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– How Walking Can Improve Your Memory, Cognition and More!

You might not think that walking has much to do with brainpower, but science has actually proven that walking can improve your brain health in a number of ways. For starters, walking can help to increase blood flow to the brain, which helps to deliver essential nutrients and oxygen. Walking also helps to reduce stress and anxiety, both of which can lead to better cognitive function. Additionally, walking has been shown to improve memory and protect against age-related mental decline. So next time you need a break from work or studying, go for a walk! Your brain will thank you for it.

1. Walking Helps Lower Your Risk of Depression
Walking is an excellent way to improve your mental health. A 2018 study showed that any kind of moderate aerobic exercise like brisk walking can boost your brain health and lower your risk of developing depression by a third.

2. Walking Improve Your Cognitive Function
A number of studies have shown that the magic amount of twenty to thirty minutes of daily aerobic exercise, such as walking, improves cognitive function and memory.

3. Walking Stimulates Endorphins
Just ten minutes of walking is enough to start your brain releasing endorphins, the brain chemicals that lower stress, boost your mental health, and make you feel good. You’ve heard of the runner’s high? Well, you can get a similar positive rush from a brisk walk!

4. Walking Releases the Brain’s Magic Protein
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) has been dubbed the brain’s ‘magic protein’ as it helps to rewire and build new neural pathways. Scientists believe it can even help lower your risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. And cardiovascular exercise is an easy way to stimulate the production of BDNF and keep your brain in peak condition.

5. Walking Lowers Physical and Mental Fatigue
A 2008 study by the University of Georgia found that just three sessions a week of a low-intensity exercise like walking can reduce fatigue levels by as much as 65 percent.

6. Walking Builds Hippocampus Strength
Your hippocampus is the key part of the brain for forming and storing memories. Research has shown that even brief walks can actually increase the size and efficiency of your hippocampus.

7. Walking Improves Creativity
Artists, writers, and philosophers have long known the importance of walking for clearing blocked creativity and getting inspiration flowing again. Science can now back this up with a 2014 study by Stanford University showing that walking increases your creative output by up to sixty percent.

8. Walking Increases Blood Flow to the Brain
Blood is vital for every organ in your body, not least of all, your brain. That magic twenty minutes is all it takes to increase the blood flow to your brain to keep it active and healthy.

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The Truth About Essential Oils and the Brain – Surprising Results!

Essential oils have long been prized for their aromatic properties, but recent research has shown that these potent plant extracts can also have a profound effect on the brain. Studies have shown that essential oils can improve cognitive function, reduce stress and anxiety, and even promote healthy sleep. For example, one study found that lavender oil improved memory and attention in a group of college students. And another study showed that lemon balm oil was effective in reducing stress and improving cognitive function in a group of healthcare workers.

So how do essential oils work? It is believed that they work by interacting with the limbic system, which is the part of the brain that controls emotions and memory. Inhaling essential oils activates the olfactory system, which sends signals to the limbic system. This can result in a calming or uplifting effect, depending on the essential oil used. So next time you’re feeling frazzled, reach for some lavender oil or lemon balm oil and take a deep breath. You may just find that your mood and your brain function improve as a result.

Those wonderful smells are made up of gazillions of tiny particles that directly affect the limbic part of your brain. Every time you breathe in the essential oil molecules, they are absorbed through the mucous linings of your nostrils and go straight to the olfactory system, eventually ending up in your olfactory cortex and your limbic area.

The limbic part of your brain regulates emotions, memory, your nervous system, heart rate, and blood pressure. The reason that essential oils can be so effective and beneficial for your brain is due to the characteristics of sesquiterpenes, one of the three compounds that make up essential oils.

Sesquiterpene molecules are so tiny they can pass the blood-brain barrier. They are also oxygen-carrying molecules which means they can help the brain heal, improve concentration and learning, and boost brain energy.

But how do you know which essential oils to choose? The following oils have all been shown to improve cognitive function.

Rosemary is an excellent oil to use if you’re studying, or to help manage dementia, as it has proprieties that can enhance your ability to store and retain information.

Peppermint can help improve concentration, memory, and alertness. It is also good for soothing and relaxing muscles and can be applied directly to the forehead to help headaches.

Basil is an ancient plant long used to increase attention spans and improve memory. Basil can also help calm and de-stress when you’re feeling overwhelmed. As well as helping to reduce anxiety, nervousness, and fatigue, basil will give you an energy boost right when you most need it.

