Healthy Brain, Happy Life (21 page)

It sounds like an easy decision to make, but it wasn’t. I feared that if I ended it with Art, I would never find anyone else for the rest of my life. But the decision was basically made for me. We were just not getting along, and there was no choice but to break it off with him.

While the development of my new exercise class was an exhilarating part of the transformation I was going through, my breakup with Art was an equally important, and very painful, part of the same process. At the heart of this was me becoming more self-aware. That may sound obvious. But keep in mind how focused on science and my work I had been for the previous twenty years. Did I love my career? Did I love the work I did in my lab? The research? The reading? Yes. But I was realizing that if I wanted a more full, balanced life, I had to literally rebalance my own brain–body connection, with more focus on the body part of the equation. Then I began to seek this same kind of balance in my relationships; I wanted more from them. This became a process of becoming more aware of what I really wanted in life. I had spent years focused on the goal of getting tenure and working hard, loving the science that I did but putting anything that got in the way of my job on the back burner. I focused so much on my work goal that I didn’t pay nearly enough attention to the present moment. I still had a way to go, but this whole process was one of starting to pay more attention to my emotions and desires, my likes and dislikes, and being more open to what was going on at that moment instead of focusing so much on trying to control the future.

And that’s part of what my regular exercise provided: a constant focus on the present moment. You really can’t be thinking about the future when you’re in the middle of a serious workout session, especially an intentional workout like I was giving myself. For those sixty minutes of intenSati class, I felt completely connected to myself: my thoughts, emotions, and physical movement. I was all one—body and brain. I was supremely aware of how I felt, how my feelings changed during class, and all my emotions that came during and after the workout, from annoyance to joy to peace to relief to exuberance. I experienced a moving meditation in which I was able to be in the present moment, allowing myself to experience what my brain and body were telling me.

This sensory, intensely emotional, physically charged experience became the catalyst to figure out what I
really
wanted to do with my life, with no expectations and no preconceived notions. What can bring me joy? What do I no longer need if it doesn’t bring me satisfaction or joy?

TAKE-AWAYS: EXERCISE AND NEUROGENESIS

•  Exercise is responsible for the majority of the positive brain changes seen with environmental enrichment, including increases in the size of the cortex, enhanced levels of growth factors like BDNF and neurotransmitters like acetylcholine, and enhanced growth of blood vessels in the brain (angiogenesis).

•  Both exercise and enriched environments enhance neurogenesis, or the birth of new brain cells, in the hippocampus.

•  The increased levels of BDNF stimulated by exercise help the growth and development of these new brain cells.

•  Exercise also enhances the volume and size of the hippocampus, increases the number of dendritic spines on hippocampal neurons, and enhances the physiological properties of hippocampal neurons as measured by LTP.

•  In humans, most studies of the effects of exercise have been done in the elderly.

•  In studies in the elderly, higher levels of exercise are correlated with lower incidence of dementia later in life. This is an example of an observational study.

•  In elderly people, randomized controlled studies (interventional studies) have shown that increased exercise can improve attention and increase the size of the hippocampus.

BRAIN HACKS: HOW DO I INCREASE MY EXERCISE? PART I

If you don’t have hours in the day to exercise, here are some ideas that I use in my own life to get that regular exercise practice going in just four minutes:

•  Walk up the stairs to your favorite upbeat song (like “Happy” by Pharrell Williams) until the song is over, then take the elevator the rest of the way up.

•  Challenge a friend or coworker to do a combination of desk push-ups and squats at work for four minutes a day (or multiple times a day for a whole week). Then challenge someone else.

•  While you are brushing your teeth for four minutes, do a rotation of deep knee squats and side bends (face toward the mirror and slowly lean your body to the right and then to the left, stretching out the ribs on the side opposite to the direction that you are leaning). To make the side bends more difficult, wrap a big towel on your head as if you were drying your hair; it makes your side abs work even harder.

•  Keep it fun by playing a four-minute game of tag with your kids, or borrow someone else’s kids to play it with.

