Keeping Up With Your Mental Fitness

Mental fitness is just as important as physical fitness, especially as we age. But there are certain things that we can do to help keep us more alert in our Golden Years. 

The brain is like a muscle – if you don’t give it a regular workout, it loses tone.

Here are some tips to help you improve your mental fitness:

1. Exercise for 30 minutes a day 4-5 times a week. Physical exercise delivers oxygen to the brain. This can help to improve your memory, reasoning abilities and reaction times.
2. Read often and read widely. Keeping an active interest in the world around you will help to exercise your brain and improve your mental fitness.
3. Boost your levels of vitamin B. Eat plenty of wholegrain cereals, leafy greens, and dairy foods. Vitamin B is essential to brain health.
4. Challenge your intellect and memory. Stretch yourself mentally by learning a new language, doing the cryptic crossword or playing chess. This is important for brain health and good for your social life.
5. Take time to relax. Excess stress hormones like cortisol can be harmful to the brain. Schedule regular periods of relaxation into your week.
6. Take up a new hobby. Learning something new gives the ‘grey matter’ a workout and builds neural pathways in the brain.
7. Actively manage your health. Conditions such as diabetes or heart disease can affect mental performance if not diagnosed and treated. Have regular check-ups with your doctor to prevent future problems.
8. Engage in stimulating conversations. Talk to friends and family about a wide range of topics. This gives your brain an opportunity to explore, examine and enquire.
9. Take up a manual activity or craft. Hobbies such as woodwork and sewing or activities like skipping require you to move both sides of the body at the same time, in precise movements. This can help to improve your spatial awareness and increase your reaction time.
10. Exercise your brain with others. Watch, question and answer game shows and enjoy the competitive spirit. Involve the family in regular games to test their general knowledge.

What Happens When We Sleep?

          According To The Sleep Foundation, Yes There Is Such A Place.

NREM (75% of night): As we begin to fall asleep, we enter NREM sleep, which is composed of stages 1-4

N1 (formerly “stage 1”)

• Between being awake and falling asleep
• Light sleep

N2 (formerly “stage 2”)

• Onset of sleep
• Becoming disengaged from surroundings
• Breathing and heart rate are regular
• Body temperature drops (so sleeping in a cool room is helpful)

N3 (formerly “stages 3 and 4”)

• Deepest and most restorative sleep
• Blood pressure drops
• Breathing becomes slower
• Muscles are relaxed
• Blood supply to muscles increases
• Tissue growth and repair occurs
• Energy is restored
• Hormones are released, such as Growth hormone, essential for growth and development, including muscle development

REM (25% of night): First occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep and recurs about every 90 minutes, getting longer later in the night

• Provides energy to the brain and body
• Supports daytime performance
• The brain is active and dreams occur
• Eyes dart back and forth
• The body becomes immobile and relaxed, as muscles are turned off

In addition, levels of the hormone cortisol dip at bedtime and increase over the night to promote alertness in the morning.

Sleep helps us thrive by contributing to a healthy immune system, and can also balance our appetites by helping to regulate levels of the hormones ghrelin and leptin, which play a role in our feelings of hunger and fullness. So when we’re sleep-deprived, we may feel the need to eat more, which can lead to weight gain.

One-third of our lives that we spend sleeping, far from being “unproductive,” plays a direct role in how full, energetic and successful the other two-thirds of our lives can be.