Thinking about our brain makes you think about how fantastic it actually is. Our brain is about 3 pounds heavy, but here’s an interesting fact: did you know that it can produce the amount of energy we need in order to power a low-voltage light bulb? Yes! Our brain really is a fantastic thing!
Throughout our whole life, our brain grows cells which is called neuroplasticity. Still, our brain isn’t perfect. Something that can be considered as a disadvantage or a flaw is how our brain reacts to stress.
Stress isn’t something we can avoid. We need it in order to be able to cope with various days and survive.
If we didn’t feel stress, we wouldn’t be able to protect our body and our health.
Imagine yourself in a situation that is stressful. If you lack the response to stress, you won’t be able to save yourself.
This kind of a response is also called flight or fight response, but it can sometimes be bad because people aren’t always able to determine whether their threat is a real or a perceived one.
How Is Stress Connected To Brain Function?
If we find ourselves in a state of alert that is persistent, our brain as well as our body won’t be able to put up with it.
In this kind of a situation, every piece of energy we might have goes to our brain, but also our muscles and its fuel is the stress hormone called cortisol. When we have too much of it, our hippocampus suffers the most.
Cortisol can damage and kill the cells in our brain so our long-term memories suffer the most and new memories cannot be produced that easily.
Still, we shouldn’t be so worried.
We might even experience benefits because of moderate stress, especially our physical and mental health.
Boredom and depression are some things that might disappear if we have the proper amount of stress in our lives. Our complete cognitive performance becomes improved.
Here Are Some Easy Ways That Can Help Us Improve Our Memory As Well As Cognition
- Do Some Activity! Exercise!
Exercising is one thing that offers amazing benefits for our body, but also for our mind. Our brain cells become protected, the blood flow in our brain is increased and our complete mood is improved. Neurons grow faster and this causes neurogenesis to appear.
- Have A Sharper Focus
It’s very important to pay attention on one thing only. No matter what you do, just don’t do anything else. This will improve your mindfulness as well as your memory power.
- Meditation
There is entrenched negativity bias in our human brain. People mostly focus on something bad than on something good.
Meditation can help us control the situations and our brain will focus on positivity more.
- Brain-Boosting Foods Can Be Really Helpful
Here, we’ll put the foods that contain an abundance of omega-3 fatty acids like walnuts and salmon as well as cognition-improving foods like broccoli, cauliflower, legumes, blueberries, whole grains etc. Try to eat them more every day.
- Repeat
We all know that if we don’t repeat, we won’t learn. That’s the best we can do for our brain to memorize something, especially when it’s important to us.
Practice doing these things and improve your brain and memory by dealing with stress.
Source: gottadotherightthing.com
