Is your brain older than you are?

You’re striving to stay on top of your career, managing complex decisions, coming up with creative solutions, and working with younger colleagues whose brains process information quickly. You want to maintain your edge in the workplace, keeping pace with the flow of ideas that sustain and drive forward your business.

At the same time, you’re working to secure your retirement. You’ve put money away. You’ve taken relatively good care of yourself. You’ve paid off your mortgage. In short, you’ve ensured that you have the external resources to live out the rest of your life in comfort. So what have you missed?

What if despite all of your efforts to secure your future you’ve neglected to maintain your brain? If you lose your faculties, your ability to enjoy that future and your independence will be in jeopardy.

If you’re in your 40′s or older, you may have already noticed signs of mental decline. Do you sometimes forget where you put your keys? Do you have a hard time remembering names? Does the word you mean to use escape you, and you find yourself scrambling for synonyms? These are all indications that you have begun to lose your neuroplasticity. Not only are your retirement years at risk, because your cognitive abilities are stuck in the rut of habitual thinking, you are potentially jeopardizing your creativity and ability to stay competitive in the marketplace.

Not to worry. Your brain is capable of regaining much of what you’ve lost.

Think back to when you were a child. You constantly had to learn new things: how to walk, talk, dress yourself, read and write – to name a few. Gradually, you came to master these skills and more. Your mind was in a constant state of intense concentrated learning, ensuring that your brain maintained its plasticity.

As we move into adulthood and become established in our careers, our daily routine often presents fewer opportunities to learn new skills. Instead, it becomes incumbent upon each of us to seek them out. Why? If we don’t, our brains begin to lose their neuroplasticity. They becomes fixed in their functions, and we start to lose our cognitive abilities. We process information more slowly and have more difficulty recalling facts and figures. Our response time is affected and even our problem-solving skills.

We become creatures of habit as we age, choosing a daily routine that has very little change. As we get older, we tend to stay within our comfort zones. With nothing to shake up our world, we stop learning new skills. Instead, we simply build on the ones we’ve already mastered. To build new neural pathways in the brain, it’s imperative that we learn new skills on a regular basis, or we risk atrophy.

Neuroplastician, Michael Merzenich, in The Brain That Changes Itself, concludes that, “…when you are eighty-five, there is a forty-seven percent chance that you will have Alzheimer’s disease… We’ve got to do something about the mental lifespan, to extend it out and into the body’s lifespan.”

Some of Merzenich’s suggestions for fighting cognitive decline include:

1. Learning a new language.

2. Learning new physical activities that require concentration.

3. Solving challenging puzzles.

4. Changing to a career that requires the mastery of new skills and material.

Today, there are a number of programs available through the Internet that can improve our mental faculties. Merzenich is the developer of Posit Science, a series of brain training programs designed to address age-related cognitive decline, which attacks memory, thinking, and process speed. Posit Science has dropped its prices considerably since their programs first came out on the market $690 for the complete program to $345. The site includes sample games you can try, as well as an opportunity to test your brain.

A popular site that allows users to compare their cognitive abilities with their peers is Lumosity. Users go through a training program for a very reasonable cost. $200 will buy you a lifetime membership. You can pay considerably less if you want to give the program a trial run of a shorter period of time. Lumosity fans can even participate in scientific studies that use their stats to understand neuroplasticity and other aspects of brain science. Lumosity also offers a smartphone app so that some games can be played while mobile.

Another program, Cognifit allows users to unlock applications by inviting Facebook friends to participate. Cognifit uses a more general comparison of a user’s score to that of the world in general, but also breaks it down by profession, gender, age and country of origin.

Regardless of which program you gravitate towards, don’t fool yourself into thinking that these computer-based tasks are going to cut it. Get exercising, eat right, get enough sleep, and drink in moderation. Avoid excessive TV time or video game play. A well-rounded life leads to healthier grey matter.

Whether you are in the work world and want to stay competitive with your peers or you are planning for a fulfilling retirement, ensure you stay sharp. Maintain your brain!

Defending the Night Owl

Image from Stock Xchng

What time does your head habitually hit the pillow? Are you asleep right after the nightly news or still going strong in front of your computer during the wee hours? Can we choose whether to be a night owl or early riser, or is it something genetic that makes us predisposed to either hitting the sack before midnight or burning the oil till dawn?

While most folks are tucked into bed, I can often be found walking my dogs at midnight, cooking a meal or doing laundry at 1 a.m., or catching up on my emails at two in the morning. By the time I get to bed, it’s often 2:30 or 3 a.m., and I’m up by 7 or 8. Now this does catch up on me occasionally, and I find myself nodding off in my papassan in front of the TV, often with Diesel, our cattle dog, draped over my lap and one of the cats perched on my shoulder. But give me about 30 minutes of that, and I’m good to go into the early morn.