•  Set a timer for four minutes and clean up as much of your home or office as you can as fast as you can. Try cleaning the bathtub or doing some speed vacuuming or mopping; that can really work up a sweat and it will last only four minutes!

•  Be a kid again by using a Hula-Hoop for four minutes. It’s an amazing aerobic workout for your abs and core.

SPANDEX IN THE CLASSROOM:
Exercise Can Make You Smarter

A
t 9:25
A
.
M
. on September 7, 2009, I was clad head to toe in my best spandex, standing in front of a room of undergraduate students at NYU, ready to lead my very first “Can Exercise Change Your Brain?” class. As we stood about in the same space where I had lectured countless times before, the students were decked out in a varied assortment of what could pass as workout clothes—from athletic to sassy to Goth to rumpled, messy, and pajamalike. Clothing was not the only thing different that morning: I felt nervous. And I had not been nervous before teaching a class in at least ten years. I had a lot on the line.

I had been training to be a kick-ass intenSati instructor for the prior six months, and had been planning this class for over a year. This day was the culmination of my vision to bring together two vastly different worlds: exercise and neuroscience. And I was going to do it in a way that had never been done before. Was I just wasting my time? I wondered if my colleagues thought I was more than a little off my rocker to put so much effort into this crazy exercise class when I didn’t even study exercise in my lab (or at least I hadn’t up until then). At that point even I considered it my pet science hobby. It was definitely risky to spend so much time and effort on this one class. I had some doubts even as I was developing the class syllabus. In general my department head had been open and tolerant, allowing my colleagues and me the room to develop a wide range of different courses, but no one had designed a course like the one I was about to launch.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who was nervous. While all the students knew that they were going to exercise in this class, I could tell they did not quite know how to react when confronted with their spandex-clad professor. When I looked out at the room, I saw a mixture of expressions: fear, amusement, querulousness, studied boredom, and hints of nervousness. Well, I would never know what was going to happen unless I actually started, so I calmly stepped out in front of the room and said, “Welcome to the very first ‘Can Exercise Change Your Brain?’ class! I hope you guys are up for something a little bit different because NYU has never offered a class quite like this before. This course was inspired when I decided I wanted to get in shape, and I started going to the gym. I became a regular gym goer and noticed how much exercising really helped my attention, my energy, and my concentration at work. With that, the idea for this class was born. I was fascinated with the neuroscience underlying this change, so I designed this course in which we will be combining physical exercise class with lectures on the effects of exercise on the brain. And here we are.”

I told them that we were not going to be just passively learning about the neuroscience research that has examined the effects of exercise on brain function; instead we were going to be actively participating in the research process. In fact, they were going to be tested on their performance at the beginning and then again at the end of the class, up against a control group, to see if exercise could
really
change their brains. We would also be considering lots of different questions, such as how exercise changes your brain, how much exercise is needed to make a change, how long does the duration of exercise need to be (days vs. weeks vs. months), and what kind of exercise might elicit the best response.

Then I asked, “Okay, are you ready to work out?”

A quiet murmur of consent followed. Not the level of enthusiasm that I was looking for that morning.

So I repeated myself, dramatically cupping my hand to my ear as I asked, “
Are you ready to work out?!
”

They came back with a strong yes. And with that, we started exercising.

SWEATING IN THE CLASSROOM

I started the class by explaining how the exercise part was going to work and that we would be pairing movements from kickboxing and dance and yoga and martial arts with positive spoken affirmations like “I am strong now!” and “I believe I will succeed!” There were a few incredulous looks and giggles that spread over the crowd with this explanation, but once the giggles died down, I turned on the music. I needed to start.

With music blaring from the surround-sound speakers in our classroom, I introduced the first move, one called Commitment. I showed them how to stretch their right and left arms up in the air (hands wide open and fingers spread) in an alternating fashion to the beat of the music.

Once they got that, I added the affirmation: “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

That was easy. The next move was called Strong, and was accompanied by alternating right and left punches with legs apart and bent at the knee in a light squat.

The students picked up the affirmation “I am strong now!” quickly, and the rest of that day the room rang out with exclamations of: