Incorporate stress strategies for optimal brain function

Deal with stress and keep concentrated glucose and fructose low.

Meditate, don’t medicate.
A Thai study of stressed-out students found that four days of meditation reduced cortisol by 20%!

Spend more time outdoors.
Don’t lose touch with nature--contemplating nature landscapes mitigates stress, reduces depressive thoughts, and improves cognitive function.

Incorporate aerobic and anaerobic into your overall lifestyle
This includes biking to and from work or doing gardening with varying levels of intensity. Both types of exercise are critical! Find activities you enjoy to create consistency. Take one to two days off per week for rest.

Have a massage.
Massages significantly reduce cortisol. Let yourself go for it once a month.

Practice deep breathing.
Simple and effective, exhaling activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the body’s “rest-and-digest” processes.

Build intermissions from work into the day.
Rest from work with enjoyable activities. Experts have called all day sitting the new smoking.

Undergo intermittent fasting.
Intermittent fasting host massive benefits. It improves decision-making and insulin sensitivity, enhances fat loss, activates genes involved in antioxidant protection and repair, stimulates autophagy (the body’s waste disposal system, where cellular junk, including damaged cells, gets cleaned up), improves hormone profile and neuroplasticity, increases cholesterol recycling, reduces inflammation, enhances resistance to oxidative stress and synaptic protection, and boosts growth hormone.
If you’re a female, fast for 14-16 hours; if you’re a male, fast for 16-18 hours. After twenty-four hours of fasting, growth hormone shoots up as high as 2,000 percent!