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Bad Habits That Can Affect Your Brain

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Zenith
Zenith
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PostZenith Sun 16 Mar 2014, 8:50 pm

Bad Habits That Can Affect Your Brain
Constant testing has been shown to lower IQ by up to 10 points.

Did you know that your daily habits may actually be hurting your brain? Eliminating these three behaviors from your daily routine can help your brain and improve your life.
Stop overdoing it with internet, email, social Networking, and Testing.

Cell phones, text messages, email, chat rooms, and social networking are the latest must-have communication tools. What’s ironic is that these very communication devise may actually be causing communication breakdown as well as host of brain-related problems.

According to a recent study that examined eleven hundred people in a work environment, the distractions of constant text messages and emails have a worse effect on IQ and concentration than smoking marijuana. Than average IQ loss was measured at 10 points, more than double the 4-point mean decrease found in studies of marijuana smokers.

The study subjects showed an increased inability to focus and heightened drowsiness due to the constant interruptions of incoming messages. Emails in a particular were found to have an additive, drug-like quality.

Checking your messages systems is an important way to communicate, but it is better to set aside specific times each day to work on them and leave them alone the rest of the time.

Cute the Aspartame and MSG
I’ve had my share of diet sodas in my life, but when I read about the negative effects of aspartame, I became concerned. At the age of thirty-five, I started to develop arthritis in my hands and knees. When in stopped drinking the diet sodas containing aspartame, my joints no longer hurt.

Many of my patients have also reported feeling better after eliminating artificial sweeteners from their diet. Their headaches went away, they could think more clearly, their joint pain improved, and their memory improved. Some of them even lost weight.

Mono sodium glutamate (MSG) is another problem for many. Personally, I get a headache when I eat something containing MSG. some people have much more dangerous reactions to it. One of my patients, who had ADHD as well as anxiety and depressive symptoms, told me he became violent whenever he ate foods with MSG.

As part of his evaluation, we scanned him twice-once without MSG and once after he ate a Chinese meal laced with MSG. the MSG scan showed a significant deficit in the temporal lobe, which is often associated with violence or rage.

I told him he had a chance: stay away from MSG or take medication to protect his temporal lobes. To my surprise, he decided to take the medication. When asked why, he said that if he lost his temper one more time his wife was going to leave him and you never know what his MSG in it. When possible, hold the MSG.

Learn to Cope With Chronic Stress
Chronic or severe stress, stemming from family conflict, financial hardships, health problems, or environmental challenges can affect all age groups. When stress becomes unremitting, it hurts the brain.

In a series of studies reported in the journal psychoneuroendocrinology, researchers looked at the effects of long-term exposure to stress hormones, especially cortisol, on the brain function of older adults, young adults, and children.

The researchers found that older adults with continuously high levels of cortisol performed worse on memory tests than older adults with moderate or low cortisol levels. They also had, an average, a 14 percent smaller hippocampus, the area of the temporal lobes involved with memory.
They drain energy and zap brain performance. Here’s how to avoid them.

Are you struggling to get through your workouts? Zoning out during games and matches? You might have some bad brain habits that are holding you back.

Moment-by-moment functioning of your brain controls the way you think, feel, act, and even the way you exercise. If your brain is having a bad brain, you can bet your body won’t be up to stuff, either. Here are five bad brain habits that may be hurting you.

Chugging caffeine
Sure, caffeine gives you a momentary jolt of energy, but drinking too much caffeinated coffees, sodas or energy drinks restricts blood flow to the brain. When blood flow is reduced, activity in your brain goes down and that can lead to an inability to concentrate, decrease motivation, slowed thinking and problems with coordination.

Using caffeine to rev up your engine also increases the release of stress hormones and ramps up your anxiety levels. And when you’ve about to take that last-second buzzer beater, you want to be calm and confident, not stressed out and anxious.

Being a Night Owl
It’s no surprise that lack of sleep hinders athletic performance. Research shows us that sleep deprivation impairs motor function, which makes you less coordinated and more likely to strike out at bat or to shank your drive on the golf course.

The reduced cognitive functioning associated with lack of sleep means that you may not make the best on-filed decisions or remember news plays. Plus, you tend to feel tired faster because sleep deprivation negatively affects glucose metabolism.

On the other hand, getting a good night’s sleep can give your game a boost. A Stanford university study found that after getting extra shut-eye for a two-week period, basketball players shaved an average of one second off their sprint time, improved their free-throw shooting by about 10%, and upped their three-point shooting percentage by more than 10%.

Too Many Beer Runs
Alcohol lowers overall blood flow and activity in the brain, which over time diminishes memory and judgment. A study involving rhesus monkeys revealed that excessive alcohol consumption lowers the number of new brain cells that are formed in the hippo campus, one of the brain’s main memory centers. In the study, monkeys that consumed alcohol experienced a 58% decline in the number of new brain cells formed and a 63% reduction in the survival rate of new brain cells.

A 2008 study found that people who drink every day have smaller brains. When it comes to the brain, size matters! If you aren't making the smallest decisions when you exercise or play sports, cut back on the cocktails.

Skimping on Nutrition
Did you know that your brain is 80% water? Anything that robs your brain of hydration makes it harder to drink and react quickly and makes you more irritable. Even slight dehydration can cause problems.

I once did a SPECT brain scan of a famous bodybuilder. His scan looked like he was a drug addict, but he vehemently denied it. Then I learned that he significantly dehydrates himself before photo shoots to look learner for the camera, and he was doing a shoot the day after we did his scan. When he was adequately hydrated the following week, his brain looked much better.

Living with chronic stress
Chronic stress affects several areas of the brain that are important for peak performance. These include the hippocampus (involved with memory), amygdale (involved with emotional stability), and prefrontal cortex, or PFC, (involved with attention, planning and follow-though).
A faulty hippocampus means you might not remember that the guy at bat likes to hit down the right filed line. So you forget to cover the line when you’ve playing right filed. A subpar amygdale means you might go ballistic when a call doesn’t go your way, and you get ejected from the game. When your PFC is drained, you tend to loss focus and zone out, so you might only get through half of your weight routine.

Chronic stress also weakens your body’s immune system, making you more likely to get colds, flu bugs and other infections during emotionally difficult times. Get your stress under control with relaxation techniques like deep-breaking and medication to pump up your brainpower and your athletic performance.

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