Antiaging Wellness Blog

Today I want to talk with you about learning to gain better control over your mental state and how to engage your mental performance supply chain to prepare your brain for the right action.

The four main supply elements our brain needs daily for peak performance are:

1. Exercise
2. Relaxation
3. Quality sleep
4. Good nutrition

Until it becomes an ingrained habit to supply all four of these elements to our bodies we cannot attain a state of optimised health and wellbeing. We cannot reach a state where our brain is fully equipped to manage our emotions, thoughts and behaviour.

When faced with unexpected demands for fast and clear decision making, we need to engage a clear mental state ‘in the moment’. This means you must restrain your learned emotional response : outburst, fear and panic. The first effect of this response is a physical one, so our control mechanism must also first be physical: Breathe out, slow your mind and your pulse, and pay attention to your heart.

Once you have reached a physical state of calmness, you need to engage your cognitive capability – controlling your thoughts – and focus on some positive element of the situation. Even if this is generic as appreciating the opportunity to find a better way to do something. Focus on what can be learned from this situation. This help you find the silver lining. It also helps you respond calmly and positively.

Evoking this controlled response takes some practice. After all, you are trying to overcome a lifetime of learned response behaviour. So start practising with less challenging situations where you can be more mechanical in adopting your controlled response, just as you would if you were engaging a physical challenge.

One of my favourites is when stuck in traffic. In many of us this evokes a stress response, But instead, see this as a moment in time that you have to yourself and relinquish control. It’s about accepting that there are moments in life you simply cannot control despite your good intentions.

Practicing with interactions with children is another rewarding environment – in fact with any close personal relationship.

The result of this practice is that you develop the emotional flexibility, strength and capacity to respond readily to times of diversity and you quickly learn to recognise how much power you have over the way you feel. For instance if you feel tired, you can dial up a wave of exuberance and passion about the task you are currently working on. If you are irritated and angry in a traffic jam, activate care and compassion. Sit there are try to imagine where all the other people are going. They may have some personal emergency – whereas you are only late for a meeting. I’m not try to suggest this is an easy thing – it takes a very strong will to break a habit that has taken a lifetime to perfect and one that results in a vicious spiral of negative emotion. The result of this old response is a downward spiral of negative emotions focused on how bad things can get – as if they had already happened. So many of us worry more about what might happen that what is actually happening. A lot of you will know the book – How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The author talks about living in day tight compartments, visualising the very worst possible outcome, building the resolve to accepting that – then everything better than that is a bonus and not to be stressed over. It really helps put things in perspective.

One of the surprising outcomes of adopting your new mental performance response state is that you start welcoming more challenges, strong challenges that would have sent you into a frenzy of anxiety. You start to appreciate the change in focus and the heightened state of awareness you feel.

I had a situation today when a truck driver attempted to make me into a Mercedes sandwich. The interesting thing was that my intuition kicked in before the event. I was turning left into a lane and he was turning right. I knew we each had our own lanes so there was nothing to stop me continuing but something made me pause for just an instance. Fortunately. Because within a few more seconds the driver crossed over three lanes, without indicating and should I have been a few meters forward of my position I would have been sandwiched between the truck and the parked car. I missed by millimetres. I could not have slid my hand between my car and the truck. I pulled alongside the truck at the next set of lights, wound down my window and attempted to gain the attention of the driver. I wasn’t about to abuse him, I merely wanted to inform him of what happened so that he might be more careful in the future. He was too busy talking on the phone [which is no doubt why his attention missed me earlier] and his look and demeanour told me that he would most likely not take my concern well. I was already shaken and not in the mood for a hostile confrontation. It was a beautiful day and I was enjoying being out and about – so I just let it go. Some of you may rightly say that I was selfish. That pulling his attention may save somebody else in the future. And you are right. But we are all allowed to be selfish. I am going through a very intense time in my life and as part of my planning; I had resolved to be kind to myself. To avoid any further stressors than necessary. So I just let it go, and took the opportunity to appreciate that fleeting moment of intuition that had just saved my life.

As more of us struggle to find the balance between healthy outdoor exercise and protection from the damaging effect of UVB, it is always interesting to hear more ways to protect ourselves from this skin cancer activator.

The latest is bran.

According to recent research at the University of Maryland, atioxidants found in bran could help protect against DNA damage from sun exposure and radiation therapy , regardless of whether it is ingested or applied topically. Yeah – I can just imagine running down the beach with my breakfast spread all over my body!!

But seriously, inositol and inositol hexaphosphate (IP6), found in legumes and bran, can protect human skin cells from exposure to UVB radiation. And that includes protection from the sun or radiation from a nuclear disaster or bomb.

The two molecules, which are found in legumes and bran, protect human skin cells from exposure to UVB radiation, according to researchers. UVB is the longer wavelength radiation that is absorbed in the upper levels of the skin containing keratinocytes. Cell exposure to ionizing radiation may cause permanent DNA damage, resulting in cell death.

There are two ways in which cells normally die:

1. They are killed by injury
2. They are induced to commit suicide – apoptosis

Under normal circumstances, cell apoptosis is controlled by a tumour-suppressing gene, as a protective mechanism preventing uncontrolled division of damaged cells leads to tumor growth. This occurs in instances such as cancer, virus infection, cells with DNA damage and immune system cells. Both inositol and IP6 are known to have potent antioxidant properties, and when applied topically or ingested IP6 may provide protection against ionizing radiation in general.

It seems therefore, that conventional sunscreens may not be the only defence against sun damage.

Other internal radiation protection foods include a broccoli extract sulforaphane, which may help to protect against UV damage by stimulating the cell’s own protective mechanisms.