Boost Your Brainpower
Usage Rights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the publisher’s prior written permission.
Disclaimer
All the material contained in this book is provided for educational and informational purposes only. No responsibility can be taken for any results or outcomes from using this material.
While every attempt has been made to provide accurate and practical information, the author does not assume any responsibility for the accuracy or use/misuse of this information.
©2020 by Debbie DeMoss Compton
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Boost Brain Function by Including These 6 Vitamins and Minerals in Your Diet
Do This Only 5 Minutes Per Day for a Healthier, Happier Brain
Long-Term Benefits of Boosting Your Brain Power Now
The 5 Habits You Need to Change to Boost Your Brain Power
5 Fun Ways to Keep Your Brain at Peak Performance
About the Author
Bonus 8 Fun Ways to Stimulate Your Brain 23
This is dedicated to the over 15 million unpaid caregivers in the U.S. today. If you try some of the recommended tips, you can reduce your chances of contracting Alzheimer’s by nearly 50%.
Take a little time for yourself starting today!
Introduction
Thank you for picking up your e-book! It will give you valuable action steps you can begin using TODAY to help boost your brain power and help ward off Alzheimer’s and other types of Dementia.
If you do everything suggested, does that guarantee you won’t get Alzheimer’s? NO. Unfortunately, there are no absolute guarantees. Doctors don’t yet understand everything about Alzheimer’s and other types of Dementia.
Making the suggested changes doesn’t ensure you absolutely won’t get Alzheimer’s disease, but it does mean you will be drastically reducing your odds of getting it.
While there is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s, doctors are constantly learning more about this horrific disease.
We now understand risk factors better, how early diagnosis can help, and activities that can reduce your chances of getting it.
The latter are discussed in this book. It is not meant to be all-inclusive, but it will give you many changes you can make today to have a healthier brain tomorrow.
This book suggests lifestyle changes, vitamin and supplement suggestions, habits supporting brain function, and fun activities proven beneficial to overall brain health.
It is written without all the fluff that would make it a much longer book. I opted instead to get straight to the information you need without any filler.
You can obtain a FREE COPY of “How to tell the difference between Dementia and Natural Aging” here. It will explain when you might want to see a doctor versus when forgetfulness is normal.
You will also discover Reversible Dementia and how to correct it at home. Grab your FREE copy today!
If you are a caregiver and need more in-depth information, I wrote a book just for you! Caregiving: How to hold on while Letting go. It has what to expect next and how to deal with it. Steps, stages, tips, ideas to try, what the experts say, and lots of encouragement are all included.
If you need some joy, laughter, and hope infused in your life, then Sonshine for the Soul is for you. It has funny stories, quotes from famous people about God, and uplifting Bible verses. Sonshine is a quick read that is sure to brighten your day!
Now let’s get straight to the information you came for. Enjoy!
Boost Brain Function by Including These 6 Vitamins and Minerals in Your Diet
While we all know eating right affects how you feel, were you aware that the right balance of vitamins and minerals will boost brain function? Let’s look at six such items destined to change your life.
B-6
B-6 works to take brain chemicals and convert them to Serotonin with an added dose of dopamine to boot. These are what’s responsible for your mood and keeping you alert. If you want to get this naturally, concentrate on your dark green leafy vegetables, cauliflower, garlic, tuna, cranberries, and bell peppers.
B-12
B-12 Found in meats, you need B-12 to form Myelin, which insulates nerves and protects them. B-12 is what protects you from nerve damage. You need B-12 to keep your memory sharp and your mood positive. B-12 also gives you clarity of thought and the ability to think swiftly through a situation and make decisions.
Vitamin C
Vitamin C intercepts free radicals, which age your body and brain. Found in many foods, you can quickly get enough through a healthy, well-balanced diet, though it never hurts to take a supplement.
Vitamin C also protects against Alzheimer’s, which is why it’s so important to make sure you’re getting enough.
