Who doesn’t want to rest their brain in a world as fast as the one we live in? This organ remains active and busy for several hours a day (sometimes too many), but it is fair and necessary to take care of it. Brain health is another of the great well-being challenges so that it can rest. It is not always easy to achieve that level of disconnection, especially at night, during the weekend, or on vacation. Although there are certain habits that can help and even more so if we take into account, as Regina Insa Martinez, a psychologist at Mundopsicólogos, explains that the brain has the characteristic of plasticity, that is, “the ability to continually create new neural connections to adapt to the environment.” Therefore, it is a matter of training.
Meet with our brain 30 minutes a day
This exercise is one of the proposals that psychologist Monica Johnson makes in one of her Savvy Psychologist podcasts to help the brain stop at night. The expert herself talks about dealing with mental issues during the day, that is: planning, thinking, reflecting, and even worrying during the day so that these things do not happen at night. Our brain is constantly stimulated, but what it is about is spending a while without distractions to work on thoughts, pending tasks or worries. “When the meeting time is up, thank your mind for that time and remember that any unfinished business is for tomorrow’s meeting,” Johnson says. And although meeting with our brain for half an hour a day may sound difficult to carry out, the expert advises letting our mind speak that’s what this metaphorical meeting is about even while doing a routine task like laundry or when you are strolling.
Breathe through the nose
“In a year we breathe more than 7 million times,” affirms neuroscientist Nazareth Castellanos emphatically in her book Neuroscience of the body. However, she adds, “we would be surprised at the low percentage of breaths that we are aware of or have controlled at will.” That is why doing conscious breathing brings many benefits to our brain (and its rest). “Breathing influences the ability to memorize, remember and learn because it impacts the hippocampus and influences neuronal dynamics,” says Castellanos. And he affirms that in resting situations it would be advisable to breathe regularly through the nose. “The nose prepares the air so that it can enter the body in a healthy way. It involves a process of heating, humidifying and cleaning the inspired air and has benefits that are not present in mouth breathing”, he adds.
Listen to binaural music
If we google ‘ binaural sounds ‘ we will come across a multitude of videos and applications that offer the possibility of listening to this type of music generated by two different types of sound frequencies that give a certain sensation of three-dimensionality. According to many experts, this type of sound helps our brain to rest. This is stated by Catalina Hoffmann, an expert in cognitive stimulation and creator of the Hoffmann method. “Binaural music allows us to rest by listening to slightly different frequency tones in each ear, and they directly affect the brain, modifying our state of mind,” she points out. She, for example, has made this type of music using natural sounds such as water, fire or air on a musical basis with traditional instruments.
Go from ‘do’ mode to ‘be’ mode
Monica Johnsson also talks about the importance of switching the ‘do’ mode our brain is in all day to the ‘be’ mode before we go to bed so that the mind knows that the time for productivity has to stop. To do this, you can do something that you really like: listen to music, walk with your dog, play a board game, watch a series or do a craft. In fact, Miranda Makarroff recently reflected on her Instagram account about how therapeutic collage-making was for her. “I like it because it is a meditative exercise to not think. It is impulse, without mind. Just intuition and freedom. Collage is playing, without great pretensions, without judgments. With chaos and beauty that remove toxic thoughts and give space for nothing and in nothingness, a volcano of creativity”.
Empty negative thoughts
Catalina Hoffmann calls it ‘artificial neural pruning’ and it is about emptying negative thoughts. One of the alternatives that he proposes is to make an emotions notebook and consists of writing without thinking. “We use it when negative thoughts or emotions come to us, so that the pen represents our subconscious part, the part where we store 70% of the information in the subcortical area of the brain is where emotions are found and where we must apply our ‘artificial neural pruning’ to eliminate all these negative thoughts”, explains Hoffman.
