Who needs brain fog to start their day? Nobody! To help you stay focused on the tasks of your day, try these simple brain boosters to your early-morning routine.
Life can get pretty hectic for most of us, leaving us with very little, or no time for the things we love as individuals. We have to heavy workloads, relationships and family responsibilities to contend with. The stress of trying to keep up can zap our concentration, make us irritable or depressed, and harm our relationships—including the professional ones we’ve forged at work. Working out areas of the brain before a full day can set us on a path of increased agility and flexibility in our thinking and enable us to communicate more calmly and effectively with our colleagues. Fold a mix of these simple activities into your morning routine and you’ll find yourself with a boosted mind, ready to take on anything the day throws at you!
Did you know?
Your brain might account for only about three percent of your body weight, but it receives about 30 percent of the blood being pumped by your heart. This shows how much attention and support it requires in comparison to the other seemingly important areas of your body.
Meditation
While it’s been around since the dawn of time, only recently have scientists focused on understanding the extent to which meditation can help improve attention, concentration, reduce anxiety and depression and improve our overall psychological makeup. Studies have found that the amygdala, known as the brain’s ‘fight or flight’ center and the seat of our fearful and anxious emotions, decreases in brain cell volume after mindfulness practice. Meditating will allow you to take a step back, become more aware, more accepting, less judgemental and less reactive. Individuals who meditate on a constant basis somehow have a greater ability to recall information faster, leading researchers to believe that the ability to quickly ‘screen out’ mental noise, allowing sharper focus on tasks at hand.
A Morning Workout
Exercise is a great way to improve our health as well as our mood, as we are well aware of, but there are some additional brain-boosting reasons to sneak in a sweat session before work. Exercise is capable of altering your brain’s chemistry, with an effect that is akin to taking antidepressants. It can signal the release of several key neurotransmitters, many of which play a vital role in keeping our brain sharp as we age. When you exercise, blood is pumped more efficiently to the brain, bringing along oxygen with it. This allows our grey matter to work to its highest capacity, which translates to better and sharper decision making, judgment and memory.
Let There Be Classical Music In The Background
The gentle, peaceful sounds of classical works from the likes of Mozart and Beethoven have long been touted as beneficial to the brain and productivity in general. The most famous study involves the so-called Mozart effect, found that listening to classical music can enhance a person’s spatial-temporal reasoning, or their ability to think long-term and abstractly It has also been found that listening to music in all types of work and professions increased work output by six percent. Listening to classical music while getting dressed in the morning or exercising is a one-two punch of neural circuitry that’s been shown by researchers to significantly improve verbal fluency, cognitive functioning and overall focus and concentration. So, do you have your Mozart CD ready for tomorrow morning?
Play A Game Of Sudoku In The Morning
Older people who love to learn new things are definitely a step ahead in their mind prowess compared to others. Learning and working out the brain promote brain health and create new neural connections. Even just taking a stab at Sudoku or a crossword puzzle that challenges your mind, can help build cognitive reserves, It’s important to keep brain-boosting activities constantly changing with increasing complexity. Consistency is key, and many of these techniques can be done in just a few minutes every morning to keep your brain power and your wits up!
Be Grateful And Count Your Blessings
When you bring your attention to the things in your life for which you’re grateful, your brain actually works better. This may sound a little far off, but brain imaging studies show that negative thought patterns change the brain in a negative way, but that conversely, practicing gratitude literally helps power up your brain (and that’s something to be grateful for, wouldn’t you say?). Every day, write down five things you’re grateful for. Research from the University of Pennsylvania found that when people did this exercise, they noticed a significant positive difference in their level of happiness in just three weeks. Other researchers have found that people who express gratitude on a regular basis are healthier, more optimistic, make more progress towards their goals, have a greater sense of well-being and are more helpful to others.
Read Something, Anything.
We are living in a time when it’s not easy to just unplug as we like and take time for the simple things that relax and stimulate our mind. So, whenever possible, take the opportunity to this in the mornings instead – the effect is just as gratifying! Reading, be it a chapter book, newspaper, or online article can help shift your mind and help you look at your tasks from a different perspective. Taking in a good book or a piece of welcome news in the papers is not only a calming way to start your day, but it also can help you reorient your priorities, taking you momentarily out of the daily grind from yesterday before today’s begins.
