When was your last trip to the gym to burn off some of those extra calories that are keeping you from reaching your ideal weight? Probably within the last couple of days if this is really a goal for you, or within the last couple of weeks if you haven’t quite committed to reaching your fitness goal.
When was your last checkup with your doctor? Probably within the last year, or so. Maybe within the last two years if you’re in sales, because it’s hard to take time off for something so important when quotas have to be met.
When was the last time you paid any attention to your brain’s health? Do you ever pay attention to your brain’s health, or do you sit back and wait for the presumed inevitable deterioration of your brain’s cognitive abilities? It’s likely that you’ve never had a physical for your brain. It’s likely you don’t exercise your brain either.
The point is that when we typically discuss “being healthy,” we focus on our diet, workout routine, and overall physical health, but rarely do we ever focus, or even think about our brain’s health. Why? Our brain controls it all. Our brain is what tells us to wake up in the morning and make the trip to the gym. Our brain is what reminds us to make an appointment with our doctor. Our brain is the center of our physical universe, yet is the most neglected.
The good news is that brain health is starting to get a lot more attention. Whether it’s the discussion of mental illness, intensive studies of how our brain actually works, or even how we can improve our brains, progress is being made. One estimate put advances in brain health about twenty years behind advances in heart health, but this is a growing field of study.
We typically pride ourselves on how much we can memorize, and how fast we can recall that information. The ability to excel at rote memorization is actually not a good measure of brain health. In fact, it may even be more harmful than good. It’s nice to have, but it doesn’t strengthen your brain’s connections. “In order to strengthen and exercise your brain, work on challenging your mind to construct deeper-level, thought filled ideas when presented with any type of information.” (Chapman, 93)
When asked about a political situation, do you simply recall the facts that you know based on your own experience, do you spit out the memorized ramblings from your preferred news-for-cash station, or do you take a step back and think about all of the factors at play? What else is going on in the world that may have caused this situation? If X action is taken, what impact will that have on Y? By taking the step back, connecting info, you’re exercising your brain, hopefully staving off cognitive loss down the line.
Now, let’s take that into the workplace. When given a problem to solve, do you quickly reach into your vast memory banks to deliver the answer that you think will please your manager (not to mention the extra points for doing it so fast)? Or, do you analyze all of the information, taking a broader look at the pertinent information in order to come up with a well thought out answer? In doing so, you see how everything connects, so that if one of the parts fails, you still know how to connect the dots to a strategically devised solution.
One of the most important lessons I learned in the Navy’s nuclear power program is to analyze the facts and how they affect the big picture. How to get to the answer, without initially knowing the answer. During our training, we spent a lot (a lot is an understatement) of time memorizing plant diagrams, system valves and why they’re significant, casualty procedures, and more. This was accomplished by hours upon hours of rote memorization by drawing and writing on white-boards and erasing. Repeat. However, we also had to know how everything worked together, and have an idea of how an impact to one system could affect the overall plant operation. One key question that was asked on all qualification boards was “What happens if there’s a leak in the Reserve Feed Day Tank (RFDT) that goes unnoticed for days?” Wait, this was not covered anywhere in all of the rote memorization of systems and diagrams, so how am I supposed to know this? The key was to take the information we had, apply it to the feed system, then the next system, and so on, until we could get a big picture understanding of the overall effect. It wasn’t about having the answer memorized, rather challenge our integrated reasoning to see if we could solve the problem. Who knew a simple leak in a seemingly simple component could cause plant failure?
What if we could apply similar challenges to our everyday life? What if we reached beyond the information that is fed to us by organizations with an agenda? What if we could burst through the walls of “I can’t,” and “I don’t know” that we’ve set up in our own minds?” The truth is, we have the information we need to be able to, therefore “I can.” We have the components to know, therefore “I know.” It’s all in our mind, but we need to go the extra mile to challenge ourselves to look at the facts, understand what those facts mean to us, and connect them to the other things we’ve learned and experienced in life. By doing so, we’re not only eliminating our own personal limitations, we’re improving our brain’s health, and increasing our brain’s longevity to go along with our expected longer life spans.
The power of the mind has recently become a huge interest of mine. The fact that I have two grandmothers with dementia has accelerated my interest and desire for a healthy brain. I was fortunate to take part in the Center for Brain Health/Brain Performance Institute’s SMART program, which really reinforced a lot of my recent findings from books I’ve read like Succeed by Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson, RAPT by Winnifred Gallagher, and more. I’m currently reading Make Your Brain Smarter by Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman, the Chief Director at the Center for Brain Health.
http://www.brainperformanceinstitute.com