Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Boost Your Brain Health | Dr Wendy Suzuki #382

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 325 of the podcast with neuroscientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology, Dr. Wendy Suzuki. Wendy starts each day with 30 minutes of exercise because she knows it makes her more focused, happy, motivated, and even creative. In this clip, she explains how even just 10 minutes of exercise creates changes in the brain that go much further than simply boosting our moods.

Starting point is 00:01:53 A lot of your research has completely changed the way we understand our brains. You do 30 minutes of exercise every single morning. And I believe that that has been informed by your research. Absolutely. So why do you do that? I do that because I know from not just my research, but the research of all of my colleagues that every single time you move your body, starting with just walking, but I like to do kind of cardio weights workout for 30 minutes. What that is doing, it is releasing a whole bunch of neurochemicals in your brain. Dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, but also growth factors are being released. And I like to say that it's like giving your brain a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals. And what do these

Starting point is 00:02:45 neurochemicals do? Well, the dopamine and serotonin are making you feel good. They're bringing your energy up. And the other thing that we know that happens with movement, physical activity is that the functions of your prefrontal cortex right behind your forehead get sharper, they get better. And so I do that first thing in the morning and I do that to prepare my brain for work. And I want to come into work. I want to be happy. I want to be motivated and I want to be able to focus well. And the reason why I do it every morning, no matter what day it is, is really about habit formation. 30 minutes, first thing in the morning was something that I can do. I could keep doing it every single day. It didn't tire me out the

Starting point is 00:03:31 next day. The 30 minutes every morning is really about building that habit that will stick with you and does not go away. You mentioned a lot of things there that I think we all want. a lot of things there that I think we all want. Happiness, motivation, focus, productivity, thinking better. You know, these are things that no matter who we are, we're all seeking them in our lives. Now you've found that when you do this as part of your morning routine, you almost set your body and brain up for the day with those emotions and feelings that you want. I think that's really, really powerful. You've obviously found what works for you. You can do 30 minutes in the context of the rest of your life. So you do it, right? And you've experienced the benefits. One thing I've

Starting point is 00:04:21 spoken about on this podcast for many years is that I do a five-minute strength workout every morning, like of going on YouTube or Instagram or emails, I do a strength workout in my pajamas. And I always say that because the point is I've made it as easy as possible. And I wrote a book about five-minute interventions, how powerful they can be. Because I think we've been conditioned, Wendy, to think that, oh, there's no point doing it if it's only five minutes. Yet, I think I keep in really good shape from a five-minute strength workout seven days a week because it's so small that I can do it every day, pretty much. That's the most popular question that people always ask me. Really, how little movement do I really need to do to get all that good stuff that you've been talking about? The answer to that is simple. We know that significant decreases in anxiety and

Starting point is 00:05:31 depression levels, not clinical anxiety and depression, just our overall anxiety levels, can come with just 10 minutes of walking. That comes from the science. That is the kind of minimum amount that has been shown to have an effect. You don't have to run a marathon. You don't have to go to those scary classes. Walking, starting with walking, has a significant effect. Specifically, 10 minutes of walking can decrease those negative mood states and increase the positive mood states. Only 10 minutes of walking can have an immediate positive effect on anxiety levels. That is, it will decrease your anxiety levels. And the reason for that is what we talked about, what we started with, that wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals. By moving your body for 10 minutes walking,

Starting point is 00:06:25 you are releasing serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline. By the way, these are the things that are in common antidepressants. You get it for free just by walking inside or outside, up the steps or down the hall. It comes with that. You know, this message that we've been hearing since we were kids, that physical activity is important for our physical health. Your research, it's expanding out our view of physical activity. You go, no, that's not just for your physical health. It makes you a better human, right? It makes you more creative, more productive. It makes you happier, more motivation, helps you with memory, all these things. I think it's absolutely fantastic. So any other research to help people understand that you don't need to do that much? Yeah. Mood change is one of the most consistent, strongest effects of physical activity. Now, the hippocampal cells have been studied extensively in animal model systems, and we don't have an exact how much a day for how long do you need to have that.

Starting point is 00:07:32 However, the study that I love to highlight is a correlational study done in Swedish women. It was published in 2018, and it was a 44-year follow-up study. So in the 1960s, they went and looked at 300 women in Sweden and characterized them as low-fit, mid-fit, or high-fit. Just what is your physiological level? Again, they were in their 40s. They did no intervention. They came back 44 years later and asked what was their status now that they're in their 80s. And it turns out that relative to the low fit women, the women that were high fit in their 40s, 1960, they staved off dementia by an extra nine years. Nine years.

Starting point is 00:08:22 So what does that mean? Well, I immediately go to, I know that regular exercise is increasing growth factors, which is increasing the number of hippocampal brain cells. That's not curing dementia, but it's making your hippocampus, as I like to say, big and fat and fluffy. That just takes longer for any disease to come in and damage it. And what does both normal aging and dementia do? It goes in and it attacks the hippocampus, which is why in dementia that memory problem comes in early. So let's look at those high fit women.

Starting point is 00:08:56 What's happening? They're staving off dementia by nine years. It is consistent with the neuroscience that we understand about what regular long-term exercise can do, particularly to the hippocampus and your memory function. There are many studies that are in that same direction that suggest that regular exercise, as much as you can do for as long as you can do during your lifetime, is helping your brain, particularly two areas that are sensitive to aging, the hippocampus we just talked about and the prefrontal cortex, stave off those debilitating effects that can come with aging. You've mentioned growth factors.

Starting point is 00:09:38 How is it that exercise is giving us these incredible benefits? So BDNF is a growth factor that we know quite a bit about. We know a lot about what it does in development. So as our brains, as young babies are growing, BDNF and lots of other growth factors are basically there to help make those new connections happen. They facilitate connection or synapse formation in the brain. And then what happens when we're adults? Well, in adulthood, it's also facilitating new synapse formation, which is happening all the time. You learn something new, there are changes in those connections in your brain and BDNF plays a role. But there's only two areas in the human brain where brand new brain

Starting point is 00:10:27 cells grow in adulthood, just two. They're not growing all over the brain. One is the hippocampus and the other is the olfactory bulb. But the hippocampus is the only place where exercise can stimulate the release of growth factors. Where does that come from? It seems to come from muscles in your body, from liver release, factors released in the liver that then release BDNF that goes into the brain that goes straight to your hippocampus and helps those brand new brain cells grow.

Starting point is 00:10:58 Exercise doesn't do that to the brain cells in the olfactory bulb. So if you want shiny new brain cells in the part of your brain critical for long-term memory, that is your motivation to exercise. That is my personal motivation to exercise. But it turns out that the hippocampus doesn't only help us with memory, but it helps us put information in our memories together in new ways. In other words, it's important for imagination. If there was going to be one area that I could have that has new brain cells, I want it to be my memory area. You know, it's critical to our personal histories. It defines us

Starting point is 00:11:39 as people. You don't realize, you know, where would you be without your own personal memories, your likes, your dislikes, the things that make you laugh like there's no tomorrow. All those things are stored in your memory. And that is because of this beautiful structure that we all have, one on the right, one on the left, that is our right and left hippocampi. That is the structure that we get to get brand new brain cells in. And I've just given everybody the secret tool to do that.

Starting point is 00:12:12 Move your body. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Do This Every Day to Boost Your Brain Health | Dr Wendy Suzuki #382

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