Vitamin E
Vitamin E likewise works against Alzheimer’s. An antioxidant, E also takes on the job of protecting your brain from damage. Adequate levels of Vitamin E in your diet can prevent damage caused by aging and Alzheimer’s, making it essential for brain health.
Folate
Folate is also called folic acid. You find folate in lots of fruits and vegetables and beans. It’s another “B” family member, which means you need it for a high-functioning memory and mood. Folate also protects your brain cells from damage, so you want plenty in your diet.
Magnesium
Magnesium is one of the great protectors against neurotoxins in the brain. Unfortunately, most magnesium is lost from food when it’s cooked. While you find it in green leafy veggies, grains, and nuts, you’re still probably not getting enough. A supplement might be your best bet here.
You'll discover a brand new you by paying attention to what you eat and drink (or add as a supplement). Think clearer, remember more, and protect your brain against the effects of aging. Make sure your diet is balanced. The right vitamins and minerals will change your world.
Do This Only 5 Minutes Per Day for a Healthier, Happier Brain
We all want happy and healthy brains. Did you know doing a straightforward thing for only 5 minutes per day can change how your brain works?
You only need to do one thing to optimize your mental processes: Meditate.
As you age, your brain undergoes many changes. On a brain scan, you can expect a certain amount of loss of brain matter over time. This shrinkage is what causes you to forget things. It’s why your brain begins to slow down, making it harder to concentrate or remember.
Except in people who meditate, this shrinkage doesn’t happen.
Various studies have shown a marked change in people who meditate regularly vs. those who do not. Or, more accurately, a lack of change. One scientific study used brain scans over eight weeks to discover if meditation changed the brain. While the brains in the control group (non-meditators) got smaller, the brains of those who meditated did not. Studies have proven that those who consistently meditate will see brain growth, reversing damage over time.
How do you meditate to get optimal brain health?
Make Meditation a Daily Practice
The meditation style doesn’t matter, but you must do it regularly. You only need to meditate for a few minutes daily for a significant impact on brain health—a commitment even a busy person can make.
Schedule a Date with Yourself
Once the commitment is made to meditate daily, add it to your calendar. Make sure you keep this appointment. Protect it. It’s time for you and is necessary for your good health.
Breathe
While there are different exercises for breathing during meditation, there is no one right way to do it. The point is to concentrate on breathing and allow it to be natural.
Here are some quick breathing techniques to get you started:
V-Shaped Breathing
Imagine the breath going in and coming out through a V-shaped opening between your eyes. By putting the focus here, you are calming the frontal lobe. You make decisions in this area, so it’s an excellent place to concentrate.
Box Breathing
- Inhale deeply through your nose while counting to four.
- Hold the breath inside you while counting to four.
- Let the breath out slowly while counting to four.
- Repeat four times.
Three-Part Breath
Inhale deeply, starting with your stomach. Pull the air from there up into your chest. Keep going until it’s in the upper chest by the collarbone. Exhale out of each area. Pay close attention to how the breath feels. Pull yourself into the rhythm and feel the calm.
As a Christian, I focus on the peace of God as I breathe. It helps bring calm to my life.
Another tip is to pick a word and focus on it, such as “hope, peace, calm, or relax.” Say the word in your head as you focus on deep breathing.
Protect your brain. Grow it. Meditate and discover an answer to stress and optimal brain health. You can have a healthier, happier brain.
Long-Term Benefits of Boosting Your Brain Power Now
Have you ever considered exercising your brain?
Giving your brain a good workout isn’t quite as simple as getting up and taking a walk. However, many activities will help your cognitive skills and prevent age-related memory decline. Give your brain something new and exciting to latch onto; the more complex, the better. The magic happens from there.
Why bother? People who take part in an activity designed to boost brain power experience these long-term benefits:
You Enjoy a Life with Less Stress.
Stress is the #1 reason for poor health and productivity. By reducing stress now, you will feel better daily, live longer, and have fewer health challenges.
You Find You Experience Fewer Memory Lapses.
