Is your Brain as fit as your Body?

Few things which led to the thought for this article are as below:

1. An old colleague of mine told me about how people of this generation are likely to live to a 100 after attending a summit …

2.A biographic movie that I watched on Winston Churchill a few weeks back which was based during the height of World War 2 with the allied forces based in England planning an offensive on the Nazi forces in France. The movie also showed how active a mind he had which thought from various directions and dimensions and despite a steady dose of drinks and cigars he continued to be active till into his 90s

3. HR asking for training requirement for self and team for the coming year

All these parameters set me thinking how in the last couple of decades awareness on physical exercise has grown manifold and the percentage of people who do some kind of exercise daily and also increased manifold which has also led to the huge increase in the number of gyms etc. and the general belief?that a fit body also leads to a fit mind ...but couldn’t the opposite also be true that a fit mind can also lead to a healthy body and when we think about it do we really do much to take care of our mind or brain..

I had earlier also written about the human brain in my article on Habits dated...Nov 1st, 2020, and on Connecting learning and intelligence in my article on August 11th, 2021, both of which are available on my LinkedIn page and my website links of which are as attached below

Cementing #New #Year #Resolutions into #Habits – #Systems #Thinking Brain – Rejo Francis

Connecting #Learning and #Intelligence – #Natural and #Artificial – Rejo Francis

In both these articles I had spoken about the human brain works using the system 1 and system 2 brain and how the human brain forms patterns to develop habits…

But while there is a lot of awareness today on working out and walking daily to maintain the body and rejuvenate it with yoga and meditation etc. there is hardly any awareness or discussion on maintaining and improving mental health...

Before we get into that Lets first try and demystify some of the usual myths that we all believe in

1.. Brain diminishes with age

Recent findings have found that this doesn’t hold good, and it is also found that neurons the basic cells which are crucial for providing the brain with its computing power do not have to die off as we grow older. The process called neurogenesis which allows the brain to expand neurons as we age is hugely dependent on the way we live our life. The brains anatomy, neural networks, and cognitive abilities can all be strengthened and improved through our interactions with the environment.

2.. Your brain power is based on your genes and there is nothing one can do about it

3.. Brain development ceases with childhood and adolescence

4.. You can’t make changes in your brain once you have reached adulthood

5.. It’s very difficult to learn new skills after a particular age

6.. It’s difficult to learn a new language after a particular age

It is clearly established now that we can improve mental fitness which translates into improved ability to reason, remember, learn, plan and adapt by certain attitudes, lifestyle choices, and exercises. Having improved capabilities in the above will lead you to make better decisions, solve problems and deal better with stress and change. It will also allow you to be more open to new ideas and alternate perspectives. It can also allow you to adapt your behaviors and response patterns to achieve all your dream goals.

Let’s try and list out some of the steps which are believed to improve and strengthen mental health which can be adapted to our daily lives

1.. Management by walking around.

I have seen this been practiced by a lot of senior executives from my first job and what I used to feel at that time was that these brilliant senior executives many of them in their 50s and 60s in those days were doing it to check on how we were doing and to identify gaps in the way we did things ..While that might have been one of the reasons because at times they did observe things like lot of dust etc. later on I have come to realize it was a way for these senior people to interact with people at various levels and get an understanding and feeling on what is actually happening rather than actually finding out what wrong were we doing..

Very often at senior levels people tend to tell you only what you want to hear and hence you tend to lose sight of the real problems which can only be understood by meeting with you teams and customers ...But how does all this help in the development of the brain…

The walkaround is named after an Australian rite of passage in which adolescents undertake a prolonged and challenging physical journey sometimes for several months in search of psychological and spiritual self-definition and maturity. Technically these kinds of journeys enable the brain to establish and integrate the neural networks in the prefrontal cortex and helps the brain to start functioning in a more mature and organized manner.

Management by walking around in a similar way helps to keep our minds open to various interactions with the various crucial stake holders in the chain ...the employees, partners and customers. There is the widely quoted example by former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy who took over Xerox at the turn of the century when Xerox was about to go bankrupt and successfully managed to turn around the company. Among the many other things that she had later cited that helped her in this journey was the practice of walking around ...that is staying in touch with her employees and consumers right from the first day ...During these interactions she was able to build in the same purpose among all the employees in the company of how each one could contribute to the turning around of the company. In fact, she even says that if you were to ask a lot of employees who were there in xerox during this period everyone would come out with what they had personally done for the turnaround of the company. Since she started doing this from the initial period of her taking over as CEO her brain also created those new neutral networks which help her to keep her mind open to various possibilities that she would come across during these interactions. Such an open mind might not have developed if she had just stayed within her office and based her decisions purely on charts and analytics.

So, while management by walking around and interacting with all concerned not only helps us improve our own mental health it also plays an effective part in ensuring your thoughts can be communicated to more people directly, but you can also understand their opinions and concerns and get a more effective buy in for your business goals.

While there are many more such day-to-day actions that we could do to improvement of our mental health, which we will cover subsequently can we look at implementing the walk around in our areas of work for the next 21 to 66 days to build this as a part of our daily routine and to make it into our habits.

Keep watching this space for the next set of daily actions that we can implement in our day-to-day work lives which will not only improve our mental health and alertness but also significantly help improve our business goals...