Your Brain: Use It Or Lose It

Yoga – Mindful attention to movement

How To Improve & Reverse Brain Aging 

Are you using your brain? Of course, but if you’re not using your brain correctly, you are losing cells and your brain is aging more quickly. What does that mean to you? Memory loss, not being able to maintain focus, mood problems, and even physical problems can start becoming more evident, slowly but surely!

Luckily, there are excellent and easy ways to make certain that you are taking care of your brain with both feeding and exercising, and relaxing your brain. But it’s not something that you can put off. Yes, you can restore many lost and depleted functions because of brain plasticity (the brain’s ability to use other parts to relearn and learn new functions – even into old age). However, it’s a LOT harder to get back into something than to get out of it!

One of the tools I’ll be teaching in my upcoming webinar* (make sure you sign up to get the info!) is about how slowing down and focused attention on physical motion helps your brain to sharpen up.

After I had arthroscopic surgery on my knee (from being a rabid tennis player – lol), I was told that I had to move it right away. It was swollen as a big melon, and I was afraid it would hurt. I was using a crutch, and not putting my weight on my foot, only my toes to keep my balance. When I went to the doctor’s office, he immediately not only made me stand flat on my foot, but he instructed me to “WALK”. I couldn’t figure out how to do it! I had to learn how to SLOWLY break down the process of shifting my weight, moving it forward, extending my bent right leg, slowly straightening it out and putting my heel on the ground…. Try it yourself: do it really slowly, observing each of the parts of your body and action it takes to do something as simple as walking!

You’ve just exercised your BRAIN, and started growing new brain cells just by focusing on physical motion! This is one of the ways that yoga is so effective. Done with focused attention to the physical feeling and postures, you are improving your brain’s ability to grow! Most of the physical motions you do in a day are habitual, and you don’t need to use your brain to think about it to do it.  And that’s good for many actions. Just imagine if you had to focus to tie your shoe laces each time! But habitual thinking is also a way that doesn’t challenge your brain, and won’t grow new brain cells.

So, use it or lose it!

What other physical actions do you do during the day that you can consciously slow down and focus on to improve your brain function? Please share your ideas to help others!