Neuroscience Says This Simple Habit Improves Cognitive Health and Makes Your Brain Act Younger...

“The idea here is that we can momentarily counteract [decline] through movement. It’s compelling.”

Do things like this ever happen to you?

• Someone asks you about a restaurant nearby. You love it, you tell them; you go there all the time. Then, you realize the last time you actually visited was several years ago.
• You come up with a fantastic business idea. But then you go to share it with a colleague, and you realize as you share it that you’ve missed several big holes.
• Perhaps most on the nose: You’re trying to remember some of the minutiae of everyday life — a password, or a routine that you’ve done hundreds of times — and yet, you draw a blank. You start to worry. Is your brain just getting older?

Time catches all of us eventually. But what if I were to tell you that a new study suggests there’s a simple thing you can do every day that can improve brainpower and restore cognitive health, to the point that your brain functions as if it were several years younger?

Writing in the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine, researchers at the Penn State College of Medicine say they may have found just such a thing.

In short, after putting together a study of middle-aged people who simply participated in “everyday movement,” which didn’t even have to be intensive exercise, but instead things like walking a dog or doing chores, wound up with improved brain function.

Specifically, according to a statement released with the study: “improvement in cognitive processing speed equivalent to being four years younger.”

As study lead Jonathan Hakun, assistant professor of neurology and psychology at Penn State and the Penn State College of Medicine, put it:

You don’t have to go to the gym to experience all the potential benefits of physical activity. All movement is important.

Before we dive in deeper, let’s clarify a distinction. We’ve seen lots of studies suggesting that long-term brain health might be improved as a result of exercise.

Heck, one of my favorite studies suggests that exercise can reduce people’s risk of death from any cause, during any given year by as much as 27 percent.

The difference with this study, however, is that it suggests improved brain function in the short term. Take the dog for a walk in the morning, enjoy “improvement in cognitive processing speed” after lunch, so to speak.

As you’ll see, the researchers really were focused on how exercise affected brain power in the here and now.

In short, they studied data from 204 participants, all of whom were residents of the Bronx, New York, and between the ages of 40 and 65.

Over the course of nine days, the participants checked in six times each day: reporting their level of physical activity since the last check-in, and asked to play two brain games, one assessing working memory and the other assessing cognitive processing speed.

Sure enough, cognitive processing speed increased after participants reported having had at least some physical activity since their last check-in.

Takeaways for business leaders?

It might mean simply working physical movement into your ordinary workday: things like walk-and-talk meetings or phone calls, or making the effort sometimes to visit colleagues where they work, instead of doing video calls or else trying to get them to come to you.

Oh, and I don’t think this is a replacement for serious exercise. It’s more about adding something simple and pleasant to your daily routine.

“We get slower as we age, both physically and cognitively. The idea here is that we can momentarily counteract that through movement. It’s compelling,” Hakun continued. “There’s the potential for a brief walk or a little extra movement to give you a boost.”

EXPERT OPINION BY BILL MURPHY JR

Republished by Greg Herrera: Silicon Valley CEO Group; Helping leaders benefit their companies, families and society...