Lavender is not just good for helping you sleep. Research has shown that it can help you focus and improve your mental performance precisely because it helps cut through mental stress and fatigue.

Grapefruit essential oil is associated with increased creativity, energy, and positivity and stimulates the brain to promote alertness and improve focus.

Lemon stimulates the central nervous system, leading to increased attention span, greater focus, and enhanced ability to remember information. One study even showed that exposing workers to lemon essential oil increased work accuracy by more than fifty percent!

Ylang ylang has been shown to have an antidepressant effect, and improve mental processing and memory. Ylang ylang is also calming and leads to improved mood.

If you were using your essential oil diffuser to make your environment smell nice, now you know you can do so much more with it. Improve your mood and your cognitive function, all while enjoying refreshing scents!

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How To Keep Your Brain Healthy in Just 5 Minutes a Day

Just as you regularly exercise your body to keep it healthy, so too should you exercise your brain if you want to keep it in top condition. “Brain training” exercises can help to improve your memory and cognitive skills, and there are a number of apps and websites that offer fun ways to give your brain a workout.

In addition to brain training, keeping your mind active by learning new things and engaging in stimulating activities can also help to keep your brain healthy. And finally, don’t forget the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Eating a nutritious diet and getting plenty of exercise will not only benefit your physical health but your mental health as well. So if you want to keep your brain sharp, make sure to take care of it just like you take care of the rest of your body.

You look after your body, stay as fit as you can and make time for a healthy lifestyle, right? It’s just as important to keep your brain healthy too if you want to deal better with stress, be more productive, and reduce your risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life.

The good news is that you can keep your brain in tip-top condition by practicing meditation for as little as five minutes a day. Meditation has been shown to reverse the shrinking that happens as part of the natural aging process from your mid-20s onwards. A Harvard study showed that meditation can increase the size of your brain after just eight weeks of regular practice.

Here’s how you can develop a meditation practice to suit you and your lifestyle to start taking better care of your brain right now.

1. Find the Right Meditation Style for You
Possibly the most important way to start a meditation habit is to find what works for you. You don’t have to sit on a cushion for hours in a temple unless you want to. There are meditation apps for your smartphone, yoga and meditation tutorials on the internet, or you can find a meditation group in your local community. It can be as easy as sitting in a park during your lunch hour.

2. Schedule Meditation Time
Be intentional and make time in your schedule for regular meditation practice. Studies have shown that as little as five or ten minutes a day is enough to feel the benefits of meditation, but it must be done consistently. If you can find time to brush your teeth, you can find time to meditate.

3. Start Small
You don’t have to launch into a full meditation to start with. Take baby steps and begin by just sitting quietly and focusing on your breath. Observe your breathing and feel calmer as you concentrate inwards.

4. Add Some Meditation Exercises
Once you feel comfortable with sitting and breathing quietly, you can add in some meditation exercises. A good one is the V-Shaped Breath exercise:

Focus your attention on the point between your eyes. Imagine cool air coming in and out in the shape of a V. As you breathe in, expand the V across your forehead. Then as you exhale bring the breath down the V to the point between your eyes.

As well as regulating your breathing, you are calming your frontal lobes, increasing your capacity to analyze and problem solve. Adding a five-minute meditation practice to your day is the first step toward a healthier, happier brain.

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3 Ways to Make Sure You Get All the Sleep Your Brain Needs to Stay Healthy

According to the National Sleep Foundation, 50-70 million US adults have a sleep disorder. That’s a lot of bleary-eyed people struggling to get through the day! If you’re one of them, you’re not alone. But just because insomnia is common doesn’t mean it’s normal. In fact, poor sleep can have a major impact on your health and well-being.

It seems like insomnia is a modern epidemic. Whether you deal with insomnia or you are chronically sleep-deprived, it’s likely that poor sleep is affecting your performance.

Sleep deprivation feels terrible. You will have noticed that if you’ve had a bad night’s sleep, you feel sluggish, heavy, and slow, as though you’re trying to walk through syrup. You’re clumsy and confused, you drop things, and nothing seems to go right.

As well as making you feel bad, a chronic lack of sleep can have physical effects on your brain. Sleep deprivation impairs your ability to process and store memories and can even increase your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. Two proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, beta amyloid, and the tau protein, increase with chronic poor sleep. There is some evidence in laboratory tests on mice that sleep helps to clear these proteins from the brain.

