6 Ways to Foster Brain Health with Yoga

by Nina and Ram

Mademoiselle Ferrand Meditating on Newton by de La Tour

In his post Mental Exercise, Yoga, and the Perfect Brain, Ram mentioned six basic ways you can help prevent age-associated memory loss and foster brain health. Today I thought we'd look a bit closer at each of those ways, so if brain health is a concern of yours (and, really, who isn’t concerned about this?), you can target your yoga practice to help support your brain health as well as your overall health in general. 

1. Engaging in Physical Activity. Engaging in regular aerobic activity leads to structural changes in the brain that result in improved cognition. Physical exercise increases nerve branching and in some cases triggers regeneration of new nerve cells, especially in the memory centers of the brain. Physical exercises help you learn new things, and to be more alert and attentive owing to the structural changes. Scientists believe that physical exercise triggers increased blood flow to the brain. The greater the blood flow is, the more oxygen and other important nutrients that reach the brain, which may explain the cognitive improvements associated with exercise. Physical exercises will also help maintain optimal blood pressure, control diabetes and lower cholesterol levels, all of which are potential mental risk factors.

A regular, well-rounded asana practice provides an excellent form of exercise, fostering strength, flexibility, balance, and agility. But targeting cardiovascular health with your practice could be especially helpful for brain health (see About Yoga for Heart Health And Circulation). As Ram says, “What is good for the heart is good for the brain.” After all, your brain is one of the important organs of your body, just as your heart is.

2. Staying Mentally Active. Just as exercise and physical activity prompt muscles to grow stronger, mental exercise tones thinking skills and memory. Mental exercises maintain, build, and remodel neural network connectivity, trigger production of nerve growth factors that increase neuronal branching, and stimulate new synthesis of neural cells. The brain actively grows and rewires itself in response to stimulation and learning. Our brain grows stronger from use and from being challenged. This is called brain plasticity. Plasticity is the reason why stroke patients can relearn skills after a brain damage and also explains how a healthy part of the brain might assume the job of a damaged part. The brain is continually morphing/re-sculpting itself in response to new experience and learning. The greater the neural density, stronger and more resilient is the brain and mind that keeps the physical body strong, in turn promotes healthy aging.

According to Baxter’s post How Yoga Sequences are Brain Aerobics, to be a “brain aerobic” an activity: needs to engage your attention, must break a routine activity in an unexpected, nontrivial way, and must involve more than one of the senses. So practicing yoga asana mindfully, which not only engages your attention but involves more than one of your senses, can meet all three of these requirements if you intentionally keep your practice varied (see Practicing Yoga Mindfully and Stuck in a Rut?). Meditation and pranayama can also meet these three requirements, again, if you vary the practices. See How Yoga Sequences Are Brain Aerobics for more ideas. And, of course, simply learning new yoga poses and practices, and studying the scriptures (see The Power of Svadhyaya, Part 2) provide excellent learning opportunities.

3. Being Socially Active. Social engagement reduces the risk of isolation and depression. Remaining socially active also supports brain health and delays the onset of dementia. Because being socially active requires that you plan, participate, engage, and be attentive and alert, it qualifies as mental exercise. Social engagement is also a learning exercise for the brain and mind. As with other mentally stimulating activities, social activities help build up healthy brain cells and the connections between them.

Attending yoga classes and participating in your local yoga community is a good way to stay socially active as well as to keep your practice going strong. See 8 Ways to Join the Yoga Community for more ideas. You can even practice yoga with one or more friends (see Practicing Yoga with a Friend).

4. Eating a Healthy Diet. High blood pressure, obesity, diabetes and high cholesterol are potential mental risk factors and increase the risk of dementia. A healthy diet helps to keep these factors at optimal levels. Some of the consequences of chronological aging are increased oxidative stress, free radical production, and uncontrolled inflammation that not only hasten aging but also trigger rapid brain aging. A healthy diet soaks up free radicals and brings down inflammation, thus preventing brain decay. Eating a healthy diet promotes good blood flow to the organ system, which includes the brain.

Practicing yoga stress management techniques improves digestion, prevents stress eating, and reduces cortisol levels. Cultivating mindfulness with meditation and asana practiced mindfully can help make you more aware of what your body really needs (and what it doesn’t). And using your meditation practice to strengthen you will power will help support you in changing your eating habits. See Yoga for Healthy Eating: An Overview for further information. 

5. Managing Chronic Stress. Chronic stress (see About Stress: Acute vs. Chronic) causes havoc not just to the body but also to the brain. Chronic stress brings with it several health issues, including constant fear, worry, anxiety, depression, and memory deficits. 

While stress hormones do sharpen attention and spur us to take needed action, we are not designed to handle high levels of stress hormones day after day, year after year. In the brain these stress hormones weaken blood vessels, kill off neurons, and shrink the hippocampus, resulting in memory loss. Chronic stress also speeds up the normal aging of other cells that in turn affects normal structure and function of the brain.

Using yoga’s stress management techniques help you dial down stress levels when you are suffering from chronic stress (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga). Cultivating equanimity in the face of life’s difficulties will help you from getting stressed out in the first place (see 7 Ways to Cultivate Equanimity with Yoga). 

6. Sleeping Well. Lack of sleep or sleep deprivation triggers accelerated mental decline. Sleep appears necessary for our nervous systems to work properly. Too little sleep leaves us drowsy and unable to concentrate, and leads to impaired memory and physical performance. If sleep deprivation continues, hallucinations and mood swings may develop. Just as sleep gives the body time to heal itself, sleep allows neurons to lower down their neurochemical activity and repair themselves.

