Show Notes:

 I am so glad to have you here and with me today as we wrap up our series on small steps for quick wins. Today I want to share some of the top ways you can use your body to help your brain and support your mental health, wellness and resilience. 

Your brain and body are an intertwined system. Your brain offers feedback to your body, and likewise, your body offers feedback to your brain. When we know how the brain and body connect with one another, we can use the body as a tool to access supporting and managing the brain when it gets intense; along with being able to strengthen aspects of our physiological system in an effort to promote capacitates in our mental, emotional and psychological systems. 

The tools I want to offer you today are pieces that you can do that use your body as an access point to supporting your brain and its related thinking, feeling, relating, resilience capacities. As with all the things we’ve discussed in this series, the more you can engage these tools with consistency, the more effective they will be and the more effective they will help YOU to be. 

-        Number 1: heart rate and oxygenation. In recent history, scientists discovered regions of the brain that have ongoing capacities for new cell growth – meaning that the human potential for ongoing neurological growth and connectivity is far more than we ever knew. The regions of the brain that showed the most capacity for new cell growth are uniquely oxygen-rich regions in the brain. What this means is that people with more effective cardiovascular health, are more likely to have promoted cell growth in these parts of the brain, offering them advantages in potential for learning and growth that surpasses people with less effective cardiovascular health. 

Now, I started out saying that I wouldn’t make you get a gym membership – and I hold to that promise. I’m not saying you need to become a long distance marathon runner or triathlete…I’m saying that enhancing your cardiovascular health in any way, has a direct benefit for your brain. When you make your heart work, you are training your body to move oxygenated blood through your system. Any activities that get your heart rate up support this goal. You can have a dance party for 3 minutes to your favourite song, take a quick-paced walk on your lunch break, or do 20 jumping jacks. 

Beyond offering your brain more oxygen and giving it new opportunities to reach new levels of potential, cardio-based activities also offer a great opportunity to express pent up emotional energy. Stress, fear, anger, and a host of other emotions play out not just emotionally but also physically. There is an energetic component attached to them. We want to shake or hit or cry or growl. Moving our bodies gives a mechanism to channel that energy somewhere and move it through and out rather than keeping it stuck and trapped inside. There was a famous clinician who wrote that “depression is anger turned inward” – when we trap emotional energy in our bodies with no outlet to channel it through, it burns and burdens and transforms into increasingly difficult things to cope with and heal from. Having a mixture of daily movements that support being able to put this energy somewhere can be really valuable in keeping us more emotionally stable. Having a mixture of situational movements we can access when we’re in a moment of particular high energy and need to have somewhere to channel it, is also really valuable. These might not be as big – they may be things like shaking your hands out or doing a quick run on the spot – the goal is to give your body a quick release to help it recalibrate in a given moment. When we are able to engage in activities that give somewhere for the energy to go, we give our bodies a tool to tell our brain that we’re safe and able to manage regulating our selves – and this is how our body gives feedback to our brain, which then help alleviate some of the stress feedback your brain offers back to your body.

-        Number 2: muscle tension. When your muscles tense, it sends a feedback alert to your brain that there is something going on worth tensing up for. Your survival-centered brain interprets this as indicating threat must be lurking and further increases muscle tension to keep you at the ready to be responsive to whatever the possible risk might be. As you carry this tension over time, this feedback loop further and further entrenches itself. 

Working to intervene at the level of our muscle tension, can send a new piece of information to our brain that the threat has lessened. And our brain can then come down a bit, which allows it to send an alert to your muscles to relax a bit more, and so on and so forth. We can use the exact same feedback loop to our benefit if we can mindfully intervene in it rather than ignore it or unhelpfully feed into it. Engaging in light stretching whenever you notice muscle tension coming up; regularly engaging in yoga or related stretching practices; and using tools like massage, heat and magnesium supplementation can all support building a new feedback loop that helps your brain re-train toward calm. Tools like an electric massager that can sit on a chair, or a foam roller, or an electric heating pad – these can all be used in ways that can support releasing and relaxing muscle tension to offer a new message to your brain about where you’re at. 

-        Number 3: muscle strength. Your body is constantly offering feedback to your brain. Things like your posture, your capacity to gather a deep breath and related pieces tell your brain something about how you’re doing and what it needs to be doing to keep you safe and ok. Engaging in strengthening activities can support you in a host of ways. I’ll give you an example – when I had my kids my body went through a ton of changes but among them was some significant postural changes. I suddenly lacked a lot of core strength, and was lifting babies, carrying babies, rocking babies, feeding babies…and all of this led to a kind of collapsed posture. I felt tight across my chest from hunching over to nurse or to cradle and my back muscles and core muscles weren’t strong enough to compensate. This collapsed posture impeded my ability to have the same depth of diaphragmatic breath, and led to a lot of other pain, discomfort and tension. All of this served to tell my brain something is wrong, we’re not ok, and so I would feel more anxious and stressed for absolutely no definable reason. I want to see my chiropractor who encouraged me to really focus on strengthening my back muscles to help pull my chest more open and to strengthen my core to help hold up my diaphragm more effectively. That advice was a game changer and made a tremendous difference in the experience I was having in my body as well as my emotional wellness. 

So where are you hurting in your body? Where does the tension live? Where are you over compensating? What movements do you engage in regularly that may benefit from some functional mobility work and strengthening? 

Beyond this functional movement pieces, strengthening practices also communicate to our brain an affirming sense of readiness and preparedness. Our brain likes when it feels like we are capable and ready to respond to anything. It feels calmed by believing that we are set. When we strengthen our bodies, even in small ways, it sends a signal to our brains that we are a little more prepared to handle something if it came our way than we might have been otherwise. And this lets ou...