According to my friend Aaron’s blog, I can even pat myself on the back for being in a group of people who are generally healthier, wealthier, and wiser than the old adage suggests I should be. In fact, according to Aaron’s information, there is a genetic component – an “after hours” gene – that affirms my behaviour. It also explains why only one of my four children napped during infancy and toddlerhood for more than a few minutes a day.

Historically, sleep patterns were different from what they are today. People often woke up during the night, took care of some household chores, and then went back to sleep. So, some of us who are branded insomniacs may simply be abiding by an historic sleep pattern.

I enjoy the wee hours and find that some of my most creative moments arrive during the night. I relish a walk outside when the rest of the world is asleep, encountering night creatures in their wanderings, and there’s something wonderful about leaving food still hot on the stove for my husband when he comes home from work at 4 a.m. It’s also delightfully indulgent to sit in bed with my pets and a good book, reading until just before dawn breaks or writing the poetry that only comes when the brain is tripping gently between waking and dreaming.

So, if you have a child that refuses to nap, it may not be obstinance that keeps them wide-eyed but a genetic leaning toward wakefulness. I can recount many an afternoon of staring at the ceiling of my room during my “nap time” until I finally got permission from my mother to “wake up”. This poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, entitled “Bed in Summer”, spoke well my lament as a child of parents who believed in “sensible” bedtimes – a concept that often serves the parents more than it does the active, inquiring mind of a wakeful child:

In winter I get up at night

And dress by yellow candle-light.

In summer quite the other way,

I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see

The birds still hopping on the tree,

Or hear the grown-up people’s feet

Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,

When all the sky is clear and blue,

And I should like so much to play,

To have to go to bed by day?

Digging Down to Find Your True Nature – The 8 of Pentacles

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

Often, the thoughts we have during the day come in waves. At one moment, we may have clarity and realize our true potential. We experience the elation of knowing what we are and what we can achieve. At other moments, we get sucked down into the maelstrom of fear, worrying that we won’t be able to succeed in life, that we’ll be rendered helpless and alone.

The 8 of Pentacles is all about recognizing our true nature – our divinity – and holding that recognition before us like a flame that lights our way (you may see Olympic references here if you wish). It takes discipline to keep our eyes on that flame and not to get bogged down in darkness.

When I feel that sense of foreboding, it helps me to meditate, read inspiring books, and remember the guides and higher awareness that come to me in dreams to remind me of my divine beingness.

Apart from owning my place as a Being of Light, I have the added luxury as someone who works with energy fields of being able to see others as they appear as a light being.

What lies behind the outer appearance, you might ask? When you peer down through the layers to the core, we all look like stars. It’s incredibly humbling to observe others in their divine state, and it’s even more amazing to experience the energy of that state. It’s my wish that all people could see the world around them as it actually is. There would be more peace if we all recognized each other as holy. Hence, the reason for the greeting, “Namaste” – the divine in me salutes the divine in you.

In my courses on reading the human energy field, I provide my students with the opportunity to tune in on the various layers of the human energy field and to open to the experience of their divinity for themselves and in connection with others. It’s my wish that we drop our barriers and see that in essence we all are in a state of harmony. The disharmony we see is illusion. Working with the human energy field can help you to look past the illusion to what really lies beneath.

My next course begins January 17th. If you wish to sign up, please do so at www.tarotkingston.com. I look forward to seeing you there!

Honour your Creativity – The Nine of Wands

The Aquatic Tarot. Author/Artist: ©Andreas Schröter 1995-2002

Today’s tarot card warns us not to squander our creativity. The creative force is a natural energy running through all of us. By its nature, it seeks expression. When we neglect it, I believe we actually sacrifice our well-being.

Ask yourself how much of your stress is directly related to not doing something that you really want to do. Are you living your dreams or settling for what feels safe, secure and available?

When we answer our soul’s calling and find ways to express our creativity, we rediscover our personal power, our intuition, and our spontaneity. We find the child in us who sees all things as magical.

Ask yourself how you can be creative today. In small and large ways, seek to do what your soul desires. Be open to thinking outside the box and being silly and playful.

Sit quietly and ask yourself several times during the day what you’d really like to do in that moment and be open to the answer. Then, follow through as best you can. If you can’t give expression at that moment to your soul’s desire, make a list of steps to achieving it, and take the first step – even if that step is just researching scuba-diving schools on the Net during your coffee break.

As you take steps toward living your dreams, you give energy to meeting those goals. That energy frees up your path to take the next step, and the next. Before you know it, you’re doing what you’ve always wanted to do.

Take it from my friend, Susan Biali, a doctor who decided to become a flamenco dancer  - and succeeded. It’s never too late to live your dreams. Just take a chance… and take that first step.