Why Train Your Brain?

Brain training is a new way to think about actively supporting your health through activities that positively impact your brain.  Though some brain training techniques, such as playing bridge, doing crosswords or getting exercise, have been used for optimizing cognitive sharpness and emotional wellness for decades, the idea behind training your brain has developed in recent years as brain science has confirmed the brain is plastic and can change through ‘exercise’ to perform better.

Brain Training For Stress Management

Are you familiar with your brain’s stress response?  Also called the  Fight/Flight/Freeze response.  Helping your brain de-stress is an important support for mental and emotional health.

Brain training to support lowering the brain’s stress and to create resiliency against it is now a major focus in the health and wellness industry. How does stress show up for you and when?

When your boss asks you to meet a deadline are you noticing a racing heart and sweaty palms?  Do you find your mind ruminating with worrying thoughts when it’s time to relax and fall asleep?  Are you easily irritated?  Do you snap at your kids and regret it?  Is your breathing usually shallow?

The most difficulty arrives when we cycle through these states too often and notice them negatively impacting the quality of our relationships and our physical health.  Now what to do? 

Read here about What Neurofeedback is Used For.

Best Brain Training Techniques For Stress Reduction

Exercise

Exercise is a great brain training practice for de-stressing. It increases oxygen flow to the brain and stimulates brain function and emotional regulation. Interval training is shown to improve cognitive functioning and is a proven support for improving your mood and sleep.  A new study shows that aerobic exercise can also improve executive functioning.

Sleep Hygiene

We don’t usually think of sleep as brain training but training yourself to sleep well means your brain can perform needed functions for optimal performance at night.  For example, recent research shows that the brain disposes of metabolic waste in the brain when we sleep. Emotional resiliency, key to managing stress, is intimately connected with proper sleep.

Not sure if that’s true?  Spend a day with a sleep-deprived toddler and you’ll see the link between sleep and emotional regulation. It’s a catch-22 as well: we need good quality sleep and enough of it when we’re stressed and our sleep is most likely to be disrupted when we are under a lot of stress. The best practices are to start and maintain good sleep hygiene.  Here’s our free e-book on the best sleep management practices.

Brain Training with Neurofeedback

EEG biofeedback or neurofeedback is at the forefront of brain training technology for stress management. They work by using precisely timed feedback to help identify and reset negative habits. These brain habits can be associated with aging, such as lacking mental focus and concentration, feeling overwhelmed, poor sleep, and worrying.

Brain training with neurofeedback can be a great addition to a stress management regime, because the focus is on optimizing overall mental and emotional performance and sleep. Neuroscience has come to understand that our mental and emotional habits are, in part, the result of the brain’s electrical activity being stuck in habitual cycles.

What this means is that when a person forms a hard-to-break habit, such as struggling to concentrate on tasks, this is reflected in the individual’s brainwave activity. Neurofeedback software tracks brain wave activity collected through EEG sensors attached to the head. When the software picks up on changes in brain patterns, through a feedback system that is either auditory or visual, it alerts the brain to pay attention to its habits.

This microsecond by microsecond feedback allows the brain to register and reset the maladaptive patterns.   There are a lot of devices that call themselves neurofeedback. It is important to stay up-to-date on the best neurofeedback equipment.  Neurofeedback has a range of benefits, including improving cognitive function, focus, memory, emotional regulation, and sleep management.

Ways to Get The Most Out Of Your Brain Training

When we engage in brain training techniques for stress management, we are retraining our brains to be in a more relaxed, present and clear state.  In that state, we are able to respond to actual real threats as needed and in a “rest and digest” state at other times to be able to respond appropriately to incoming stimuli with skill, clarity and precision.  Here are 3 ways to improve your brain training regime

1.  Consistency with training is key   It seems like a no-brainer that showing up is half the battle, but that’s really the truth! It is very hard to create and establish new habits that actually support our health and well-being. It would seem like the opposite–that we would be more easily drawn towards habits that support our physical and emotional well-being.

However, our brains would have us believe that we need our old habitual patterns to survive even if they appear more complicated to uphold and make life more difficult.  We can trick ourselves in to creating new habits.  With meditation, we just start by sitting 5 minutes a day and often times we find we will want to sit a little longer.

With neurofeedback, we make sure we keep regularly scheduled appointments and if training at home, set up a regular training schedule that we can adhere to. 

2.  Eat Well & Sleep Well    When we train our brains to be in the “rest and digest” state, we want to be able to also mirror that in our lifestyle–Resting and Digesting! This means that we need to take 7-9 hours of sleep every night (more if ill) and limit the use of caffeine, alcohol and sugar. I don’t like to sit here and finger wag at those who don’t do these things–but it is to say that diet and sleep do have an impact over the nervous system as well. If we are not giving the nervous system added support to regulate, then we may find ourselves continuing in the same stressful patterns.

So this isn’t about shoulds, as much as the other ways you take care of your health that really do have an impact over stress levels and could get in the way of the nervous system coming into a more relaxed and present state.

3.  Use other ways to support the brain.   Think of all the things that stress you out. Write them down. How many of these things can be “helped” and how many of these are just a part of circumstance that are out of your control. What can you change? 

Could you go for regular “forest bathing” as famous biohacker Dave Asprey calls it in his Top Ten Biohacking Tips for a Superior Brain & Body, walking Colorado hiking trails a few times a month? Could you create morning and night rituals that are soothing and supportive– such as waking up with a warm cup of tea on your patio and taking the time to do 10 minutes of free-writing, shutting off all screens an hour before bed at night?

Whatever it is you find soothing, relaxing and supportive are just the resources you might need to encourage the nervous system to stay regulated–we want continual reminders to the nervous system that you are safe and supported in the present moment.

And really, there is no right time to start this kind of work– the best times might be in the midst of a divorce or a break-up, dealing with grief, pregnancy or during a major illness– all times when our nervous system would need even more support for our sanity and clarity.

Learn more about how to manage your stress.