New Year's resolutions are a great way to focus your brain on what you want to accomplish in the coming year. The more time you spend pondering and writing down your goals, the more you engage your brain in the process. Basically, you're enlisting your brain's help, and, lucky for you, your brain is easily your strongest ally in the accomplishment of those goals. To prime your brain for the tasks ahead, make sure you establish some goals that will specifically benefit your brain. We're offering up five suggestions for resolutions that will have your brain humming along all year.
Resolve to Widen Your Perspective
If you understand the inner workings of your brain, particularly in relation to its continual ability to grow and change, you can choose activities and strategies that will tamp down negative behaviors and bolster the areas you want to improve. For instance, thanks to plasticity (see a prior blog, "Plastic Is Fantastic . . . for Your Brain"), your brain has the ability to grow new neurons, make new connections, and tamp down dysfunctional or unproductive connections. If you pinpoint the problem areas in your brain (too unfocused, too susceptible to stress, hyperactive, difficulty remembering crucial information, and so on), you can choose activities that will tamp down the unwanted responses and increase those that will bolster the new responses you desire. In our books, we make everything you need to know about your brain simple to comprehend and offer many suggestions for things you can do to get happy and rich . . . or simply to have a more smoothly functioning brain. There have been major discoveries in the last few decades about how your brain functions, and learning more about them will help you maximize your brain's potential. It's also highly productive to widen your perspective in other areas of learning, as the more your brain knows, the more it can help you on your quest for success or happiness or whatever else it is that you want to manifest in the new year.
Your brain is your ally, resolve to get it up to speed and reap the rewards.
Resolve to Challenge Your Brain
Giving your brain new (novel) experiences helps it to form new neuronal pathways, i.e., whatever you focus on will generate activity and growth in the areas of your brain that are required for that activity, particularly if it's something you've never done before. The more you do something, the more synapses your brain fires and creates. Novelty is great because it will stimulate synapses that have lain dormant or create entirely new ones, because your brain is trying to adapt to process and understand whatever it is that you deem important.
If you're athletic, try something that will flex your cerebellum more than your biceps, something requiring precise movement and muscle control, like dancing. If you're an obsessive reader, try learning table tennis (which is supposed to be one of the best physical activities for your brain because it involves anticipation, memory, analysis, and physical coordination, all at a very rapid pace). If you haven't read a book in five years, try researching and writing an essay on something that taxes your brain-like neuroscience or quantum physics. If your work is mostly focused on office work or numbers, take up a visual hobby, like photography or painting, to broaden what you ask your brain to focus on and to specifically stimulate your visual senses.
Two of the most fantastic challenges for your brain involve music and language. Learning to read music and play an instrument has been shown to positively morph your brain in ways that few other activities can, and learning to speak a foreign language requires a lot of mental focus and work. Speaking a foreign language, in particular, appears to create a cognitive reserve and improves your ability to stop paying attention to one thing and focus on something else quickly-and it may even keep your brain young. A study published in the journal Neurology surveyed 211 patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's and found that those who spoke only one language saw the onset of their first symptoms four to five years earlier than their bilingual peers.
Other activities that are really good for brain development include:
- Learning to play complicated games challenges your working memory and often includes interaction with others, which sharpens your people-reading skills.
- Learning to build scale models enhances certain cognitive skills, such as concentration, visual-motor skills, and executive functions, such as planning, organizing, strategizing, and both paying attention to and remembering details.
- Learning to practice origami requires learning complicated patterns and an entire new "language" of folds, symbols, and patterns. It requires manual dexterity, hand/eye coordination, and a sharp eye for shapes and spatial relationships.
- Learning to write calligraphy also involves intensive hand/eye coordination and the necessity to learn new ways of doing something you normally do without thinking at all.
Those are just a few ideas, designed to stimulate your own thoughts on activities that would uniquely challenge your brain. Like exercising, it doesn't matter what you do as long as you do something that will engage and challenge your brain. Picking something you find intriguing or joyful will strengthen your resolve to keep doing it-but maybe you won't know how much you like it until you try it.
Make a resolution to do something new and challenging and your brain will thank you for it almost immediately.
Resolve to Choose Your Fats Carefully
Approximately 60 percent of your brain matter consists of fats that create all the cell membranes in your body. Unfortunately, even good fats are a very concentrated source of energy, providing more than double the amount of calories in one gram of carbohydrate or protein, which is why it's important to choose the healthy fats and to eat them in moderation.
Eat More Omega 3 Fatty Acids
The good fats, or lipids, that work so beautifully in your body-and your brain-are called fatty acids. If your diet provides the essential, good fats, your brain cells can manufacture higher-quality nerve cell membranes and influence positively your nerve cells' ability to function at their peak capacity. Omega-3 fatty acids are great for mental clarity, concentration, and focus. Foods containing omega-3 fatty acids include:
- Certain cold-water fish (bluefish, herring, mackerel, rainbow trout, salmon, sardines, tuna, and whitefish)
- Olive oil
- Flaxseed oil
- Peanut oil
- Canola oil
Studies have revealed that Omega-3 fatty acids, which are essential for maintaining normal cognitive function, have additional advantages in the brain. For example, DHA and EPA, the Omega-3 fatty acids found in fish, particularly salmon, albacore tuna, sardines, and swordfish, are vital for a sharp mind. Just remember to limit fish high in mercury to twice a week, and check with your doctor if you have any concerns.
Severely Limit Trans Fats
Most American diets are sadly way over the top when it comes to consuming saturated, hydrogenated, and partially hydrogenated trans fats. When unsaturated fats are heated for a long time, in metal pots and pans, they form altered or trans fatty acids. In contrast to healthy fatty acids (whose soft pliability helps nerve cell membranes function smoothly), these trans fatty acids become double-bonded, rigid, and thus tend to gum up synaptic or electrical nerve cell communication. Besides greatly increasing your chance of gaining too much weight on foods that contain little to zero nutritional value, here's a short list of the damage trans fats can do to your brain:
- Alter the synthesis of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine.
- Increase LDL (bad) cholesterol and decrease HDL (good) cholesterol.
- Increase the amount of plaque in blood vessels and increase the possibility of blood clots forming, both of which puts your heart-and your brain-at risk.
- Increase the amount of triglycerides in your system, which slows down the amount of oxygen going to your brain, and the excess of which has been linked to depression.
Foods to severely limit or exclude include:
