As the part of your body responsible for thought, memory, emotion, breathing, hunger, and regulating every process your body uses to live, your brain is vital to your overall well-being.
This three pound organ uses 100 billion neurons, connecting to 500 trillion points via your synapses, to process 70,000 thoughts a day, and creates your understanding of thought, memories, and sense of self. Without your brain, you can’t think, feel, or perform the most basic functions in your body.
This makes brain disorders all the more dangerous, as they can affect the way you think, feel, move, or see the world around you. To prevent dealing with these issues, you need to maintain habits to keep your body and brain at peak health.
Patients in the Salt Lake City, Utah, area concerned about conditions that may affect their cognitive function can get help with Dr. Jake Schmutz, Dr. Joshua Hersh, and the experienced staff at Integrative Medica. We offer a combination of conventional and holistic methods to treat a variety of debilitating, long-term conditions.
Let’s look at how your health affects your brain, what conditions can lead to cognitive decline, and how you can keep your brain healthy.
As your brain is responsible for regulating the way your body functions, how you treat your body affects the way your brain functions. What you eat, how much stress you put on your body, and how much or little exercise you engage in can determine your risk for neurological disorders and cognitive decline.
In short, what you do to your body affects your brain long term. We often think of mental decline in terms of people getting older and losing their faculties, but things that lead to brain disorders can happen at any age, for a variety of reasons. These include:
Many conditions can impact your memory, speaking, judgement, and other aspects of your cognitive health, such as:
Brain tumors can occur at any age, be malignant (cancerous) or benign (noncancerous), and can be the result of other cancers that spread to your brain (secondary or metastatic tumors).
These conditions affect the nerves in your brain and worsen over time, affecting your memory, mood, inhibitions, and other functions. Common diseases include Alzheimer’s disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), Parkinson’s disease, and dementia.
This is a wide variety of issues that affect your mood and behavior, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and schizophrenia.
Here are some basic tips to ensure better brain health:
Research shows that a regular exercise regimen helps reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and other conditions that affect your mental faculties. Routine physical activity helps your body and mind, increasing the blood flow to your brain and combating issues that can affect your brain as you age.
Both your mind and body require enough rest to get the necessary regenerative effects to keep you healthy. This means at least seven to eight hours of uninterrupted sleep every night, and managing any issues that can affect sleep like insomnia or sleep apnea.
Like any part of your body, your brain needs regular use outside of the basic functions it provides for your body. This means staying mentally active through activities that test your brain’s cognitive skills, like puzzles, reading, and playing card games.
It’s important to maintain a healthy diet for your heart and brain to keep both at optimum efficiency. Foods like fatty fish, blueberries, broccoli, pumpkin seeds, nuts, oranges, eggs, and even dark chocolate can help ensure your body gets the right balance of vitamins and minerals for your health
Staying engaged with family and friends can help keep your mind active and protect you from descending into depression and anxiety disorders, both of which can lead to memory loss.
There are many ways to experience cognitive decline, but you can do a lot to keep it from happening. If you’re dealing with any mental conditions and need help, contact Integrative Medica today by calling our office or booking an appointment online.
