..around your building before you start your next big project!
Not only does it clear your head from what you were previously concentrating on, but acute exercise fires up the brain and enables you to think better, faster and longer. Is that something you strive for in 2018?
Have you ever noticed the difference in your morning productivity & creativity when you walk to the office or workout in the morning? Or, what if you don’t? Recent research shows a 10 mile run isn’t always necessary. As little as 10-20 minutes of movement will bring substantial improvements in your cognitive functioning.
Back in 2012 a meta-analysis showed a significant overall positive effect of acute physical exercise, just 20 minute spurts, on executive functions. Subjects were aged 6-35. The team led by Lot Verburgh at the Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, VU University Amsterdam, looked at focus and working memory in particular.
As we age and as the number of projects we are juggling increases, working memory – the ability to store and process information relevant to the task at hand, tends to suffer. Can you find 20 minutes?
Most of us work out to keep our bodies healthy and strong. We are constantly reminded of the critical need for exercise for cardiovascular and metabolic health. Remember this physical well being also benefits our brains.
Mount Sinai researchers looked at the brain scans of 823 participants in the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a large brain imaging study funded by the National Institutes of Health. The team led by D.A. Moser found a positive correlation between the brain networks associated with working memory and what we think of as healthy traits- higher physical endurance and increased cognitive function.
Working memory accounts for individual differences in personal and professional attainment along with higher daily outcomes. By the way, suboptimal health habits including binge drinking, overeating and regular smoking were correlated with less cohesive working memory networks.
So keeping healthy on a whole is great for our brain and 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise improves task-specific activity along with being a ‘boost’ to executive-related cognitive control. But we are busy, what can we do in a shorter amount of time to attain a great mental jump start.
Most Recently, January 2018 Ashna Samani & Matthew Heath, at The University of Western Ontario sought to determine whether such a ‘boost’ is evident for an exercise duration as brief as 10 min. They found a 10-min bout of moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic exercise benefits an increase in attention/arousal and improved task-specific activity within the frontoparietal networks.
10 minutes really removes any excuses we have to exercising for our brains! If I knew this in college perhaps a brisk walk around campus vs that jumbo coffee with those complex formulas would have impressed my mom.
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