The brain is a tremendous organism that helps all of us. And brain obviously functions for
our cognitive function, it functions for our well-being, for our mindfulness, for how we
interact with others. And I want to start to tell you a couple of stories that I think
gives us the flavor of what we need for long-term brain health. The first is an experiment that
was initially done in mice and then it was done in humans. And that is touch, the power
of touch. If you take a mouse and you take it away from other mice and put it alone,
all of a sudden it gets more immune problems, it gets more disease, it takes longer to get
over infections. You put it back so it's touched all the time it goes back to the way it was
and much quicker getting over when it gets sick. And the same is true in humans.
We were designed to be social. And so people who are loaners that spend all their day alone
where there's no touch and no other human interactions don't to do well. So you need
to figure out a way to get that touch. People who live with someone, cohabitate, live longer
than people who live alone. So figure out a way to do it and figure out a way to change
your life. Go out tonight. Find somebody. Obviously I'm not pushing you to live with
somebody right away, you have to live with the right person, because that other side
of it is stress is bad. And when you have relationships that pull you down it's very
hard for all of us. So there's an old Buddhist expression, detach and transcend. And I want
you to do that. Start to take a look at your relationships, both good and bad. When it's
difficult and when you see a relationship that really makes you crabby, whenever you're
with this person it get's you in a different mood or really affects you, you need to figure
out a way to get away from that. Obviously you can't eliminate all of your family because
many of those are family members, but you have to figure out a way so that those interactions
don't bring you down and hurt the rest of your life.
I want you to take that 20,000-foot view of you to look at your social interaction because
I think that's key.
Because life is a marathon and I think it's key to go that marathon and do well is to
have those designed correctly. At the same time I want you to be mindful of you. I want
you to figure out what is the best schedule and ways to deal with your life. So, for example,
we know is that downtime is important. Downtime every day is actually what allows what happened
during the day to sink in. So if a child is at school they study and study and has no
downtime, they're not going to remember as much as if they have that downtime at the
end of the day. So figure out a way to do it for your children and for yourself. For
me it's that drive home. That drive home I turn off my devices and I like to listen to
some music, classic rock, which my kids make fun of me for listening to, and that's my
downtime and it actually works. At the same time the brain needs quiet.
There was a study done in Europe where they looked at circles around and airport, the
closer you were to it the higher the rate of cognitive decline. So figure out a way
to get that quiet time. So whether you live in a city, whether you live next to noisy
neighbors, figure out a way at night when you have the time. I wear those earplugs at
night. Why? Because my dog snores and I need to figure out a way that I can get the quiet
time and my brain can actually re-put itself together for the next day. We all respond
to stress differently. And in today's world there are metrics that we can actually measure
stress. And we can measure stress in each of us and figure out what it is. To me it's
playing with the dog, it's reading a book, it's taking a walk in nature and they work
for me, but figure out what works for you then use a metric. And I also know when my
shoulders go up I'm in the yellow zone; I'm starting to get a little bit of stress and
I figure out a way to go back to green, to less stress. So figure out a way to do it
for you, know yourself.
You look back to the greatest writers of the medicine, and this is what astounds me, 2000
years ago Hippocrates wrote really the foundations of what medicine is today and the foundation
of it was to know yourself. And he would look and say when I eat to this I felt good or
I felt bad. And that's how he started to get these intuitions about health. And I want
you to do it for you to personalize it for yourself.