How to Become a Memory Maestro

I was sitting in church when I finally decided it was time. I have been debating about it and dancing around it because most people are jaded about it. They have been told about it countless times. But then I realized that my reasons for not addressing it were limiting beliefs. I believed that anyone who would open this post would think, “Yada yada. Heard it before,” but what if they hadn’t? What if I could provide information on a topic written about by different people thousands of times a day in a fun, snarky way that allows people to have a new perspective? And here is the first part of my series on exercise, written by a sarcastic exercise nerd that hopes she can change some of the attitude and mindset on…exercise. Yes, exercise because as it turns out exercise plays a key role in helping your brain grow more cells so you can have a better memory and a sexier brain.

Genetics Loads the Gun. Lifestyle Pulls the Trigger- George Bray?

Your lifestyle is how you choose to live your life, interact with others, and choose to eat and move your body. Your lifestyle is affected by how you act and interact with your environment. Lifestyle is structured by genetic code and is directed by how we handle our stress, eat, drink and move our bodies.?

Lifestyle and living are a series of good and not-so-good choices. When we are younger, the lifestyle choices don’t seem to have an immediate impact, but they can build up, like waters behind a dam. Eventually, even the best dam cannot withstand constant choices that put it under stress. When the dam breaks, the parts of the body that were protected are now at risk, and that includes your brain.

Exercise and our Genes

A 2011 Australian study reported that television viewing shortened life expectancy by 22 minutes for every hour of television viewing. The entire Game of Thrones series amounted to 63 hours of television viewing, which meant you had one less day to live if you watched all of it. While I might believe that your time was better spent watching the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the fact remains that we must move for our brain and body to function the way we are programmed or risk early death due to mediocre T.V.?

We have long known that exercise was good for us. Still, currently, we are just scratching the surface of understanding exactly how our bodies are adapted to being very physically active. Active does not mean we look like those guys who completely do not use illegal suppliments (wink, wink). Active mean movement. Understanding how our bodies have been programmed with the need to be physically active is what University of Arizona anthropologist David Raichlen and psychologist Gene Alexander have focused on in their research. Their work concentrates on a research program that looks specifically at exercise and the brain. Raichlen and Alexander believe that we have physiologically developed to survive longer with continual increases in physical activity levels as hunter-gatherers. Their research papers are as drool-worthy to exercise nerds as trashy romance novels are for women in their forties.??

A 2016 study revealed that endurance runners' brains have more connections between regions of the brain than the brains of people who didn’t exercise when compared on MRI. This study mirrors the information in the book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Spark discusses how exercise works to boost the number of connections in the brain. In simple terms, you have more nerve cells, and those nerve cells talk to more parts of the brain, allowing you to do more complex stuff. This build-up happens because exercise leads to an increase in the levels of important neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are chemical messengers that your body can't function without. Their job is to carry chemical signals (“messages”) from one neuron (nerve cell) to the next neuron. These neurotransmitters cause physical changes to your brain cells.?

Learning and your Brain

Every time you learn something new, the cells in your brain forge connections to process the new information. The more you use these connections, the better they work and the faster they work. An example would be how much effort you have to put into learning your multiplication tables, but now you know that 3x3=9 without having to work through why that is the case. Exercise helps to facilitate the connection process and strengthens it. The book Spark discusses real-life evidence of the use of exercise for struggling high school students.?

At Naperville Central High School, some students had difficulty with reading comprehension. The school formed an academic reading class for these students with an interesting addition for half of the students. They had one-half of the students participate in a before-school or zero-hour P.E. class with their regular P.E. class later in the day. This became Learning Readiness P.E., a class designed based on research that indicated that physically active and fit students were more academically alert. The group with zero-hour P.E. went directly from vigorous exercises to their reading class. The exercise class group improved their reading comprehension by 17 percent – while classmates who didn’t exercise improved only by 10.7 percent.

How Exercise Grows Your Brain

The results from the Naperville school are not alone in the research. Highly controlled experiments show that aerobic exercise leads to the formation of new brain cells within this brain. Exercise protects the brain across the lifespan, leading to enhanced brain functions and the potential for successful cognitive aging. It does this by causing new cell growth in the hippocampus. In addition to having a pretty funky name, the hippocampus plays a critical role in the formation, organization, and storage of new memories.

It is only recently that we do not need to be physically active regularly to live and survive. My great grandparents were extreme endurance athletes, working as farmers in Montana compared to me. However, almost no one thinks about the lack of exercise decreasing their brain ability because exercise is not a behavior that requires significant brain power. However, if you think about what made our ancestors successful, it was the amount of physical activity they put in during the day. If they hunted more, planted more, and harvested more they had a higher likelihood of survival because they were more active throughout the day.?

