7 WAYS JOURNALING CAN BENEFIT YOUR BRAIN

In this present day and age, journaling is considered a quaint hobby at best, a waste of time at worst. We live in an era dominated by audio-visuals and writing is an increasingly specialized endeavor, reserved for and delegated to professionals.

And yet we find, all through history, scores and scores of successful people, inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and presidents have all kept their own journals religiously. What is it that connects the keen and creative mind to journal keeping?

A lot, actually. Turns out, our ancestors figured out long ago what scientists have gathered verifiable evidence for only recently – journaling has incredible benefits for your brain, as well as your overall physical and emotional health.

Whether you are just jotting down useful information, keeping tabs on your goals, or simply pouring out your thoughts as they come – the very exercise of writing down what’s in your head helps you to unlock a lot of potential your brain would otherwise leave untapped. Read on!

What does journaling do for our brain?

Strengthens memory

Writing does wonders for your memory. It helps you build better comprehension skills, thereby leading to better recall. Also, it has a direct impact on your working memory. When you record your thoughts in the written form, you are going over them again and again in your brain as your thoughts are much faster than your writing speed could ever be. This builds a better capacity for working memory and instant recall.

Better IQ

Several studies claim that writing regularly can have a direct correlation to improvement in your intelligence quotient. Among other things, writing forces you to think and express in established language forms, and that requires new vocabulary acquisition. Turns out, one of the biggest indicators of your IQ score is the breadth of your vocabulary.

Increases focus

Journaling is one of the best ways to sharpen and streamline your focus on anything – be it a long-term goal or the study material at hand. Here’s a tip: get into the practice of scribbling down any idea, information, or thought that you think may come in handy at a later time. Writing it all down embeds it deeper into your brain. You’ll remember why you need to do this thing or that a lot more easily, thereby keeping you focused.

Cognitive processing

Writing has incredible benefits for our cognitive processing and decision-making capabilities. Writing down your thoughts forces you to articulate them in a different medium. You have automatically started processing information when you write it down. It adds to your understanding, and helps clear up any vagueness those ideas may have had while just running through your mind.

Relieves stress

We live in the Information Technology era, and our minds have to take in a mammoth amount of information every day. It is truly a challenge to take in such an amount of information and then to process it and put it to work. The discord between our information-retention capacity and processing speed can lead to huge amounts of stress and poorer decision making on our part. Writing can help you to offload extra information from your memory, keep a lighter head, and to have the luxury of revisiting information or thoughts from some time ago. This significantly relieves the stress and anxiety associated with multi-tasking.

Boosts creativity

Writing is inherently a creative function, but it helps you to unlock your creative potential as well. Journal keeping helps us with lateral thinking, and allows us to see and make connections between different ideas which we wouldn’t be able to see in our heads alone.

Improves your mood

Journaling makes you happy. Especially, writing down your trauma and negative experiences goes a long way toward identifying and facing the issues you are struggling with. It gives us an outlet, thereby lightening our minds and improving our moods. It also helps us look at our emotional issues from a different perspective, thereby improving our emotional intelligence.

Conclusion

Journal keeping gets a less-than-favorable reputation, as though it is only for overly emotional people. But the habits of many illustrious people all over the world and recent science-based evidence tells us that this is one of the best ways to keep your brain from burnout, process your emotions and decisions, and make sense of the world around you. So take out your beautiful stationary today, and set to writing down your thoughts. Your brain will thank you.

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Have trouble focusing on one task for long? Attention span getting shorter and shorter? You are not alone. We seem to be suffering a deficit of attention on a global scale these days. The mind’s nature is to wander, and often it is difficult to make it sit in one place to do what we need it to do.

Fortunately, with some practice, you can actually control your concentration abilities and bring your attention back where it belongs.

Here are 4 mental exercises that can help you get your focus back.

1. Counting exercises

• Take a random book and start counting the words in one paragraph. Don’t count them aloud and don’t point fingers at each word. Do it a couple of times to get the count right. Then count the words in two paragraphs. When you see you are able to do two paragraphs easily, increase the number of paragraphs.
• Count backward from 100 to 1, again, mentally and not aloud. Repeat the exercise. When you are comfortable with this range, increase it to 500, and so on.
• Count backwards with variations. For example, skip the numbers by fives, such as 100, 95, 90, 85, etc. When you are comfortable with that, try a harder variation, like a count of three – 100, 97, 94, etc.

2. Observation exercises

• Take any physical object – a fruit, a toy, a book, anything – and focus your entire mind on it. Observe its characters and features carefully and meticulously. For instance, if it is an apple, note what the color is, how red or how green, if the shape is crooked or smooth, the texture, the smell of it. Simultaneously, keep your mind from straying toward other random thoughts. For example, your mind might stray from the apple to your grocery bills, but don’t think of those things. If your mind strays, gently bring it back to the contemplation of the apple. Start by observing for 3-5 minutes, and increase the time to 10-15 minutes in phases.
• When you master focused observation, try observing without thinking. When we think, we are usually having a conversation in our minds. We think in languages, and those language words bring out images from our memory stores. In this exercise, you try to observe without any kind of talking going on in your head. Don’t tell yourself that the apple is red or green or smooth or crooked. Just observe without thinking anything. Increase the observation time slowly.

