We expect so much from our brain, yet we do very little to help them maintain their optimal functioning. Here’s a few things you can do to give your brain some TLC.
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Video Transcript:
Hi. It’s John Paul Fischbach, the CEO and Chief Alchemist here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator. This week the Hot Tip are some things to help you reboot your brain. I am constantly fascinated at how we take our brains for granted. We rely on our brain to do so much and take care of so much but what are we doing to maintain the health of our brain. There are nutritional things that we can do like keeping hydrated and feeding your brains the kind of fat that it likes to consume. I am not a nutritionist but I have helped my brain a lot by learning about what keeps my brain functioning at its peak ability.
I encourage you to do that too but here’s a couple of things that I have learned over the years to help reboot my brain and you can use them too. By far the best thing that you can do is daily meditation. I cover some easy ways to get into the habit of meditation in Hot Tip #44 but here are a couple of other things that you can try.
The brain has two hemispheres. You’ve got a left hemisphere and a right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is where the logic and the puzzling takes place and the right hemisphere is where the creativity and the art and the design takes place. Left and right, two parts of the brain. The brain really likes to be stimulated and your neuroplasticity actually depends on it. Spending too much time in one hemisphere leads to fatigue.
There are some exercises that you can do to get the neurons to fire on both sides of the brain. These are exercises that I have learned as part of a daily brain gym routine. The first one is just a lazy 8. You put your hands in front of you. You look at the back of your thumbs and you trace that pattern, the lazy 8, the infinity sign. You just follow it with your eyes and trace that pattern for a little while. That gets the neurons on both sides of your brain to cross the corpus callossum and fire on both sides of the hemisphere.
Another fun one to do, it’s a bit of a good exercise is a cross crawl. You can take this hand and cross it to this knee. I dont know if you can see that. You take this hand to this knee, this hand to that knee, this hand to that knee. You know how that goes. That cross crawl again gets you neurons to fire on both sides of the brain and move across.
You can also reboot by simply crossing your wrists and crossing your ankles. You can sit in that posture with your wrists crossed and that also helps to get both sides of your brain to fire. Simple exercise.
Another powerful reboot is to change your brain wave pattern. Spend some time in the alpha brain wave state. It’s also called expanded awareness rather than the sharp concentration, sharp focus that you spend so much of your time on. The way you do that is you pick a spot on the wall, a little dot on the wall across the room. You focus on that dot and then you take your hands and you move them this way until they’re beside you and you can see your fingers moving and you can also see the dot. When you can see them both your brain enters an alpha state. It’s harder to concentrate but that expanded awareness is really a good brainwave thing to do.
Be good to your brain. Feed it, water it, let it have some down time and exercise it. Here’s my challenge. What is something that you could start doing that would benefit your brain? Think about it. What is your brain management plan for this week?
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