Healthiest You

Selective.

Creating an increased awareness about a particular behavior can make all the difference when it comes to changing that behavior.

Your brain only pays attention to a small portion of the information it's receiving at any one time. It does this through the reticular activating system (RAS), a network of nerve cells that controls consciousness and selective attention to information. The RAS is inactive, for example, when a person is sleeping or under general anesthesia. The cortex still activates in response to incoming information but the brain neither processes the information nor remembers it. If the RAS is turned on, it will be conscious of the incoming information.

A selective brain is efficient. It saves energy. If your brain processed everything it saw, heard, smelled, tasted or felt it would quickly be overwhelmed with inconsequential information. Selective attention also allows you to multitask, to mentally lose yourself in thought without having to expend mental energy on the mundane tasks you do every day. How often have you taken a shower and brushed your teeth in the morning without really thinking about it? Or, how often have you driven to work while lost in thought?

Making a major behavior change often requires that your brain pay attention to behaviors it has become used to ignoring. Change often starts by simply paying close attention to whatever it is you want to change. It may help you to write down what you eat every day, record how many cigarettes you smoke or list the times you felt anxious. Simply having a heightened consciousness can be pivotal in making a change in your behavior. At first, it can be frustrating because what you are doing differently is so new you keep forgetting to do it. But with practice, as I've said you will start to remember it. Try to build a reminder into your daily routine. After a a while, you will not need to make such a conscious effort; the change you are trying to make will become second nature.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Track whatever behavior you are trying to modify so that you consciously pay more attention to this behavior.
• Build in set reminders during the day to remind yourself to track your behavior so you get in the habit of doing it. You can set a watch alarm or set up a daily automatic text message or email reminder. Perhaps you agree with a friend to call each other every day to check in.
• Keep your goals constantly in front of you. For example, have your goals appear as your screen saver, or keep them on a note in your car so that you see these goals every time you drive.

Resistant.

Although your brain can change, it is generally set up to resist change, especially sudden change. People who are ultimately successful in initiating and maintaining major behavioral changes usually make the changes gradually, one step at a time.

Although your brain can change, it usually won't do so without putting up a bit of a fight. That's because it is set up to resist change, especially sudden change. Your brain operates under the same principle as your body: homeostasis. Just as your body's physiology works to keep parameters like calcium, blood sugar and weight stable, so your brain works hard to continue whatever behavior has become the norm. It seems to say "Okay, I got you here with this behavior and you're still alive, so just keep on doing what you've been doing, and everything will be fine."

Too rapid a change is interpreted as a stressful event by most brains. Your brain will automatically resist a sudden change in your behavior or routine, and just knowing this can be a big help when you are trying to switch from a not-so-healthy behavior to a healthy one. Studies using functional MRI scans of the brain have evaluated patients who were asked to make a change. If a patient is asked to make a big change, the scan shows activation of the amygdala, the seat of the stress response. But if the subject is asked to make a little change, the amygdala remains quiet. People who are ultimately successful in initiating and maintaining major behavioral change usually do it through gradual, step-by-step changes. Often people want instant gratification, but for most of us this just isn't realistic. We need to accept the fact that most people's brains are not set up well to handle rapid change. For the majority of us, slow and steady is actually the quickest road to long lasting results.

If you feel your motivation beginning to slip, it is probably because your brain is saying "Oh no you don't! I sense a change here, and I'm not going to let that happen." This can leave you feeling frustrated and confused. How, you ask yourself, can you so desperately want to make a change one day, but then come up with 1,000 reasons not to the next? When this happens, remind yourself that this is simply an example of your brain working against you—doing what it thinks it has to do to protect you. You can outsmart it, though. Your brain will start to feel more comfortable with your new actions once you have repeated the new behavior many times, so start repeating the new action over and over again.

