resting to restore Archives - Amazing Health Advances

Vacation Health Benefits: How Taking Time Off Changes Your Brain

The AHA! Team — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 05:25:48 +0000

Kissairis Munoz via Dr. Axe – A study published in Translational Psychiatry found that both taking a vacation and meditating actually make an impact on our molecular networks. We can probably all agree that leaving the cubicle and heading out on a holiday or taking a midday break to meditate and de-clutter our minds feels good. But did you know that these disruptions in our regular schedules actually change our minds and bodies for the better, on a biological level? And that’s just one of the vacation health benefits. A study published in Translational Psychiatry found that both taking a vacation and meditating actually make an impact on our molecular networks. The study followed 94 healthy women between the ages of 30 to 60 years old. They all stayed at the same resort, with half simply on vacation and the other half following a meditation training program. To better understand the “meditation effect,” the scientists behind the study also followed a group of 30 experienced meditators staying at the retreat the same week. The research team looked at changes in 20,000 genes to figure out which genes changed during and after the resort trip. The results showed that spending a week at the resort significantly changed the molecular network patterns of participants in all the groups: the vacationers, the beginner meditators and the experienced meditators. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most notable gene activity was in those areas relating to stress response and immune function. A month after the experience was over, those newbie meditators were riding the relaxation wave with fewer symptoms of depression alongside visible stress relief compared to the non-meditating vacationers. Essentially, while it seems logical that taking a vacation or engaging in heavy meditation would reduce stress, this is one of the first times that researchers have been able to pinpoint large changes in the body’s genes in a short amount of time. What happens in your body when you go on vacation or meditate? Keep reading to learn more of the benefits of taking a vacation. Vacation health benefits Let’s start with the elephant in the room: Most of us don’t take enough time off. In fact, more than half (55 percent) of Americans don’t use all of their paid time off (PTO), and when they do take off, 52 percent say they have worked during time they took off. While it might seem that you’re just getting ahead and proving your worth to your boss, not taking full advantage of those days off means you’re failing to receive the benefits of vacation time. For starters, just planning a vacation can actually boost happiness levels. Whether it’s from the anticipation of the unknown or the excitement of planning time away, getting ready for a holiday can increase happiness, with one study finding that participants saw their mood levels improve about eight weeks before going away. But the real magic occurs when you vacation. Being in a new environment, particularly abroad, affects how our neural pathways respond to things (also known as neuroplasticity) and can make us more creative. When we’re in our normal, day-to-day lives, our brains can go on autopilot: They know how things work and where places are. When our brains are exposed to new sounds, tastes and cultures, different synapses fire off in our brains, revitalizing our minds and encouraging us to try new things, if only because we have to. Maybe you’re not too keen on getting in touch with your creative side. Going on vacation will help you physically, too. The Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948 and is still going strong, found that women who took vacations just once every six years were nearly eight times more likely to have a heart attack than those who took one at least every two years. A University of Massachusetts study discovered that among middle-aged men at high risk for coronary heart disease, the frequency of annual vacations was associated with a reduced risk of dying. Men who went on vacation regularly were 21 percent less likely to die of any cause and 32 percent less likely to die of heart disease. Who needs medicine when you can lie on the beach? Maybe you don’t have the luxury of jet-setting off to an exotic locale or taking weeks off at a time. That doesn’t mean you should skip taking time off. Turning off your email and “unplugging” can ease you into a vacation state of mind, whether you’re enjoying a “staycation” or hitting the road with your family. Being willing to try new things, whether you’re in an unfamiliar location or not, can keep your brain active and on its toes. Try local food and an adventure you might not normally indulge in. Staying local? Check out a restaurant with a cuisine you might be unfamiliar with, or visit a nearby town you haven’t explored yet. How meditating changes your body Meditation has been around for thousands of years, and the positive effects from people who practice “mind exercising” have been touted for nearly as long. Now science can back up that the benefits you feel after taking a few minutes of zen are real and actually transform your cells. For instance, a 2014 study published in the journal Cancer found that cancer survivors who participated in stress-reducing techniques, including meditation and yoga, physically changed their cells. At the end of the three-month study, the two groups who meditated had longer telomere lengths than the control group, which only participated in one six-hour stress-reduction workshop. Telomeres are bits of DNA at the end of our chromosomes. Shortened telomeres are associated with aging, diseases like cancer as well as death. As our telomeres age and can no longer shorten, the cells they’re attached to begin dying as well. This is how our bodies age. When the study was over, the telomeres of those who meditated were the same length as when the study began. The control group’s telomeres were shorter, indicating that something about the stress-reducing activities was able to keep the telomeres intact in those three months. “We already know that psychosocial interventions like mindfulness meditation will help you feel better mentally, but now for the first time we have evidence that they can also influence key aspects of your biology,” said Linda E. Carlson, the study’s lead investigator. Meditation has also been proven to help reduce anxiety, and it all comes back to the “Me Center,” or the medial prefrontal cortex. This is the area of our brains that processes information about ourselves and the world around us (hence the “me”). Usually, the neural pathways from the sensation and fear areas of the brain to the Me Center are quite strong, triggering a reaction in the Me Center. Meditation actually weakens this connection, so the instinct to react to an upsetting situation weakens. At the same time, the Me Center link to the brain’s lateral prefrontal cortex, or Assessment Center, strengthens. Instead of freaking out about a situation, our minds are able to assess what’s happening in a more rational manner. So, for example, if you email your boss a question and it takes her a few hours to respond, instead of worrying that your job is in jeopardy, you’re able to ascertain that she’s probably in a long meeting and unreachable at the moment. Regularly meditating might actually make you a more compassionate person as well. A 2008 study found that when meditators heard sounds of people suffering, their temporal parietal junctures, the area of the brain linked with empathy, had a stronger response than in the brains of those who don’t regularly meditate. To read the original article click here.