Having a memory that can stand up to the rigors of aging is one of the most important reasons to stimulate your mind now. By the time you reach the age of 85, you stand a good chance of experiencing memory loss – 35% of people do. Putting the work in now builds for better brain power later.
Your Mood Stays Positive Longer.
A brain well-fed with interesting stimuli is engaged continuously, meaning a pleasant influx of positive brain chemicals such as dopamine and other endorphins are constantly enhancing your mood.
You Can Concentrate Better.
Maintaining focus for more extended periods is essential, especially when you’re planning on staying active past age 65. Making your focus sharper then becomes crucial toward doing so.
You Feel More Motivated.
Motivation leads to productivity. If you want to get things done, you need your brain chugging along to keep your willpower strong. Without motivation, it’s challenging to force yourself to complete tasks consistently.
You’re More Creative.
Raising brain power means raising intelligence levels. With this comes more flexibility regarding mental challenges and finding outside-the-box solutions to problems.
You Have Better Reaction Times.
As we age, we slow down. This is why older drivers are forced to relinquish their driver’s licenses. Having a quick reaction time is crucial if you want to pass those driver’s tests and keep your independence.
You’ll Have Less Vision and Auditory Problems.
Believe it or not, these areas benefit from regularly challenging your mind.
Remember, the crucial thing you need to know to challenge the brain is to give it a novel experience and ask it to perform complicated tasks requiring deep reasoning skills.
Whether you play games, learn a language, or take up a new hobby, there are numerous ways to keep your mind agile. Engage your brain regularly, and you will be experiencing the benefits for years to come.
You can download many apps to play games designed to sharpen your mind and reactions. A few are: Word Search, Wordscapes, Word Collect, BlockuDoku, Woody, and Luminosity.
The 5 Habits You Need to Change to Boost Your Brain Power
Habits can be beautiful things. While most people think of habits initially as bad things you need to conquer, good habits keep you on track, like reminding yourself to brush your teeth every morning or drink water throughout the day.
Did you know there are habits you can add easily to your daily routine that will boost your brain power? Let’s look at five changes you can start making today and get you on track to creating the best version of yourself.
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Sleep
This one should almost go without saying. Sleep is how you recharge and prepare yourself to face the new day. What you might not realize is sleep is what helps you to process your day. Without deep sleep and the dream state, you would never be able to deal with whatever trauma you went through during your waking hours. By getting enough sleep, you’re hitting the reset button on your brain, allowing it to work through the rough stuff so you can start the next day with a clean slate.
If you are a caregiver, you will notice a massive difference in your care recipient when they get restful sleep versus continually interrupted sleep. My mom is more confused, my mother-in-law would be more anxious, and my dad would hallucinate more. Restful sleep is crucial to proper brain function.
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Get Up When the Sun Does
Pay attention to Circadian rhythms. Starting the day at dawn syncs your body with the world around you. People who are out of sync experience all manner of problems, from obesity to depression. To stabilize your mood, start the day early and go to bed when it gets dark.
I will be transparent here and tell you I am not good at this. I have never considered myself a morning person, but I can easily stay up late.
I have noticed when I get up earlier and go to bed earlier, I do feel better. Still, it’s a struggle.
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Use Fish Oil
If you’re not into eating a lot of fatty fish in your diet, a fish oil supplement will give you the Omega-3s crucial to your good health. That is needed to repair your brain cells, with the added benefit of guarding you against memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s.
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Practice Mindfulness
You might already know meditation will help reduce stress and give your brain a break. Were you aware meditation is also responsible for stopping the loss of brain cells and even reversing the effects of aging? Meditate for at least 5 – 10 minutes daily to see a positive benefit.
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Do Weird Stuff
It would be best if you challenged it regularly to grow new connections in your brain and keep your neurons firing. Take up a hobby, learn a language, or try something new for a quick start to get your brain going. Even doing the same old routine alternatively can have a positive benefit. So, brush your teeth with the opposite hand or try going a different way to work to jump-start the process.