It is not always easy to change the way you behave, but the good news is that you can do it. If you practice a new behavior over and over for a long enough period of time, your brain will eventually decide that this new behavior is the one that needs to be protected and continued. The key words here are "over and over." You need to repeat the new behavior for long enough to cement it permanently into your brain and therefore into your life.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Change slowly, advancing in a gradual step-wise progression. This is generally less stressful on the brain.
• Try changing within some form of structure so you do not have to make decisions every step of the way. This requires less work for your brain.
• People often fear unfamiliar or unknown situations, so try to have as much clarity and transparency as possible in whatever you are working toward. When people know the rules and know what is expected of them, it is generally felt to be less stressful.

Social.

The process of behavior change does not need to be a lone venture. We are all on the journey, working to stay healthy in a world that has become more and more challenging. Take advantage of your social brain. You can learn a lot from other people, and they can learn a lot from you.

Although we learn from gathering information and from personal experience, we also learn from other people's experiences. Simply hearing a story about something that has happened to another person can set off brain activity that actually mirrors what we would feel if we were having that experience ourselves. The neurons that fire in this process are called "mirror neurons," and they are responsible for our feelings of empathy.

Our ability to learn from each other can give us a powerful edge in the behavior change process. Mirror neurons help us share in other people's experiences and are believed to have played a pivotal role in "the great leap forward" humans accomplished 50,000 years ago, when we began to develop the tools, language and social skills which enabled the formation of large, complex societies.

Your brain reacts to social interactions. Healthy social relationships have a positive effect on both your mental and physical health. Oxytocin is a feel-good chemical that is released in social situations, promoting social bonding. Oxytocin is released in very high amounts in mothers after giving birth, promoting the development of tight bonding between mom and baby. In men, the chemical equivalent is vasopressin. Pleasant social interactions can also stimulate the release of dopamine and serotonin, other powerful, feel-good chemicals.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Listen to others who share similar goals, and learn from their experiences; share your stories with them as well. We can all learn from each other.
• Cooperate and collaborate with each other. We are intrinsically wired as humans to be social and collaborative.
• Surround yourself with a positive, affirming social circle, as this can play a key role in keeping you strong and resilient when times get tough.

Rational.

Human beings are highly intellectual creatures. Your brain is well-designed for problem solving. Keep this in mind, and use it to your advantage when you run into challenges with healthy living.

The frontal cortex in your brain is the highly developed area that allows for problem solving. This is where sophisticated levels of thought processing occur and where information is processed so that you can understand it. Knowing why you do what you do, and having an appreciation for the potential consequences of your actions can help shape your behavior.

The orbitofrontal cortex is a section of the frontal cortex, which sits at eye level behind your forehead. It is the center for impulse control. It promotes delayed gratification and helps you behave within the social mores of society. It can help you "do the more difficult thing" when other parts of your brain are calling for you to do something else. It allows you to check and balance yourself so that you don't act impulsively with every temptation that comes your way.

The frontal cortex is specifically developed for problem solving. It is often called the CEO, or the Chief Executive Officer, of the brain. In problem solving, especially as it relates to healthy behavior, there is almost never only one answer for how to get from A to B. Ultimately, it is not so much about how much willpower you can muster when you face challenges; it is more about how well you can strategize around these challenges. You need to learn how to confront a challenge in a way that will best work for you as an individual.

Because the "intellectual" and "emotional" centers are so tightly connected, you cannot rely purely on willpower (governed by the intellectual part of your brain) when you want to make a change. None of us are exclusively creatures of rational thought. Our emotions have a lot to do with our actions. The great news in all of this is that we are capable of altering both cognitive and emotional input. We can even use the connections between the intellectual and emotional brains to our advantage, by learning to enhance positive emotions, while diminishing the negative ones. By understanding both how to use your emotional brain to influence your rational brain and how to use your rational brain to influence your emotional brain, you can have a big impact on changing your behavior.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Identify challenges you anticipate will arise as you work toward your goal. For each challenge, devise a strategy to let you work around it. Because your rational brain is so tightly connected to your emotional brain, accomplishing your goals is more about problem-solving than about brute-force willpower.
• Spend time understanding why you behave the way you do in certain situations. For example, if you feel you are reacting emotionally in ways you wish to change, practice replacing old thoughts and behavior with new ones. Over time, your frontal cortex will develop new alternate paths of thought that become reflexive.
• Remember to repeat new behaviors and thought over and over. Repetition is necessary for creating new physical circuits in the brain.