The post Vacation Health Benefits: How Taking Time Off Changes Your Brain appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.

The Difference Between Rest & Restoration, Why Resting Alone Is Not Sufficient

AHA Publisher — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 08:00:29 +0000

Dr. Caroline Leaf – In the middle of a global pandemic, the idea of rest seems so…complicated. What is it? How do you do it? How do you find peace when things seem so crazy? In this podcast (episode #253) and blog, I talk about the difference between resting to restore versus just resting, why rest alone is often not enough, and how to use a Neurocycle to effectively and sustainably restore your mind and brain. How many of you have ever binge-watched a Netflix show because you desperately needed a break, only to feel completely unrested the minute the binge ends? How many of you went on that weekend break or holiday, and came back feeling like you are still exhausted, even though you spent hours lying on that beach and going for long walks in beautiful scenery? If this sounds familiar, you are not alone! Indeed, finding ways to rest well can be incredibly challenging — it is a recurring challenge in my life. Although there is a ton of information out there (just look at how many social media posts are encouraging you to make self-care a routine part of your regimen!), so many people are still exhausted and burned out. It seems like almost every day I get a new article or research notification telling me how bad things are! So, what can we do? Is there hope? Although this may sound counterintuitive, rest has so much to do with the mind. Regardless of what technique we use or thing we do to rest, if we can’t manage what is going through our heads, it can backfire on us, leaving us feeling tired and downcast. To do this, I recommend doing a Neurocycle, the scientific mind-management process I have developed and researched over the past three decades and discuss in my upcoming book Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess and in my latest clinical trials. These 5 steps can help you learn how to rest well—speaking from experience. Recently, I started using the Neurocycle daily to find out why I was still having frequent periods exhaustion and burn-out. I knew the main reason why I felt this way was because of the issues I was dealing with in my business and family—I knew the root cause and was analyzing this because I try to live a mind-managed lifestyle (I really do apply my own system in my life!). I also have an incredible relationship with my husband—we live and work well together. I do daily fasted workouts and hot yoga, I eat real food mindfully, I have daily infrared sauna sessions, and really do try to take care of my mind and body. But still I was not truly resting, and I kept saying “I am so exhausted”. I couldn’t seem to catch my “mental breath”, so I knew something else was going on as well, and that I needed to dig deeper to find the vein of that root in my life. So, starting on Jan 1st, for around 7 minutes a day, I went through the 5 steps of the Neurocycle (gather, reflect, write, recheck and active reach—see below) to find out why I was not feeling rested even though I was taking “breaks” and living a mind-managed lifestyle. This is what I did daily: Step 1: Gather In this step, I gathered awareness of the rest I had that day and my physical and emotional warning signals, behaviors and perspectives. Step 2: Reflect I then asked, answered and discussed why I am feeling the way I do, based on what I became aware of in step 1. Step 3: Write I then wrote my answers down to help me organize my thinking and gain more clarity into how I felt that day and why. To do this, I used a Metacog, a way of writing that is naturally and instinctively based on how we try to work out meaning from information. In this method, I focus on the essentials, which is usually around 15 to 35 percent of the information we are processing. For more on this, see my book Think, Learn, Succeed. Step 4: Recheck In this step, I did what I call a “mental autopsy”. I rechecked what I wrote on my Metacog, looking for patterns and triggers, and thought about why I felt the way I did and how I can do better. Step 5: Active Reach Lastly, I worked out an action for the day from my recheck, which would help me practice what I learnt about myself and my need to rest better that day. Today is day 34—I still have 29 days of practice left to establish this thought as a habit in this 63-day cycle. However, I was so excited at what I have discovered thus far, which is helping me enormously, that I wanted to share it with you in this podcast and blog. I noticed the obvious pretty quickly, which was that I still wasn’t taking sufficient time out, and had been swinging between a heavy workload, financial strain, and a family crisis. I addressed this through my active reaches daily by taking time alone in the sauna and having long, hot baths at night. However, I