The good news is that there are things you can do to improve your sleep health to keep your brain in tip-top shape.

1. Find Out Your Own Best Sleep Levels
Everyone has their own individual sleep needs. Famously, British politicians Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher needed very little sleep, but only getting four or five hours a night is not recommended for most people. Whether you need seven hours or ten, find out what is enough sleep for you.

Enough sleep means waking up without needing an alarm, feeling rested and energetic, and not needing coffee to get you through the day.

2. Improve your Sleep Hygiene
Studies have shown that the hour or two before bedtime has a powerful effect on the quality of your sleep. Schedule in some proper downtime, and stop using blue light-emitting devices like smartphones, computers, tablets, and television an hour or so before you plan to go to bed. Read a book, take a relaxing bath, or listen to calming music—or all three—instead.

3. Don’t Lie There Trying to Sleep
If you can’t sleep after ten minutes, get out of bed and do something else. Lying in bed, getting stressed because you can’t sleep is a recipe for poor sleep and insomnia. You’re also likely to start brooding, mulling over problems or running over the events of the day.

Get up do something relaxing like reading or meditating until you feel sleepy. It’s okay to do this more than once, even multiple times. You’re trying to train your brain to think of bed as a sleeping place, not a thinking place.

Improving your sleep will help you to feel calmer, be more productive, and may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s later in life.

How Can Meditation Stimulate Creativity

When you meditate, your brain enters what is known as the alpha state. This is a state of deep relaxation, and it has been linked to increased creativity. In the alpha state, your mind is more open to new ideas, and you are better able to come up with creative solutions to problems. You are also more likely to have what are known as ”aha moments,” when a sudden insight allows you to see things in a new light. So if you’re feeling stuck, try taking a break and doing some meditation. You may just find that it helps you to tap into your creativity and come up with some great new ideas.

It might surprise you to hear that meditation can kickstart your creative process. After all, meditation is about getting chilled, right? Well, yes, meditation is often recommended for calming the mind and reducing your stress level, but it also has a physical effect on your brain. But how does this help creativity?
Meditation and Your Brain
The simple act of regular meditation frees up the parts of your brain that deal with memory, focus, and cognitive ability. Research has shown that the act of meditating stimulates the high-frequency brain waves that signal attention and perception—all qualities associated with creativity.
The Creative Brain
You probably know that your brain is a complex machine. It has built up capacity over millions of years, but not all the historical layers are as useful as they were when humans were hanging out in caves, alert for the sound of saber-tooth tigers.
The ‘newest’ part of your brain is the neocortex. That’s where the creative stuff happens: Envisioning, problem-solving, creative thinking, and strategizing. Great and useful for the modern world, right?
But there are older parts of your brain that deal with survival (the reptile brain) and emotions (the limbic system) that can prevent the neocortex from getting on with its job. If you’re stuck in fight or flight mode due to lots of stress, or if you’re emotionally out of balance, those parts of the brain dominate and don’t allow your neocortex to get a look in. And that makes sense because if you are confronted with immediate danger, you need all your survival instincts working. But this response is no longer so useful in the twenty-first century. Basically, if you’re stressed out and unhappy, your brain figures you don’t have the luxury to get creative.
Meditation as a Circuit Breaker
Modern life has a way of keeping you permanently wired, with your reptile brain and your limbic system constantly overstimulated. Research has shown that mindfulness meditation is not just calming during your meditation session, it can reduce the hypervigilance of your reptile brain, even out your emotions and stimulate your neocortex. Mediation helps get you out of rigid thinking modes and allows you to start thinking in more creative and innovative ways. Cue better visioning, problem-solving, and strategizing.
Meditation calms down your entire neural system and makes sure the neocortex gets all the resources it needs to get your creativity flowing.

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How to Use Mindfulness to Boost Your Creativity

Have you ever been stuck on a problem, only to have the solution come to you seemingly out of nowhere? That’s the power of mindfulness and creativity working together. When you’re stuck in a rut, it can be difficult to see things from a different perspective. Mindfulness allows you to step back from your thoughts and observe them without judgement. This can help you to break out of negative thinking patterns that can block creativity. In addition, mindfulness can help to increase focus and concentration, both of which are essential for creative problem-solving. If you’re looking to boost your creativity, incorporating mindfulness into your daily life is a great place to start.

