Halt brain decline - take responsibility

Here is the last tip on reducing the decline of your brain - and it’s a bit different to the others.

It’s about having an ‘internal locus of control’

More help with improving your brain

Locus of control

If you have an internal locus of control you take responsibility for what happens to you. You assume that there is something you can do about your situation.

If you have an external locus of control you think that the problems you have are the fault of others and that your life is determined by fate, so there is nothing you can do about it.

Your brain and locus of control

In the study at Johns Hopkins University on the Harvard Alumni that I referred to in the first of these blogs; this was the fifth factor affecting your cognitive skills in old age.

http://vinehouse-essential.blogspot.com/2012/01/prevent-decline-in-your-brain.html
The internal locus of control is linked to retaining those skills.
In another study, carried out by Dr Rosy Daniel on breast cancer patients, she discovered that there was a big difference in survival rates of the patients who had an internal locus of control and those who had an external locus of control.

I heard her speaking about it at a conference years ago. I can’t remember the exact figures, but I do remember that your chances of surviving 10 years were more than doubled if you had an internal locus of control.
It doesn’t take much thinking to work out why. If you take control and identify what you can do to help yourself get better, it seems much more likely than your health will improve as compared with giving up.

Internal locus of control - good all round

So taking this approach to your life is good for many aspects of your life and also helps you to live longer.

Look out for others

When people get depressed or stressed, they can tend to drop into the external locus of control. You will hear things like: “They did it to me.” “They should do something about it.”

One way to help an individual take control is to ask this question:
“What is your responsibility in this situation?”
Sometimes you may have to wait quite a long time for an answer. But do keep waiting. This question can really help a person to turn their thinking around.

You might want to ask yourself the same question.

Blame

This is not the same as blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong. It’s more about identifying the action you can take to improve matters and achieve your goals.

Five ways to improve your brain

Now you have five ways to improve your brain - use them well so that, when you are retired and in your old age you can enjoy and make the most of it.

Aerobic exercise

Non-aerobic exercise

learning

social activity

Halt brain decline - reduce dementia risks by half

Halt brain decline - reduce dementia risks by half
In the first blog on this topic last week I mentioned a study carried out on Harvard Alumni.
That study took several thousand alumni in their 70s and identified those who were still cognitively active and those who were not. In other words, those whose brains were still working well and those who spent most of their time sat staring at a TV screen.

The researchers looked at the past lives of the group to see what differences there were that could account for the on-going brain activity. There were five key differences. These outweighed genetic factors.
That means that if you have parents or grandparents who have declined almost to the state of vegetables, you do not have to follow them. (It also means that if you have parents who are still very mentally active you will not automatically be the same.)

We have already looked at three other factors: aerobic exercise (the most effective of all), non-aerobic exercise and learning new things.

Improve your brain now

Social activity and your brain

In a study at Kaiser-Permanente published in the American Journal of Public Health women who interacted frequently with friends and others in their social network were half as likely to suffer from dementia as those who did not often see friends, or had few.

This is backed up by other studies. In fact, one shortcut to an early grave is to live in poverty on your own as a hermit.

Keep in touch with your friends

It can be so easy to let contacts slip, so make sure you have a system for keeping in touch with people. And get in touch with those you haven’t seen or heard from in a while.

Make new friends

This can be a daunting prospect if you are not used to it. But here is a true story of what happened to my grandfather. When my grandmother died he was devastated and sank into a depression.

At her funeral, instead of flowers, we all donated money to a local school for blind children, so my grandfather was invited to see the oven that had been bought with the money.

While he was there he noticed that many of the children’s toys were broken. As a cabinet-maker he had all the skills required to mend them, so offered to take a few home with him and fix them.

When he brought them back they were delighted and he took more home. He ended up visiting several days a week and working with the children. It completely changed his life.

I called in to see him one time, but he didn’t have time for a long visit because he was dashing off to the school. Instead of the morose, dismal individual he had been he was back to his old self; lively, interested in life, happily chatting with me.

At his funeral I met the Head Teacher of the school. She told me how grateful they were for all the work and help he had given. He had clearly been very popular and contributed a lot.

Just joining in with a new group of people had brought benefits to all of them.

Have a plan

It’s easy to end up in a situation where your friends have moved away or died, as you get older. So make sure you join organisations, keep in touch with friends and don’t end up as Jonny-no-mates. It just requires a small amount of effort, but the benefits are tremendous.

Halt brain decline with learning

Here’s another way to halt the decline of your brain - it’s pretty straightforward and is much more what people think about when they talk about improving your brain.

Learn something new

The newer and more different it is, the better. It’s good for your brain because it encourages you to grow new connections in your brain.

So, if you already speak seven languages, instead of learning a new one, learn to do watercolour painting or dance the tango.

If you can already tango, what about learning to play chess?

In his book “Aging with Grace: The Nun Study and the science of old age. How we can all live longer, healthier and more vital lives.” David Snowdon identifies that further education delays the onset of dementia.

You’ll find lots of suggestions for things to learn, depending on your personal preferences and what you already do in my booklet “Boost Your Brain in Your Spare Time.”

Tomorrow and Friday, some rather surprising suggestions that you may not have come across, so stay tuned.

