bonus 1 exercise sleep

8/12/2019 Bonus 1 Exercise Sleep

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www.turbochargeyourmemory.com

The Turbo-Charge

Your Memory

Special report onExercise and

Sleep & their

effect on memory

Exercise

Although the Turbo-Charge Your Memory web site and book, and

live training, revolve around memory skills, showing you how to

use your brain in the most effective way to retain information,

there are other things that can powerfully affect your memory and

your brain function, notably exercise, and that is what this guide

is all about.

For most of our evolution as a species, from the time that the

forests receded and we were forced to eke out an existence on

the savannah, our brains have been working and evolving on top

of a body that moved: we were hunter-gatherers, we were

endurance hunters, and it has been estimated that we covered up

to 12 miles each day. So we were fit, we had to be to survive, and

our brains evolved on a fit body.


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Its not surprising to discover, then, that our brains work most

effectively when we are using our bodies in the way that we

evolved to use them. A sedentary, exercise-free, couch potato

lifestyle is not what we are designed for and not what our brain

needs to work in the most powerful way.

In his excellent book, Brain Rules, Dr John Medina says,

we grew up in top physical shape, or we didnt grow up at

all the human brain became the most powerful in the world

under conditions where motion was a constant presence.

Research

One way of researching the effects of exercise on brain power is

to look at groups of elderly people and compare their health with

the lifestyle that they have had in terms of exercise. When this

has been done it has been found that a sedentary lifestyle is not

good for you: its associated with a shorter lifespan and

deteriorating health (for example, heart disease and strokes).

A lifestyle that contains regular exercise has a powerful effect on

your brain, being associated with enhancements in a whole range

of important brain functions: everything from long-term memory,

reasoning, attention, problem-solving, to fluid intelligence.

If you take a group of sedentary people and put them on an

aerobic exercise programme, their mental abilities improve within


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just a few months, whether you are looking at adults or children

(where jogging for 30 minutes 2-3 times a week was found to

lead to a significant improvement in their cognitive performance).

Stop the exercising and brain performance drifts back to pre-

exercise levels.

How much exercise

So, how much exercise do you actually need to do to make a

difference? Because most people wont want to don leotards and

spandex and huff and puff in a gym! Fortunately, it looks like you

dont need to do a huge amount of exercise in the scheme of

things to produce a noticeable positive difference in your brain

function, and exercise can be carried out in many ways.

Even just walking a few times a week will make a difference.

In the laboratory, the ideal seems to be 30 minutes of aerobic

exercise, 2-3 times a week, and if you add some strength

training, too, your brain functions improve even more.

And not only will some regular aerobic exercise like this improve

your mental ability in the short-term, it also helps your brain to

work properly for you in the long-term: regular physical activity

will cut your risk of general dementia in half, and your risk of

having Alzheimers reduces by an amazing 60%.


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Walk for 20 minutes a day and you reduce your risk of having a

stroke by 57%!

And when you look at younger people, you find that if children

exercise then they can concentrate better, and for longer. To

quote Dr Antronette Yancey who has studies the effect of exercise

on children,

Kids are less likely to be disruptive in terms of their

classroom behaviour when theyre active. Kids feel better

about themselves, have higher self-esteem, less depression,

less anxiety. All of those things can impair academic

performance and attentiveness.

If you would like to read in more detail about the transformative

effect of exercise on young minds, mental health and academic

performance I recommend that you take a look at Spark! How

exercise will improve the performance of your brainby EricHagerman & Dr John Ratey

In fact, regular exercise does so much good for your body in so

many ways, its ridiculous! To quote John Medina again,

Exercise makes your muscles and bones stronger and

improves your strength and balance. It helps regulate your

appetite, changes your blood lipid profile, reduces your risk

for more than a dozen types of cancer, improves the immune

system and buffers against the toxic effects of stress. By

enriching your cardiovascular system, exercise decreases

your risk for heart disease, stroke and diabetes. When


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combined with the intellectual benefits we have in our

hands as close to a magic bullet for improving human health

as exists in modern medicine.

So, to summarise, we did not evolve so sit about all day and our

brains wont work to their full potential if we do. The more you

move your body regularly, the more you give it a spring clean and

enhance a whole range of functions that will help you to learn

effectively, to solve problems, to concentrate, and to have a

properly-functioning brain long-term.

Note for Geeks

For those interested in the mechanism behind these

improvements in brain function: basically, exercise encourages

your body to create new blood vessels which penetrate deeper

and deeper into body tissues, including the brain. This means

more oxygen and more glucose supplied to brain cells and better

removal of waste products. This is a good thing for your brain!

Not only that but exercise stimulates the release of a substance

called BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) which works a bit

like fertiliser for your brain cells: it helps to keep your brain cells

young and healthy and encourages your brain to create new brain

cells. Healthy cells connect to each other more, and new cells

mean new and more connections.


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Sleep

If you want to remember well, you need to get some decent

amounts of sleep because lack of sleep just cripples your

thinking.

I am going to have to quote Dr John Medina again, because he

has a wonderful way with words. In his book Brain Rules, which I

recommend you purchase, he says this:

Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can

measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive

function, immediate memory, working memory, mood,

quantitative skills, logical reasoning ability [and] general

maths knowledge.

For example, take an A grade student (in the top 10% of their

class) and give them less than 7 hours sleep on weekdays (with a

bit more on weekends) and their performance will slip so far that

they compare with the bottom 10% of non-sleep-deprived

students! And the sleep deficit is cumulative, so that if you dont

catch up on that lost sleep, youll be affected the following week

too.

Restrict your sleep to six hours or less for five nights and your

cognitive performance is equivalent to that of a person who

hasnt slept for 48 hours. This is serious stuff, even ignoring the

other shocking effects on your body systems, stress levels and

ageing.


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Sleep is intimately tied up with learning because we seem to do

some sort of offline processing when were slumbering, going

over information, revisiting it repeatedly, again and again, and if

that process is interrupted then we dont remember so well.

So if you want to get the best out of your brain and maximise

your learning potential, you need to pay attention to your sleep,

and certainly not pull late-nighters on the run up to your exams.

and if you follow the Turbo Charge Your Memory system thenyou wont need to.

What to do next:

Order the Turbo-Charge Your Memory Book or eBook Book yourself on one of our TCYM Bootcamps Enrol on the TCYM

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