Being Brain Healthy

By nature, medicine and treatment are made to deal with sickness. Rebuilding after a brain incident or setting yourself up to nourish your brain and grow new neurons must first be about health, well-being, and amplifying the quality of your life. It also needs to be about making those things you are already doing, and must continue doing to live successfully in the world, a vehicle or platform you can use to think and live better. I know that was a mouthful, but here is the key: If you want to thrive, focusing on brain health has to be a constant condition, not one you employ every now and then. Consistency and vigilance line every path to optimum function. It happens by amplifying and maximizing what is already there and using the activities that support your life to raise the quality of your health and increase your ability to thrive. You don’t have to give up anything or add more activities into your day. That is certainly not a standard protocol in our country’s healthcare mentality. When someone is “injured” in our society, we find treatments to fix their deficits. There was a point in my recovery process where I made a shift in focus and I am not even sure I know where or when that happened. That shift moved me from seeking treatment and looking for intervention to make me better to reaching for those things that empowered me and turned up the volume on the quality of my life at that moment. It must have been one moment in time, and I imagine it was significant. Too bad no one who might remember such things was living in my head at that point. My path to Okay was filled with a resolve to find ways to build up the good things that were left in my life. I set out to simply amplify and turn up the noise on those things I love and find ways to work through the discomfort by building quality in my life through that process. There was a point when I realized that my body rewarded me every moment that I felt good, so why not try to repeat that? I tried to use all those activities that we know are good for our brains and turn them into things that make my experience on Earth a better one. Here is one of my favorite examples. I love music so I find every way possible to use it as a tool. I studied the healing properties of music—brain activity associated with specific rhythms or styles or levels of complexity—and then took the experience associated with music up as many notches as my brain would handle. I worked music into so many moments in the day but, most significantly, into things that might not be so exciting (like exercise), keeping the focus on the element I love—the music. After a while, the two things became paired to me. That pairing became a new experience, one that created a feel-good experience and one I wanted to repeat. I also wanted to mix similar experiences I love into my day-to-day activities just to see what would happen. My approach is to intentionally maximize the everyday and the routine, turn up the noise on quality, and tune in to how that makes me feel. That is not the typical health experience, but it is one that I can tell you from personal experience can make every life better. There is no subscription, no membership fee, no co-pay. You need only make a commitment to feel more and better. Ultimately, this book is not only about brain injury or the aging brain. It is about taking what is right in front of you and using it to build a better nourished brain and a better life for yourself. Why this book and why now? A whole generation closely follows the aging process these days. We watch and listen as our peers and our elders lose their keys, their words, and their grasp on the connection between names and faces. We feel those things creeping into our own lives bit by bit. We want to feel in control of how we think, act, and feel. We don't want to lose our grip on the moments. We want to be able to use those moments to be, do, and think better. There are books out there that talk about all of this conceptually and scratch the surface of how our brains age. Volumes address brain structure and function on a deeply scientific, anatomical, and research-based level. It feels like we are swimming in a sea of information that is either so simplified that it doesn’t feel useful or credible or is layered so much scientific jargon and research that most of us glaze over.