Move It!
Take a hike. Climb some flights of stairs. Lace up your sneakers and head out for a walk, run, or bike ride. Learn how to dance. Pump some iron. Complete a circuit workout at the gym.
Everyone knows that physical exercise is good for the body, and now we know it’s just as good for the brain. A number of studies over the past 10 years have demonstrated how important exercise—especially the aerobic kind—is in regard to both cognitive function and memory.
Brain shrinkage, especially shrinkage of the hippocampus, is associated with memory loss, decreased cognitive functioning, Alzheimer Disease, and dementia. As one witty reporter on the subject said, “at least as it relates to the hippocampus, size does matter.”
But brain shrinkage is not an inevitable function of aging. Regular aerobic exercise has been shown to increase the size of the hippocampus by generating new nerve cells (a process called neurogenesis). The more exercise you engage in as a young or midlife adult, the less brain shrinkage you will have to make up for when you are older. But aerobic exercise can trigger neurogenesis at any age or stage of life.
Aerobic exercise gets your heart to pump more oxygen to your brain and initiates your body’s release of hormones that contribute to the growth of brain cells. Not only can you grow new brain cells as a result of exercise, you can also create new connections between them, thereby increasing your brain’s plasticity.
Working memory, planning and scheduling (managing time and attention), multitasking, switching focus, and dealing with ambiguity are some of the functions of an area of the brain known as the executive center. For many people, executive center functions are adversely affected with age. The great news is that these are the very functions that benefit most from regular physical exercise.
Exercise provides short-term benefits, too—as in right now. Twenty minutes of aerobic exercise can immediately improve your cognitive functioning. To enhance the effects, do something that also requires coordination or strategy, such as dancing, playing a game, or ice skating.
It isn’t only aerobic exercise that provides these cognitive benefits. A recent study indicates that yoga may be even better at sharpening the mind. The sample for this study was small, but the results are intriguing. If they can be replicated in other studies, this would be great news for people who can’t–or don’t want to–engage in vigorous physical exercise.
Recent research published in the Journal of Comparative Neurology shows how inactivity also alters the brain, but not in a good way. This is your brain. This is your brain on the couch.
Physical exercise is “neuroprotective” for your brain no matter how old you are–and maybe even no matter what kind of exercise you do. It’s never too late—or too soon—to move it for your brain’s sake.
Exercise Your Veto Power
The unconscious part of the brain—also called the subliminal brain or System 1—is a much faster processor and reactor than the comparatively plodding conscious part of the brain—the only part of the brain we’re aware of. The unconscious responds quickly, automatically, and without thought. This often works to our advantage. I once found my foot slamming on my car’s brake before I was even aware that a speeding pickup truck outside my line of sight was about to run its red light.
Had my unconscious brain not reacted as quickly as it did, I would have been in the middle of the intersection at the same time as the truck. The conscious part of my brain needed a lot more time to process all the information. I didn’t fully grasp what was happening until after the pickup ran the red light, the driver recognized the near miss, and the truck came to a screeching stop at the shoulder of the road on the other side of the intersection.
In a situation like that, stopping to think through what to do could have proven fatal.
Most of us don’t find ourselves in life-threatening circumstances on a regular basis. But the unconscious brain reacts or responds just as quickly in our ordinary, everyday situations. It is notorious for jumping to conclusions. And in many cases, the unconscious response, reaction, or conclusion isn’t the most accurate or appropriate one. Those are the times when it pays to slow down, consider what the best response might be, and make a conscious choice. We can choose to go with the flow and accept the initial reaction or impulse generated by our unconscious. Or we can exercise our veto power and choose a different response.
A participant in one of the courses I teach came up with the acronym STOP. When she notices herself engaging in automatic behavior, she reminds herself to Stop, Think, Observe, and then Proceed.
We can’t prevent the unconscious from doing its thing—and we definitely wouldn’t want to. But learning when to trust it and when to STOP and exercise our veto power can help us avoid doing and saying many things we might later wish we hadn’t.
I Think; Therefore, I Pay Little Attention to What I Do*
We know other people based on what they do. How else could we know them? And we infer all kinds of things about them from their behavior—especially from their habitual behavior.