Responsive.

The environment has a powerful impact on your behavior. Genes are turned on or off based to a large degree on what's right around you. Set up your world so that it encourages healthy living.

Environment is a critical piece of the puzzle when you look at behavior, because your brain reacts profoundly to its surrounding environment. One of the main reasons you are not simply predestined for a particular behavior by your genes is because your environment can turn those genes on or off; when you learn how to optimize your environment, you learn how to make behavioral change easier and more successful. Certainly, we are all a little different in terms of how our genes respond to various environments, but what is perfectly clear is that environment matters.

How big a role do genes have in learning? Is your ability to learn purely determined by your genes? Although genetic predisposition certainly counts when it comes to how easily one can learn new information, genes do not inevitably predetermine learning capacity.

The changing landscape around us today is one of the major forces behind the obesity epidemic. Think about the environment in which we humans evolved over the past millions of years. The world we live in now is a very different place. In modern times, food is everywhere, it is often processed and stripped of nutrients and now, with all the current technology in day-to-day living, we barely need to move at all to get anything done. If you don't set up your world to cue your brain toward healthy behavior, you'll be working at a distinct disadvantage. Clear the junk food out of your house, remove all ashtrays from sight, place your workout clothes right where you will see them every morning—it all makes a difference. Don't underestimate the power of your immediate environment on your behavior. Set up the world around you, as much as you can, so that it triggers your brain toward healthy behaviors.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Your brain responds chemically to its surrounding environment, affecting which genes are turned on and off. Optimize your physical world so that it promotes the behavior you want. Keep healthy food in and junk food out of the house. Keep workout clothes in plain view so that you are encouraged to exercise.
• Your brain responds to your social environment. Surround yourself with friends who are modeling the behavior you would like; minimize interactions with those who have behaviors you are trying to avoid.
• In order to stay healthy in today’s world you will always need to remain vigilant, because our current society does not always promote healthy living. In order to live healthy, you will probably need to live a little differently from those around you.

Emotional.

The rational and emotional centers of your brain are tightly interconnected. You can learn how to have a positive influence on your mood and modify your stress levels through well-defined behaviors that will improve your ability to be healthy and happy.

In addition to their role in rational decision making, emotions also have a profound impact on how we experience life. Fortunately, we can learn to enhance our positive emotions and play down those negative ones that get in our way—a skill that can help us more than any other when it comes to making positive, long lasting changes in the way we live.

Your emotions are housed in your limbic system, an anatomic structure in the core of your brain. Within the amygdala, the limbic system plays a leading role. The amygdala is the seat of the stress response and fires whenever it senses danger, activating the infamous "fight or flight" response. As you now know, activity within the limbic system affects the activity within your frontal cortex.

When you are stressed, for example, your frontal cortex receives less blood flow and is therefore less able to engage in higher levels of thinking. When you experience the stress response, your brain and body are set up for "fight or flight." This gives you quicker reflexes and heightened senses, but it is not an optimal setting for complex problem solving. All your brain and therefore your body care about in this situation is being able to fight or run to safety.

You can also learn how to turn off the stress response through deep breathing, meditation or even mental imagery. You have a lot more control over what goes on in your brain and body than you probably think. We often set goals and make decisions in life based on our feelings about these goals. This is not bad unless we have allowed too much negative emotion to impair our decision making. Negative emotion can simply overwhelm the decision making process. You want to be able to direct your brain in a way that works FOR you and not AGAINST you. This is one of the most important skills you can learn in life.

