A neuroscientist, Dr Tara Swart, explains the 5 most effective methods to keep your brain healthy.
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Nutrition
- The top 5 brain-friendly foods are salmon, avocado, eggs, nuts and seeds, coconut oil and olive oil
- Although your brain only weighs 2-3 kilos, so its a tiny percentage of your body weight, it sucks up 20-30% of the breakdown products of a healthy balanced diet. So glucose is a resources for the brain.
2. Sleep
- It takes 7-8 hours for our brain to clean itself overnight. That’s why sleep is so important to the brain.
- If you have any sleep disturbance over night, you can be operating with an IQ loss of 5-8 points the next day.
3. Hydration
- The general advice is to drink half a litre of water for every 15kg of your body weight per day.
- For the average male leader, this would be approximately 3 litres of water per day.
4. Oxygen
- Just doing 10 deep breaths before a high stakes meeting can really send some extra resources to your brain.
- Ideally you would move around all day, doing an average of 10,000 steps.
5. Meditation
- The scientific evidence shows that 12 minutes of mediation per day reduces your stress hormone levels.
- Allowing more of a pause button between emotional instinctive reactions and how you choose to behave and think in the workplace