Sort Your Brain Out. Адриан Вебстер
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There are a few things that you could start doing right away to instantly improve your brain's performance and get you off to a flying start. Let's call them Brain Optimisation Principles, or BOPs for short. You can follow these simple suggestions to get your brain firing on all cylinders each and every day. Here are five for starters.
BOP1: Water – Start every day by rehydrating your brain
Believe it or not your brain is 80% water. If you are dehydrated, the speed with which the electrical messages are sent zipping around the 100,000 miles of brain wires is compromised. The trouble is that you wake up slightly dehydrated every single day. How do we know? Well, if you managed to survive until morning then you must have kept on breathing through the whole night. Nonstop breathing is absolutely vital to staying alive because that is the only way to get oxygen into your body to maximise release of the energy that powers all your cells, tissues and organs. It's also the main way to get rid of the primary waste material produced by this metabolic process, namely carbon dioxide. In order to get these gases moving in and out of your bloodstream, the inner surface of the lungs must be kept nice and moist at all times.
This means that every time you exhale, you lose some water vapour in your breath. (That's what fogs up a mirror when you breathe on it – as the warm vapour hits the cool glass, it condenses to become liquid water droplets). During the daytime we replace this lost water whenever we feel hungry or thirsty and decide to find something to eat or drink. At night there are fewer opportunities, if any, to replace this lost water, so by morning there is inevitably a deficit to correct. So start the day by rehydrating your brain to get rid of that woolly‐headed feeling caused by those sluggish, dehydrated neurons.
BOP1: Drink a whole glass of water as soon as you wake up in the morning to quickly replace all the water you lost over the course of the night. And remember to keep topping up throughout the day – for your brain's sake.
BOP2: Exercise – vital for brain health (and for holding onto your marbles)
Exercise is well known to be good for the body, but everyone overlooks its immense impact on the health of your brain. In the short term, the moment you start to do any form of even moderately demanding exercise, your body automatically responds by releasing a torrent of hormones and brain chemicals to make you feel good. Even more importantly, an ever‐increasing body of evidence suggests that people who take regular exercise enjoy a better‐functioning brain. It even increases the rate at which new brain cells are created in the hippocampus. And it seems to be more important than any other factor in helping people hold onto their marbles well into old age.
BOP2: Do a minimum of 20–30 mins of moderately intensive exercise every day (or 40–60 mins every other day).
BOP3: Stress – Get a grip on cortisol to manage your stress levels
Stress has a bad reputation. We tend to think of it as being a bad thing, something to be avoided if at all possible. Yet cortisol – the primary stress hormone – is vital for helping us to get things done. Released in your body in response to the problems of everyday life, it actually helps you deal with those problems. It may make you feel “stressed out,” but it's most definitely a friend and not a foe.
Cortisol is actually a vital part of any happy, well‐balanced and successful life. The part of the equation that many people overlook is that the desire to get rid of that feeling of being “stressed out” is part of the motivation we need to get useful things done. If cortisol didn't make us feel uncomfortable, we'd probably lack the impetus to take action. It also mobilizes body and brain to help deal with life's daily stresses by increasing metabolism, so that more physical and mental energy is available to help us eliminate the cause of the problem.
There's a natural daily rhythm to the release of cortisol to ensure that we're keyed up during the daytime and winding down towards bedtime. Bad or upsetting news triggers a boost of cortisol, which is why it's not a great idea to look at emails, social media or newsfeeds in the hour before bedtime.
The key point here is that a little bit of stress in the short term is a good thing but chronic stress is most definitely bad. Part of the reason is that in order to help you deal with life's major challenges, cortisol suppresses the immune system. This enables us to postpone feeling ill – which would otherwise force us to rest, to divert all available energy and resources into fighting off the bugs – until the stressful situation has passed by or been resolved.
Chronic stress describes a situation where cortisol levels remain high for many weeks or months, meaning that the body and brain never get the chance to repair properly, nor fight diseases. While it's often impossible to remove the sources of stress in life, there are several things you can do to actively reduce cortisol levels.
BOP3: Manage stress by proactively setting aside GOM time (see the chapter “All Aboard the Stress Express!”), clinically proven to reduce cortisol levels.
BOP4: Get out into nature, go soak up some rays
Getting out into nature makes humans happy. Two or more hours of recreation time outdoors each week makes a measurable difference. In fact, the more time we find to relax in parks, on the coast or in the countryside, the happier we become – an effect that peaks at five hours per week. This is partly due to the calming effect that fresh air and being in nature has on brains, but also thanks to getting more exposure to UV light from the sun.
When ultraviolet (UV) light strikes the skin it makes vitamin D. Vitamin D is vital for bone health, but it is also used in the brain to make a very important brain chemical called serotonin. Serotonin is crucial because it is involved in several brain pathways, including those that regulate mood and sleep. Keeping your vitamin D topped up by getting outdoors on sunny days improves mood by helping to keep serotonin levels high across the whole brain.
Your skin is your heaviest organ – and weighs three times more than your brain!
In many parts of the world, as the days get shorter there's not enough ultraviolet‐B (UVB) light available from the sun to activate production of vitamin D. To keep your serotonin levels topped up year‐round, try to be vigilant about getting out into the daylight from spring through to autumn when the UVB is stronger. Don't be put off by cloudy days! While cloud cover cuts out a large proportion of visible light, making it seem a bit gloomy compared to when the sun is out, the strength of the UV light is not diminished to the same degree. This is why you can still get a nasty sunburn on the beach even when it is overcast.
BOP4: Get outside in nature as much as you can. Two to five hours per week makes a significant difference to happiness levels!
BOP5: Caffeine – Great for brains (but morning only is best)
It is estimated that more than 50% of the world's population consumes coffee on a daily basis. That's despite us all having heard at some time or other that too much coffee is bad for our health. So what's the story? The scientific evidence suggests that if you regularly drink coffee then the caffeine will make you feel more alert, but only to levels that people who have never touched a drop in their lives enjoy every day! On the other hand, there do seem to be some long‐term benefits. Coffee drinkers enjoy a neuroprotective effect in the long run. It seems to slow down the neurodegenerative processes that are responsible for neurological conditions like dementia and Parkinson's disease, by 5–10 years! That said, it's also important to bear in mind that caffeine sticks around in our bodies for a very long time.
It takes six whole hours to reduce the caffeine levels in your bloodstream by half. That means if you have four cups of coffee in you at midday, then six hours