Healthy Brain: Discover the Secrets to a Sharp Mind

No one should be surprised to hear that, without our brains, we can’t do anything. A healthy brain controls everything we do. It keeps us moving, interprets all the signals from our senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), and keeps the involuntary parts of our bodies working (beating heart, breathing, temperature control, to name a few).

We need to take care of our brains because if we don’t, we limit what we can do. And that takes care and proper feeding, plus exercise. Care comes in the form of getting enough sleep, not getting hit in the head, and stimulating our brains by learning new information (not doom-scrolling through social media sights).

Feeding is nutrition. And if we follow the seven nutritional guidelines I list on the body page, we’re properly feeding our brain. But that’s not all – research reported by Cleveland Clinic suggests that exercise helps keep our brains healthy, too.

Before we get into care and feeding, let’s take a quick look at what this 3-pound part of our bodies does.

Your Brain Does More Than You Might Realize

The brain is the central processing and control unit for our body. It controls everything we do, whether voluntary or involuntary, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Without a properly functioning brain, we lose the ability to smell, see, hear, walk, talk, and move our bodies, among other things.

How does our brain do all this? It’s an amazing system, and worth putting a little effort into understanding.

An example of our brain in action: Let’s say we touch a hot skillet with our hand. Our immediate reaction is to move our hand away from the hot skillet. But how?

In that split second, nerve endings in our skin transmit an “it’s really hot” signal to our brain. Our brain processes that sensed signal, and then transmits a movement signal to nerve endings in the muscles in our arm. Those nerve endings trigger muscles in a way that we move our hand away from the hot skillet.

But our brains do more than control movement – a lot more. Let’s look at decision-making, complex problem-solving, automatic actions, and movement.

Daily Decision Making – Most of Us Know This

Our brain serves as a huge memory warehouse. It stores our memories and can access those memories to solve problems. When we must decide, our brain accesses these memories and tries to filter and connect the relevant memories. It combines thoughts and comes up with a solution.

Depending on the problem, it may take more or less time to come up with the solution. But the bottom line is that the solution is based on what we already know. Fortunately, our brains are excellent at combining these memories and coming up with a solution. We see this in action all the time when we’re awake. For example, we need to decide whether to go to the gym to exercise or sit in front of the TV and watch another episode of Judge Judy. Our brain decides based on what we already know. But unfortunately, it isn’t always that logical.

Our brain is pre-programmed for survival and preserving energy because our ancestors didn’t know when or where their next meal was coming from. So, using energy to jog on a treadmill isn’t an immediate survival need. And our brain may fight the logical decision to get some exercise, even though we know it’s the way to a healthy body (and healthy brain).

But when we’re faced with a difficult problem, the solution will come when we’re asleep. That’s where the real problem-solving takes place.

Complex Problems and Movements - Sleep on It

We’ve likely heard the phrase “I need to sleep on it.” When we sleep, our brain is freed from executive decision-making (go to the gym or sit on the couch, what to fix for dinner, turn right or left). During sleep, it combines memories we’d never think of when we’re awake. Some may be extremely wild thoughts. It does this repeatedly while we’re asleep, trying different solutions.

When we wake up, we suddenly have a solution to a nagging problem. That’s because our brain worked on it while we were asleep. And that’s one reason why restful sleep is critical to not only our brain health – it can accomplish things while we’re asleep that we otherwise wouldn’t accomplish.

I finally learned to use this to my advantage. When faced with a complex problem, I’d work on it for a while. But if I ran into a wall and just wasn’t getting anywhere, I’d set it aside and sleep on it. Almost like a miracle, I’d wake up with a solution most of the time.

And it works for learning new things, too. Even a dance move. A movement that may seem difficult one day seems easier the next day. Give it a shot and see if it works for you.

Plus, a good night’s sleep maintains a healthy brain.

Autonomic Nervous System and Control

This is the stuff that happens without having to think about it. Breathing, for example – it just happens. And our heart beats without having to think about it. Walk up a flight of stairs and our heart may beat a little faster – and we don’t consciously tell it to beat faster, it just does.

That’s our autonomic nervous system doing its job. Cleveland Clinic points out that this part of our nervous system is responsible for a lot more. It connects most of our internal organs to our brain so our brain can control them. We want a healthy brain to be in charge and in control of these things. Just imagine if you had to think about increasing your heart or breathing rate, or digesting food. We wouldn’t have time to think of anything else.