As is noted in Zombieland, the first rule of the zombie apocalypse is cardio. However, we don’t all need to pick up a shovel and go back to farming the old-fashioned way. A study of Glaswegian postal workers shows us that you don’t need to start running marathons to make a difference. The postal workers that got 15,000 steps or spent seven hours a day on their feet had the best health and very sexy hippocampus. Their sexy and beefy hippocampus meant that they also had an easier time remembering all the names of the Game of Thrones characters who died in the last season. So get out there and start working on getting that brain nice and beefy so can remember off-hand quotes from Dazed and Confused and finally win at trivia night. Alright, alright, alright.?

Action Steps

Get Deliberate: Write a realistic physical activity goal for yourself. One that stretches you a bit and schedules it at a time where you can’t get out of it as easily.?

Get Inspired: Find the reason why you actually care about committing to exercise. Your why can be the thing that pulls you through when you want to sleep in or have that candy bar.

Get Going: Sometimes, the best thing I do for myself is to put on my running shoes and workout clothes first thing in the morning or lay them out the night before. It is prepping me to head out the door to get my exercise on.

https://renegadewellness.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-memory-maestro

Unwinding Anxiety with Exercise

I was in a bathroom gasping for air, hoping no one would walk in and ask me what was wrong or if they could help. I had never been in a situation like that before. I had one test that would change the course of the next 12 months. Continue on in the program or repeat a whole year of grad school because of this one test. So there I was in the bathroom 15 minutes away from taking that test, panicking. Some people live with panic, anxiety, and fear regularly. And it shrinks their world. Because when they leave their safe area, they can spiral as their brain is ready to see fear everywhere. Living in this fear prevents them from living the life they were meant for and living a life of possibilities.

Some super cool research shows that exercise can be extremely helpful as a treatment option for anxiety. How so? Well let’s dig into all those interesting science facts and take an adult magic school bus trip to our brains.

Anxiety: The Breakdown??

Anxiety is a natural reaction to a threat that you see as fearful. Everyone has felt the effects of this reaction. You get that uncomfortable feeling when you're about to give a speech, facing a rampaging emu, or giving the birds and the bees talk to your child. When situations like these or worse occur, your sympathetic nervous system takes over. Your sympathetic nervous system is the one that helps you move quickly when a bear attacks or you see a young child with a permanent marker heading to your couch.?

When your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, your heart rate speeds up, and you shunt blood away from digesting your food and shift that blood to your muscles.? Those muscles also start to tense up, preparing for action. While discussing sex with your child might not be as stressful as running away from a small ostrich-like bird, your nervous system senses your fear and reacts similarly. If you find that explaining sex to your kids was a breeze, you should look into coaching others through it, as most parents start getting heart palpitations thinking about it. However, the fear response in anxiety disorder is when your brain gets stuck in an emotional worst-case scenario loop.?

People with a diagnosed anxiety disorder have debilitating fear when there's no real threat. Clinical anxiety affects about 40 million Americans or 18% of the population in any given year and only a small percentage of them get treatment. There are different types of anxiety and panic disorders, but they all share the physical symptoms of that intense fear response by the sympathetic nervous system.?

This is Your Brain on Anxiety?

In brain terms, fear is the memory of danger. When someone suffers from anxiety disorder, the brain replays that memory forcing them to live in that fear repeatedly, getting stuck in a fear loop. The memory can be triggered by an image, a feeling, a smell or a sensation like having tense muscles. Any of these can start them down a very unfortunate memory lane. The fear loop response is the fault of a little part of the brain shaped like an almond called the amygdala. The word amygdala is Greek for almond, so now you are learning about anxiety and Greek! Go you!?

Now back to the topic at hand. The amygdala’s job is to get multiple systems going when we have a fear response. In anxiety disorders, the ‘all clear, no danger here’ signal doesn’t work like normal. This is because the connections in the brain almond (amygdala) telling the body to stay in a fear response loop are stronger than those telling it to stop. They are stronger because the nerve cells that the amygdala controls have been used more, so they are stronger.?

In brain terms, the more nerves are used, the more the brain makes it easier for the signals to travel quicker and faster through nerve upgrades. That is super helpful when we learn how to walk, add or read. The speed of the connections in anxiety disorders ‘stay in the fear response loop’ is racing in a formula one car on asphalt, and the ‘calm down’ signal is racing on a dirt track.

However, the brain has plasticity, meaning connections can be made, unmade, and remade. The brain is moldable, and you can strengthen connections or make them weaker. We can change the brain. To disrupt anxiety disorder, we need to get the amygdala to calm the f# Mark Nowlin, PT, DPT, OCS, CSCS own and train it to stay that way. How do we do that? OH MY GOSH, I AM SO EXCITED YOU ASKED!! I literally am writing this whole post just to get to this part because this is the good stuff.?

