The Resilient Brain
What makes a brain resilient? And why would you want to have one?
A resilient brain is a brain that can withstand various forms of challenges, and remember, learn and adapt to past experiences to make for an easier, better tomorrow. From improving healing time following injury, cognitive efficiency and structural integrity, a resilient brain is a capable brain.
At first glance, a brain looks like a rather non-resilient organ. Its jelly-like consistency sloshes about in a thin veneer of thin protective sheets, suspended in a fluid, all encapsulated within a boney container lined with sharp protrusions and uneven ridges for it to bump into. Given it’s squishy nature, you certainly wouldn’t be the first to think “nothing about this organ seems resilient in the slightest”.
But like many other things in life, all it takes is a little bit of interest and understanding to suspend judgements and change your mind (or brain).
The brain, in my opinion, is one of the most resilient organs in the body. Although its susceptible to damage, it is also highly equipped to rebuild and rewire itself after serious trauma, sometimes repairing itself to a point where the initial injury can be entirely undetected.
Given it’s highly plastic nature, why would it be worth spending any time at all in trying to add to it’s already-existing resilience? Simply put, the brain’s ability to take care of itself requires a bit of meta-intervention to capitalize and optimize its healing abilities. You - the owner of the brain - need to give it the proper fuel, training, and care at the proper doses in order to create the optimal environment for maintenance and healing. After all, “you” are the outcome or summation of the quality of ongoing processes in your brain; why not put in a little time and effort to let more of “you” come through?
Creating this optimal neural environment can seem relatively unimportant to you until something as simple as a good whack on the head, or a significant dose of some form of poison, leads to serious negative outcomes that become more and more difficult to heal as time goes on. Cognitive deficits like impacted short and long term memory, ability to recognize objects or people, or to control your body (and many, many more) are all ways in which somewhat trivial hits to the head or other forms of trauma and breakdown can lead to.
Besides protecting you from serious negative consequences, there are also countless positive benefits that can be gleaned by taking care of your brain. By taking care of your brain, you are effectively improving its efficiency and performance. If you like feeling happy, focused, productive, creative, capable, grounded, resilient, and authentically “you”, this might be of interest to you.
Some ways in which you can support and take care of your brain include:
Getting adequate exercise: Exercise improves the resilience of your brain in many ways, including driving nutrient-rich blood into all your neural nooks and crannies, thereby removing waste and refuelling valuable neural structures that help you think, feel, remember, behave, and live. The responses and adaptations that your brain must undergo in order to perform things like exercise serve as excellent stimuli for growth, maintenance, and protection. Things as simple as improving oxygen and glucose efficiency for brain health, or structural and neurophysiological changes that allow you to deadlift greater and greater loads are all made possible when following an exercise program.
Meditation: Meditation improves the resilience of your brain in a somewhat similar fashion that exercise does; by activating neural substrate and driving blood to valuable areas of the brain associated with emotion regulation, attention, concentration, and safety. Regular meditation, even 10 minutes a day, offers a form of cognitive exercise that is very unique in our modern world. Meditation programs have been found to increase the number of neurons, and the amount of insulation (myelin) that surrounds valuable neural highways that are associated with improved cognition across many domains.
Getting adequate sleep: Getting the right amount of sleep can be an unbelievably powerful resilience builder for your brain. 7-9 hours of quality sleep (at similar times night-to-night) helps your brain flush out waste from the day before, and rerun, analyze, and encode all the interesting things that happened to you so that you can extract and apply valuable lessons. Interestingly, during sleep your brain actually shrinks and constricts down to 80% of its day-time size, thereby exposing the smallest of nooks and crannies so that your night-time clean up crew (glymphatic system) can get a good deep clean and prepare you for the following day.
Adequate nutrition: You are literally made up of the food you consume, so making good food choices will help to ensure a strong resilient brain. Since your brain is primarily made of fat, water and proteins, a diet that considers water intake and quality sources of fat and protein are ideal. Although the science gets incredibly murky when it comes to this, a safe bet is to eat a colourful diet; bright colourful fruits and vegetables are fantastic sources of nutrients and minerals that your body will use as building blocks for brain (and other bodily) tissue. Things to avoid are vegetable oils, like canola or grapeseed oil, as they contain high amounts of inflammatory molecules like linoleic acid. Eating processed foods and most things that come out of a box are surefire ways to fuel your body to build weak cells with leaky membranes and crappy conditions for the maintenance of optimal neural environments. A great pneumonic for food choices is: eat things that could remember where they came from (if they had a brain as powerful as ours ;) ).
Avoid poisons: This one is probably quite obvious for most folks, but I think the definition of poison can become a bit murky without a decent understanding of what defines a poison (something that does more damage than good). Things like alcohol, harsh chemicals like glyphosate (used on growing vegetables and fruits), trace compounds like mercury or fluoride, molds in your home, excessive exposure to certain cleaning products, and so on. The list seems inexhaustible, but I believe so long as you have the intention to learn about and avoid labelled and unlabeled poisons, you are on the right path.
Intellectual stimulation: Intellectual stimulation is one of your brain’s favourite activities to do because it’s like giving your brain a bath, except from the inside, and instead of bathwater, it’s nutrient-rich blood and neural activity. The age-old pneumonic “use it or lose it” deserves a mention here because that is the precise mechanism that your brain adheres to. By seeking out all sorts of various intellectual stimulation, your brain gets to bathe all sorts of neural circuitry and structures, ensuring their prolonged existence and involvement in present and future cognition. Examples of this also happen to be nearly inexhaustible, including things like reading books (bonus points for reading books with content you aren’t well versed in), learning new physical and mental skills (learn to juggle, sing, handstand, speak a new language etc), memory activities like memorizing poems, or brain games etc.
Avoid chronic stress: I almost didn’t put this one because it is so obvious to many of us, but like you’ll read in the paragraph following this list, you can start improving the function of your brain in so many ways; starting by reducing unnecessary stressors in your life is a great place to start. Whether that is taking a few extra minutes in the morning to do some light breathing or to chew your food slower, or take a day off from your usual balls-to-the-wall routine, anything that can alleviate some stress from your life can be a potent adjustment to make.
If you find yourself overwhelmed by this, rest assured you are in good company. There are so many avenues in which you can take to start improving the health and functioning of your brain, which simply means that you can start where you are and only bite off as much as you want to chew. Maybe you’ve been pushing off learning a new skill because you haven’t made time for it, or you’re in a crumby relationship that has been stuck in a rut for far too long; give yourself the permission to make the changes that you know you need to make. You have one life here, why not make it as good a time as possible?
Remember, the largest effect we can have on the resilience of our brain rests in the decisions we make, the environments we frequent, and our desire to create the best life we can given our situation. I mentioned it last week but I believe it’s worth it to mention again; resilience is always relative. Sometimes our situations don’t allow for certain practices, and that’s okay. At the end of the day, our true goal is to live happier, resilient lives; we won’t get very far if we are constantly demeaning ourselves because our journey into resilience looks different from someone else’s. It’s all about starting where we’re at and working from there.
Change your brain, change your life.
Have a great week everyone.
