Exercise For Your Brain
/Exercise is one of the Factors of resilience dsicussed in the book, The Resilience Way. One important part of this section talks about the benefits of exercise for your brain. And when it comes to resilience, brain health is critical in supporting all of the other Elements.
Here are a few things we know about exercise and brain health…
Dr. Wendy Suzuki, a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Center for Neural Science at New York University, is also an author, storyteller and fitness instructor. Several years ago, she began an experiment on herself. She was finding that despite her successful career as a neuroscientist she was not happy. She had no social life and did not have a healthy lifestyle. When she went on a rafting trip, she discovered she was the weakest person on the boat.
This was a turning point for her. She decided to make exercise part of her life.
The result was a complete change to her life, both personally and professionally. She ended up changing her entire research focus to look at the effects of regular exercise on our brains.
The first thing she found was a growing body of literature that was essentially showing everything that she had noticed in herself. People who exercise regularly experience better mood, better energy, better memory, and better attention.
Exercise has three impacts on our brains:
1. First, it has an immediate, but short-lived effect on your brain. A single workout will increase your mood immediately. Dr. Suzuki’s research showed that “a single workout can improve your ability to shift and focus attention, and that focus improvement will last for at least two hours.” You can also expect improved reaction times.
2. Second, an exercise regime that increases your cardio-respiratory function will give you longer-lasting effects, including the production of new brain cells that actually increase the brain’s volume, which improves long-term memory, focus and attentiveness. These improvements are less transient and have long-term benefits.
3. Perhaps the most important thing that exercise does is protect your brain. If you think about the brain like a muscle, it follows that the more you exercise, the bigger and stronger your brain becomes. This is important, because when the brain grows, it expands the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, the two areas most susceptible to neurodegenerative diseases and normal cognitive decline in aging. According to Dr. Suzuki, “…with increased exercise over your lifetime, you’re not going to cure dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, but…you’re going to create the strongest, biggest hippocampus and prefrontal cortex so it takes longer for these diseases to actually have an effect.”
“You can think of exercise as a supercharged (savings plan) for your brain.”
Recent research out of The Cleavland Clinic aligns with Dr. Suzuki’s findings. This research suggests that physical activity may benefit the brain in a number of ways, such as:
Promoting cardiovascular health.
Improving blood flow to the brain.
Reducing inflammation.
Lowering levels of stress hormones.
According to Aaron Bonner-Jackson, a neuropsychologist with Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, all of these factors can adversely affect cognition.
Dr. Bonner-Jackson offers these take-aways:
Stay physically active. Aim for 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity (like walking, jogging, biking or swimming) a week, but realize that any physical activity can benefit your brain.
Try new, mentally stimulating activities you enjoy. Practice new hobbies, read a new book, or learn new skills, such as woodworking, gardening, solving puzzles or math problems, or mastering a new language or musical instrument.
Stay socially engaged, and avoid isolation. Schedule regular get-togethers with friends and family, join a social organization, or volunteer at your church, hospital or charitable group.
So if you are anything like me, and you struggle to find motivation to exercise, do it for your brain and think of it as insurance for your mental aptitude as you age. This will help you to remain resilient in your later years.