The Case for Exercise Calming the Brain

When we exercise, the body lowers the muscles' resting tension, helping the body feel more relaxed and less tense. This decrease in tension can interrupt the anxiety feedback loop in the brain. However, exercise has more tricks up its sleeve for helping those with anxiety. Exercise increases the release and production of serotonin. Serotonin plays several roles in your body, including influencing learning, memory, and happiness. Serotonin is made from the essential amino acid tryptophan. Without tryptophan, there is no serotonin to be had. Exercise increases the amount of tryptophan that makes it into the brain, AND that increase sticks around after you are done exercising. But wait, there’s more.

My last post discussed how exercise causes new brain cells to form. Specifically, there is a noted increase in the number of new cells in the hippocampus. Besides having a funky name, the hippocampus plays a critical role in forming, organizing, and storing memories. A huge issue in anxiety disorder is that the emotional almond of the brain (amygdala) causes those with anxiety to repeatedly play fear memories. However, getting more connections in the hippocampus with exercise will help us create new nerves to make new memories that we want to relive.?

Many studies show that aerobic exercise significantly relieves anxiety disorder symptoms, but exercise also helps the average person reduce normal feelings of anxiety.? Those would be the feeling I got before taking that test that would determine if I was in graduate school for two or more years. A 198-person study measured exercise's physical and mental effects in a group of Chilean high school students for nine months. In the exercise group that got 90 minutes of exercise three times a week, the anxiety score decreased by 13.7%. The group that received no exercise outside of a really long form to fill out several times during the study had a decrease in self-rated anxiety of 2.8%.?

Bottom line exercise helps us all to control the stormy moments of life. It helps to divert you from feeling overly nervous and anxious about an upcoming test, a big presentation, or an important meeting. It also helps us control the ‘all clear’ signal by getting the front part of the brain and the hippocampus overriding the emotional almond (amygdala) controlling your thoughts.?

DIG Deep Action Steps:?

Get Deliberate: Have something that will cause some anxiety at work or school? Try going up and down the stairs right before your presentation or test, or schedule a workout so you can get a good sweat on without being late. If you believe you have an anxiety disorder, meet with a mental wellness provider because there is no such thing as getting too much help from other mentally healthy adults.??

Get Inspired: Write down how you feel when you are anxious and how do you act towards those you love. Use this as your inspiration for changing how you deal with your anxiety.?

Get Going: Start making exercise something you schedule in your week. Write down the first two emotions you feel once it is done. Use that as motivation for staying consistent.

https://renegadewellness.substack.com/p/unwinding-anxiety-with-exercise

Decreasing Depression with Exercise

I was sitting in the doctor's office staring at the boxes, “Do you feel exhausted? Do you feel overwhelmed? Do you have difficulty concentrating? My eight-week-old sat beside me in her car seat, quietly staring at me. The answer to most of the depression questions was a yes. I argued with myself silently, nevertheless, that I didn’t need to check yes. I had a 17-month-old at home in addition to the newborn and averaged 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Who wouldn’t feel overwhelmed and exhausted? I talked myself out of talking to someone because I didn’t think I could work it into my schedule. Just making time to cook dinner daily seemed like a considerable effort. I was breastfeeding and didn’t want medication. So slowly, I worked through my rough days. Slowly I got back to doing enjoyable things, but I could have made it easier by talking to someone or getting back into a regular exercise routine. Yep, exercise.

Talk therapy and medications have starring roles in treating depression. Depression is more common, you might know, with 6%-8% of people having a depressive episode this year, and 72% of them will go without treatment. Depression hugely affects your ability to get to what you need to in life and connect with friends and family. Finding a good provider for talk treatment can be difficult. People aren’t always willing to take medication for side effects or other personal reasons. A third part of what should be a star in the treatment plan for depression is regular exercise. Using exercise to treat mood disorders is like using Chuck Norris to go after bad guys. It is always a good idea so let’s explore why exercise works.?

Exercise for Depression: Does it Work?

What do we know about exercise decreasing the effects of depression? When you look at the impact of exercise and medication, exercise is equally able to treat depression. Multiple studies have compared medication and exercise head to head with the result that they come out with the same results--they both work.?

There is also research to say that exercise makes a difference throughout your life in managing various mood disorders like depression or anxiety. One of the best examples is the Alameda county study which was a study that looked at the same people over a span of years. The Alameda study looked at the effect of being physically active and if that changed the risk of depression. For this study, they surveyed 8,023 people for twenty-six years. The people in the study who became inactive were 1.5 times more likely to have depression by the end of the study.??

This means if you primarily watch daytime television as your “activity” after retirement, your odds of getting depression each year go from 6%-8% to 10%-12%. It is even worse for each generation that is born. My grandparents had a 12% chance of having depression throughout their lives. Those aged 30-44 have a 25% chance of having a major depressive disorder in their lifetime. The depression rates for children today will likely be 50%. And I know what you are thinking now, “Gah, this is depressing, so now I will watch a cat video.” But don’t leave because this is where I get to the good stuff.?