3. Visualizing exercises

• After you have observed an object thoroughly for a few minutes, close your eyes and try to visualize it, exactly as you have observed it, from different sides and angles. Try to imagine its texture, smell, shape, color, everything that you have noted with your eyes open. If the image tends to blur, open your eyes, observe for two more minutes, then close them and try again.

4. Focusing exercises

• Sit in a quiet place and choose a word to focus on. It can be anything, as long as it has some positive or inspiring connotation for you – like ‘love’, ‘success’, ‘joy’, ‘courage’, etc. It can also be a phrase or a motto, whatever works for you. Now repeat this word or phrase constantly in your mind with complete attention for 5 minutes. Try to keep your mind focused on just the word/phrase and nothing else. When you find that comfortable, increase the time to 10 minutes.

Now, just like physical exercises, mental exercises too need a bit of preparation and warm-up. Follow these ground rules before starting any mental exercise.

• Choose a comfortable place to sit with minimal disturbances, visual or auditory.
• Sit with your spine straight. You may sit cross-legged in a Yoga posture, or just sit in a chair. What matters is that you sit straight and comfortably.
• Increase the intensity of the exercises slowly, and move to a bigger count only when you can comfortably and easily perform the previous amount.
• Remember these exercises are not about success, but consistency. If you can’t get your focus back after 3 days, you are not supposed to. Keep at it and the effects will show.

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Conclusion

Our mind is no different from our body. The parts get rusty if we don’t work them out. With so many things screaming for our attention these days, our concentration often does not get the workout it deserves. So give your focus that extra boost with these simple exercises.

A steaming mug of coffee or tea is what the majority of us enjoy waking up to. It energizes us, prepares us for the day ahead, and a huge number of people the world over find it difficult to truly “wake up” or clear their head without these beverages.

But what is it that makes coffee, or tea for that matter, so important to our productivity?

Well, it’s the caffeine in both these beverages that does the trick. Caffeine is a naturally occurring substance in coffee beans, cocoa beans, tea leaves, cola nuts, and specific kinds of berries. Which means the products made from these plants also contain this chemical – namely coffee, tea, chocolate etc. Caffeine is also used in cola-based drinks and energy drinks.

Caffeine has a host of impacts on our brain and its functions – both positive and negative. Read on to learn about them!

Ways Caffeine is Good for Your Brain

• Alertness and attention – Caffeine suppresses a neurotransmitter called adenosine. This particular chemical influences our attention, memory, and sleep. Over the course of the day, adenosine levels rise in our brains, and after it reaches a certain level, it signals our bodies to prepare for sleep. Caffeine blocks adenosine build up, so you cannot get sleepy and therefore stay alert.
• Reflexes – As your alertness increases, so does your ability to respond quickly to situations. Caffeine intake has been linked with decreased response time and increased vigilance, thereby improving your reflex actions.
• Energy and mood – When caffeine blocks adenosine, other chemical components in the brain like dopamine, glutamate, and serotonin also get activated and start flowing more freely. Both dopamine and serotonin are associated with happiness and positive emotions in our brain, so caffeine gives us an instant energy boost and mood lift.
• Memory – Caffeine boosts our long-term memory, at least up to a certain level. Recent research at the John Hopkins University suggests that caffeine can boost pattern separation abilities in our brains, making it more discerning and prone to spot differences in apparently similar images. This is a feature of long-term memory.
• Reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease – Caffeine can shield you against Alzheimer’s or other memory-related diseases. New studies suggest that drinking three cups of coffee a day might prevent Alzheimer’s disease or at least delay its onset by several years in the elderly population. Scientists at the University of South Florida found in a study involving 124 people between ages 65-68 that the people who drank coffee every day had a significantly lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s later in life.

But a high consumption of caffeine can have negative impacts on your brain as well.

Ways Caffeine Can Be Bad for Your Brain

Caffeine is classified as a brain stimulant and a psychoactive drug. Like any drug, over-consumption of it can lead to addiction and withdrawal symptoms, and there are other side-effects as well.

• Anxiety – For someone with an Anxiety Disorder, the stimulating effects of caffeine can turn negative. Caffeine makes them jittery, as it unlocks the “fight or flight” response in the brain and increases the chance of a panic attack.
• Insomnia – Adenosine helps us sleep, and caffeine blocks it, which can lead to shallow and disruptive sleep patterns which are bad news for your brain performance. If you consume too much caffeine during the day it will keep you up at night, and essentially counteract the positive effects for the next day.
• Addiction and health hazards – The cycle of coffee – bad sleep – drowsiness – more coffee can lead to dependence and addiction, which have other serious consequences like high blood pressure, increased acidity in the body, and potentially bowel diseases. All of this affects your brain and productivity.

Conclusion

It is clear that coffee can boost several functions of your brain, but only in moderation. Daily caffeine intake for a normal healthy adult should not exceed 400 mg, which translates to roughly 3-5 cups of coffee a day. So let’s raise our mugs to that, and drink a healthy amount for a brain boost!