5 Ways to Love Your Brain

5 Ways to Love Your Brain

Claire - March 11, 2014 

Did you know this week is Brain Awareness Week?

To celebrate is here are 5 suggestions on ways you can tell your brain that you love it.

1. Give your brain a fat boost – aka “Fat-heads are healthy!”

Your brain is made up mostly of fat – about 70 percent of its dry weight is cholesterol. It is imperative to feed your brain good fats for two reasons. The first is that the process of  “myelinisation”, which is a bit like insulating an electrical wire and it requires lots of good quality fats to occur properly. Without proper myelinisation the brain can “short circuit” or stop making adequate neural pathways. This leads to terrible things like learning difficulties, ADHD, Parkinson’s, MS etc.

The second reason fat is great for your brain is that diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s are now being recognised as metabolic disorders, now being coined “Type 3 diabetes”.  The brain can only run on either glucose or ketones (by-product of fat metabolism). When the brain can use the alternative fuels, other than glucose, this allows the insulin receptors to stay sensitive and functional. As such, the brain stays healthy, rather than starving to death when insulin resistance comes into play in later life.

One of the best ways to feed your brain fat is to start your day with a “Fat Black” coffee. See here on our You Tube video on how to make a Fat Black. 

2. Give your brain a break.

We spend so much of our time thinking about stuff. Not really important stuff and often just stories we make up in our heads that make us feel bad. In fact, it has been suggested up to 80% of what we think is complete rubbish that causes unnecessary stress. During hot yoga class, we often refer to this as the “Monkey Mind”. For great mental and brain health, switch this bit off for a while and give your brain a break.

A few easy ways to do this are:

1  Get in that Hot yoga room and do a 90min open eye meditation

2  Listen to some Hypnosis MP3’s

3  Tune into your breathing for a few moments

4  Learn how to meditate and start a daily practice

5  Start your day with some quiet time outside listing to the world around you

6  Have a nanna nap

3. Move your body.

The biggest stimulating factor for your brain is not calculus, but rather, movement or your body. If you want to get really specific, it is movement of your spine, particularly your neck.  When you move your body you stimulate things called proprioceptors. These proprioceptors wake your brain up, lay down new neural pathways and release happy brain hormones.

According to Dr Roger Sperry (MD and Nobel Prize recipient for his work in this area), 90% of the brain’s energy comes via spinal movement/stimulation. The average spine goes through over 100,000 tiny little movements everyday, so it becomes a veritable powerhouse for your brain! The more the better!

Get in that yoga room, go for a walk or a run, play with your kids or play some sport. Sitting is like sugar to the spine and your brain.

4. Putting together the pieces of the puzzle.

Give your brain something to really think about. Turn off the TV and the computer and do a crossword, a sudoku or even a jigsaw puzzle. Use it or lose it is total truth when it comes to your brain. (Can you remember how to calculate the area of a circle?) If you don’t stimulate those parts of the brain, problem solving and lateral thinking could well be lost to you.  Physical puzzles, like we did at the family movement workshop are doubly as effective.

5. Get Adjusted.

After a Chiropractic adjustment the brain produces more “Alpha” brainwaves. These are the waves that are associated with relaxation, healing and health. This means your brain is happier and healthier after each adjustment. Another benefit of chiropractic adjustments, particularly those in the upper neck region, stimulate those proprioceptors we spoke about in point 3.

So many ways to help your brain stay happy and healthy… stay tuned, there’s more to come!

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6 Secrets to a Better Sleep

6 secrets to a better sleep

Claire  - Wednesday, March 05, 2014

Anyone with children knows that sleep deprivation is the worst form of torture. The only thing worse than being woken in the middle of the night by a miniature person with an urgent, indefinable need whose only means of communication is screaming; is waking up for absolutely no reason and then spending an hour thinking about all the things you can't fix at 2am.

So, why do we do that? What causes that annoying middle of the night worry session and how can we fix it?

1. Fix your dark deficiency

One of the biggest contributors to poor sleep is we keep telling our brains that it is morning at every hour of the day.

Our eyes, which are essentially just an extension of our brains, tell us what time of day it is by the levels of the different lights bands they register. In the morning the light we see is very high in blue light and much lower in the red end of the spectrum. In the evening, blue light from the sun is really low, but we see loads of the slower orange and red light. Think about the colours you see in an amazing sunset.

With the introduction of artificial lighting and particularly TV/computer/phone screens we bombard our eyes with blue light around the clock. This inhibits the production of the sleep hormone, melatonin. Our eyes keep telling us it is morning so not sleep time.

Some easy ways to fix this are:

•   Get yourself a pair of yellow (blue-blocking) glasses to put on as soon as the sun goes down.

•   Install f.lux, good sleep or any other app that puts a filter on your phone and computer screens at nighttime.

•   Get into the habit of living by candle light at nighttime. This is the best option if you have serious sleep issues, suffer from chronic inflammation or weight issues*

2.  Eat earlier

Another inhibitor of melatonin production is insulin. The easy way to remedy this is to eat dinner earlier. Optimally this would be 4 hrs. between eating and sleeping is best, but even 90mins can have a dramatic effect on your sleep.

  3. Magnesium

Magnesium is required for making the hormone melatonin, unfortunately in this day and age we chew through our magnesium stores when we are stressed out as well as when we metabolise sugar and carbohydrates. Most people are magnesium deficient and a decent magnesium supplement can improve sleep quality significantly.

4.  1/2 Tortoise Pose

You may have heard yoga teachers say, "Thirty seconds in half tortoise pose is the equivalent to getting 8hrs sleep." What half tortoise does is stimulate your pineal gland in your brain. Can you guess where melatonin is made?

5.  Eat fat and get cold

Eating good fats helps sleep on a number of levels, from lowering insulin levels and therefore allowing melatonin to kick in earlier, to setting up a hormonal chain of events that not only allows you to tolerate cold better, but use it as a super tranquilliser.

Cold showers or even ice baths can improve sleep, reduce inflammation, reduce chronic pain and even help you lose weight in the healthiest way possible. It is almost like a mini hibernation overnight. 

6.  Peak your sleep enhancing hormones at bedtime.

Ok, so we have spoken a lot about melatonin already, but there is one last way that is perfect for kick starting your hormones for sleep and that is, a little lovemaking.

When we make love (either on our own or with a partner) we release a cocktail of hormones that not only make us feel good, they also reduce stress and enhance the function of hormones that help us get to sleep and stay asleep.

So if you are wondering what to do with those 90 minutes after dinner when the lights are out, the TV is off and the candles are lit...

Sweet Dreams.