How mental and physical exercise improve brain health
Brain health and happiness often takes a backseat to the physical attributes we can see. In this video, HealthMaker Alvaro Fernandez talks about why the brain is so important and how it can help us live more fully.
Transcript
You have a brain. It's your best friend. It's your best friend right now.
How I'm preparing today for my keynote tomorrow? How can I, when I go to the reception this afternoon,
regulate my stress and talk to five people at the same time? So the brain is a resource. To maximize the benefit of that culture,
if we truly invest in our brains, is that we're going to delay disease. But we don't want people to think avoiding disease is the main outcome of the reason we
have a brain to start with. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Is the brain working as a system in the way it is supposed to be? So do we have enough attention, enough working memory,
enough capacity to regulate emotions and stress? So does that organ serve its function for why we have it?
And if we define it that way, it opens a completely new mindset because even what are the outcomes of health,
what are the measurements of health, what are the interventions that can enhance that function
decades before it becomes any kind of even preclinical disorder. Brain fitness is a whole new field,
as physical fitness was 50 years ago. Now, we have health clubs everywhere. We have an awareness of how to maintain the body.
We have personal trainers. We think that something very similar is going to happen with the brain. These are two types of exercise that are good for the brain.
One is the impact of aerobic exercise. People don't know that every single day we will have a few thousand new neurons that
weren't there yesterday. And not only that, it seems like aerobic exercise can even increase that rate of neurogenesis.
So it's a free resource. The more we exercise ourselves, the more neurons we will have. And then mental exercise can help influence
where those new neurons migrate in the brain and how long they survive because they have to connect with other circuits
in order to be functional and to survive. So both physical and mental exercise are very important. And what I think the media has not explained very well
is that it's not one or the other. You need both because the mechanisms are truly complementary.
It's the most important resource we have. We spend our lives thinking about everything else, except our brains, because we don't see it.
And that's the tragedy of the poor brain, which is alone up there. And we pay attention to everything else. Every morning, we see ourselves in the mirror.
I can ask, where did my abdominals go? And that maybe forces me to go to a health club, to be more active. I can realize biceps.
I can realize many things about my body. But the brain, often we just ignore it until it is too late.
So we don't realize it's our best ally, our best resource to help us cope with anything we face in life,
either our school when we are younger, our workplace, our family, delay health problems.
So if we understand how it works, then we can better manage it.
brain health nervous system
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