Motivation Daily by Motiversity - WORK HARD TO PROTECT YOURSELF - Motivational Speech on Your Brain and Exercise

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

This isn’t about fear, it’s about awareness and prevention. The more you understand how dementia develops, the more power you have to slow it down, protect your mind, and stay sharp for decades to come.Special thanks to The Diary of a CEO.Speakers:Dr Wendy Suzuki https://www.wendysuzuki.com/Jim Kwikhttps://www.instagram.com/jimkwik/?hl=enDavid Raichlenhttps://x.com/DavidRaichlenDr. Lisa Feldman Barrett https://x.com/LFeldmanBarrettDR. Jill Bolte Taylor https://drjilltaylor.com/Dr Tara Swart https://www.taraswart.com/Music: Fablefort - WhodunitStanley Gurvich - Wandering Souls - pianoKevin Graham - From nothing everythingDEX1200 - Falling Up (Epidemic)Philip Ayers - What we discovered (Epidemic) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivirity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. If I got serious about my brain health, how much of a difference could I realistically see?

The longer you have regular physical activity in your life, the longer you're able to stave off dementia. The primary reason you have a brain is to control your movement. What exactly is going on in my brain then when I'm physically active? One of the things that happens when we exercise is we increase blood flow to the brain, and that helps bring nutrients and keep our neurons functioning properly. I want to be a whole human with a whole brain. I want all of it.

It's delicious. Oh, my gosh. And it lasts this long and then it's gone. Let me be very, very concrete here. The answer is absolutely yes. So studied people that are 65 and older and asked, what is the probability of getting dementia in the next? six years, depending on the level of activity that you have. Just right now.

Physical activity. Physical activity. And they measured it in how many walks you take per week. And if you took three walks a week or more, you were 30% less likely to develop dementia in the next five years. What exactly is going on in my brain then when I'm physically active? That's causing my brain to be protected, insulated from things like Alzheimer's and dementia. And, in some areas of the brain to actually grow. What is actually happening inside? A lot, a lot of fun things. Your muscles actually generate proteins called myokines,

and those travel to the brain, and they interact with neurons in ways that upregulate neurotrophen. So there's this great neurotrophen called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, and BDNF acts kind of like a fertilizer for brain cells or for new neurons. So BDNF, when it's upregulated with exercise,

helps both the birth of new neurons, and it helps them to survive and integrate into the processes that they're meant to work for. The primary reason you have a brain is to control your movement. That's the number one reason mammals have brains is to control movement. And it's not just a one-way connection. Yes, your brain controls your movement,

but actually moving actually stimulates different parts of your brain. When you move, by the way, a study show that when you listen to your podcast, When people are listening to this podcast and they happen to be doing something rhythmic, going for a nice walk with the dogs or on an elliptical, they'll actually understand the information and retain it better. When your body moves, your brain grooves. Just remember that. When your body moves your brain grooves.

When you move your body, you create brain-derived neurotropic factors, B-D-NF, which is like fertilizer for the brain. From an epidemiological standpoint, there's been this really great work coming out on something that's called vigorous, intermittent physical activity, activity that's not purposeful. It's short in duration, but it's vigorous. So going up the stairs or walking really briskly for like a minute or two. That in the long run, people that do that often have a lower risk of mortality and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease, regardless of purposeful physical activity, right? So you can actually get big benefits by just doing these short bursts of activity.

Exercise. It's like you're throwing yourself out of metabolic balance so that the brain can learn to get itself back in. You're basically improving the resilience of your physical systems. Okay, on the other side of the coin then, what are some of the central behaviors that people do that destroy their brain? Sedentary behavior is one of them. Not getting enough sleep is critical. We haven't talked about sleep yet. Sleep is so important for normal functioning of the brain. I like to scare my students by saying that in torture situations, if you deprive a person of sleep for too long, they literally die. They die. You cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row.

It's that critical. Yet we happily watch too much Netflix at night and get only five hours of sleep, when we could have had eight. Sleep is everything. Sleep, sleep, sleep. These are billions, 800 billion cells that are eating and creating waste for you to have a consciousness in every instant.