One of the processes that the autonomic system controls is our fight or flight response to stressful situations. Hiking in the woods and cross paths with a grizzly bear? With a healthy brain, you don’t have to take time to analyze the situation – your autonomic nervous system triggers the fight or flight response (hopefully flight in this case) and you immediately react by running in the opposite direction.

Muscle Control

Our muscles are controlled by the somatic nervous system. Unlike the autonomic nervous system, the somatic nervous system requires conscious thought to do something. Sensory and motor nerves make up this portion of the nervous system:

Sensory nerves: They do what you think they might do – sense something (pain, heat, touch, for example). The sensory nerves send those sensed signals to the brain through our spinal cord for processing.
Motor nerves: These nerves, referred to as motor neurons, receive signals from the brain to trigger muscle fibers. Every muscle fiber has an associated motor neuron.

So, to control or activate a muscle, our brains trigger a specific motor neuron that then activates a muscle fiber. This activation is the way we move.

Do Muscles Learn?

You may have heard the phrase “muscle learning.” But do muscles learn? Nope. They are just dumb fibers in our bodies that need to be told what to do. Instead of the muscles learning, our brains do the learning and instruct our muscles to act.

Throughout our lives, our brains learn which muscle fibers to activate to accomplish a specific motion. One such example is standing on one foot. A youngster who has never done that struggles. Or an adult who hasn’t done it in a while struggles to balance on one foot.

Test yourself: when putting on socks, stand on your right foot and lift your left foot off the floor. Raise your left foot directly in front of you as high as you can. Bend over and put your sock on your left foot. Then repeat but for the right foot.

Can you do that without leaning against the wall? If not, then your brain needs to learn which motor neurons to activate so that the correct muscle fibers contract to keep you stable and upright. And that takes learning. Through trial and error, our brain eventually learns to activate the appropriate muscle fibers to keep us upright.

This is how an infant learns to walk. It takes practice, but the little ones finally learn how to walk without falling over. And it’s also how a gymnast or martial artist learns to maintain balance while moving spectacularly.

We Can Learn to Do Any Movement – With Practice

The point here is that it takes learning to figure out which muscles to activate for a specific movement. For example, there’s no such thing as natural balance. Gymnasts must practice balance on a beam to become proficient at it. And we all can do it – we may just choose to not put in the effort that it takes to learn that level of balance.

I was at the gym watching a young adult dribble basketballs with each hand. He had been practicing the movement because he had it down well. I suggested he increase the speed with one hand but not the other.

Not shying away from a challenge, we started dribbling faster with his right hand. Almost immediately he lost control of both basketballs. But he tried again. After a few attempts, he managed to do it successfully. After which I commented I could never do that.

He looked at me and said, “Kirby, yes you can. You can learn to do anything.” He called me out in my own game. I responded, “Eric, you’re absolutely right, and thanks for the reminder.”

So, yes, we can learn to do any movement (that’s physically possible) – it just takes practice so our brains can learn how to do it. So don’t shy away from those fancy dance moves. Just practice them and you’ll be the master someday. And this is key when it comes to teaching our minds how to lift weights for exercise.

A Healthy Brain Communicates with the Rest of Our Body

To complete all these tasks, a healthy brain communicates with our bodies. Here’s how this happens:

Nerve cell (or neuron): Neurons make up an interconnected mesh throughout our bodies. This mesh allows the neurons in our brain to receive messages from the sensory cells and send instructions to other cells like muscle cells. The neuron is made up of a cell body, receptors, and transmitters. When stimulated, it generates an electrical impulse.
Transmitters (commonly called axons): pass a message to other cells. For example, a transmitter can send a message to either another neuron or to a muscle cell.
Receptors (commonly called dendrites): receive incoming messages from the transmitters of other nerve cells, such as sensory neurons or other decision-making neurons.

If you’re following along, you now know that messages are passed by a transmitter of one neuron that connects to a receptor of another neuron or cell that needs instruction. But they don’t physically connect. Instead, there’s a gap between the transmitter and receptor called a synapse.

The electrical impulse in the cell body causes the transmitter to release chemicals (neurotransmitters) that cross the synapse gap and carry a message to receptors. This process of electrical impulse-to-transmitter-to-neurotransmitter-to-receptor continues until the signal reaches its destination (a muscle cell, for example).

For high performance, this process requires a healthy brain. If you don’t take anything else away from this section, at least recognize that our brain function is a complex well-tuned combination of electrical impulses and chemical laboratories.

How Do We Maintain a Healthy Brain?

