CAN DAILY EXERCISE IMPROVE MEMORY AND OTHER BRAIN FUNCTIONS?

Daily exercise touts a litany of benefits. It prevents heart disease, strokes, diabetes mellitus, and even cancer. It promotes healthy weight maintenance, regulates blood pressure, improves mental health, and helps clear age-related brain fog. But can it improve memory, thinking capabilities, and more?

Researchers at the University of British Columbia found that when you do regular aerobic exercises, certain areas in the brain, including the hippocampus and temporal lobes, increased in size. These areas are responsible for memory, learning, processing emotions, and more.

The Effects of Daily Exercise on the Brain

Exercise increases memory and influences your ability to think, both directly and indirectly.

Direct ways include:

• Decreasing insulin resistance
• Decreasing inflammation
• Increasing the release of growth factor chemicals (These chemicals protect the health of brain cells and enhance the growth of new blood vessels in the brain.)

Indirect ways include:

• Improvement of mood and quality of sleep
• Reduction of stress and anxiety levels
• Prevention of cognitive impairment

Studies show that the areas of the brain responsible for memory and thinking (the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and medial temporal cortex) are larger in people who exercise regularly.

One study found that regular exercise of moderate intensity for six months or more increased the size of multiple brain areas.

Start Exercising Now

The question is: how much should you exercise to improve your memory?

Studies show that walking and doing aerobic workouts are the best forms of exercise to pump your heart. One hour of walking, twice a week, is moderate intensity exercise, according to research. You want to aim for this level of physical activity four to five days per week for the best results.

If you’re just starting out, start small. Depending on your health and physical capabilities, set a goal for ten minutes of activity and work your way up to a minimum of thirty minutes a day. If you can handle that, increase the intensity or time. You want to push yourself without over-exerting yourself.

If you don’t like walking, there are many other forms of moderate-intensity exercises, such as playing tennis, swimming, or squash. Household activities such as mopping the floor, vacuuming, and scrubbing are moderate intensity exercises, too. Anything that makes your heart rate increase and makes you sweat is the level of exertion you’re aiming for.

Conclusion

Exercise is important to your overall health, and daily exercise is good for your brain. Multiple studies over time show that physically active people have lower rates of age-related brain decline. The sooner you increase your physical activity, the healthier you’ll become.

For more on how exercise benefits your brain, watch this video:

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How do you motivate yourself? It’s hard enough to find motivation to reach your goals. But what about doing the things you don’t want to do?

One feature of adult life is doing things you’d rather not. Sometimes it’s for work, sometimes for other people, and sometimes that includes doing things for yourself. But problems can arise when not wanting to do a task turns into not doing it at all.

The longer you put off a task, the harder it is to do. And soon, procrastination becomes a habit. This can affect your work, family, health, and relationships. So, how do you break out of this cycle and find the motivation to get unpleasant or unenjoyable tasks done?

Why the delay?

First, it’s important to understand why you want to put something off. It’s common to think the reason you don’t start a task is because you’re lazy, or slow, or incompetent. But the problem is rarely your work ethic. Often, there is an underlying problem you don’t recognize that’s causing the resistance.

You might also fall into the cultural ideal that if you follow your passion, you’ll never put things off. But that simply isn’t true. There are three main reasons you put off doing things.

• You care too much about the task and are afraid to do it badly.
• You feel unmotivated and let other tasks or emotions distract you.
• You worry the job is hard, uninteresting, or both.

All of this can unlock the threat response in your brain, and when your brain expects stress in the future, it will employ all its strategies to make you avoid going into that situation. The best way to unfreeze your brain is to break the task down so it doesn’t feel threatening or stressful anymore.

How to get started

If forcing yourself to “be positive” or to “just do it” were as easy as they sound, no one would procrastinate. But rarely does it come down to willpower alone. Instead, tackling your to-do list with simple step-by-step strategies can help get you started and unlock your motivation.

1. Analyze why you are delaying

As we pointed out above, there’s a reason you don’t want to do a task. If you find yourself not wanting to do something, write down all the reasons you don’t want to do it. Be detailed and include things like why it’s unappealing, what you might be afraid of, and what you think is holding you back.

2. Feel the fear

Once you’ve identified your why, think about what you stand to lose if you don’t complete the task. Your brain is designed to maintain the status quo. Having a new goal may motivate it, but losing what you already have activates your motivation far more effectively. Use that fear to get unstuck and started on your goal.

3. Give yourself limits

Set a certain time limit for doing a task, and stick to it whether you complete the task or not. Tell yourself, “I’ll write this report until 6 p.m. and after that, no matter what state it might be in, I’ll move on to another task.” When you maintain this routine, your brain will learn to focus on the task within the time frame, and you’ll get more done.

