Do You Know The Six Pillars Of Brain Health?

In our fast-paced world, maintaining optimal brain health is essential for living a fulfilling life. Just like a well-built structure, the brain relies on sturdy pillars to support its functionality and longevity.

These pillars, known as the 6 Pillars of Brain Health, encompass various aspects of our lifestyle and habits that contribute to cognitive wellness. By understanding and nurturing these pillars, we can unlock the full potential of our brains, enhancing memory, focus, creativity, and overall mental well-being. They help you focus sharper, improve your memory, stay on your game, and keep your brain as healthy as it can be, no matter your age.

So, let’s embark on this enlightening journey as we unveil and explore each of these vital pillars.

1. Nourishing nutrition

You are what you eat. Your diet influences your thinking, mood, and memory. What you consume makes us smarter and happier or slower and depressed. Research shows that what you eat helps generate healthy neurons. It also keeps nerve endings firing and allows you to maintain brain flexibility, which is also referred to as neuroplasticity.

Food provides brain sustenance by providing:

• a stable source of energy.
• nutrients. Nourishing food helps your neurotransmitters to transmit signals to help your mood and improve memory.
• antioxidants in foods, which reduce the effect of oxidation in cells.
• useful fats. Essential fatty acids help protect the cell membrane, transmit messages, reduce inflammation, and support the reproduction of neurons.
• water.

The brain is 78% water; a thirsty brain doesn’t work at its best capacity.

Here are some foods that help your brain

• Walnuts, flaxseed, and certain vegetable oils
• Leafy greens
• Berries
• Tea and coffee
• Dark chocolate.

2. Physical exercise

Whether you walk, run, swim, bike, pump iron, or dance, exercise impacts your brain health directly. Along with strengthening your heart, lungs, and muscles, melting excess body fat, and offering protection from chronic lifestyle diseases like diabetes, exercise also helps build an ageless brain.

Regular workout sessions increase the flow of blood to the brain and keep regions vital to thinking and memory young. A 2010 study, that appears in the journal ‘Psychosomatic Medicine’, notes that as little as eight weeks of cardiovascular exercise improves memory, attention, and processing speed.

Several studies point to the fact that the brain’s levels of Brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF (a protein involved in learning and memory) wane as we grow older. But exercise counteracts these age-related drops in BDNF and restores youthful levels of this protein in older brains. A University of Maryland study in 2015 showed that regular exercise also plumps the cortex, which is vital to higher-level thinking ability.

3. Manage stress

Stress makes your brain think you’re in danger. You get into a fight-or-flight mode. Your brain, then, responds by maintaining a high state of alertness and producing chemicals called glucocorticoids.

If you don’t de-stress, nothing tells your brain that the danger has passed, and those chemicals keep streaming through your blood and become toxic to your brain. When your brain is focused on survival, it has no time for rest and regeneration.

Stress harms your brain by:

• creating free radicals that kill your brain cells
• impacting your memory
• exacerbating your anxiety and irritability
• interfering with the creation of new brain cells
• increasing your risk for mood disorders, like depression
• shrinking your brain, leading to memory and decision-making issues
• escalating your likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s
• killing off brain cells prematurely.

For a healthier brain, take conscious steps to de-stress. Along with exercise and the right nutrition, meditation has been acknowledged as one of the best stress-busters. Research from the University of North Carolina also found that meditating for as little as 20 minutes a day, over just four days can be enough to improve cognitive skills.

If you are new to meditation, look out for meditation groups listed in your area, or watch how the experts do it on a vlog. It will help you also lower your stress levels if practiced at the end of every day for even 10 minutes.

4. Restorative sleep

For clear thinking, get enough sleep. Your body, including your brain, mends and maintains itself while you sleep. Even as you sleep, your brain clears out waste, builds new pathways, forms new memories, and helps maintain your mood.

Being sleep-deprived increases the likelihood of accidents and mistakes. You’re down on energy and find it harder to respond quickly and effectively to situations. Chronic fatigue prevents the mind and body from functioning at its best capacity, depresses the immune system, and wears you down physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Deep sleep is transformative. Sleep allows the brain to work on the input of new information to produce flashes of creative insight.

Some benefit by taking a quick nap during the day. According to a 2019 report in the journal ‘Sleep’, people who nap regularly have an easier time learning. Research suggests that the right hemisphere of the brain is more active during sleep, while the left side relaxes. After you wake up, the left side will be refreshed and ready to learn new stuff. So, get enough rest; it’s good for your brain!

5. Mental wellness

Mental inactivity can age your brain. To maintain agility, you must pursue it consciously. You have to treat your brain like a muscle and give it a workout on a regular basis.

When you are learning, important changes take place in your brain, including the creation of new connections between your neurons. This phenomenon is called neuroplasticity. The more you practice, the stronger these connections become. According to a 2021 report by Harvard Health, practicing a new and challenging activity is a good bet for building and maintaining cognitive skills.

Your brain has the ability to learn and grow as you age — a process called brain plasticity — but for it to do so, you have to train it on a regular basis. Embracing a new activity that also forces you to think and learn and requires ongoing practice can be one of the best ways to keep the brain healthy. Research has found that creative hobbies like painting, learning an instrument, doing expressive or autobiographical writing, and learning a language also can improve cognitive function.

Here are a couple of ways to help your brain work out:

• Troubleshoot your phone or computer yourself instead of hiring someone else to fix it.
• Learn a series of complex physical movements as a part of a dance routine or Tai chi.
• Cook dishes previously untried.
• Complete a puzzle or quiz daily.

6. Social connections

Spending time with friends and loved ones makes you feel good. It increases your sense of happiness and well-being and decreases the likelihood of depression. Connecting with others can also help you keep your brain healthy. In fact, it might even help you ward off dementia.

Research from John Hopkins has shown the more isolated you are, the more likely you are to develop dementia. Social isolation is linked to an increased risk of dementia. In fact, socially isolated older adults have a 27% higher chance of developing dementia. Researchers believe that social connections matter for our cognitive health, and the risk of social isolation is potentially modifiable.

Studies show that people who spend time socialising do better on memory tests and other learning. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC) USA, social engagement can improve the quality of life even for those living with dementia and slow its progression.

Even if you can’t meet groups of friends personally as many times as you wish to, and keep in touch with them with the help of technology, like your cell phone, it can prevent social isolation.

Conclusion

These six pillars of brain health will help you do everything from improving your memory to stimulating and sharpening your mind. From foods that can protect your brain’s health to exercise and mental activities that will boost your brain power, these pillars will help your brain become stronger and function at its best capacity. You will, then, see an improvement in your performance in all areas of your life, be it at work or at home.

Let’s embrace this holistic approach to brain health and unlock the incredible potential within us. Remember, it's never too late to start caring for your brain and embark on a journey towards a sharper mind, improved memory, and a vibrant life filled with endless possibilities.