make it easier to think yet more negative thoughts, they also make it more likely that negative thoughts will occur to you just randomly walking down the street. (Another way to put this is that being consistently negative starts to push your personality towards the negative).

Parton explains how these closer synapses result in a generally more pessimistic outlook: “Through repetition of thought, you’ve brought the pair of synapses that represent your [negative] proclivities closer and closer together, and when the moment arises for you to form a thought…the thought that wins is the one that has less distance to travel, the one that will create a bridge between synapses fastest.” Gloom soon outraces positivity.

2. You are whom you hang out with. Not only does hanging out with your own negative thoughts rewire your brain for negativity, hanging out with negative people does much the same. Why?

“When we see someone experiencing an emotion (be it anger, sadness, happiness, etc.), our brain ‘tries out’ that same emotion to imagine what the other person is going through. And it does this by attempting to fire the same synapses in your own brain so that you can attempt to relate to the emotion you’re observing. This is basically empathy. It is how we get the mob mentality…. It is our shared bliss at music festivals,” Parton writes. “But it is also your night at the bar with your friends who love love love to constantly bitch.”

The takeaway lesson is, if you want to strengthen your capacity for positivity and weaken your reflex for gloom, “surround yourself with happy people who rewire your brain towards love.”

3. Stress is terrible for your body, too. All of which sounds like a good argument for staying away from negativity to protect your mental health, but Parton insists that quitting the complaining habit is essential for your physical health, too. “When your brain is firing off these synapses of anger, you’re weakening your immune system; you’re raising your blood pressure, increasing your risk of heart disease, obesity and diabetes, and a plethora of other negative ailments,” he says.

The culprit is the stress hormone cortisol. When you’re negative, you release it, and elevated levels of the stuff, “interfere with learning and memory, lower immune function and bone density, increase weight gain, blood pressure, cholesterol, heart disease…. The list goes on and on,” says Parton.

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Want A Healthy Brain? Better Avoid These 7 Habits

By Carolyn Gregoire, The Huffington Post, April 30, 2015

Why are some people sharp as a tack at 95 years old, while others begin struggling with mental clarity in their 50s?

A lot of it has to do with genetics, but certain lifestyle factors also play an important role in how our brain ages. So while you can’t control your genes, you can avoid these seven big brain mistakes:

Mistake No. 1: Eating a standard American diet. Foods high in sugar, unhealthy fats and processed foods–i.e., the typical American diet–can wreak havoc on your brain over time. Studies have shown that excess sugar consumption can impair learning and memory, and increase your vulnerability to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Some scientists have even referred to Alzheimer’s as “Type 3 Diabetes,” suggesting that diet may have some role in an individual’s risk for developing the disease.

A Mediterranean-based diet, on the other hand, can help protect the brain from signs of aging and ward off cognitive decline. A recent study showed that following this type of diet–which is a good source of brain-healthy nutrients and includes a lot of fish, healthy fats, whole grains and vegetables–could slash Alzheimer’s risk by up to 50 percent.

Mistake No. 2: Living next to a highway. Living in a smoggy city might be bad news for your brain. According to research published this month in the journal Stroke, exposure to air pollution is linked with premature aging of the brain.

The researchers found that people who lived closer to a major highway had greater markers of pollution in their lungs and blood, which increased their risk for a form of brain damage known as “silent strokes,” or symptomless strokes. Increased pollution volume was also linked to decreased brain volume–a major sign of aging.

Mistake No. 3: Drinking a few evening cocktails. Don Draper’s daily cigarettes and two-martini lunches might seem glamorous on “Mad Men,” but research suggests that they’re a fast track to neurodegeneration.

It should come as no surprise that excessive drinking and cigarette smoking at any stage of life can have a negative effect on the brain, damaging brain tissue and leading to cognitive impairment. Alcoholism can cause or accelerate aging of the brain.

But just a couple of glasses of wine a night could pose a risk to brain health, even though there are some cardiovascular benefits. A 2012 Rutgers University study found that moderate to binge drinking–drinking relatively lightly during the week and then more on the weekends–can decrease adult brain cell production by 40 percent.

“In the short term there may not be any noticeable motor skills or overall functioning problems, but in the long term this type of behavior could have an adverse effect on learning and memory,” one of the study’s authors, Rutgers neuroscience graduate student Megan Anderson, said in a statement.

