Boost Your Brain (16 page)

Week One:
Commit to cutting your consumption of trans fats almost entirely and your consumption of simple carbohydrates—often found in processed foods—by 50 percent. Try to avoid sugary foods, such as donuts, which are high on the glycemic index, as they’ll cause a spike in your blood sugar.

Week Two:
Continue to stay away from junk food, and now cut down salt and cholesterol. Choose lean meat and eat it no more than once or twice a week.

Week Three:
Continue with the cuts you made in weeks one and two and work on reducing serving sizes and limiting caloric intake. Consider tracking your calorie intake for one week through an online tool or app. Seeing just how much a bagel and cream cheese “costs” you in calories can help you convince yourself to tuck into a bowl of yogurt with blueberries instead.

Track 2

If you’ve already detoxed, or you already eat a somewhat healthy diet, this is your track.

Week One:
Focus on eating natural rather than processed or fast food. Be sure to include flavonoids.

Week Two:
If you drink coffee, cut back to one cup in the morning and none in the afternoon. Instead, add a cup of tea in the afternoon.

Week Three:
Focus on adding salmon or other fish to your diet, and add more fruits and vegetables.

Track 3

If you’re already eating a healthy, balanced diet, this is your track.

Week One:
Supplement your diet with 1,000 milligrams daily of DHA. (Note: If you take Coumadin or another blood thinner, do not take DHA.) Be sure you know the levels of your vitamins B12 and D. If they’re low, supplement. If they’re borderline, adjust your diet to feature more foods that offer vitamins B12 and D.

Week Two:
Continue with supplementation. Don’t forget to get adequate water. Your brain needs water to function well, so be sure to drink six to eight glasses a day. Add a glass of wine per day several days a week.

Week Three:
Continue with supplementation, and continue to eat healthy portions and brain-friendly foods. Try to taste new flavonoids you’ve never tried before.

CHAPTER SIX

The Path to a Calmer, Sharper Brain

“I
want you to
imagine you’re in a field with green grass all around you and a big, beautiful tree in the distance,” Dr. Eylem Sahin says in a calm, quiet voice. “Now, walk toward the tree and sit down under it. Relax.” She is talking to Beth, a twentysomething patient of mine whose memory and attention issues have landed her in my brain fitness program.

Beth’s eyes are closed and she’s nestled in a comfortable chair in a dimly lit meditation room in my Brain Center offices. She has already gotten herself into a meditative mind-set by focusing on her breathing and relaxing a succession of body parts—moving from her toes up through her legs to her torso, her shoulders, arms, hands, and then finally her face. By the time she reaches the spot between her eyebrows, she has banished extraneous thoughts—about the paper she has to write for school, or what she’ll eat for dinner, or who might be texting her.

Mentally relaxing under the tree, she’s halfway through her meditation session, guided by Dr. Sahin, a licensed clinical psychotherapist and the director of my brain fitness program. For the next ten minutes, Beth will nonjudgmentally note whatever thoughts and feelings come to mind. Then, she’ll turn her attention again to her body, progressively focusing on relaxation from toe to head.

Beth, who suffers from attention deficit disorder, will complete twelve weeks of these meditation sessions, along with cognitive skills training and neurofeedback (which you’ll learn about in a moment). In conversations with our “brain coach,” she’ll be guided in other areas of her life—exercise, sleep, and diet, to name a few.

All of these efforts are aimed at improving Beth’s cognitive function by growing her brain. If we were to hook her up to an EEG after her meditation, we’d likely find her brain operating primarily in the alpha zone, the type of brain activity that reflects a calm, focused, and attentive state of mind. Even better, after a few weeks we’d likely begin to see that pattern even long after she stops meditating. Why? As you’ll learn in a moment, mindfulness training promotes healthy brain activity in the short and long term and literally changes the structure of the brain.

You’ll recall from chapter 2 that healthy brain wave activity has some parallels to a healthy heartbeat. Just as you’d be alarmed if your heart raced at 120 beats per minute for a prolonged time for no apparent reason, you also want to avoid having your brain “race” in the high beta range (higher than 25 hertz) without good reason. Instead, the ideal is to have overall brain activity in the alpha range of 8 to 12 hertz during periods of alertness—with the exception of short bursts of beta (13 to 25 hertz), which are necessary to perform certain tasks. Alpha activity is associated with calmness, alertness, focus, and attention. It’s the zone I’m in when I’m putting my six-year-old to sleep and playing with her hair, and the zone Beth is in as she meditates.

Amazingly, just as we can condition the heart through regular exercise, so that it thrums at a calm 60 beats per minute while at rest, we can also train brain waves to remain in the ideal alpha zone for long stretches of the day. And it’s not just meditation that can get us this mindfulness benefit; neurofeedback offers it, as do other activities such as yoga, tai chi, and even prayer.

Om? Growing Your Brain with Meditation

As Beth sat with Dr. Sahin and imagined herself relaxing on the grass under a tree, she was engaging in a type of quiet contemplation called mindfulness meditation. It is just one style among many, each of which has its own methods and strategies.

That broad variety makes definition difficult, but in general the term meditation refers to the practice of deliberate techniques aimed at inducing a state of relaxation, attentional focus, or contemplation. It may involve repeating certain words or phrases (a mantra—“om” is the stereotypical one), regulating your breathing, clearing your thoughts, suspending your logical thought process, or directing your thoughts in a particular way.

Whatever the method, the goal remains largely the same: to train your mind so that you can bring yourself to a state of consciousness that benefits you in some way, be it simple relaxation, heightened awareness, enhanced concentration, or even the achievement of an “enlightened” state of being. Along with the temporary state of relaxation they achieve with every session, meditators often report long-term benefits that spill over into their day-to-day lives, from emotional stability, to improved physical health, to better sleep.

