Limitless,, Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

NEW LEARNING

One of the most important things you can do for the health of your brain is to keep learning. We are all capable of expanding the capacities of our brains, even as we get older, which we discussed when we talked about neuroplasticity in Chapter 3.
What this means is that, as long as we keep learning, we continue to create new pathways in our brains. We keep our brains plastic and supple, capable of processing new information in relevant ways. This is especially true if we give ourselves genuine challenges in our learning. Attempting to master a new skill, to discover a new language, to embrace parts of your culture or the cultures of others that are new to you all keep those neurons firing and creating new pathways. By increasing the ways you use your brain, you increase the capabilities of your brain.

9. STRESS MANAGEMENT

We all experience some level of stress in our everyday lives, sometimes a great deal of stress. Whenever we experience stress, a hormone known as cortisol is released to alleviate the physical rigors of stress on our bodies. If this happens occasionally, it’s not a problem, but if it happens with great regularity, the buildup of cortisol in our brains can lead it to cease functioning properly.
But there’s more. “There is evidence that chronic (persistent) stress may actually rewire your brain,” says a piece on the Harvard Health Blog. “Scientists have learned that animals that experience prolonged stress have less activity in the parts of their brain that handle higher-order tasks—for example, the prefrontal cortex—and more activity in the primitive parts of their brain that are focused on survival, such as the amygdala. It’s much like what would happen if you exercised one part of your body and not another. The part that was activated more often would become stronger, and the part that got less attention would get weaker. This is what appears to happen in
the brain when it is under continuous stress: it essentially builds up the part of the brain designed to handle threats, and the part of the brain tasked with more complex thought takes a back seat.”⁹
With such clear evidence that stress can be debilitating to your brain, finding ways to reduce or avoid stress becomes critical. I’m going to offer a number of suggestions in this area over the course of this book.

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