Mistake No. 4: Giving in to stress. Living a stressful lifestyle may be the worst thing you can do for your health as you age. Chronic stress is known to shorten the length of telomeres, the sequences at the end of DNA strands that help determine how fast (or slow) the cells in our body age. By shortening telomeres, stress can accelerate the onset of age-related health problems.

What about the brain? Well, some research has suggested that high levels of stress hormones can increase an individual’s risk for age-related brain damage.

“Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of chronic stress can accumulate and become a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease,” Howard Fillit, a clinical professor of geriatric medicine at The Mount Sinai School of Medicine, wrote in Psychology Today. “Several studies have shown that stress, and particularly one’s individual way of reacting to stress (the propensity to become ‘dis-stressed’ often found in neurotic people for example), increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.”

If you’re feeling stressed out, try picking up a meditation practice. Research has shown that meditation is effective in lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol and protecting the brain from aging.

Mistake No. 5: Getting by on less sleep than you need. There are a number of scary health effects associated with sleep deprivation, from a higher risk of stroke and diabetes to impaired cognitive functioning. Over the years, losing shut-eye can also accelerate brain aging. In a study conducted last year, researchers from Singapore found that the less that older adults slept, the faster their brains aged.

The study’s lead author explained in a statement that among older adults, “sleeping less will increase the rate their brain ages and speed up the decline in their cognitive functions.”

Mistake No. 6: Sitting all day. It’s a well-established fact that sitting for long periods is terrible for your health. A growing body of research has linked a sedentary lifestyle with health risks including heart disease, diabetes, cancer and early death, even among people who get the recommended daily amount of exercise.

And it turns out that sitting is also pretty bad for your brain. Research has linked physical inactivity with cognitive decline. Moreover, weight gain in older adults–which may result from too much sitting–has been linked with shrinkage in brain areas associated with memory.

So when in doubt, move around. Physical activity has been linked with a number of brain health benefits, including improved learning and memory.

Mistake No. 7: Zoning out. Use it or lose it! If you want to keep your brain sharp, keep it engaged. It doesn’t have to be a challenging intellectual task or a brain-training game, either–simply engaging in everyday activities like reading, cooking or having a conversation (as opposed to vegging out in front of the TV or computer) can make a difference.

The bottom line? Doing new and novel things promotes neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons in the brain. So get outside, learn, discover and try something new to keep your brain sharp through the decades.

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Higher purpose in life tied to better brain health

By Roxanne Nelson, Reuters, April 7, 2015

People with a high sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of stroke, according to new research.

“We and others have shown that purpose in life is protective against multiple adverse health outcomes in older age,” said lead study author Lei Yu, an assistant professor of neurological sciences at Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Importantly, purpose in life may be improved through changes in behaviors or participation in activities like volunteerism, among other things, Yu told Reuter’s Health in an email.

A stroke can occur when blood flow to the brain is blocked. The damaged brain tissue may contribute to a number of conditions including dementia, movement problems, disability and death as individuals grow older.

For their study, published in the journal Stroke, Yu and his team analyzed autopsy results on 453 older adults who had been enrolled in the Rush Memory and Aging Project. All of the participants underwent annual physical and psychological evaluations, including a standard assessment of purpose in life, and were followed until they died, at an average age of 90.

None of the participants had dementia when they entered the study, but 114 people had suffered a stroke.

At autopsy, 154 individuals had macroscopic infarctions (areas of stroke damage visible to the naked eye) and 128 had “microinfarcts” (areas of damage visible with a microscope).

Purpose in life was judged on a five-point scale with higher scores indicating a greater purpose. The average score was 3.5.

With every one-point increase in the score measuring purpose, the likelihood of having one or more macroscopic infarctions decreased by about 50 percent. There was no link between purpose and microinfarcts.

This study is very well done, thorough and very intriguing, said Dr. Jose Biller, chair of neurology at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

“If we put everything together, my opinion is that having a purpose in life is very healthy, and this is the message I would want to convey,” Biller said.

Yu said it’s important for people to be thoughtful about what motivates them. They should engage in rewarding behaviors, he said.

“Health conscious adults are encouraged to work actively to improve their sense of meaning in life and goal directness,” Yu said.

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How Exercise Can Boost Young Brains

By Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times, October 8, 2014

Encourage young boys and girls to run, jump, squeal, hop and chase after each other or after erratically kicked balls, and you substantially improve their ability to think, according to the most ambitious study ever conducted of physical activity and cognitive performance in children. The results underscore, yet again, the importance of physical activity for children’s brain health and development, especially in terms of the particular thinking skills that most affect academic performance.