Without sleep, neurons become “fatigued” and begin to malfunction. Sleep helps to clear out toxins from the brain as well as from the body (see Sleep, Alzheimer's Disease, and Yoga). Finally, the brain gets exposed to thousands of stimuli through the five senses, and sleep helps to reduce chaos and bring order to the information flow, helping to put an order to these information inputs and archive them as memories. 

Yoga can be really helpful for improving sleep because you can use it to manage your stress levels and reduce anxiety, both of which are frequent causes of insomnia (see The Relaxation Response and Yoga and 10 Ways to Soothe Anxiety with Yoga). If pain or physical discomfort is keeping you awake, you can use yoga pain management techniques (see Yoga for Pain Management). And soothing practices, such as restorative yoga and simple, calming forms of pranayama, can help you if you wake in the middle of the night. See Yoga for Insomnia, Part 1, Day to Night: Yoga for Better Sleep, and Five Tips for Better Sleep for further information.

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More

Emotional Memory is Malleable

by Ram

Inhabited Painting by Helena Almeida*

The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron connects to about 1,000 other neurons, totaling an unimaginable trillion connections. Neurons combine with each one and help lay down many memories at a time. Furthermore, emotions associated with a memory are stored in a different area of the brain than the content of the memory itself. While we do not know the storage capacity and the size of memory space in our brains, certain memories involve more details and take up more space. Other memories that are not worth remembering or that are forgotten are cleared up by the brain through a process called neuronal rewiring, thus freeing up more memory space.

A layman would define memory as objects, colors, sizes, and shapes or more complex emotional feelings like fear, worry, anxiety, joy, happiness, anger, and so on. While memories may seem a complex combination of objective information, neuroscientists see them as electrochemical signals that are exchanged between nerves; or simply put, information in the form of electrochemical signals that arise in a nerve from one specific area of the brain to another nerve in the same area or a different part of the brain which together encode everything that we associate with a memory.

Recently, we here at Yoga for Healthy Aging had some very stimulating exchanges on the topic of trauma, which triggered a lot of interesting discussion. Lives get severely disrupted following a traumatic experience and when, where and how the memory associated with the negative experience will surface depends on each individual. While most people recover from traumatic events, many do not, and they continue to experience constant fear, worry, anxiety and/or depression. Until recently, neuroscientists believed long-lasting traumatic events created non-pliable neuronal wiring that fired off these memory events randomly upon exposure to some stimulus. So the question that these scientists have been asking all along is: can traumatic memories be erased, wiped out, or overlaid with favorable events so that the person is free from periodic recurrences of traumatic experiences?

The answer is yes, and in a seminal paper recently published in the prestigious journal Nature Bidirectional switch of the valence associated with a hippocampal contextual memory engram, neuroscientists led by a noble laureate concluded that emotional/traumatic memories are malleable, meaning that they can be manipulated such that these unfavorable memories can be turned into more favorable ones. Using state-of-the-art techniques, these scientists were able to show in mice the areas of the brain that created both positive and negative memories and how these memories areas could be switched around. In addition to identifying the nerve cells that lit up after favorable or unfavorable experiences, these scientists also showed that the negative emotional memory got relived as though it was happening all over again. But when the mice that had been exposed to a shocking experience received a favorable experience, it stripped the painful and negative feelings associated with the previous traumatic memory, suggesting that new positive information attached to an unfavorable memory event may help to diffuse its negative impact.

According to these researchers, while negative and unfavorable memories may not fade away, they can be replaced, overlaid or changed by new and contrasting experiences. Emotional valence—which is a measure of good feelings (appetitive behavior) or bad feelings (aversive behavior)—is not rigid. And, based on the studies done on these mice, circumstances/events/places that were scary, unpleasant, or upsetting could become happy, safe, or warm. In the above mentioned study, as the mice got exposed to repeated favorable experiences, their neuronal connections involved with the negative events got overlaid by newer and positive connections, tilting the balance of emotional valence towards appetitive behavior. The hope was that in due course the neuronal connections responsible for firing off the negative events would shrink or be lost.

Although the neuroscientist’s work was with rodents, it may be possible to make an effective therapy for humans that focuses on positive feelings to overlay painful memories and transforms the negative experience (see Friday Q&A: Trauma Resurfacing, Crying in Class and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Yoga to the Rescue). What do I mean by “transforming negative experience”? Surely the traumatic memory does not go away—or does it? According to the authors of the above-mentioned study, transformation would mean using methods/ways to lessen the impact of the harrowing event and transform it to something less traumatic. So this “transformation” would make the memory less intense to help prevent those frequent flashbacks. Cognitive neuroscientists have also discovered that in response to the stress of recalling trauma, the brain also releases “feel good” chemicals, akin to a compensatory mechanism. These calming neurochemicals that help to deal with the stress and trauma may be the brain’s answer to fighting off the traumatic memory. So whenever we feel the traumatic memory arising, we could resort to methods that will stimulate the body to flood the brain with feel-good neurochemicals.

So what suitable remedial procedures exist for humans suffering from long-standing traumatic memories, such as those involved in PTSD? In addition to psychotherapy, group therapy, and neuro-medications, yoga practices, such as asanas, pranayama, meditation, self-inquiry and yoga nidra, may help to transform any negative experience. Through these methods it is hoped that the individual may come to terms with or accept the traumatic event, allowing him or her to build self-confidence and become stronger in both body and mind. This way, not only does the individual remain connected to his or her inner self, it also keeps the person in the present moment. 

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More