was still battling with exhaustion. So, what was going on here? What was I doing wrong? My “ah-ha” moment came around day 14 (two weeks in): I had learned how to build rest into my routine, but I still wasn’t fully restoring! So, for the next week, days 15-21, I embraced, processed and reconceptualized this realization using the 5 steps of the Neurocycle until I worked out how to rest to restore versus just rest. And this is what I want to share with you now: Let’s begin with the definition of restoration. Restoring is a transitive verb; it means to give back, to return, to put or bring back into existence and use…to renew. The opposite of restoration is to weaken, undermine, cripple, undo, depress, split or dull. Rest, on the other hand, is defined as ceasing of activity to relax and refresh, or to recover strength. I recognized that, by days 19-21, I was getting the rest bit right, but I had missed the restore element. I wasn’t watching what my chaotic mind was doing while I was resting! So, for example, when I binged watched Netflix in my infrared sauna or with my family, or went to an exercise class, or had fun with my family, I was resting physically, but not restoring. Deep down, I was still worrying about a family member, the work I had to do, how this person was going to react to that person and how could I prevent it and all these things! Instead of allowing my mind and brain to renew and return to baseline, thus bringing coherence back into my mind, I was weakening, undermining and undoing my rest, which was impacting me mentally and physically. After realizing this, I came up with four active reaches I have been doing daily to rest to restore: 1. Taking more thinker moments Research shows that we spend half to ¾ of our day in our minds and time-traveling through our thoughts and memories. How we do this can either help or harm our ability to rest well, which is why it is important that we take what I call “thinker moments” throughout the day. These are periods where we let our minds wander and daydream, which help us rest and restore because they give our brains the downtime they need to function optimally. When we let our minds wander, we internally reboot our thinking, giving our internal dialogue some quality “me time”. I have found that the best way to have a thinker moment is to close your eyes and allow your mind to release a free flow of thoughts creatively for 5 minutes. I find that having pen and paper at hand is useful during this process, so you can write down the thoughts that are flowing freely and their direction, as well as the thoughts you keep coming back to that are stealing your peace, which you can then work on in a separate Neurocycle. 2. Avoiding “milkshake” multi-tasking Multi-tasking is really not good for the brain. Even though we can do it, our minds aren’t good at this kind of scattered, jumpy thinking. It draws energy from our brain and creates something akin to a dust storm in our minds, which can affect our mental and physical health. When we multitask, we end up with what I call “milkshake thinking”, which is the opposite of mindfulness. Every rapid, incomplete, and low quality shift of thought makes a “milkshake” with our brain cells and neurochemicals, which is the opposite of how the brain is designed to function. When we consciously try to jump rapidly from one task to another, we essentially cloud our ability to concentrate and think deeply, which impacts our ability to do a task well, leading to unnecessary levels of anxiety and stress in our life. If you are anything like me, sometimes it is hard to resist the temptation to multi-task when resting. However, I realized that when I consciously made an effort not to multi-task (I did a Neurocycle on this too!), I really did feel more restored and renewed. 3. Making my rest periods about myself, not other people. I came to the realization that I need to make my rest periods about my rest, and stop letting other people pull on my energy reserves. Indeed, you can’t help someone or deal with them if they are on your mind all the time, because it will wear you down. I also realized that being around negative people resulted in poor restoration. I needed to balance my time with healthy people and healthy, happy conversations, and I needed to enforce my own boundaries. 4. Practicing self-regulation. I realized that I felt more restored if I prepared myself mentally before whatever rest activity I was going to do, and self-regulated my thinking during my periods of rest to make sure I appreciated every moment. I would ask myself questions like “what am I thinking of now?”, “Is this bringing me mental peace?” and “Can I solve it now? If yes, then solve it and move on, and if no, then set a later time to deal with it”. To read the original article click here. For more articles from Dr. Leaf click here.

The post The Difference Between Rest & Restoration, Why Resting Alone Is Not Sufficient appeared first on Amazing Health Advances.