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Is Excessive Weight Aging Your Brain?

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Obesity and Brain Health

There is no question – obesity has negative effects on health, overall. Most of us know this already. But maybe less known is its role in brain health. Science continues to conduct research studies to measure the impact of elevated weight on brain function.

It is normal for us to think about the brain and its well-being when it may be after a traumatic brain injury – or repeated impacts arising from contact sports. Indeed, these events have been linked to chronic problems in brain function; other factors seem to just make sense on the disease continuum – from high blood pressure to the increasing prevalence rate of Alzheimer’s disease, the latter being exacerbated by lifestyle habits that are omnipresent in our daily lives. This can include a long list, such as harmful diet, excess alcohol consumption, and chronic sleep deprivation. We commonly think about these disorders once symptoms arise. however, the underlying neuropathology has been present for years – even decades – prior to any symptomatic onset.

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Enhancing Support for Brain Functions with Supplements and Nutraceuticals

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Enhancing Support for Brain Functions

Note: the nutraceuticals and supplements discussed in this post is not intended to be understood as an endorsement of their usage. Any changes to intake in the form of supplementation should be discussed with a physician prior to use.

As a Certified Brain Fitness Coach, the need to expand your knowledge of nutraceuticals cannot be overlooked. Often credited with serving to support optimal cellular functioning, nutraceuticals play an important role in ensuring your clients have the foundational building blocks that allow them (and their physical form) to continually produce neurotransmitters and co-factors at levels essential to supporting optimal brain health.

Aging occurs when cellular death from reactive oxygen species occurs at a faster rate than cellular growth. What is interesting is the science that allows us to see the brain as the most metabolically active organ in the body, causing it to generate a large amount of reactive oxygen species in the process. The brain is also quite vulnerable to oxidative stress; these reactive oxygen species often get neutralized by the brain’s natural antioxidant systems in a healthy individual.

These systems operate efficiently for most of our lives but in an aging individual, the reactive oxygen species are often in excess of the antioxidant capacity…resulting in cellular aging. The solution is to incorporate nutritional solutions to support the brain’s antioxidant capacity.

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What’s Unique About Dialectical Behavioral Therapy?

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What’s Unique About Dialectical Behavioral Therapy?

Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is a type of cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy to help people with mood disorders, traumatic brain injury, eating disorders, and substance abuse.

DBT was originally intended to treat borderline personality disorder (BPD), but it has been adapted to treat other mental health conditions. It can help people who have difficulty with emotional regulation or are exhibiting self-destructive behaviors (eating disorders and substance use disorders).

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Hydration and its Impact on Brain Function

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Hydration and its Impact on Brain Function

Humans can survive without food for several weeks but without water, life would end in three to five days. Our brain is comprised of approximately 75% water. That fact, alone, tells us how critical hydration is to the brain and body.

While we often think of food and nutrients as critical to life (they are), water is even more so. The average person can live only three to five days without water. Most can survive about three weeks without food.

Now that we’ve established water is important, let’s look at how it impacts you.

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What is the Relaxation Response?

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What is the Relaxation Response?

The counterpart to the fight-or-flight response, the relaxation response, occurs when the body is no longer in perceived danger, and the autonomic nervous system functioning returns to normal. As a form of meditation, the relaxation response tends to be well received by those with busy minds.

Physician Herbert Benson was a pioneer in studying the physiological changes that occurred during meditation techniques. Benson can be largely credited for demystifying meditation and helping to bring it into the mainstream, by renaming meditation the “Relaxation Response.”

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How to Improve Your Brain Fitness

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What is Brain Fitness?

We often hear the phrase “use it or lose it” in reference to brain fitness. With the growing awareness of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, there is a greater concern for maintaining brain function and avoiding disease.

Brain Fitness is the state of brain health and mental well-being that makes you “fit” for life and work demands. It’s a fundamental measure of the brain’s ability to function efficiently and effectively during work and leisure activities, to be healthy, to resist disease.

Brain fitness can be protected and nurtured by lifestyle, by formal education, by being actively mentally engaged in life, and by targeted practices designed to challenge important mental skills.

Healthy lifestyle habits including mental stimulation, physical exercise, good nutrition, stress management, and sleep can improve brain fitness. On the other hand, chronic stress, anxiety, depression, aging, decreasing estrogen, excess oxytocin, and prolonged cortisol can decrease brain fitness as well as general health.

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How to Listen to Your Brain and Give It What It Needs

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Written by Mark Teahan Director of Education Programs

Giving Your Brain What It Needs

It has been said that real change has to connect with the heart for it to occur or endure. That sounds really nice, but it’s not the whole picture. The truth is, change starts just as much in the brain than anywhere else in the body. Referencing the heart addresses our need for a warm feel-good requirement in our coaching sessions but the truth is, there is a lot of science behind the change. And it mostly comes from the brain. [Read more…]

How Your Brain is Optimized With Quality Sleep

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How Your Brain is Optimized With Quality SleepAs a Certified Sleep Coach or Brain Fitness Coach, you know that a clear and rested brain works at peak efficiency after quality sleep. A well-functioning brain creates more opportunity for success in each aspect of life.

Quality sleep is 7 to 8 hours of restful, uninterrupted sleep. The National Sleep Foundation defines quality sleep as:

  • Sleeping more time while in bed (at least 85 percent of the total time)
  • Falling asleep in 30 minutes or less
  • Waking up no more than once per night; and
  • Being awake for 20 minutes or less after initially falling asleep.

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The Brain and It’s Connection to Sleep

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The brain serves as the command center that tells us when to feel sleepy and when to be alert and awake. Brain cells are in charge of making us fall asleep.The brain serves as the command center that tells us when to feel sleepy and when to be alert and awake. Tiny amounts of brain cells are in charge of making us stay awake or fall asleep. Some of them encourage alertness and others encourage sleep; some cells promote stages of wakefulness and others promote levels of sleep (9). The brain cells (neurons) that encourage alertness also work to prevent actions that encourage sleep, and vice versa. Maintaining a balance usually results in either a reasonably constant phase of alertness or a reasonably constant period of sleep. This is how the brain is believed to regulate sleep.

The intricacies regarding exactly how the brain controls sleep is not fully understood. Certain areas of the brain, such as in the hypothalamus, and the brainstem support mental alertness and wakefulness by releasing neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine (9). These chemicals stimulate the cerebral cortex, which when activated causes us to stay awake. This is what happens when a person takes caffeine. It stimulates the cerebral cortex, which covers the thought process, and it also stimulates the medulla (9). The latter results in decidedly negative effects, such as an increase in heart/respiratory rate and poor muscular coordination (9).

[Read more…]

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