7 Ways to Increase Neuroplasticity and Help Your Brain Adapt

Hey, welcome to this video on how to increase

neuroplasticity.

We're gonna talk about seven ways to increase your neuroplasticity,

and this is a phrase you might have heard about.

It's the brain's ability to essentially change and adapt,

and the whole nervous system can rewire itself depending on the environment,

depending on the actions you take.

And we'll talk about, uh, the sixth and seventh ways which don't

even involve you doing much at all.

You don't have to be taking in new information for your brain to change.

First, what is neuroplasticity? You can think about your brain as this

connection of eighty-five billion

cells called neurons on one

level, and there's also eighty-five billion

support cells called glial

cells. Glial comes from the Latin, uh, glia for glue.

These neurons are wired together.

You can imagine, uh, two neurons, and if one

neuron fires and the other one fires soon afterwards,

that's called spike time-dependent plasticity, then

yeah, they wire together more tightly.

There's the classic phrase you might

have heard, "Neurons that fire together, wire

together," and truly they wire together more tightly.

There's also new connections that can be formed in the brain.

There are new neurons that can be grown, especially in the hippocampus, and that's

called neurogenesis.

So there's many ways that neuroplasticity takes place,

and it happens on

different levels, on the network level, on the cellular level.

And there's ways that we can enhance or increase the

likelihood that the brain will change.

The first way is through sustained focused

intention. When you pay attention to something, and

especially if you're highly motivated and you're interested

in what you're focusing on, you're telling your brain

that there's something

important there, that it needs to learn, that it needs to adapt.

Research has found that through

the, the context, the time, and

the motivation and in- attention that goes into something

can enhance your neuroplasticity.

Second way to make it more likely your brain will

change is actually

through movement. Exercise was

shown to increase brain-derived

neurotropic factor, which is related to neuroplasticity on a genetic

level,

and

also through balance. For

example, yoga, where you can put

yourself, put your body in a position where it's

almost on the verge of falling,

and this, uh, it was shown, puts your brain into a state of heightened

learning.

The third way is through newness, through a fresh experience,

novel environment. You're basically putting your brain into a

situation where it's not familiar and it, it's also in a

heightened state of, uh, learning and exploration.

So it's no surprise that enriched environments, um,

are shown to

be associated with neuroplasticity.

The fourth way is through psychedelics,

and the research is still coming out on this.

There's a lot of research, um, that's using

animal studies that relate, uh, psychedelics to increased

neuroplasticity.

And I'm not encouraging anything illegal.

We don't actually know the exact

doses that are required or, for example, whether a microdose could

also increase neuroplasticity.

The research is still coming out, but it

seems like in those early studies on animals,

uh, neuroplasticity is occurring, especially in the neocortex.

And the fifth way is through fasting.

Intermittent fasting, for example, is when you constrict the time window

of your eating. So you would have no calories outside of a

certain window.

Say you'd ate, eat within eight hours all of your meals,

and

then for sixteen hours of the day you would fast.

The last two ways of increasing neuroplasticity

are

unique from the first five we talked about.

First five are what we could

categorize as activity-dependent

plasticity. That means that you're interacting in some way,

way with the

environment,

or in the case of enriched environments,

this could be experience-dependent

plasticity. But you're still, there's some kind of new information

coming in.

The sixth way to actually increase neuroplasticity is through

sleep. It was found in one study that the brain

continues to learn, uh, new skills and in fact can

improve a task by up to thirty-five percent just by

sleeping without new information coming in or needing to repeat the

task more. Simply giving ourselves the time to rest,

that's

actually when most of the,

uh, plasticity is occurring. That's when the brain is remodeling itself,

repeating

skills, and even finding new ideas or connections between

other ideas, uh, such as in REM sleep, the dream phase.

And now finally, the seventh and my favorite, so

I saved it for last.

The way that we can increase neuroplasticity

directly in what's called self-directed neuroplasticity

is meditation,

and that's when you consciously train your mind in a

certain way. In ancient texts, it's said that whatever someone

frequently thinks and ponders upon, that will be the

inclination of their mind. Makes sense, right?

If we're

training a certain way of being in the world,

we're thinking certain thoughts,

we're more likely to repeat those thoughts in the future.

We're more, we're basically becoming

that person, however

we're thinking about

things, however we're reacting to things.

So we can actually train this ability consciously through what's called

metacognition, becoming aware of our own mind and how it

works, and then resculpt it so that we can

change, well, really become whoever we would like.

And, um, simply through awareness and through,

uh, intention, we can ch- we can consciously

mold the brain that we would like. It's kind of like going to the gym

and getting

stronger muscles. And research has shown that

meditators have a stronger

connection between their prefrontal

cortex and the amygdala, and that's after eight weeks of training.

So

the implication there is that you become, you gain more

self-regulation. You can kind of

respond instead of reacting, uh, especially in stressful

or, um, emotional situations. In another

fascinating study, it was found that fifty-year-old meditators

have brains that,

compared to non-meditators of the same

age, actually

appear about seven and a half years younger, uh,

based on the gray

matter val- volume. So

these are

interesting, uh, studies that suggest that meditation is actually

changing the brain, although of course, in that case, it, it's correlation,

it's not direct causation.

But what's amazing is that the altered states in meditation,

the temporary ability to enter into these deep states of calm

and bliss and, uh, applied a sustained attention

can become altered traits over time.

In other words, the temporary state is training the brain and

changing it so that even when someone's not meditating,

they can start to

naturally,

uh, have those states of mind.