I was recently forced to learn to play pickleball left-handed. I do everything right-handed, I mean everything, so this was a significant challenge. Nerve damage to my right shoulder meant I’d either learn to use my left hand or quit. Since I’m not a quitter, I learned.
I feel a real sense of accomplishment in developing this new skill, and you will also.
As with any habit, the key is doing these things daily for the best benefit. Boosting your brain power is amazingly simple. Commit to building new habits starting today. After all, there’s no time like the present!
5 Fun Ways to Keep Your Brain at Peak Performance
With so many articles touting ways to boost your brain performance, keeping your brain at peak performance starts to sound like work. The trick is to keep things fun so you don’t lose momentum and can quickly build your brain health into part of your daily routine.
Where should you begin?
Do Things with Your Opposite Hand
If you’ve ever had your dominant arm in a sling, you know how complicated life can be when it comes to doing even the most basic things. Opening a door or brushing your teeth becomes an entirely new adventure. Your brain thinks of it that way as well. Doing something different forms new neural connections in your brain and stimulates areas you don’t usually use while doing the mundane.
Create Variations
You can probably move through your house blindfolded. While that’s great when you’re up in the middle of the night and don’t want to turn on the light, it doesn’t challenge your brain much if everything is in automatic mode. Moving around the furniture in a room, changing the order of things in your kitchen cupboards, or even setting random objects upside down or sideways will all compel your brain to work a little harder.
Trying Showering Blind
While a bit of caution might be prudent so you don’t slip and hurt yourself, showering with your eyes closed is an entirely new sensation worth trying. By using different senses than usual, you stimulate new parts of your brain that you may have neglected for a while.
Change the Order of Things
Doing your daily routine doesn’t add many stimulations to your brain cortex. Get things moving again by switching the order of things. Instead of brushing your teeth first and then showering, how about showering first and then brushing your teeth? Make little changes in your daily routine throughout the day to keep things interesting.
I hope you are seeing that changes don’t have to be big to have an impact on our brain.
Open a Window
The hippocampus needs smell and sounds to be activated. The problem is our environment gets so well-protected from outside influences that, typically, there isn’t a lot there to stimulate things. By opening a window in your office or a car, you’ll hear something you don’t usually and expose yourself to new odors. These are the building blocks of memory, so don’t be surprised if you find yourself remembering things you haven’t in a while when you do so.
By doing little things, you push your brain to work. Peak performance comes from repeating these exercises daily. Make these small things a habit for the best benefit, and find out just how much more your brain can achieve.
Be blessed!
Debbie Compton
CEO The PurpleVine LLC
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Debbie DeMoss Compton is an author, speaker, caregiver, and Community Educator for the Alzheimer’s Association.
She’s a Certified Caregiving Consultant, Certified Caregiver Advocate, and Grammy to 8 little bundles of joy. (Several who are not so little anymore!)
Debbie has been a primary caregiver three times for her parents. She cared for her father in his home till he passed from Parkinson’s Disease. Her mother, who just passed after a 22-year fight with Vascular Dementia, and her mother-in-law until she passed from Alzheimer’s Disease in Debbie’s home.
If you, or someone you know, would like to talk to an experienced, trained professional about your caregiving journey, Debbie is offering a complimentary 30 minute zoom chat. Bring your biggest questions and see how Debbie can help you. Some need a CAP, (Caregiver Action Plan) while others have questions about how to find help or reduce hallucinations. Whatever your need, Debbie is waiting to help YOU. (And it's FREE!) E-mail [email protected] with several dates and times you are available.
Many of the tips and ideas she offers in her first book, Caregiving, How to Hold On while letting go, are ones she and her husband came up with when the textbooks didn’t help. If you know a caregiver, giving them a copy of her book is a great way to support them. (Available on Amazon or order an autographed copy by emailing [email protected]
Debbie’s second book is a collection of bulletin bloopers her sweet mom made, funny stories from her family, quotes by famous people ranging from Billy Graham to Dr. Seuss, and Bible verses. She included the latter because Debbie draws strength, encouragement, patience, and hope from the word of God. There is no plot or characters to remember. (Her mom was struggling with remembering, so Debbie came up with a simple pattern of verses, funnies, and encouraging quotes. That pattern repeats throughout the book, thus removing the stress of remembering. Each page stands alone.)
