High levels of stress affects our ability to think and perform at our best and can actually start to make some areas of our brain deteriorate. Fortunately, rest helps the brain ‘grow back’ to normal function. How much rest do we need? Coincidentally, it takes four weeks for some brain regions to grow back to normal size. If you haven’t taken four weeks holiday in a while, now could be a good time to start.

In a study of medical students who crammed for three weeks before final exams, it was shown that their cortex (the part of the brain that learns, controls behaviour and helps us to think critically) actually began to shrink. A smaller cortex means less ability to do all the things that make you valuable in work and life and help you achieve your goals.

The student’s brains eventually returned to normal size, but only after four weeks of rest. While some long weekends and a few short breaks here and there help us to recharge in the short term, our long term brain health and our ability to perform requires us to have some longer breaks as well.

Here are some tips for making this more effective:

1)     Get away

If possible, get away. Away from work and away from home. This makes sure that there is no feeling of ‘oh, I really should be doing x’ around the home or home office

2)     Turn off the office

Set up your auto-responder and divert your phone. You might still see your email on your smart phone, but if you’ve set up an auto-reply, then you set the expectation for people that you won’t be getting replying until you are back from holidays.

3)     Spend time slowing down

Don’t go flat out every day on your holiday. Trying to cram things into your holiday can sometimes be as stressful as cramming them into your work day. Make sure you take time every day to stop and slow down. Maybe a long walk on the beach, or an hour reading a book – anything that takes your mind of

If you have the right inputs, you can create the right chemicals. You can create calming chemicals like serotonin or damaging, stress chemicals like cortisol.

To fight stress, the fuel we take in is critical. Here’s what we need: antioxidants to fight the damage that stress causes; omega 3 fats to rebuild cells and B-group vitamins to help produce calming chemicals that work in opposition to the stress response.

Antioxidants:

When we are under stress, we produce enormous amounts of energy and our cells (both body and brain) work overtime. This is why stress is exhausting. Just like a car, when we run our cells at high levels, high levels of by-products are also produced and it is these by-products (called free radicals) that eat away at our brain cells (and others) and hurt performance.

Antioxidants neutralise these free radicals. Foods high in antioxidants are coloured fruits and vegetables and berries. Article – 5 Foods Rich in Antioxidants

Omega 3 Fats:

Omega 3 Fats nourish our brains. After we are working overtime with the stress response, we need to repair the cells. We also need to make sure we have enough of the fuel that helps us to build new cell connections (this is learning) and lay down new behaviuors and habits. Omega 3 is that fuel.

Omega 3 Fats are found in some nuts, and fish such as salmon. Article – Best Omega 3 Foods

B-Group Vitamins:

These vitamins provide the inputs from which our calming chemicals are made. Like anything, if you don’t have enough ingredients, you can’t make enough of what you need. B-Group Vitamins, especially B6 and B12 are the ingredients for serotonin and GABA – the calming brain chemicals that help us to switch off the stress response so we can get back to normal.

Milk and milk products are one source of vitamin B. Article – Foods that are high in Vitamin B

The worst thing you can do when you are experiencing high level negative emotions is to try to suppress them. High-level emotion prevents us from thinking clearly, but so does trying to stop them, as our ‘emotional handbrake’ competes directly for resources with our rational brain. Research shows that the most immediate way to neutralise negative emotion is to write down succinctly what you are feeling. Describe it in three words or less and then get on with your day.

High-level emotions stop us from doing our best work. Our emotional centre, when switched on, actually causes our rational brain (the prefrontal cortex) to switch off. For some reason, we are hardwired so that these two regions cannot function at the same time. And usually it is the emotional area that gets the attention in these situations.

But the opposite is also true. When we switch on the rational brain, the emotional area starts to dampen down and this is something that most people don’t take full advantage of. Finding a succinct label for the emotion and writing it down seems to switch on the prefrontal area in such a way that it helps to switch off the emotional region.

Students with high levels of performance anxiety performed thirty percent better on exams when they were asked to succinctly describe their emotions (in written form) just prior to sitting the test.

If you feel you�re spinning your wheels and not getting closer to the things you really want, then you need to step back and be clear about the future. When we get real clarity around the outcomes we want, whether that is work or our life outside of work, we make better decisions about the behaviours we choose on a daily basis. In fact, research shows that when we are unclear about our �future selves� we operate with a brain region reserved for thinking about other people instead of ourselves.

A simple research experiment measured people who were disciplined at keeping financial goals (savings targets) with people who were not. The one difference they found was that those who could achieve these long term goals had a clear picture of their �future self�. Accordingly when they thought of themselves in the future, they used a brain region corresponding to self-thought.

By contrast, when the researchers looked at those who couldn�t achieve the long term goal, they found the pictured their �future self� with a slightly different brain region � one that is reserved for thinking about other people.

When we are unclear about our future, we don�t even treat our future self as being us. This has incredible impacts on the decisions we make. If it�s not us in the future, we don�t seem to be as accountable for the decisions we make.

We spend so much time focussed on what we have to do that we rarely have enough opportunity to do nothing at all.

The thing about doing nothing is this: when our brains are completely

quiet, we have the greatest capacity for breakthrough ideas and truly creative thinking. We can make more connections between disparate things, which helps us combine different experiences and knowledge to achieve true innovation.

What happens when we get breakthrough ideas? Well, the first thing that happens is that our brain activity goes completely quiet. After this comes a big spike in activity across a whole range of areas and most scientists believe that this is how we combine different learning and different ideas to make a combined innovation. We literally �switch on� different areas of learning all at once. The point is that these breakthroughs only come after a period of complete quiet.

When we think too hard about a problem, we don�t allow these periods and that�s why we can never find the answers to problems when we try too hard. In fact, people with damage in the most analytical part of their brains find it easier to do abstract problem solving.

One of the most important nutrients that we can have in order to boost performance is Omega-3 fatty acid. If you want to think more clearly, quicker, control emotions and behaviours and learn at a faster rate, this is the nutrient that allow all of this to happen, enabling your brain to lay down neural patterns faster and reinforce them quicker. The best source is �oily� fish like salmon.

There are a lot of bad things said about fat, but one of the greatest effects of this kind of fat � Omega-3 � is that it helps to produce myelin. Myelin is like �insulation� for your neural networks, which govern everything from habits to control and learning new concepts and behaviours. This myelin makes these neural networks hyper-conductive � making them faster and more readily stimulated.

Try to consume fish 2-3 times per week, or take an omega-3 supplement if you really want to boost your brain health.