How Exercise Treats Depression

Okie Dokie, so we are about to get some Latin on and learn some long words, BUT I think it is important that you understand how exercise helps to treat depression. It makes it more legitimate. Plus, you will sound like a smartie when you chat with your coworkers about this amazing Substack you started reading (that would be this one), so they can subscribe. And now, onto a deep dive into how exercise affects the brain after that shameless plug.?

Exercise immediately elevates levels of norepinephrine in certain areas of the brain. It wakes up the brain and gets it going. Norepinephrine increases alertness and arousal and helps with focus and concentration—improved ability to tackle the day after exercise because you feel focused and alert can help self-esteem, which is one aspect of depression.?

Exercise also boosts dopamine which improves mood and feelings of wellness and jump-starts the attention system. Dopamine is all about motivation and attention. Exercise equally affects serotonin, vital for mood, impulse control, and self-esteem. It also helps stave off stress by counteracting cortisol, that pesky hormone that plagues us when we are under constant stress.?

Dr. Stephen Ilardi, a clinical psychologist at the University of Kansas and author of The Depression Cure, notes that “researchers have assessed the Kaluli people of the New Guinea, modern-day hunter-gatherer bands, for the presence of mental illness. They found that clinical depression is almost completely nonexistent among such groups.”

The reason depression is so rare, Ilardi argues, is that people like the Kaluli live a lifestyle that’s congruent with their biology and psychology. We were meant to move, not to sit. Their way of life essentially acts as a natural antidepressant. They’re too busy to sit around. They get lots of physical activity because they still hunt and gather. Their diet is unprocessed, their level of social connection is extraordinary, and they regularly have as much as 10 hours of sleep. I do not think we need to move to New Guinea so we can all start over, mainly because I REALLY love indoor plumbing and toilet paper. However, we can take some of this new information and use exercise to tackle and defeat depression. The biggest question we have to answer is how does someone start to add in exercise, and what do you pick? Or maybe you fu#!ing hate exercise, so are you still screwed to live in the depths of despair? Nope. Luckily exercise nerds have lots of tricks up their sleeves. There is still hope.?

Choosing Your Exercise?

Many people who come to see me are inactive and don’t have a lot of positive experiences with exercising. Most of them think about running in gym class or running outside when it is hot or cold or raining. Basically, there are a lot of people that assume they hate all exercise because high school gym class was traumatic.?

There is so much out there that does not involve running! Most of the time, it will be trial and error to find the exercise that you would prefer to do. Be mentally prepared to discover things you don’t like and find something you really like. I once took a pole aerobics class that even included the stripper boots. It was a killer arm workout. Bottom line, if you hate it, there is something else out there for you--Barre, Pilates, CrossFit--the options are plentiful, and most of them are available on a guided workout app you can get on your phone.

The biggest thing to do when you start is to write a goal that you will move your body ___minutes each day or Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, etc. BE REALLY FU@!ING SPECIFIC!!! On the days that you move, take two minutes and write on a piece of paper on your fridge what you feel like mentally at the end of the day. This is part of what will motivate you to keep it up.?

Often feeling isolated and alone is a significant contributing factor in depression. If so, an exercise program with a community feel can be more effective than even an exercise you prefer alone. The social aspect of it and someone knowing your name or asking where you have been is huge for decreasing the feelings of being alone. If a larger group will be too much, connect with a friend who does work out. Have them give you their left shoe, and you give them yours. If you don’t show up, they can’t walk or exercise, and the same goes for you. Again, journal how your mood at the end of the day. Talk to your friend about how it feels to exercise.?

The longer you exercise, the easier it will be to keep depression at bay. The SMILE study out of Duke University that compared exercise and antidepressants immediately and at ten months found that those who used exercise only had a relapse rate of 9% as compared to 38% of the antidepressant group. How we think and feel is governed by our brain cell connections. So become your electrician and start making exercise a part of your regular daily and weekly routine.??

DIG Deep Action Steps:?

Get Deliberate: There is no such thing as getting too much help from other mentally healthy adults. If you haven’t tried talk therapy with a counselor many of them are available virtually now. They can help you with setting up exercise goals and other goals for treating and keeping depression at bay. Setting up very specific goals for exercise is key to making movement a part of your regular weekly routine. Check out this post on goal writing for some guidance.

Get Inspired: Think about that feeling you get when you have just finished a workout. Even if it has been a while close your eyes and mentally get into that post-exercise zone. Write down what it feels like, type it up, and put it on your fridge or mirror with the title “why I exercise.”

Get Going: Put on your walking/running shoes first thing in the morning or as soon as you get home from work. Decrease the barriers to making exercise happen in your day-to-day life!

https://renegadewellness.substack.com/p/decreasing-depression-with-exercise