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3 Habits to Improve your Brain

With the New Year coming up, let me share with you three.. 3 1/2 simple things that would make good resolutions by themselves, or will make it easier to complete your other new year’s resolutions as well.

Go to sleep as close to 10PM as you can Improving quality of sleep overall is incredibly helpful for mood, focus, energy levels, and health in general, but if I had to pick one thing that improved my sleep the most, it would have to be this.

Have you ever slept a perfectly reasonable amount like 7 to 9 hours and woke up feeling groggy and tired? This is thanks to circadian rhythms. Your body runs on a biological clock that dictates many physiological processes.

We have a daily dose of cortisol in the morning to wake us up and a rise in melatonin at night to put us to sleep. If you can act in sync with this rhythm, falling asleep and getting higher quality sleep is much easier.

What our body would prefer for us to do, is to fall asleep just a few hours after the sun goes down. This differs depending on where in the world you are, but for most people it’s around 10PM.

The powerful anticarcinogen and antioxidant melatonin as well as the restorative “youth hormone” -Human Growth Hormone are secreted in their strongest doses between 10PM and 2AM. As Neurologist Kulreet Chaudhary says, “If your body is chronically deprived of the regenerative sleep between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., then you may still feel fatigued when you wake up in the morning.” I’ve found that going to sleep around 10PM is always better.

For example if I get six hours of sleep from 10PM to 4AM, I will feel much better than if I got eight hours of sleep from 1AM to 9AM. 2) Limit your usage of novelty at a click websites Internet addiction is a real phenomenon and more and more studies on this topic are coming out.

But you don’t have to be technically addicted to see detriments. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible for making you want to do things and is the reason drugs can be so addictive.

Drugs cause a huge surge in dopamine. And, when someone becomes overexposed to dopamine, the dopamine receptors down regulate meaning more dopamine is necessary to get the same amount of motivation.

Essentially, the receptors become desensitized. And, it doesn’t have to be surges of dopamine to get you addicted, it can be frequent exposure. For example the rate of addiction to cigarettes is surprisingly higher than heroin- the difference between the two is you can take puff of a cigarette and get a dopamine rise dozens of times a day, but you’d be passed out or dead before you get anywhere near that frequency with heroin.

The thing with the internet is that websites like reddit, imgur, facebook, twitter act like that puff of a cigarette. Swipe for a new picture and you get a bit of dopamine. Scroll down and you get a bit of dopamine.

Click on a link and you get a bit of dopamine., but you can repeat this hundreds of times throughout the day. This will desensitize your dopamine receptors and it will be harder and harder to get motivated by activities that aren’t instantly gratifying. The gap between behavior and reward with the internet is incredibly small - it can be half a second. Behavior: move thumb.

Reward: funny picture. By using the internet too often, it’s harder and harder for your brain to tolerate more time between behavior and reward. Imgur can reward you with a funny picture in a couple seconds, but staying focused on a project can take several hours before you’re rewarded with a sense of fulfillment.

2 and a half is Meditate I’m lumping meditation in with this because it’s a great way to deprogram this kind of anxious, instant gratification oriented brain. Meditation has a very long list of health benefits, many of which have been scientifically documented.

There’s far too many to talk about here, but one huge benefit is that it quiets that constantly talking usually negative inner narrator. The inner narrator is the one saying: I gotta do this, I gotta do that, what should I eat for lunch? How come so and so hasn’t texted me back? And so on.

There’s actually a network in the brain brain called the default mode network that is generating this mind chatter. It’s responsible for thinking about your self, thinking about how other people are thinking about you and ruminating about the past and worrying about the future.

Meditation has been shown to reduce activity in this network. And, a major node in the default mode network called the posterior cingulate cortex is responsible for emotional reactivity. For example, when someone is craving a cigarette, the posterior cingulate cortex strongly lights up.

By reducing activity in the default mode network, meditation can help diffuse that anxious, impatient, unfocused and instant gratification oriented mind that the internet helped create. 3. Do some exercise every day I used to look at exercise as mainly just a way to build muscle or lose fat.

But now, even if exercise didn’t change the way my body looked at all, I would still do it every day. The positive effects on how it makes your body look pale in comparison to the impressive mental and physiological benefits exercise provides.

Exercise has been shown to help people learn much more efficiently, better deal with stress and drastically reduce anxiety. It improves mood to the point of lifting some people out of depression and it strengthens focus to the point that some ADHD patients elect to throw out their prescriptions.

One big thing exercise does is it raises your levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor - BDNF. Dr. John Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School has nicknamed BDNF “miracle grow for the brain” because it directly promotes the growth of new brain cells.

Researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for things like learning.

A 2007 study found that subjects who did high intensity exercise beforehand could learn vocabulary words 20% faster than those who remained sedentary. Exercise will also give you more motivation in general.

Earlier I explained how excessive use of the internet hampers motivation because it desensitizes your dopamine receptors, making it harder to be motivated by regular activities that don’t provide large or frequent releases of dopamine.

Well, exercise actually triggers the creation of new dopamine receptors meaning you become more sensitive to dopamine, making it easier to be motivated.

This will give a boost in willpower and focus to do the things that you want to have had done, not just the things you want to do now. Going to sleep earlier, meditation and exercise.

Pretty simple and straightforward things, but deviously hard to turn into a habit. Though, once these 3 things do become habits, they will generate far more motivation and willpower than they require.