We can see that we need our brains to communicate with the rest of our body to do anything – see, hear, move, make decisions, solve problems, and communicate with another person. If we mess up or degrade that communication path, then we lose some ability to do these things.

As an example, if you happen to drink an alcoholic beverage on occasion, you know that alcohol can hinder your ability to move, make quick decisions, and even speak coherently. A research study reported in an NIH journal points out that alcohol inhibits neuron receptors, which means that the message gets garbled. So, for example, the message to walk in a straight line doesn’t make it to the proper muscles and they move a little haphazardly, i.e., staggering.

The effects of alcohol on our brain communications wear off after a night’s sleep, but this shows that more permanent damage can be catastrophic to our ability to move, talk, and think. In essence, our mobility and independence depend on a functioning healthy brain that can communicate with the rest of the body.

So how do we maintain a healthy brain and keep it functioning at high performance? You’ll notice that it’s the same care that we need to provide for our overall body. We just prioritize a few items.

Nutrition for a Healthy Brain (and Body)

Harvard Health and others point out that the same healthy diet suggested for the rest of our body is also great for our brain. For example, 95% of the neurotransmitter serotonin is made by the good bacteria in our guts. Serotonin is the messenger from the brain that tells us when it’s time to sleep and eat. It also moderates our emotions and moods and inhibits sensed pain.

The bacteria in our guts is the key here. These bacteria fight toxins, help us absorb nutrients, and, most importantly for this discussion, activate neural pathways between the gut and the brain. This points to the fact that there is a strong connection between what we put in our guts (eat) and how our brains function.

What Do We Eat to Help Our Brains Thrive?

It’s the same stuff that I describe on the nutrition and fitness page to keep the rest of our body healthy. There are seven guidelines for healthy nutrition, and your brain is no different. Harvard Health explains that we should emphasize the following parts of the seven guidelines to nourish our brain:

Fruits and vegetables (think berries and green leafy vegetables especially)
Lean proteins – like salmon. More importantly, the unsaturated fats in salmon and the like have been linked to lower incidents of Alzheimer’s disease (a form of dementia).
Add some walnuts for the omega-3 fatty acids to lower your blood pressure and keep your arteries clear.

Follow the Seven Nutrition Guidelines – Which is Essentially the Mediterranean Diet

Data reported by Harvard Health shows that following these 7 nutritional guidelines lowers our risk of depression by 25% to 35%. A study reported in NIH’s National Library of Medicine explains that diets high in omega-3 fatty acids (salmon, walnuts, tuna) support better thinking.

On the other side of the coin, diets high in saturated fats (the ones we’re supposed to limit or eliminate) increase the risk of poor thinking and neurological issues. And none of us need that.

So, if you’re following the seven nutrition guidelines I explain in the Nutrition and Fitness post, then you’ll also nourish a healthy brain.

Exercise and Fitness

It turns out the exercise and fitness we do for the rest of our body also help maintain a healthy brain. A study reported by the Cleveland Clinic shows that increases in physical activity (i.e., exercise) were associated with a 31% lower risk for dementia. Researchers from the CDC also found that regular physical activity can reduce your risk of mental decline, including dementia. But how does exercise help us maintain a healthy brain?

As with improving health for the rest of our bodies, exercise and fitness promotes:

Cardiovascular health
Improved blood flow to the brain (nourishment)
Reduced inflammation
Lowered stress

So, as for nutrition, what’s good for our hearts and body is also good for a healthy brain. How much exercise? The CDC recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise (brisk walking is great) a week and two days of strength training each week. For recommendations on how to accomplish that, you might be interested in the Nutrition and Fitness page.

Sleep Maintains a Healthy Brain!

Sleep intrigues me the most. According to NIH’s National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, sleep is as important for a healthy brain and survival as food and water. They further state that a continual lack of quality sleep increases your risk for high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, and obesity.

However, recent research shows another benefit of sleep. During sleep, our brains take out the trash. And that trash is a substance called beta-amyloid. It forms in the neuron transmitters and interferes with neural messages. And it’s a primary indicator of Alzheimer’s disease.

If this build-up isn’t removed, then our brain loses the ability to send clear messages between neurons and to the rest of our body. When this happens, we can’t store memories and, worse, we can’t “remember” memories. And that’s because the message gets garbled.