You’ve probably heard about mindfulness, and maybe you even have a regular mindfulness practice. But did you know that mindfulness is useful not just for keeping you calm and focused, it can stimulate your creativity and open up your thinking? If you’re interested in reaching your creative potential, here’s how mindfulness can give you a boost.

Understanding the Creative Process

To understand how mindfulness can boost your creativity, it helps to look at the creative process. It can be a delicate synchronization of four steps:

• Information gathering and idea stimulation. This is the blue-sky stage where you research and fire off as many ideas as you can. Your brain needs to be in free-roaming mode here, with your cognitive control network stood down to let you get on with it!
• Incubation. Once you have as many thoughts and ideas down on paper as you can, your brain can get on processing and mulling over options for the next stage.
• Stage three is inspiration. That Eureka moment when you make connections and get creative insights.
• The final stage is the verification or testing phase when your critical brain can analyze and evaluate.

Different parts of your brain dominate different stages of the creative process. Stage one relies on divergent thinking, which is freewheeling and non-critical. The incubation stage is taken care of by the brain’s memory organization area. The inspiration is controlled by your brain’s salience network, which is basically an early warning system for great ideas and making good choices. The verification stage is where you can allow the cognitive control network to get analyzing and critiquing.

But it’s essential to keep these phases in sequence and in balance. If any of these stages get side-lined, say if your Inner Critic jumps in at Stage one or two, your creative process is in danger of falling apart.
The Role of Mindfulness

Mindfulness can help with each stage of the creative process. It boosts divergent thinking necessary for brainstorming, it calms distracting thoughts allowing the incubation of all your brilliant ideas. Mindfulness also strengthens the salience network, so that bright spark of creative insight doesn’t get lost in the crowd. Finally, mindfulness promotes cognitive function, helping you analyze and evaluate your project during the final phase of the creative process.

As well as assisting with the mechanics of the creative process, mindfulness meditation will help you develop self-compassion and non-judgment. Because not all creative projects work out, and that’s okay. Mindfulness will help you develop insight into your own creative process and how you can reach your creative potential.

Beating Social Anxiety – These Avoidance Techniques Are Making Your Social Anxiety Worse

People who suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder become very adept at avoidance or safety behaviors. It’s a natural reaction to something that feels bad, and of course, they will do whatever it takes to avoid those situations. But unwittingly they are reinforcing their anxiety and even making it worse. Have a look at the common avoidance behaviors, and see if in trying to minimize exposure, you’re feeding the beast.

1. Avoidance
Some experts say that avoidance is one of the biggest obstacles people with social anxiety face. True avoidance means doing anything not to have to face the feared social situation. That can range from just not turning up to parties and refusing invitations, to changing jobs so as not to have to give presentations or even dropping out of college.

2. Partial Avoidance
Partial avoidance is a less obvious safety behavior because the sufferer still seems to be participating while still keeping themselves safe. These behaviors include:
• Sitting in the back of the room
• Keeping your eyes lowered and looking like you’re absorbed in taking notes
• Protective body language like crossing arms, or avoiding eye contact
• Daydreaming
• Drinking or taking drugs.

3. Escape
Not surprisingly, people use escape as a safety valve for anxiety. As in partial avoidance, the sufferer seems to be participating but gets to a point where the stress is unbearable, and they have to leave. This sort of behavior includes leaving a party or other gathering early, pretending to get an urgent message so they can leave a meeting, or hiding in the bathroom

What can you do?
While such avoidant behaviors help in the short term, they act to reinforce your vulnerability. They keep you in a hypervigilant state, constantly on the lookout for danger or fearful situations.

Avoidant behaviors keep you stuck right in the middle of social anxiety. They stop you from trying and failing, but they also prevent you from working and succeeding. You won’t learn how to overcome your fears or learn that you’re pretty good at giving presentations. If you never speak up in meetings, all your good ideas stay in your head. If you hide your light under a bushel, you never get the chance to shine.

An easy gateway technique to start overcoming your social anxiety is to try the five-minute strategy. When you feel the urge to avoid or run away or shrink down, give yourself five minutes. You can put up with pretty much anything for five minutes, right? Just give it a try, be kind to yourself and encourage your real self to take it easy

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How To Embrace The Anxiety Of Problem Solving.

Many of the best insights I have gained over the years have often been counterintuitive.

