brain awareness Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Study: Key Differences in How Male & Female Brains Process Threats

The AHA! Team — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 05:25:35 +0000

McGill University via News-Medical – A new study has uncovered significant differences in how male and female mice process threats, even as they exhibit similar behavioral responses. The discovery suggests that including both male and female subjects in neuroscience research will lead to more accurate conclusions and ultimately better health outcomes. Understanding the influence of sex on brain function can help explain why males and females develop certain psychiatric disorders at different rates or with different symptoms, the researchers said. “Unless we thoughtfully and rigorously integrate sex into biomedical research, a huge amount of the population may be underserved by scientific knowledge,” said McGill University Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Neurogenomics Rosemary Bagot, who led the study. “Our work shows that sex is an important variable to consider, even if initial observations don’t necessarily show clear sex differences. If males and females are using different brain circuits to solve similar problems, they may be differently vulnerable to stress and respond differently to treatments.” Rosemary Bagot, Associate Professor, McGill University How brain circuits process threats and cues The study focused on two related brain circuits and their roles in processing information about threats and the cues that predict them. The researchers trained mice to recognize a sound that signaled a threat and another sound that meant safety. By observing brain activity, the team saw how communication between different brain areas processed these signals. Then, they temporarily turned off each brain connection to see how it affected the mice’s reactions, helping them understand how the brain handles threats. “We found that even though male and female mice respond similarly to threats, the brain circuits underlying these responses are not the same,” Bagot said. For female mice, a connection between two specific brain areas (the medial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens) played a key role. The study found that in male mice, a different connection (between the ventral hippocampus and the nucleus accumbens) was more important for handling the same situation. It was previously assumed that similar behavior meant similar brain function. Now, the researchers are exploring how sex impacts brain circuits in processing threats, focusing on the role of sex hormones and different learning strategies. This research is supported by funding from CIHR. Source: McGill University Journal reference: Muir, J., et al. (2024). Sex-biased neural encoding of threat discrimination in nucleus accumbens afferents drives suppression of reward behavior. Nature Neuroscience. doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01748-7. To read the original article click here.

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Embracing Your Comfort Zone Can Help Rewire Your Brain/Create New Healthy Habits

The AHA! Team — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 08:10:41 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #485) and blog, I talk to bestselling author, editor and journalist Adam Bornstein about his latest book You Can’t Screw This Up, the mental health benefits of enjoying food, the science of self-perception, the power of releasing mental baggage, why most diet plans fail, and so much more! Adam is a New York Times best-selling author and an award-winning fitness and nutrition journalist and editor. Named “one of the most influential people in health”, Bornstein is the CEO and founder of Born Fitness. Previously, he was the editorial director for LIVESTRONG.COM and the fitness editor for Men’s Health magazine. His first book, The Impact! Body Plan, was a fitness bestseller, and that was followed by The Men’s Health Diet (with Stephen Perrine), The Women’s Health Big Book of Abs, and The Men’s Health Big Book: Getting Abs. Adam has articles featured in publications such as The New York Times, ESPN the Magazine, Forbes, and Fast Company. He also has a monthly column in Men’s Fitness magazine called “Learn It.” Bornstein has appeared on Good Morning America, The Early Show, and E! News. He also blogs at bornfitness.com to discuss all topics related to health, fitness, and nutrition. As Adam notes in his book You Can’t Screw This Up, the diet industry is great at making us follow more diets, not making us leave dieting behind. But why is it that the more diet books and nutrition information we publish, the more unhealthy we become? What is going on here? We tend to associate health with extreme cost and sacrifice. However, even though change can be hard, improving our health doesn’t have to be painful. This has warped our belief on what it takes to become healthier. But the reality is that we don’t need another restrictive, unrealistic plan. We need tools that help us enjoy what we eat (including takeout!) and be healthier at the same time. In his incredibly easy-to-follow book, Adam gives us these tools, showing us how upgrading our health and losing weight for good requires us to turn our back on the typical dieting culture by following successful habits and frameworks not typically seen in nutrition and fitness. As Adam notes in his book, once we learn a better way to build healthy habits, we can leave behind the shame and guilt of most plans and make the healthy lifestyle changes we’ve been chasing. Our ability to create healthier habits relies not on abandoning our comfort zone, but expanding it. This means doing some things that are new and challenging, while keeping some things that are old and familiar, based on where and how we thrive as individuals. Yet one of the biggest barriers to this approach is our self-perception. So many of us have a mental boundary when it comes to food and health. Diets have taught us to expect a level of perfection and adherence that is not realistic or possible, and we end up just waiting for failure to come. Dieting culture has also taught us to measure success using ephemeral things like a number on a scale, counting calories or eating superfoods, which only add to our stress. This, in turn, affects how we feel mentally and physically, impacting our ability to become healthier and taking away from what we should really be focusing on: what we think of ourselves. Self-perception plays a key role in our ability to change our behaviors and improve our health When we want to change, we can’t just wait to become motivated, take action and change. The research on behavioral change shows us that we need to start with our relationship with our selves. If we don’t think we can be healthy or succeed, or if we do not fundamentally like who we are, then we are setting ourselves up for failure even if we experience short term success. Improving our self-perception starts with understanding what it truly means to be healthy. This means being vulnerable with ourselves, having self-compassion, and developing a positive self-perception; it is the understanding that “I am a healthy person, I am just figuring this out as I go along.” We know we are not a finished product; we are works-in-progress, not failures. This starts with setting small, easy goals, which are the foundation of successful behavioral change. Dieting tends to throw people in the deep end and then makes them feel weak for failing. However, when we set small, attainable health goals, we are far more likely to reach our goals and feel empowered to continue moving forward—the research consistently shows that success breeds success. We can go fast by starting slow! It is also important to remember than no diet works for everyone. Different ways of eating work for different people. Research shows that the key factor when it comes to healthy eating is what is sustainable—the way of eating we can maintain for the longest period of time. The question isn’t what food we need to remove or what dietary tribe we need to follow; rather, it is what is sustainable for us in the short and long term. For more on healthy habits and dieting culture, listen to my podcast with Adam (episode #485) and check out his amazing book You Can’t Screw This Up. Podcast Highlights 2:14 Adam’s journey 3:50 The truth behind dieting & diet books 7:10 Adam’s amazing new book You Can’t Screw This Up 12:24, 20:00 The science of self-perception 20:45 How the wellness industry manipulates our emotions 21:40 How shame & guilt impact our health 24:20 The importance of setting easy goals 26:34 We are incredibly resilient! 29:24 It’s okay to eat takeout! 31:50 The power of community meals 36:30 Why we should allow ourselves to enjoy eating This podcast and blog are for educational purposes only and are not intended as medical advice. We always encourage each person to make the decision that seems best for their situation with the guidance of a medical professional. To read the original article click here.