The news that children think better if they move is hardly new. Recent studies have shown that children’s scores on math and reading tests rise if they go for a walk beforehand, even if the children are overweight and unfit. Other studies have found correlations between children’s aerobic fitness and their brain structure, with areas of the brain devoted to thinking and learning being generally larger among youngsters who are more fit.

But these studies were short-term or associational, meaning that they could not tease out whether fitness had actually changed the children’s brains or if children with well-developed brains just liked exercise.

So for the new study, which was published in September in Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign approached school administrators at public elementary schools in the surrounding communities and asked if they could recruit the school’s 8- and 9-year-old students for an after-school exercise program.

This group was of particular interest to the researchers because previous studies had determined that at that age, children typically experience a leap in their brain’s so-called executive functioning, which is the ability to impose order on your thinking. Executive functions help to control mental multitasking, maintain concentration, and inhibit inappropriate responses to mental stimuli.

Children whose executive functions are stunted tend to have academic problems in school, while children with well-developed executive functions usually do well.

The researchers wondered whether regular exercise would improve children’s executive-function skills, providing a boost to their normal mental development.

They received commitments from 220 local youngsters and brought all of them to the university for a series of tests to measure their aerobic fitness and current executive functioning.

The researchers then divided the group in half, with 110 of the children joining a wait list for the after-school program, meaning that they would continue with their normal lives and serve as a control group.

The other 110 boys and girls began being bused every afternoon to the university campus, where they participated in organized, structured bouts of what amounted to wild, childish fun.

“We wanted them to play,” said Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois who led the study.

Wearing heart rate monitors and pedometers for monitoring purposes, the children were guided through exercise that doubled as romping. The activities, which changed frequently, consisted of games like tag, as well as instruction in technique skills, such as how to dribble a soccer ball. The exercise curriculum was designed to improve both aerobic endurance and basic motor skills, Dr. Hillman said.

Each two-hour session also included downtime, since children naturally career about and then collapse, before repeating the process. In total, the boys and girls generally moved at a moderate or vigorous intensity for about 70 minutes and covered more than two miles per session, according to their pedometers.

The program lasted for a full school year, with sessions available every day after school for nine months, although not every child attended every session.

At the end of the program, both groups returned to the university to repeat the physical and cognitive tests.

As would have been expected, the children in the exercise group were now more physically fit than they had been before, while children in the control group were not. The active children also had lost body fat, although changes in weight and body composition were not the focus of this study.

More important, the children in the exercise group also displayed substantial improvements in their scores on each of the computer-based tests of executive function. They were better at “attentional inhibition,” which is the ability to block out irrelevant information and concentrate on the task at hand, than they had been at the start of the program, and had heightened abilities to toggle between cognitive tasks.

Tellingly, the children who had attended the most exercise sessions showed the greatest improvements in their cognitive scores.

Meanwhile, the children in the control group also raised their test scores, but to a much smaller extent. In effect, both groups’ brains were developing, but the process was more rapid and expansive in the children who ran and played.

“The message is, get kids to be physically active” for the sake of their brains, as well as their health, Dr. Hillman said. After-school programs like the one he and his colleagues developed require little additional equipment or expense for most schools, he said, although a qualified physical education instructor should be involved, he added.

Extended physical education classes during school hours could also ensure that children engage in sufficient physical activity for brain health, of course. But school districts nationwide are shortening or eliminating P.E. programs for budgetary and other reasons, a practice that is likely “shortsighted,” Dr. Hillman said. If you want young students to do well in reading and math, make sure that they also move.

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Take Daily Walking Breaks To Refocus

By Rachel Gillett, Fast Company, Aug. 22, 2014

How much of your day do you think you spend sitting? 20%? 30%?

Research published in Diabetologia medical journal shows that the average adult spends 50% to 70% of his time sitting. Today we live in a world where most working professionals suffer from what the scientific community calls the sitting disease, and research shows that the longer you sit, the more likely you are to develop heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and obesity.

In addition to staying healthy, there are so many other good reasons to get up and move around that this advice is hard to ignore.

For one thing, taking a lunch break away from your desk can boost your mood and prepare you for the afternoon ahead. And researchers from the University of Edinburgh say that taking a walk in the park—or any green space you can find in your area—can lessen your brain fatigue and frustration.

While you’re outside enjoying the greenery, you’ll more than likely be soaking up some sun as well—no matter the season or climate—which helps alleviate feelings of sluggishness and boosts productivity.