So, make sure you prioritize sleep. To get good quality sleep, Researchers at Johns Hopkins suggest you:

Go to bed and wake up at a consistent time that allows 8 hours of sleep.
Turn off your phone and “screens” a couple of hours before bedtime. Research shows that the light from screens can mess up our sleep quality.
Exercise is great, but not right before bed. Give yourself a couple of hours to wind down and relax.
Relax – instead of scrolling through your phone, read a book or take a warm bath/shower.
Create a comfortable sleeping room – no bright lights, a comfortable temperature, and no TV watching.

Manage Stress and Anxiety for a Healthy Brain

Stress can be good or bad, which sounds surprising. Good stress excites us to do something and is short-lived. Participating in a sports event triggers good stress. Our heart rate increases, pumping more oxygen-rich blood into our muscles. Good stress focuses your energy and should improve your performance. When the game ends, so does the stress.

But bad stress is chronic – it’s something that becomes part of our lifestyle and rarely goes away. Chronic stress means we’re in constant survival mode, which takes a toll on our bodies and brains. We lose some ability to store memories and think rationally.

An article by Harvard Health suggests that persistent stress may cause a rewiring of our brain. We end up with stronger connections in the more primitive survival portions of our brains than we do in the more complex “thinking” parts of our brains.

And as with not getting enough sleep, living in a continual state of stress promotes:

High blood pressure
Formation of artery-clogging deposits
Depression and anxiety
Addiction
Obesity
Neurotoxins in our brain

Reduce Stress with Meditation/Relaxation Techniques

Harvard Health points out that there are several non-medication ways to reduce stress, and they are all considered relaxation techniques. But if you are continually stressed to the point where it’s affecting your life, talk to your healthcare provider. It’s no fun going through life with stress and anxiety!

My go-to technique is called breath focus. You simply take long, slow breaths and focus on those breaths. By doing so, you let go of the thoughts cluttering your mind. When you focus on breathing, you start great. But after a few seconds, other thoughts will invade your mind (what’s for dinner, pick up the kids after school, that work project). And that’s normal. Just acknowledge the invasive thought and return your focus to your breaths.

I do this every morning when I wake up and every night as I’m falling asleep. With practice, you’ll find that you can acknowledge those invasive thoughts and set them aside very quickly.

Meditation, nicely described by Mayo Clinic, is another great practice. I’m not very good at meditation, so I follow a guided meditation on YouTube. There are several of them. Find a 5 or 10-minute one to start. If you choose one that doesn’t work for you, pick a different one.

Avoid Head Injuries

Do yourself a favor and avoid activities that can damage your brain. I always wear a biking helmet when bike riding, wear head protection when I spar in martial arts, and avoid activities where I can fall and injure my head.

We love to watch and play football (American) but wonder how long it will be played in the form it is played today. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a brain disorder caused by repeated blows to the head. Nerve cells die, which garbles the communication pathways, and there is no cure for CTE. So, we avoid most things that can cause head and brain injuries. And you should, too.

Mind Games to Maintain Your Healthy Brain – Use It or Lose It

Along with sufficient sleep, good nutrition, and regular exercise, challenging your brain regularly reduces the risk of age-related brain disorders. Harvard Health (again) suggests that learning new skills helps keep our minds sharp.

Researchers report in the NIH National Library of Medicine that our brains produce thousands of new neurons every day. If these new neurons aren’t used, though, they die within just a few weeks. One of the best ways to prevent these new neurons from dying, they found, is to learn something. And the key is that we must learn something. Doom-scrolling on a social media site is not learning and doesn’t protect these young neurons.

The act of learning incorporates these new neurons into the neuron network that runs throughout our body. In other words, they must communicate with other neurons to stay alive.

It’s the Use It or Lose It model that applies to most of our bodies, like muscle fibers. You can read about the Use It or Lose It model on my Nutrition and Fitness page.

So, adopt a lifestyle that includes lifelong learning. It will help maintain your healthy brain!

What's Next?

We’ve covered a lot of ground on this page. We learned that:

Our brain controls everything our body does – movement, smell, taste, solve problems, etc. Without a healthy brain, we’d lose some or all our mobility and independence for starters.
The brain is a sophisticated network of motor and sensing neurons that send messages throughout our body.
We need to maintain the health of this neuron network to maintain a functioning body – and we do that with proper nutrition, exercise and fitness, and sleep.
Avoiding blows to the head keeps our brains healthy.
Learning keeps our minds sharp.
A byproduct of our brain activities called beta-amyloid can gum up the communication pathways. Fortunately, it’s removed during quality sleep. And if it’s not, then we start to have signs of dementia.