Imagine the number of cells it takes for you to just look at me and have a relationship in this moment with me. I mean, your brain is working hard. So it's eating, it's creating waste. go to sleep. Sleep should be a priority. And if you sleep, then the microglia can come out and then all the garbage and waste can get cleaned up. The waste gets pushed away. And you wake up crisp and fresh the next day because your brain cells have been taken care of. Very concerning with sleep and brain performance. We know when you don't sleep,

how's you're thinking the next day? You know, how's your ability to sell problems? How's your ability to focus? Remember things. When you sleep, if you have long-term memory issues, get a sleep study done. That's where you consolidate short to long-term memory is during sleep. When you sleep, the sewage system in your brain kicks in because there's energy to do so also as well. And your brain doesn't stop at night. If anything, it's in ways more active. It's consolidating short-to-long-term memory. It's cleaning out beta amyloid plaque that lead to brain aging challenges. Often a lot of the studies show that with a lot of disease, there's a kind of a sleep deficiency component also as well. Sometimes I wear a device to monitor it because it's not that

people ask the quantity of sleep what's the perfect amount, seven, eight, nine hours. It's absolutely not the quantity is the quality of your deep sleep and your REM sleep. Your deep sleep you can imagine is where you're recovering your body. Your REM sleep is where you're restoring your mind. We've always known that when you sleep, you lay down your memories and new learning, you process your emotions, the cells and the body regenerate themselves. We've, we've known that from for a long time, that's never really been enough for these very driven CE level people to want to give up eight hours a night to sleep. You know, it's, if they feel they can get by on four or five, then they'll rather do that because they've got so much to do. The ideal is eight hours and 15 minutes

in population norm studies. So that doesn't mean it's for everyone, but for most people, that's the ideal. Actually, sleeping more than that can be depressogenic, so it can start to lower your mood. So you don't want to really be sleeping for nine plus hours. But, you ideally need to be in bed for nine hours to get that amount of sleep. The exact things that we see in the pathology of dementing diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, like tau proteins and amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. How do you say that in English? Those things are being flushed out of the brain very actively overnight.

And that process takes seven to eight hours to complete the cleaning. That's why you need to be in bed for eight. nine hours. The biggest predictor of work productivity after, you know, is sleep and hydration. And after you take away sleep and hydration, I think exercises up there too, you know, some of us have more choices than others, right? But it's important, I think, for people who are CEOs, who are leaders, who are business leaders to understand that.

There are good business reasons. There are good economic reasons to take this shit seriously. And you need that regular sleep cycle in order for toxins to clear and in order to consolidate what you've learned during the day so that you can remember it later. And there are a whole bunch of restorative things happen during deep sleep that you really need. And if you can't get enough deep sleep,

that will make your budgeting problems worse, basically. We know that in regular healthy sleep, there is activity in the hippocampus that helps you strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day. It's called consolidation. And it's so important. If you shorten that, if you don't get enough, you are not consolidating your normal everyday memories. And second, it is the time during sleep when all the metabolites, all that garbage that your brain is produced. because all biological cells produce garbage, it get kind of cleaned up through the cerebral spinal fluid

that is flowing through your brain. And if you do not get enough sleep, you build up garbage metabolites in your brain. It's like you have a gunky brain. And do you feel like, I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don't sleep enough? That is exactly what is happening. When you think about things that we consume,

you know, like food and drink and alcohol and all these kinds of things. things. Is there anything that if I'm trying to have an optimal brain, I should be having or not having? Yeah. Well, so I think the most evidence is around the benefit of the Mediterranean diet, which is basically all healthy, kind of organic, not organic, but non-processed is the word I was trying to think of, things to eat that are very, very colorful. There is so much evidence about how good that is generally for the brain. That is my go-to.

What should I eat? Well, is it on the Mediterranean diet? If it is, then go ahead. If it's too processed, only do it just a little bit. The best evidence that we have right now is more plant-based, less meat-based, especially less processed meat. More plant-based foods and less meat. Less meat?

Yeah. Here's where the difficulty lies in all of this research. To study brain health, you need to observe people over long periods of time. And so you can't implement a 10-year diet intervention. Just nobody will follow it. So all of the research that's really strong in this area is asking people to report what they eat and then tracking what happens to them over time. So it's difficult work.

But the best evidence is that aspects of the Mediterranean diet seem to be linked with better brain outcomes. So more plant-based, more legumes, more whole grains, less processed food, less meat, less sugar. These are the obvious dietary interventions, right? And I think they're obvious for a reason because they seem to be so good for so much of our bodies and so much of our cardiovascular metabolic health and our brain health. At the basic level, we want people to have a healthy, balanced diet, mostly plant-based. but where you can choose a darker version of a food, the pigment in the skin of that food has higher levels of antioxidants called anthocyanins,

and they also contribute to neurogenesis. So it's basically like eating black beans instead of white beans or eating blueberries instead of strawberries, dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate, purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli. And good quality coffee counts as well. Oh my gosh, pay attention to what you're consuming. Fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, try to do it if, you know,

I know we exist in a world where not everybody can eat organic, but boy, pesticides are poison.