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The One Mind-Management Technique Required for Sustainable Healing

AHA Publisher — Tue, 28 Dec 2021 08:00:25 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In this podcast (episode #344) and blog, I talk about the importance of self-awareness and how it is a key part of the healing process. Without awareness, we cannot change or move forward. To make changes in our thoughts and subsequent communication, we need to be strategic, proactive and deliberate about our thinking. We need to try to be aware of what we are thinking about every day. This is called self-regulation. Self-regulation means that we don’t need to be held captive to our thoughts. Instead, we can capture our thoughts and change the way they impact our lives, and this begins with awareness. Awareness means tuning into the messages coming from ournonconscious mind into the conscious mind, where they can be changed. Once a thought is in the conscious mind, directed neuroplasticity(the ability of the brain to change) kicks in, and the protein branches holding the memory information in vibrational frequencies weaken. That’s when the thought is at its weakest and can be reconceptualized. This is why I keep talking about embracing our issues. We need to face what is bothering us and become aware of it—that is, be conscious of it—by gathering an awareness of the signals our mind, brain and body are sending us, such as feeling anxious, depressed, upset, sick, overwhelmed and so on. Once we do this, we can draw out the toxic stuff in our nonconscious mind and bring them into the conscious mind, where they are malleable. Only then can we process and reconceptualize what is bothering us and move on. Questions that can be helpful to ask as you do this are: 1. What keeps popping back into your mind? What thought(s)seem urgent? 2. What are you experiencing through your five senses? How are these thoughts making you feel physically? Gather awareness of these physical warning signals emerging from your body. 3. What is the information in the thoughts bubbling up from your nonconscious mind into your conscious mind right at this moment? Gather awareness of this information, noting how many thoughts there are and what they are. 4. What feelings are attached to the information the thought contains? Every thought has emotions as part of its structure—they’re stored in the nonconscious mind. When thoughts move into the conscious mind, we feel the emotions of them. How are these thoughts making you feel emotionally? Gather awareness of the feelings attached to each thought. The key thing to remember as we practice self-awareness is that we need to manage what we are aware of, or the thought can go back into our nonconscious mind even more toxic than before. Self-awareness is one part of the mind-management, as I discuss in my latest book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess, my app Neurocycle and my blogs and podcasts. The easiest way to understand the whole process of mind management is to imagine a thought tree. Look at it from the branches to the tree trunk to the roots. The first thing you need to do is gatherawareness of the branches and leaves, which are your behaviors and their attached emotions. Then you need to focus on the whole tree to try to make some sense of it—the branches, trunk, and roots, or the detail of your behaviors and emotions, what perspective they bring, and where they come from. This is a very revealing process—you are bringing the memories of the thoughts out into the open and into your conscious mind so that you can work on pruning and grafting the leaves and branches based on your process of self-awareness and self-discovery. This, in turn, will help you work towards stabilizing and consolidating the growing branches and leaves, much like those posts that are often tied to a tree or part of a tree to help it grow. Then you should allow the new branches to settle a little before you do more work on them to change the way this thought plays out in your life on a long-term basis. All of this first starts with awareness! To read the original article click here.

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