Consistently integrate exercise, meditation, and sufficient sleep into your daily routine to directly improve attention, creativity, learning, memory retention, and overall cognitive performance.
Engage in 30-45 minutes of daily aerobic exercise, ensuring your heart rate is elevated, to release neurochemicals that boost mood and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which promotes new brain cell growth in the hippocampus, enhancing memory and protecting against cognitive decline.
Schedule your exercise session right before you need to perform cognitively demanding tasks, ideally in the morning, to leverage the immediate benefits of improved mood, focus, and faster reaction times, which can last up to two hours.
If currently exercising less than 30 minutes per week, commit to 2-3 sessions per week of 45-minute cardiovascular exercise (including warm-up/cool-down) to significantly improve mood, body image, motivation, attention, and hippocampal memory.
For those already moderately fit, increasing your exercise frequency, even up to daily sessions, can lead to further improvements in mood (lower depression/anxiety, higher positive affect) and hippocampal memory function.
Practice 10-12 minutes of daily guided body scan meditation to significantly decrease stress responses, improve mood, and enhance cognitive performance, particularly by cultivating present moment focus.
To improve memory encoding, leverage the brain’s natural mechanisms by introducing novelty, employing repetition, creating associations with existing knowledge, and attaching emotional resonance to the information you wish to remember.
Integrate positive spoken affirmations (e.g., ‘I am strong now’) into your exercise routine to amplify mood benefits, cultivate a positive self-image, and counter negative self-talk, in addition to the physical and cognitive boosts from movement.
When time is limited, take a minimum of 10 minutes to walk outside, as this simple movement can quickly shift your mood by releasing beneficial neurochemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and noradrenaline.
Regularly practice meditation to build the habit of focusing on the present moment, thereby reducing anxious future thinking and rumination on past events, allowing for greater enjoyment and engagement with your current experience.
Sustain a high level of physical fitness throughout your adult life, especially starting in your forties, to potentially gain years of good cognitive function and build a ‘bigger, fatter, fluffier hippocampus’ that can buffer against age-related cognitive decline.