You can learn to manipulate your mood by engaging in activities that promote feel-good chemicals to be released. Brain chemicals that go along with positive emotions are released through all sorts of pleasurable activities like listening to music, watching a glorious sunset, reading or playing soccer with your kids. Doing the things you enjoy stimulates your pleasure centers and reward systems. Sometimes just the anticipation of doing something you love can stimulate these pleasure centers. Learning how to enhance positive emotions and dampen negative ones can help decision making, because the rational and emotional centers of the brain are inextricably intertwined. The mind and body (and therefore your health) are also inextricably connected. They go hand in hand. To be in the driver's seat of your health means you must learn to be in the driver's seat of your brain.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Learn how to turn off negative emotions. For example, take some slow, deep breaths. Do regular exercise. Mentally focus on all of the positive things in your life for which you are grateful.
• Do simple things that activate your pleasure centers. Listen to music. Read a book. Watch a comedy. Talk to a friend. Get a massage. Take a relaxing, hot bath.
• Don’t necessarily avoid stress. It’s okay to challenge yourself outside of your comfort zone; challenges can help you grow stronger and better. It is more important to learn how to be able to turn the stress response off at will than to avoid stress altogether.

Believing.

Simply believing in your ability to perform a task is often as important as having the actual skill for doing it.

"I can do it." This statement sounds so simple, yet it can be quite powerful if you really believe it. Your brain is greatly influenced by whether or not you believe you can do something. In fact, the confidence in your ability to perform a task is often as important as the actual skill for doing it. Certainly you need the skill, but you also need to believe that you can make it happen.

It is important to believe in your ability whether you are working on behavior change or anything else, for that matter. If you believe in yourself, you are more likely to set higher goals and are more likely to demonstrate resilience in the face of setbacks. You are therefore more likely to succeed.

How do you believe in yourself, you might ask, when you are filled with negative messages and self-doubts? Often the vision we have of ourselves comes from messages we received during childhood. These messages may have been positive or negative. Perhaps you experienced things that reinforced a negative feeling about yourself. Unfortunately this negative concept feeds on itself. If you were told you were clumsy, you are much more likely to be clumsy. When you do something that you feel is clumsy you will tell yourself that you really are clumsy and the idea reinforces itself once again. What if you switched the message? What if you started telling yourself you are well coordinated? What if you started telling yourself that you are funny, intelligent, loving, attractive and healthy? Once you start sending yourself these messages you start believing this about yourself. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You tend to be whoever you think you are. It is important that you understand how powerful this is.

You can learn to believe in yourself. Yes, you really can. Your wonderfully adaptable brain can redefine itself. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is by taking small steps that build upon one another. Each week, you can work on little goals that move you toward your larger goals. The goals should be achievable so that you can accomplish them and thereby reinforce your self-efficacy. You can add more small goals the following week. Small successes lead to a higher self-efficacy. It doesn't happen overnight. It requires re-messaging, over and over, for an extended period of time, but it certainly can be done. Your belief in yourself can and will evolve over your lifetime.

After three decades of research, the concept of self-efficacy continues to be regarded as one of the major forces in behavior change. Let it work for you. Believe in yourself. It really does make a difference.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• You can learn to believe in yourself more by achieving success in small, little goals that lead up to your larger goal.
• You will be more likely to believe in yourself if you surround yourself with people who have succeeded in a same or similar goal.
• Stay positive. The thoughts you tell yourself often becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, so if you find yourself thinking negative messages about yourself, stop and focus on what you are doing well.
• Mentally rehearse (goal visualize) achieving your goal over and over to get your mind used to being at this end point.

Learning.

Your brain has a tremendous capacity to learn. Enhance factors that optimize learning like getting enough sleep and reducing stress, and don't be afraid to make mistakes and stumble along the way. That's how we all learn. Your brain also remembers through repetition. Practice whatever behavior you are trying to adopt, over and over. And remember, you don't have to do everything perfectly. Follow the 80/20 rule (see below).