Halt brain decline with non-aerobic exercise

Sea Squirt

Here’s the next way to halt brain decline. Non-aerobic exercise. This is weight training or other activities that include movement, but don’t raise your heart rate a great deal or make you break out in a sweat, like gardening, dancing and walking.

 

 

Why is non-aerobic exercise so good for your brain?

Think about your brain. Where do you think it ends? At your neck? No. It ends at the ends of your fingers and the ends of your toes. Nerves are simply the ‘stalks’ of your brain cells or neurons.

As you get older the protective sheath around your nerves (the myelin) can start to degrade which means that the messages sent down those nerves are not transmitted properly.

You control all your movements by sending signals along those fibres. If the signals are not received correctly you can start using your joints badly, so they start to get damaged.

Imagine how complicated your knees and elbows are. Each muscle involved in their movement needs to contract and relax at exactly the correct moment for your knee or elbow to work properly. If not, your joints can start to deteriorate.

The good news

You can do something to drastically reduce this problem - that is non-aerobic exercise. Repeating the same movement time and time again sends signals down your nerves. Repeating the same signal along your nerve encourages it to repair any damage.

Use it or lose it

That’s what non-aerobic exercise does, so make sure you get some at least each week, if possible, get it every day.

Why movement is so important for your brain

Do you know the life cycle of the see squirt? It swims around in the ocean till it finds a nice spot to make its home. Then it attaches itself to a rock and stays there for the rest of its life.

Guess what its first meal is? It digests its own brain. This is because it doesn’t need it any more. You need your brain to decide if you are in the right place or not. If not, it makes you move to another place.

When you are young and your brain is developing, movement is a vital part of that process.

Movement is vital for keeping your brain healthy and active. It’s pretty good for your heart too.

Look out for more ways of keeping your brain from decline on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week.

Go here for the last post on stopping the decline in your brain.

Want to improve your hearing?

An interesting article in Psychology and Aging describes research that identifies a difference in the hearing of musicians and non-musicians.

It turns out that if you have musical training you cannot hear quiet sounds better than those with no musical training can hear, but on other measures you score more highly.

If you have had musical training (in the research they used people with at least six years) you will be better at discerning speech against background noise, spotting badly tuned music and breaks in a continuous tone.

These are all to do with the way your brain processes the sound you hear. So if you want to be able to hear conversations in a crowded restaurant as you get older, start learning to play an instrument.

Your brain can always be improved. By learning new skills you make new connections in your brain. You can even grow new brain cells (neurons). If you want to grow more, get some aerobic exercise. This increases the release of neurotropic factors. These help you to grow new neurons.

Getting some musical training is just one way to do it. Go here for more ideas on improving your brain.

Free learning

Are you making the most of free learning?

I ran into a dear friend today at the market. She had, somewhat reluctantly, taken a new job a few weeks back. Her first stories about it were a bit worrying. It sounded ghastly.

But not today. Today she was full of the stories of a wonderful and skilled colleague she had met and is now working closely with. Her eyes were sparkling with life and she could hardly stop singing his praises.

“I’m learning such a lot.” She said.

I was put in mind of an old colleague of mine. I was so impressed with her communication skills that I got onto a project with her, just so I could observe what she was doing and find out how it worked.

That was the start of a long road that I am still travelling. My question to you is: are you making the most of the free opportunities for learning that surround you?

So many people waste these free opportunities, but they are everywhere, if you know what to look for.

Lessons to look for

Focus on spotting people who do something well. They don’t have to do everything well, just one thing. Then try copying what they do and see if it works for you. I guarantee, the more you look, the more you will find.

The other side of the learning coin

And remember that there are also things you don’t want to copy. That’s useful to learn too. It’s a bit like the old saying I once saw on a doormat:

All our visitors make us happy; some when they arrive, others when they leave.

Go here for more about how to keep yourself learning – and how to look after your brain.
Go here to check out the questions you could be using to help yourself.

Your memory – how reliable is it?

How’s your memory? Do think it’s accurate? Can you rely on it? Have you tested it?

Memory is not a video

It’s easy to imagine that the way we remember things is like viewing an old film or video. But that’s not really the case. Your brain doesn’t work like that.

Memory is about making sense of things

Here’s an interesting experiment carried out by Elizabeth Loftus, one of the top researchers in the field.

A group of people were shown a film of a car crash. They were then asked questions about it. One question was:

“How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”

Others were asked:
“How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?”

Those asked the second question said the car was going a lot faster than those asked the first question. Even more interestingly, when they were asked later if they had seen any broken glass, those who were asked the second question were more likely to say there was broken glass.

There was no broken glass at all. They constructed it in their memories.

Your memory is not reliable – you just think it is

It’s important to know this, so that when you are convinced you remember word for word what a person said, it’s probably extremely unlikely that you do. If you need to remember information like that, write it down.

And be aware that the way you ask others about what they ‘remember’ has a big impact on what they think they remember.

And yes, I did check the recording of the interview to make sure I got the details for this blog correct, just in case you are wondering.

To find out how you can improve your memory, check out our teleseminar on memory. To look after your brain, get our booklet "Boost Your Brain in Your Spare Time"