Five Ways to Help Your Brain

Here are five non medication and inexpensive ways to help your brain work well:

1. Eat a healthy diet.  We forget that the food we eat breaks down to become the chemicals that provide fuel for our brains, but it is true.  Feed your brain well. It needs fuel when you wake up like fruit and cereal, a mid morning snack, lunch with protein, a mid afternoon snack that has additional protein, and dinner with protein and healthy carbs like vegetables.

2.  Get some exercise that you can enjoy and look forward to.  During these dark winter months it is great to get outdoors for a walk in the middle of the day even for 1/2 hour.  You may find it lifts your spirits and is great for your brain (and the rest of your body too).

3.  Ask your doctor if it is okay for you to take Omega 3 Fatty Acids, like fish oil or flaxseed oil.  Eating fish like salmon and tuna is good as well.

4.  Get lots of sleep. Establish a good sleep routine. For example take a hot shower or bath at bedtime, and have a glass of warm milk with a little honey in it.  Read a book or listen to music.  However watching TV or being on the computer in the last few hours before trying to go to sleep has been found to make your brain stay awake, so no screens before bed.  

5.  Learn to meditate.  There have been many health benefits found in meditation.  In addition you can train your brain through meditation to focus where you want to focus not where it wants to go.  There are many ways to learn to meditate.  Transcendental Meditation is one way (www.tm.org), and Mindfulness Meditation is another (www.eomega.org). 

Family meetings

Regular family meetings can be a great way to improve communication within a family.  Make it fun; serve popcorn, ice cream sundaes, or some other fun food to go along with the meeting.  Consider having each of you take a turn talking while the other members of the family listen.  The only rule is that everyone has to listen to each other respectfully (no eye rolling!) and without interrupting.  You can set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes and each person gets to talk about whatever is on their mind. The Time Timer works great for this purpose because it is a visual reminder of the amount of time that has passed and how much is left (www.timetimer.com).  After you go around the family once, everyone could decide they each want another turn.  If at the end parents need to provide some education and information about a topic that came up, this is a good time to do so. If conflicts arise then different perspectives can be shared. Perhaps some problem solving strategies can also be discussed for problems that arise in these discussions.

At the end of the meeting everyone can talk about the upcoming week. Each person can write or draw on a calendar about important events that are happening that week.  Each family member could choose a color that is theirs to write with.

Keep the calendar can be kept in a public place in the house, like the kitchen, for everyone to see.

Eating together as often as possible is also a good idea.  In this rushed society of ours, we can forget the importance of eating together.  Family dinner can be a great time for sharing peoples thoughts and feelings.  There would be no harm in going around the dinner table and letting everybody talk about their day for a few minutes, taking turns talking and listening to each other. 

A key goal of parenting is to raise an independent person

I am often reminded how dedicated the parents are who come to see me.  They are so worried about their children and will do anything for them.  So often they say, I just want him/her to be happy. I heard a story recently about a young man who was 22 years old, living in his parents basement playing video games all day.  When he arrived in the therapist's office at his parents demand, he said, "But they always said they just wanted me to be happy and I'm happy playing video games all day!"

Consider asking yourself if that is what you really want for your child.  Of course you want them to be happy, but for most of us the goal of parenting it to raise an independently functioning 25-30 year old who is  a contributing member of society.  (I used to say 25 year old but so many of this generation seem some extra time to figure out how to be fully independent).

In addition it seems to me that we want our children to learn some of life's lessons like good behavior earns good consequences and bad behavior earns bad consequences.  As an adult if you go to work and do a good job you get paid; if you don't go to work and do a good job, you get fired.  For a child, school is their job and the teacher is their boss.

What are you doing now with your child that will help them survive in the adult world?  What are you doing that will help them or hinder them as they try to become independent?  Our job as parents is not to make life so easy for them that they stay with us forever.  Our job is to help them learn the necessary skills to live on their own.  This means learning to wake up by themselves and go to sleep by themselves, learning to cook and clean and do the laundry and balance a check book.  It means learning to tolerate boring tasks and learning to do things we might not be eager to do like prepare our tax returns or take out the trash.

Is there one thing you can do today that will move you and your child in the direction of more independent functioning?