No Brainer: Boosting Mental Fitness
You might be able to Botox your wrinkles away, but there’s one part of your body that definitely can’t escape the ravages of time: your brain. Vicki O’Brien investigates the business of boosting mental fitness and explains why B.C. employers should be doing more to keep their stressed-out, aging workforce tuned in and turned on.
On a mild spring evening in mid-March of this year, more than 1,500 people showed up for a free public forum at UBC. The crowd filled the university’s largest venue and spilled over into two lecture rooms, while 150 others tuned in at home for a simultaneous webcast. Was this a charismatic world leader outlining a new strategy for eradicating hunger or solving problems in the Middle East? A Hollywood star expounding on the virtues of international adoption?
memories
Ever stood staring aimlessly into an open fridge? Or lost your car in a parking lot?
Don’t worry about it, says Jonathan Schooler, professor of psychology and Canada research chair in social cognitive science at UBC. Being absent-minded is a normal part of aging. “Most of us just need a little reassurance,” he says with a laugh. “Our mind is actually designed to forget information; it allows us to separate the forest from the trees. If you really stop to take a look at what you forget, it’s generally not that serious.”
Schooler says we all forget things. But while we remember them later, people with irreversible forms of dementia never do. Dementia affects much more than memory, Schooler notes. It also affects mood, behaviour and problem solving. “You’re generally looking for something that doesn’t
fit with the person’s former level of function, which is why family members tend to notice our symptoms first.”
He says forgetting where we parked the car is a normal memory lapse that happens to everyone. “But while most of us eventually find our car, people with Alzheimer’s lose the capacity to adjust and solve the problem. In fact, they might quickly conclude that their car was stolen.”
Memory problems that are not a normal part of aging also include forgetting things much more often than you used to, forgetting how to do things you’ve done many times before, having trouble learning new things, repeating phrases or stories in the same conversation, having trouble making choices or handling money and not being able to keep track of what happens each day. (If this is you or someone you know, contact a family physician to arrange for appropriate testing.)
When asked for his top tip to staying sharp, Schooler suggests meditation. “If you clear your mind and focus on your breath, you can train yourself to be really attuned to the moment,” he says. “Then you’re much more likely to remember that you parked on P2.”
Click for a list of Brain Boosters
Why are we so worried? Put simply, we’re getting older. We’re living longer and investing a ton of cash and sweat equity into buffing up our bodies and rejuvenating our wrinkled skin – and we don’t want to lose our marbles before we reach our golden years. Health-conscious boomers are watching, horrified, as their parents decline before their eyes. Their own old age is looming, and it’s looking ever longer. B.C. men now lead the world in male life expectancy, reaching an average age of 79, which even surpasses the expiry date of long-lived Japanese men, who have traditionally led the pack. Women in B.C. can still expect to outlive men, surviving to the ripe old age of 85.
While increased longevity seems like good news, a growing number of us will inevitably face the combined effects of a decline in physical and mental function, if not a chronic disease related to mental health. While we still fear living in poverty in our dotage and losing the freedom of a youthful physical body, today we seem more afraid of a seemingly inevitable mental decline – and desperately want to know what we can do to stave it off.
According to the experts, the news is good: like daily exercise, regular workouts for the brain over the long term can extend mental fitness well into those later years.
Just ask Guy Pilch, who has done away with his TV. Instead of sitting in front of the tube, he works on his Spanish, reads prodigiously, plays Scrabble and learns chunks of poetry to improve his brainpower. Despite a busy consulting schedule, he regularly makes time to practise reiki, a Japanese stress-reduction and relaxation technique.
Pilch, president of Victoria-based Train the Brain Consulting Inc., is a mental-fitness consultant who takes a holistic, mind-body-spirit approach to brain health. For 10 years, he has shared his techniques with interested members of the public, but he now concentrates almost exclusively on corporate and public-sector clients, offering a broad selection of programs on corporate mental fitness, smarter working strategies and leadership development.
After a brief career in U.K. network television, Pilch emigrated to Canada, went back to school, completed his master’s in psychology and became a counsellor in the fields of mental health, addictions and psycho-geriatrics. He developed his trademarked Brainfit program to help himself assimilate new concepts and ideas while coping with the pressures of a fast-paced health-care working environment. Out of interest, he tested his basic techniques on patients in the early stages of dementia, with surprisingly positive results. He claims his strategies help people stay sharp, resist stress, manage change and handle information overload.
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