A simple habit

Journalist and public speaker Mel Robbins pioneered the five-second rule method, and it can be extremely effective in wrapping all three steps into one. The rule goes like this: Whenever you are on the brink of getting distracted because of the scale/difficulty/nature of the task, stop for a moment and count from 5 to 1. When you stop counting, immediately start doing the task without second-guessing yourself.

This method makes use of your brain’s emotional response. When you think rationally, you can stay stuck in analysis forever. Your brain will keep supplying you with reasons to avoid the task if you want to avoid stress. But when you think emotionally, you employ fast-thinking. For example, if you see a child drowning in the sea when there is no lifeguard in sight, you don’t think twice about going into the water to save her. This unhesitating response comes from the emotional part of your brain.

When you do the five second count, you are creating a stop-and-go situation in your brain. By counting down from 5 to 1, you create a hard stop, where there’s nowhere to go when you reach the end. Use this instinctive response to jump headfirst into the task without thinking about it.

Conclusion

Unwanted tasks are an intrinsic part of modern existence. No matter what you do, you will come across tasks that you don’t want to do. Rather than trying to avoid them, you can learn to control your motivation and kick-start your productivity. Use these simple steps to help ensure you get anything done on time.

For more on Mel Robbins and her motivation hacks, watch this video:

Video games get quite the bad media reputation these days. Frequently cited as the cause of a range of maladies in younger generations, they’re blamed for everything from obesity to an increased penchant for violence.

But a lot of studies are surfacing in recent years that counteract these claims, and state that gaming can be beneficial for your brain. In fact, gaming has a large impact on expanding and sharpening your cognitive abilities.

How Gaming Helps Your Brain

Let’s look at the ways gaming can positively affect your brain functions.

• Sharper attention and focus: A 2012 study by Green and Bavelier found that playing action-based video games improves your spatial attention. This is the ability to locate a target when a bunch of stimuli are present. It also includes your ability to keep track of that target. Gaming trains your mind to discard unwanted spatial information and stay on a single track, which improves focus.
• Faster reflex and response time: Gaming hones skills like hand-eye coordination and audio-visual information processing. Your “fight-or-flight” response works overtime and, as a result, your response to non-game situations also becomes quicker. Video games train your brain to quickly assess and respond to game scenarios. This then improves your response time outside of gaming scenarios.
• Improves memory: Playing video games improves your ability to recognize and differentiate between patterns. Pattern recognition is a sign of improved long-term memory. It also improves your working and short-term memory by giving your brain solid practice in retaining information. Longer storylines and complicated tasks force your brain to stay engaged and recall various details at random intervals. This is a fantastic way to practice strengthening your memory.

• Better decision-making skills: Long-term exposure to gaming can improve your decision-making ability. Studies show it trains your mind to pick-and-choose between relevant and irrelevant stimuli. This strengthens your decision-making skills, as it largely depends on your ability to choose between desired and undesired actions. And because video games present decisions under time constraints, you’re forced to make decisions fast and under pressure. As you get more practice with this skill, you’ll notice decisions become easier in other areas of your life.
• Increased flexibility: Multiple studies have shown that playing video games increases your ability to switch rapidly and without error between tasks that have conflicting demands. This is an excellent skill for handling busy schedules and increased demands for your attention at work and home. Multitasking is a bit of myth because you’re really task-switching. But being flexible helps you switch between these tasks easier and faster without losing focus or concentration.
• Fluid problem-solving skills: Gaming has a positive impact on a lot of brain functions that are important for your day-to-day life. A lot of these take place in the area of your brain responsible for executive functionality. Things like attention span, working memory, mental flexibility, reasoning skills, and problem-solving are all examples of how executive function operates through your ability to “get things done”. Video games rely on the use of these skills to finish the game. Gaming also promotes creative thinking and quick response time, which are crucial skills for problem solving.
• Slows mental decline: Your mental flexibility and memory decline naturally with age. Several studies have found that long-term exposure to video games and gaming practices can keep your brain flexible for a longer period because of constant mental exercise. This helps keep your neural pathways functional and learning new skills in various games encourages neuroplasticity. All of this results in an agile, working brain even in advanced age, which improves your quality of life in the sunset years.

Conclusion

Too much of anything is bad, and the same goes for gaming. If playing video games causes you to ignore real-world responsibilities, then that hobby is a problem. But as an exercise to enjoy in your free time, gaming has multiple positive effects on your brain and cognitive abilities. Like anything, playing games in moderation can be fun and promote brain health. So, next time you feel like going on a quest, pick up that controller and game to glory.

If you’re worried about how much technology impacts your life, watch this video for tips on how to digitally detox:

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