No surprise, then, that meditation has become fairly common in recent years. In 2008, when the National Institutes of Health surveyed Americans to get a handle on how common alternative and complementary medicine practices are in the United States, it found that about 12 percent of Americans say they use deep breathing exercises and 9.4 percent report practicing meditation.

Do You Know How to Breathe? Maybe Not

When Dr. Sahin meets with patients for the first time she often surprises them with a quirky question: “Has anyone ever taught you how to breathe?” she’ll ask.

She’s not questioning their ability to fill their lungs with air. What she’s really after is technique. Proper breathing, as it turns out, is an important part of most, if not all, meditation practices.

Often patients will smile and laugh and then admit that, no, no one has ever taught them to breathe. Dr. Sahin then gives them a crash course in abdominal breathing, which involves expanding your abdomen when you breathe in and contracting it when you breathe out. How do you know if you’re doing it right? If you place your right hand on your chest and your left hand on your belly, you’ll notice that your left hand moves when you breathe in and out, while your right hand doesn’t.

Our patients use abdominal breathing during meditation, but I also have my own favorite simple breathing exercise to get me into a relaxed, peaceful state of mind when I don’t have time to meditate. I call it my “7-7-7” technique. To do it, you simply breathe in while counting to 7, hold your breath while counting to 7, and breathe out while counting to 7.

How It Grows

When I tell people meditation is good for the brain, they nod knowingly. “Stress relief!” they may say emphatically. Stress relief is indeed a benefit of meditation, as anyone who has spent ten minutes focusing on their breathing can tell you. If you’re deep in a meditative state, by definition you can’t be stressed.

That’s no small thing. Since chronic excess stress, as you’ll read in
chapter 10
, can release toxic levels of the hormone cortisol into the bloodstream, meditation qualifies as a brain builder just by virtue of reducing stress. By lowering cortisol levels on a daily basis with regular meditation, you’re protecting your brain from the toxic effects of excess cortisol, for better brain function in the short term and increased brain growth in the long term.

But meditation does far more than merely quell stress. For starters, as Beth can attest, it is one of the most effective ways to promote healthy brain activity. Meditation, after all, reduces excessive, choppy beta waves and encourages the alpha waves of a calm, focused brain.

Not only that, but meditation helps the various parts of the brain operate in harmony. In much the same way that members of an orchestra play their different parts in sync with each other, the brain’s various parts operate at different frequencies but in a complementary way. Imagine if the violins played slower than the expected tempo, while the horns played too fast—the resulting cacophony would be unpleasant, to say the least. You can think of meditation as the conductor who keeps all the brain’s parts playing in concert.

In addition to promoting healthy brain activity, we now know that meditation actually increases the size of the hippocampus and boosts BDNF.
¹
In one study, researchers looked at the benefits of meditation in patients with stress and found higher BDNF levels in the meditation group. In another review article, researchers found that the decrease in cortisol associated with meditation is linked to higher levels of BDNF.
²
More research needs to be done to assess just how much meditation affects BDNF, but as an expert in the field, I feel confident that once it’s done, such research will produce solid evidence that meditation is a BDNF booster, even in people without excessive stress.

Meditation—like other mental training—also strengthens the pathways it “works out,” leading to more synapses and greater oxygen flow in those areas (more on this in a moment).

Studies have shown, too, that meditation improves sleep and immune system function and reduces inflammation as well as blood pressure and heart rate, thus improving cardiovascular health and sending more blood to the brain. In fact, one 2010 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center found that experienced meditators had significantly higher blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and other areas of the brain that support attention, regulation of emotion, and autonomic function.
³
The study lends support to the notion that meditation results in real biological changes to the brain’s function and structure.

Paying Attention Pays Off

Now that we know the mechanisms meditation uses to effect change in the brain, the next question becomes, to what end? For starters, since meditation is primarily the regulation of attention and emotion, it’s no surprise that those are two domains of brain function that show the most benefit. In other words, as you practice regulating your attention and emotional response, you improve your ability to pay attention and regulate your emotions.

Some of the most interesting studies showing this come out of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry Richard Davidson and his colleagues have for years delved into the science of meditation. Davidson has studied meditators of all types—from Tibetan monks to novices. What he’s found is compelling evidence that meditation changes the way the brain performs, even in those who don’t commit a lifetime to quiet contemplation.

In one study, for example, his research team compared the brain activity of participants practicing a focused-attention type of meditation with those who didn’t practice any meditation at all.
⁴
For the study, participants—both novices and experts—were asked to meditate using an external visual point so that they achieved a “rest condition,” at which point they were asked to stop meditating. Researchers then performed fMRIs of their brains. They found that those who’d practiced more showed more activation in the brain regions responsible for paying attention. Expert meditators also appeared to be better able to regulate their emotional responses—measured by activity in their amygdalae—to sounds such as a baby crying.

In another study, Davidson and colleagues linked meditation training and the ability to process information.
⁵
For this study, the team measured study subjects’ ability to process information presented in rapid succession—for example, two numbers embedded in a string of letters. The average person will miss a certain proportion of the second number embedded in the series because his or her brain is too focused on the first. But study subjects who’d participated in three months of intensive training in focused-attention meditation actually outperformed non-meditators and improved their baseline scores. After meditative training they didn’t miss the second target as often as they had before. And from scalp EEG monitor readings, researchers could see that meditators were able to complete the test more easily than non-meditators. The results suggested that meditators were able to perform efficiently and at high speed without straining their brains.