The brain is often described as "like a muscle." It's a comparison that supports the brain-training industry and keeps schoolchildren hunched over their desks. We firmly believe that literacy and arithmetic exercises are more beneficial for your brain than running and gaming, but the brain-to-muscle analogy doesn't quite work. To build your biceps, you can't avoid twisting them. When it comes to your mind, the twisted approach can be surprisingly effective. Exercising your body muscles can actually benefit the gray matter in the
brain.
Scientists say that the euphoria that afflicts runners and the calmness of those who practice yoga; They have profound effects on your mind. In addition, specific physical exercises can significantly change the structure of this gray matter, in specific ways. A host of studies exploring unexpected links between fitness and physicality are coming from laboratories. This research may give you an incentive to be more active, and it can also help you choose the best ways to prepare physically for mental challenges. Such as exams, interviews, and creative projects.
1- Strengthen your memory:
The hippocampus is the part of the brain that responds greatly to aerobic exercise, as experiments conducted on children, adults, and the elderly show; This brain tissue grows steadily as people increase in physical fitness. Because the hippocampus is at the heart of the brain's learning and memory systems, this finding partly explains the memory-strengthening effects of improved cardiovascular fitness.
Exercise can also have a direct effect on the formation and formation of memory, in addition to the slow improvement of the parts of the brain responsible for memory. German researchers have shown that walking or riding bicycles during learning - and not before - helps learn new foreign language vocabulary and embed it in the brain. So exercise while reviewing your lessons. But don't push yourself too hard, as strenuous exercise can raise your stress levels, which can mess with your memory's neurotransmitters.
Increase your ability to focus:
Besides making your memories more persistent, exercise can help you focus and stay focused on the task at hand. The best scientific evidence comes from testing children in one school, but the same is likely true for all of us. Lessons combined with 20-minute rounds of aerobic exercise increased the concentration level of students at a Dutch school. Meanwhile, a large, randomized, controlled trial in the United States looked at the effects of daily exercise after school hours and throughout the school year. The results were - as expected - an increase in the students’ physical fitness, and unexpectedly, their executive control and control factor increased. They have become more skilled at ignoring distractions, better at multitasking, and retaining and processing information in their minds.
If all of this sounds like a lot of work, you may not have to be out of breath every day to reap the benefits of focus from exercise. A 10-minute coordination skill, such as spinning two balls in the air at the same time, increased the attention of a large group of German teenagers.
Whether you like it or not, bouts of physical activity can have severe effects on your mood. The runner's euphoria - the euphoric feeling that follows intense exercise - is real, and even mice have felt it. This may not be due to an “ endorphin surge ,” as levels of that human opioid rise in the body's bloodstream, but it's not clear how much endorphin actually reaches the brain. Instead, recent evidence points to a pleasurable and sedative rush at the psychoactive receptors of cannabinoids.
What about yoga ? Does it really help relieve stress? When anxiety levels rise, you become stressed, and your concentration level quickly dwindles to its lowest levels. This shift into “fight or extreme relaxation” mode occurs automatically, but this does not necessarily mean that it is completely out of your control, as yoga teaches you how to deliberately control your movement and breathing, with the aim of activating the “relaxation reactions” in your body. Science increasingly supports this claim. For example, a 2010 study put participants through eight weeks of daily yoga and meditation. In parallel with the stress reduction reported by these participants, brain scans showed a shrinkage of part of the cerebellar amygdala, a deep brain tissue strongly involved in processing stress, fear, and anxiety.
Exercise also appears to be a promising way to overcome depression. A 2013 meta-analysis cautiously suggested that exercise — both aerobic and resistance training — was “moderately effective” in treating symptoms of depression . Remarkably, exercise appeared to be as effective as antidepressant medications and psychotherapy. The people who conducted that study identified this as an area that warranted more rigorous research.
4- Enhance your creativity:
Thoreau , Nietzsche , and many other creative people claimed that walking gives the imagination wings. Last year, psychologists provided this empirical evidence. Walking—either on a treadmill or around campus at Stanford—promoted divergent thinking: the free-thinking, idea-generating element of creative thinking. However, this did not help the convergent thinking process, and if you want to focus all your attention on one solution, walking around quietly may not be what you need.
5- Slowing down cognitive decline:
The evidence that staying physically fit keeps your brain healthy into old age is compelling. Its most tangible effects are evident in the link between aerobic exercise and maintaining cognitive ability. And exercise doesn't have to be excessive: thirty to forty minutes of brisk walking, three times a week, can help prevent mental damage and delay the onset of dementia . It is also useful to get into the habit of exercising regularly and early, as the protective effects are more apparent before the cognitive signs of aging appear . It's not just your heart and lungs: exercises to improve balance, coordination and agility have had a clear impact on brain structure and cognitive function in a large group of German elderly.
Two weightlifting training sessions per week can also have a clear neurological effect. Dancing may also be a restorative factor for aging brains. Just one hour of dancing a week, for six months, did little for the elderly participants' respiratory capacity, but the physical and social stimulation boosted their cognitive health. Researchers are still underestimating the critical factors that make exercise such a powerful brain stimulant. The list of suspected factors mainly includes; Increased blood flow to the brain, sudden rise in growth hormones and expansion of the blood vessel network in the brain.
6- Do not sit still:
The cognitive consequences of exercise remind us that our brains do not work in isolation. What you do with your body affects your mental faculty. While sitting still all day, every day, is dangerous. So don't worry about the form of exercise you do, find something you enjoy, then get up and do it.
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