One of the most remarkable aspects of the human mind is its tremendous capacity to learn. Learning involves a change in both the function and the structure of brain cells. When you learn something new, the ion channels of the nerve cell's membranes open up more easily to allow the electrical message to be delivered more quickly to the neuron next door. The better you have learned something, the easier the message gets relayed, and the easier the behavior gets translated into action. This process works best with multiple repetitions that are spaced out, not by many repetitions within a short time period. Yes, you've heard it before. Practice does make perfect. The cardinal rule in learning anything, whether it is your multiplication tables or a new tennis serve is that you need to repeat the learning activity or behavior. In other words, after we have practiced a behavior over and over it becomes easier. We don't have to work at it as hard. It becomes second nature. It becomes a habit.

You learn best when you find a topic interesting, important and most of all, relevant to your life. Information is best retained when presented in pictures or graphs, not just in text; your brain also remembers more when information is presented with color and motion. Finally, when information elicits strong emotions, good or bad, you are more likely to remember it.

The context in which you learn makes a difference, too. If you skip sleep, you lose out on the opportunity to consolidate what you have learned (memory consolidation), a process that occurs as you sleep. Being sick or stressed makes it harder to learn. When you are sick, your immune system produces chemicals called interleukins. These little guys interfere with your brain's ability to store information. Chronic stress inhibits learning because it reduces neural activity in the higher cognitive centers.

Having an all-or-nothing, black and white way of looking at everything can work against you. You may think of yourself as "on" a diet or "off" a diet. If you are not exercising like crazy, you may decide you might as well not do any exercise at all. In matters of health, the 80/20 rule is a good one. If you follow healthy guidelines 80 percent of the time, you are likely to be healthy. In fact, this is worth repeating. You don't have to do everything perfectly to be healthy.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Your brain learns best when conditions are optimal for learning. You must get adequate sleep to learn optimally, and you must learn how to manage stress well. Stress reduces the blood flow and activity within the frontal cortex, the area of the brain which controls higher learning and problem solving.
• Exercise! Physically challenging your body releases all sorts of wonderful chemicals that ultimately grow your brain and increase your ability to learn and think creatively.
• Mistakes are opportunities to learn. Your brain modifies itself when you make a mistake, so mistakes are not necessarily bad. They can allow growth.

Exercising.

Exercise physically changes your brain. It helps you learn better and remember better. It promotes alertness and enhances creative thinking. It elevates mood and lowers stress. In short, exercise is your biggest ally in health.

Physical exercise changes both the function and physical structure of the brain. The e ffects of exercise on the brain are truly remarkable. When you move your body in exercise, your muscles churn out several different kinds of growth factors (known as IGF-1 or insulin-like growth factor, VEGF-1 or vascular endothelial growth factor and FGF-2 or fibroblast growth factor) that drive the brain's production of building materials that are then used to create new nerve circuits. The exercise also drives the production of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, that promotes the birth of new, baby neurons, a process called neurogenesis. BDNF also supports the growth of already established neurons and nerve networks. Exercise also generates the production of all sorts of feel-good chemicals like serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, endocannabinoids and endorphins. Your rapidly beating heart also produces ANP, atrial natriuretic peptide that races over to the brain and directly shuts off the stress response originating in your limbic system. Exercise increases the chemical GABA which acts on valium-like receptors of the brain to promote a more relaxed feeling. The bottom line is this: If you want to learn better, experience higher energy and alertness, feel happier and less stressed, then a solid exercise program is your best bet.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Try to do 30 minutes of heart-pounding activity each day to maximally keep your brain alert, creative and learning optimally.
• Incorporate more body movement into your day, in general. For example, walk to your errands at lunch. Take the stairs instead of the elevator.
• If mood, sleep and stress are issues you would like to improve, exercise is your biggest ally. It will change your brain physiologically to improve all three of these areas.

