Positive emotions — joy, curiosity, gratitude, hope, optimism, excitement, enthusiasm, anticipation, love — all fuel our brain and strengthen our immune system.
This does NOT mean forcing yourself to be positive if you don’t genuinely feel it. It means giving yourself permission to engage in self care and to fill your days with joyful, meaningful experiences. It also means giving yourself permission to feel all your feelings — even the negative ones — because emotions are an energy. If we bottle up sadness, fear, grief and anger, they’ll erode our physical and mental health. Throttled emotions weaken our immune system and damage our heart and blood vessels.
On those really tough trekking days when I was feeling pain and exhaustion beyond what I’d ever experienced, I sat on my bed in the evening and allowed myself to feel whatever I was feeling. And when I gave myself permission to simply sit and feel and do nothing (heaven forbid), within half an hour — sometimes even sooner — the negative feelings dissipated and even the physical pain subsided — at least partially.
We live in a culture that maintains we always need to be busy; a culture that fears self care is selfish. Nothing could be further from the truth. Self care is what enables you to bring the best of you, to everyone you love and everything you do. And the most critical component of self care is brain care because our brain runs the show of our lives.
Boosting our brain is the single most important thing we can do to live a long, healthy, happy life, and to have the insight and creativity to resolve the issues our world is currently facing.
So here’s a recap of ten powerful ways to ways to boost our brain using the acronym ADVENTURES.
A stands for Anticipation and Awe
D stands for Diet
V stands for Vitamin D and Vitamin B12
E stands for Exercise
N stands for Nature and Knowing you are capable of more than you think you are
T stands for Thankfulness
U stands for Uplifting emotions
R stands for Relationships
E stands for Education
S stands for Sleep
I’ll leave you with two of my favourite quotes that relate to adventure.
The first is from Sir Edmund Hilary: ‘It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.’
The second is from George Eliot: ‘Adventure is not outside a person; it is within.’
Find your sense of adventure and never let it go!
To learn more about the inspiring work of Dementia Adventure, click here.
Or to make a donation, click here.
This is a photo from Stage 22 (the final stage) of the 300+km Pekoe Trail.
For more photos of my time in Sri Lanka, click here.
If you’d like to trek the Pekoe Trail yourself, please contact Deen at srilankatrekkingclub.com
I highly recommend you do it in the recommended 22 days, not the high speed 14 days that I did it in! You can also choose to only do one or a few of the stages to get a taste of Sri Lanka’s glorious tea country. Happy hiking – it’s a fabulous brain-boosting activity!
Please share this Health-e-Byte with anyone with an interest in brain health or a diagnosis of dementia.