Looking for some creative inspiration? Scientists at Stanford suggest going for a walk—whether indoors or outdoors, in a green space or on a treadmill—to give your creativity a boost. Compared to sitting, they found any form of walking could increase creative thinking by about 60%.

“We’re not saying walking can turn you into Michelangelo,” said researcher Marily Oppezzo. “But it could help you at the beginning stages of creativity.”

It’s no secret that our energy slumps mid-morning and mid-afternoon (which is why it’s the best time to drink coffee). Research shows that getting up and taking a 15-minute walk at these times instead of checking Facebook can help you refocus.

Challenge yourself to go for a walk at least once a day.

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Why You Need to Put Your Brain on a Fitness Plan, Too

By Sandra Bond Chapman, PhD, Yahoo Shine, Feb 7, 2014

Most people don’t consider their brain health until they’re faced with injury, disease, or simply getting old. But just as we’ve come to realize that we can improve our physical health through diet and exercise, we can improve our cognitive health too. It’s simply a matter of engaging in the right mental workouts.

Science now strongly supports the fact that our brains are one of the most modifiable parts of our whole body. Our brains actually adapt from moment to moment, depending on how we use them; they either decline or improve, and which direction they go depends on us and the way we challenge them.

Our research team at the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas is working on how to improve brain performance at all ages, and our findings show that making our brains stronger, healthier, and more productive requires actually changing the way we use them every single day. And that’s where daily changes come in. We all must first abandon toxic habits that are depleting brain resources, and also incorporate complex thinking into our daily routines. Ready to make your brain smarter? Here are a few scientifically proven ways to do it.

Quiet Your Mind. “Don’t make any rash decisions!” Somewhere along the line, we’ve all been given that advice, and it actually applies to your brain too, which can often better solve complex problems when you step away to reflect on ideas and crucial decisions rather than acting without weighing choices. A halt in constant thinking slows your mind’s rhythms, allowing it to refresh. Employ a “Five by Five” principle where you take a break from whatever you’re doing five times a day for at least five minutes to reset your brain. When we let our brain work behind the scenes, we have our best “aha” moments. And don’t we all want more of those?

Translate Your World. Move away from surface-level, uninspired thinking and eschew predictable thoughts by pushing past the obvious and really think. For example, when asked what a movie was about, most people would give a play-by-play of events that occurred. To boost brainpower, instead think of the major themes of the film and relate it to personal situations in your own life and how they apply. Think back on one of your favorite movies or books from the past year and generate five to eight different take-home messages you can glean from it.

This process, called synthesized thinking, strengthens the connections between different areas of our brains. Our brains actually become quickly jaded by routine since they were built to dynamically shift between details and the big picture. They also hate information downloading, so it helps to think like a reporter. When taking in large amounts of information, try to explain it in a few sentences. Kick off meetings with provocative big ideas. Power your important email messages with simple but thought-evoking subject lines.

Stop Multi-tasking. We are inundated with more and more tasks every day. Relentless simultaneous input and output fatigues the brain and reduces productivity and efficiency. You may think that by doing two or three things at once—like participating in a conference call while writing a couple of emails—you are moving faster through your day. But nothing could be further from the truth. Our to-do lists keep getting longer while performance and accuracy slip. So, when working on higher-order thinking tasks that matter, allow your focus to be completely uninterrupted for at least 15 minutes at a time and then gradually increase the length of those intervals.

Move Your Feet. Recently published research shows that aerobic exercise stimulates positive brain change and memory gains faster than we previously thought possible. Adding regular aerobic exercise that elevates your heart rate to your routine at least three times a week for an hour won’t just help with physical health, it will also increase brain blood flow to key memory centers in the brain and improve our memory for facts. When you combine complex thinking with aerobic exercise, brain health benefits are amplified.

Until recently, we thought that cognitive decline was an inevitable part of getting old, but the good news is that’s officially not the case. Toxic habits and a life on autopilot are key culprits for unnecessary cognitive decline. Our research has shown that healthy adults who use these strategies can regain lost cognitive performance, improve blood flow in the brain, speed up communication between its regions and expand its structural connections. And you can actually evoke some of these positive changes in a matter of hours. Adopting this new, healthier way of thinking translates into real-life benefits that support our ability to make decisions, think critically, reason and plan. In other words, shaping your brain by engaging in the right kind of daily mental exercise has the power to reverse brain aging and actually make you smarter. So boost your brainpower! You have nothing to lose.

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