For example, as I have been developing muscular strength with a rigorous weight training program, I have found that I can push more weight and complete more sets when I relax and calm myself mentally before and during each set. The calmness helps me push through the pain.

In this example, the more obvious approach (for me at least) would be to pump myself up with a bunch of deep breaths and yell out loud in aggression before my set. The calm approach is far more effective and DEFINITELY a counterintuitive solution.

In the title of this article I am suggesting another counterintuitive method when I say “embrace the anxiety” of problem-solving.
You might be thinking, “why would I EVER want to embrace anxiety? I mean anxiety causes stress and stress cause health problems.”

Here’s the deal:
Have you ever sat down to write an article on a new topic that you were not comfortable with (or maybe an essay in school), read a complicated instructional manual for a new piece of furniture or attempted to learn a new piece of software on your computer that was out of your technical capacity?

If so, do you recall the sensations of frustration and anxiety that swept over you, especially in the earliest phases of the task?
How did you react to the uncomfortable feelings associated with that frustration/anxiety?

If you’re anything like most people, you quickly sought relief by checking Facebook, watching Youtube, checking email, sending a text, turning the TV on, eating a snack or doing any other “comfort” activity that helped you escape the horrible feeling you had been experiencing.

What you probably did NOT realize at the time, was that this phase of anxiety is the most natural experience in the world. As your brain is working to solve the problem and perform the work in front of you, this anxious feeling is simply a by-product of the experience.

Instead of running away from the anxiety and the unpleasant feelings that come along with it, I am going to suggest you EMBRACE it instead.

Celebrate the fact that you have given yourself a tough problem and your incredible brain is busy working away. Much like the body builder learns to actually enjoy the physical pain of a difficult weight lifting set, you simply change your perception of this process from a negative experience to something positive and exciting.

And here’s the best part…
Do you recall any times in your past when you faced a deadline and you were FORCED to work through the anxiety because you had no choice?

What likely happened was after a certain period of time had elapsed, you moved from a frustrating state to a flow state and the work started pouring out of you. You went from anxiousness to excitement. All because you were patient and persistent enough to allow your brain to work the problem and give you the answers you needed for your situation.

So… the next time you sit down to build that next “whatever’, keep this lesson in mind and REFUSE to allow yourself to indulge in temporary relief. You are only prolonging the pain anyways. Put that iPhone away and stick with your problem until you get in the zone.
Then you can simply let go and let your best ideas pour out of you.

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4 Easy Ways to Train Your Brain to Be More Creative

You might be surprised to hear that you can actually train your brain to be more creative. Oftentimes, people think that creativity is some mystical, innate skill, and you either have it, or you don’t. But research has shown that there are some strategies you can use to stimulate creativity in your everyday life and benefit from new ways of thinking and problem-solving.

1. Switch up your regular routine
It’s easy to get stuck in a rut of doing things the same way every day. But the more you stimulate your brain with change and novelty, the more flexible and creative your brain gets.

Keep your creative mind on its toes by reading new books, trying different foods and places to eat, and even trying different routes through your neighborhood. Switching up your usual routines will stimulate your mind and get you thinking about new possibilities and approaches to life.

2. Relax the rules
So much of what you do is bounded by shoulds and oughts. From those eight glasses of water, you’re supposed to drink, the right foods to eat, and how much and when, to whether it’s okay to talk in the elevator, much of your life is probably restricted by how you think you should behave.

Try breaking some of the rules today. Smile and say hi to the waiter or the bus driver. Crack a joke in that silent elevator. Open up a bit and allow your creative, maybe even slightly anarchic brain to flourish.

3. Look around you
Another good way of relaxing your mind and allowing your creativity to grow is to simply sit in the present and observe what’s going on around you. Work your way through each of your senses and really notice your environment. What can you hear, see, smell, feel, even taste? Notice everything and then write down what comes into your head.

When you walk down the street, look up and around. Chances are you’ll be the only person not looking at their phone or frowning into the idle distance. Don’t miss out on noticing the signs of spring or autumn. Look up and around and see how many colors and textures are right there in front of you.

4. Really talk to people
How much of your conversation is either you talking or being talked at? Step back a little and really engage with other people. Don’t just talk or think of what you’re going to say next. Practice active listening and give the other person space to speak.

Real conversation can open up all sorts of possibilities and creative solutions you might never have thought of.