Motivated.

Your brain is motivated by dopamine. Learn to structure your healthy lifestyle around simple things that bring you pleasure. This way, you can promote motivation and structure a healthy, sustainable lifestyle at the same time.

In the past decade, we have learned a great deal about motivation. Interestingly, the same chemical that drives motivation is also linked to addiction. The brain operates on a reward system in which the nucleus accumbens, termed the pleasure center, sends a chemical called dopamine into the frontal cortex. This chemical elicits a pleasurable sensation and drives motivation and attention. When enormously high levels of dopamine are released from addictive substances or behaviors, the frontal cortex is overwhelmed. Cocaine, for example, increases a person's dopamine levels by 800%! With these outrageously high levels, the brain resets itself and insists upon repeat performances of this substance or behavior; the normal dopamine levels are now interpreted by the brain as being abnormally low so the brain becomes obsessed with getting more dopamine. Addiction is the ultimate example of taking a good thing too far. Although extraordinarily high dopamine levels play a key role in unhealthy addictive behavior, normal levels of dopamine are not only safe, they can actually help you in your pursuit of optimal health.

Dopamine is released when we do things we like such as painting a picture, reading a good book, dancing the tango. Praise increases dopamine levels. Rewards can stimulate dopamine's release. Even the anticipation of a reward can elevate dopamine. The key essentials for the survival and propagation of the human species involve dopamine: exercise, eating and sex all stimulate release of dopamine. The important thing to understand here is that there is chemistry behind motivation that you can tap into in a healthy way as you work on behavior change.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Define the simple activities in life that can bring you joy (such as hiking in a park, listening to music, getting a massage), and make sure you incorporate these simple pleasures into your healthy lifestyle routines so that you are more likely to do it.
• Have simple healthy ways to reinforce healthy lifestyle behaviors. For example, after you do your exercise, do something you enjoy, call a friend, take a bath, read or anything else you find enjoyable.
• Avoid unhealthy behaviors (like drugs, alcohol and tobacco, overeating) that might temporarily bring you joy but will ultimately impair your health.

Unique.

The basic principles for staying healthy may be the same for everyone, but the way you work these principles into your life can be tailored just for you. We all want to be healthy, but how you choose to make this happen just has to work for you, in your own unique way.

One of the greatest things about people is that no two of us are exactly the same. We begin our lives with unique blueprints of DNA; we then march through life encountering innumerable experiences that ultimately shape who we become. We all have unique gifts and talents, and we all have unique vulnerabilities and challenges. Each of us views the world in a slightly different way. This is why, in adopting any new lifestyle behavior, you need to go forward in a way that makes sense to you personally. Certainly, it can be helpful to hear about strategies that have worked for other people, but these strategies really only matter if they work for you. There is no "one size fits all" in life or in health. There are many different ways to live a healthy life, and all strategies in the Program can be modified to suit each individual person.

One thing is for sure: Your circumstances will change over time. At one stage of your life, you may find it difficult to get exercise in because you have young children; later, your career may involve travel and you find yourself living out of a suitcase in unfamiliar cities, making exercise even more difficult. Certainly, your challenges will change over time, so what you really need to learn is how to stay flexible and problem solve around whatever situation you find yourself in. And the solution might surprise you. It may not appeal to anyone else, it may not work for anyone else, but as long as it works for you, that's all that matters.

Concrete Ways to Apply this Brain Principle

• Personalize healthy lifestyle behaviors so that they work for you in your own individual life. No one is the same, and there is no one-size-fits-all for how you apply these general brain principles to fit into your life.
• Understand that your needs in life may change over time so that behaviors may need to be modified. Stay flexible.
• Listen to others about what strategies have worked for them so you can get new ideas and tips, but remember to modify their strategies so it fits your needs.