Her book is titled Sonshine for the Soul and is available on Amazon. It’s a short, 82-page, large print book. Debbie used a large font to make reading easier for her mom. To get an autographed copy, e-mail [email protected]
Journaling can reduce stress, bring clarity, help you stay organized, and remember your blessings. Debbie created a large, 347-page journal called Write to Remember. It has all her favorite things in a journal: cream-colored, lined pages, pictures for inspiration, Bible verses for comfort, writing prompts for when you can’t think of what to write, and plenty of room to record your thoughts.
Debbie made an adult coloring book from the original mandalas she created on her laptop. It’s titled Color Me Calm because this book’s goal is to bring calm. Adults and children alike can take a break and create an original piece of art with this large book.
If you are noticing a trend, you are correct. She is focused on helping caregivers, which currently number 15.6 million people in the U.S.
Being a caregiver is incredibly stressful work, and sometimes you need a way to relax and unwind. Some days you may want to journal, some to read a funny story, and others to just color and create.
On those days you need encouragement, answers, or ideas, she’s covered that too.
Ways to connect:
Debbie has a FaceBook page called Caregiving Book.
You can join the conversations and learn more about diseases, caregiving, and prevention tips.
Her website is thePurpleVine.com where you can find more helpful articles.
Connect on Linked In
BONUS
8 Fun Ways to Stimulate Your Brain
A healthy body includes a healthy mind. To keep your brain in tip-top shape, you must take care of it. Here are 8 more fun ways to do just that:
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Listen to Something New
Podcasts and audiobooks stimulate the mind and get you thinking about new things. With such an infinite variety of things to listen to, there’s always something available to get you thinking.
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Write it Down
Blogging or journaling allows you to express yourself creatively while sharing your impressions of the world. Both can also help you in processing your day. Not a lot of time? Try keeping a bullet-point journal.
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Go Somewhere
You don’t need a lot of time or money to get away. The point here is to go someplace new or do something you’ve never done before. Visit a local festival or a tourist trap. Drive to the next town over or to the next state. Wander. Explore roads you haven’t been down before. There’s a vast world waiting for you!
Visiting small towns and touring their quaint shops is a favorite of mine. I enjoy talking to shop owners while admiring their wares.
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Read
Diving into a book is always beneficial, regardless of the choice of reading matter. Grab a thriller or spicy romance, or pick up a classic you’ve meant to read. Take it to the next level by joining a book club to discuss what you’ve read.
Online, you might join Goodreads, review your favorite books, and see recommendations from other readers. It’s free online.
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See Some Friends
Time spent socializing hits your brain in numerous ways. Conversation stimulates cognitive function. The sense of fun and well-being you get from being around others increases endorphin levels. Activities done together work on your problem-solving skills and get you thinking creatively. It’s all good!
As I write this, we are playing games via Zoom. Get creative.
FaceTime, Instant Messenger, and HouseParty conversations allow you to see each other as you chat.
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Try Something New
Take a class, pick up a new hobby, or try something you’ve never tried before. Your brain loves new experiences! To get the extra benefit of exercise, try yoga, kickboxing, or any number of activities that get you up off the couch.
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Explore Culture
Learn a new language. Cook something ethnic. Explore art, music, and culture in a variety of ways. Explore your heritage or learn something about someone else’s. Embrace the diversity the world has to offer.
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Take a Break
In the end, don’t forget to rest. A tired mind cannot process well. Be sure to get adequate sleep so you can go out and try all these things again tomorrow.
By adding a little fun in your day, you will be amazed to find out you’re thinking clearer and better than ever before. Imagine what it will be like to remember things and efficiently process new ideas. Your best life truly does begin here.