5 of the Best Ways to Support Your Brain Health
Medically Reviewed by Dr. Nicole Avena
The brain is an integrated whole, a symphony of parts that work together to create and sustain a life.” -Dr. Daniel Amen
Your brain is involved in everything you do.
How you think, act, and relate to others is directly tied to the functioning of your brain.
When the brain works right, you tend to be at your best. When the brain is troubled, you may struggle in different areas of your life.
So, what can you do to help your troubled brain or optimize your healthy brain? Adopting healthy lifestyle measures—such as maintaining a healthy diet, making regular exercise a priority, getting quality sleep, and taking high-purity supplements—is a great place to start.
The following tips also may help support your cognition and memory over the long-haul…
5 Ways to Support Your Brain Health (At Any Age)
- New Learning
Try learning a new language or hobby like painting or playing a musical instrument. Also, you can hone your mental sharpness by engaging in motor activities like yoga or dancing.
- Don’t Multitask
Can’t find your keys? Maybe it’s because you weren’t consciously aware when you put them down. If you tend to juggle many things at once, you’re bound to forget the little things.
In an increasingly distracted society, it’s become clear that the brain isn’t meant to excessively multitask. The brain functions best when it’s allowed to switch focus from one thing to another, which is why it’s difficult to read a book and hold a conversation at the same time. Intense multitasking tends to slow mental processing, so make it a point to concentrate on one task at a time.
- Play Brain Games
Brain games can help sharpen memory and other cognitive functions, especially for older adults. Spending at least 15 minutes a day on games – such as crossword puzzles, chess, sudoku, and jigsaw puzzles – may help improve your concentration. There are various online sites where you can do mental exercises to improve your cognitive skills.
Regardless of your age, mental exercise can have an overall positive effect on your brain. When you stop learning, your brain starts fading, so don’t stop challenging your brain daily.
- Practice Gratitude
Did you know that practicing gratitude causes changes in your brain that can help you feel better? Being grateful for the good things in your life also may enhance brain function.
Writing down the things you’re grateful for can make the practice even more powerful. Tell people who are important to you that you’re grateful for them. This can help boost their mood and yours.
- Take A Look
One of the best ways to improve your brain health is to take a look at your brain. How can you accomplish that? By getting a brain image.
Brain imaging removes the guesswork from the standard psychiatric approach of prescribing high-powered medications to treat symptoms, which is like throwing darts at a dartboard in the dark.
By contrast, the approach at Amen Clinics is to look inside the brain to identify the source of the problem and to treat it with as natural a regimen as possible.
If you’ve hit a wall with traditional psychiatric care, or are just curious to know what’s going on inside your brain, here’s how you can get an accurate image of your brain…
Brain SPECT Imaging
SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) is a state-of-the-art brain mapping tool that can give trained medical professionals more information to help their patients. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that’s proven to reliably evaluate blood flow and activity in the brain.
How Imaging Can Support Your Brain Health
SPECT allows physicians to look deep inside the brain to observe three things:
- Areas of the brain that work well
- Areas of the brain that work too hard
- Areas of the brain that don’t work hard enough
SPECT imaging is a clinically valuable tool for looking at brain function to help target treatment. With the help of brain imaging, doctors also can test to see if there are physical or chemical imbalances, vitamin deficiencies, low neurotransmitter production, and many other factors.
Also, SPECT scans can help families see their loved one’s problems as medical not moral, which helps increase compassion and understanding while decreasing shame, blame, and stigma. Brain SPECT imaging can help get to the root of a wide variety of mental health conditions and cognitive issues, so you can find the best solutions to get your life back on track.
Why Choose Amen Clinics for Brain SPECT Imaging?
For over 30 years, Amen Clinics has performed over 200,000 scans on patients 9 months old to 105 years old from over 155 countries.
In addition to diagnosing and treating patients with psychiatric symptoms such as attention challenges, mood issues, addiction, head trauma, and many other complex or resistant psychiatric problems, Amen Clinics also has scanned many health-conscious individuals interested in learning more about their brains and how to keep them optimized far into the future.
How to Get Help
While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has helped many people with their struggles, brain imaging technology has changed the way healthcare professionals evaluate and treat the brain.
Amen Clinics uses brain imaging technology to identify your specific brain type, so they’re able to tailor a targeted treatment plan to address your symptoms and enhance your quality of life.
If you have additional questions about brain SPECT imaging, or would like to set up an appointment, call 888-288-9834 today!
It’s Never Too Late
Regardless of how you’ve treated your brain in the past, you can support your brain health. Applying these practical tips can help brain function and pump the brakes on brain aging.
Remember, it’s never too late, or early, to adopt brain-healthy habits that can benefit you for the rest of your life.
At BrainMD, we’re dedicated to providing the highest purity nutrients to improve your physical health and overall well-being. For more information about our full list of brain healthy supplements, please visit us at BrainMD.