Say someone you know is routinely late, and his lateness affects you. He may be full of apologies each and every time. He may have reasons to offer up to explain his lateness. He may claim he really, really wanted to be on time—and that may really be true.
You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. –Carl Jung
You can’t know for sure what he’s thinking, though; you can only know for sure what he does. And it will be next to impossible for you not to draw some conclusions about him based on his behavior. Such as:
- He’s disorganized.
- He’s inconsiderate.
- He has a poor sense of time.
- He’s self-centered.
You’d likely dismiss your friend’s vigorous insistence that he intended to be on time. Actions, you might be inclined to say, speak louder than words—or well-meant intentions.
Put the shoe on the other foot, however, and the story takes an interesting turn. When it comes to our own behavior, we’re more likely to expect others to take into consideration not just what we do, but also what we intended to do (or, in some cases, what we would have intended if we’d actually put any thought into it). In fact, we expect others to accept our intentions as being even more important—and indicative of who we are—than our actions. It’s the thought that counts, right?
All of us tend to grant much more significance to what we think, intend, plan, and wish for than to what we do. So if what we do misses the mark or doesn’t live up to our or someone else’s expectations, it’s entirely too easy for us to write off the behavior, dismiss it, or excuse it. That isn’t the real me. It doesn’t reflect who I am. It’s just something I do.
I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts. –John Locke
What we do says quite a lot about who we are—if not to us (because we’re not paying attention)—to other people. Other people are inferring things about us based on our behavior just as we’re inferring things about them based on theirs. If we recognize that what we do tells others who we are, we don’t have to expect them to try to read our minds in order to understand us. Of course, that means we need to pay more attention to what we do—as well as to what we say we’ll do.
*Slight apologies to Rene Descartes.
Reinvent the Wheel
Last spring when I was clearing stuff out of my apartment and garage, I noticed that none of my exercise equipment or paraphernalia ever made it into the recycle piles. I simply left it where it was without even considering letting go of it. I had to question the hands-off attitude since I hadn’t used any of that stuff in at least a couple of years. Then I realized that, of course, I intended to use some or all of it again…one of these days.
I had been thinking about getting back into strength training for several months. I already had a fold-up weight bench, two sets of dumbbells, and a program I had followed here in the privacy of my own home. So when I imagined doing strength training, I automatically thought of re-starting that program. That’s what I had done before. I knew how to do strength training.
The problem was I didn’t want to do that program; I didn’t want to do any program in the privacy of my home. I wanted to join a gym and work with a personal trainer. It took me a while to realize that the strength training program I had used in the past wasn’t right for me now. Holding onto the exercise equipment—and my belief that what I needed to do was what I had done before—was actually keeping me from doing what I wanted to do. In fact, it was keeping me from doing anything.
So I got rid of most of the exercise stuff, joined a gym, connected with a great personal trainer, and have been working out four times a week for the past four and a half months. I love it, and I feel great.
This wouldn’t be particularly interesting if were nothing more than a personal anecdote. But I’ve noticed I’m not the only one with this mindset. Two friends—one male and one female—both want to lose weight. Both successfully lost significant amounts of weight in the past. Both have grappled with the conviction that they know what they need to do, which is to replicate what they did in the past. And just like me and my desire to re-start a strength training program, that conviction has delayed their taking action.
Another friend wants to get a better handle on her day-to-day finances. She developed a system that she used in the past, and her first inclination was to go back to that system because it worked before. But she readily admitted that she didn’t really like it and didn’t particularly want to start using it again.
Whether it was exercising, losing weight, or keeping track of money, all of us got hung up on whatever we did that worked in the past and assumed that was the only way we could be successful in the present. Rather than using our past successes as motivation to figure out what would work now, we focused on the details of what we did before. We forgot that when we were successful the first time, we weren’t relying on past experience. We had to figure it out. (We also may have forgotten other failed attempts that preceded our successful ones.)
Our brains create the sense (illusion) of a continuous self. But our present self is not our past self, nor is it our future self. When we imagine that we “know how to do that” because it worked in the past, we forget we’re not that person anymore. Instead of trying to repeat what our past self did, we’re more likely to be successful if we start fresh—if we start by assuming we don’t know how to do that. Then we have an opportunity to find out what might work this time around.
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