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Chapter 8

ENERGY

How do you make sure your brain is as healthy and energized as it can be?

What should I make sure to have in my diet if I want my brain to be at its strongest?

How do I consistently get a good night’s sleep?

You have a clear purpose for doing something, and you’ve broken down the project or goal into small, simple steps. Does that guarantee sustainable, limitless motivation?

For example, even if you have a reason to read daily and have a plan to read for just five minutes a day, what can keep you from doing so is fatigue.

Mental and physical vitality is the fuel needed to drive your actions. We know the importance of time management. Well, motivation is all about energy management and optimization.

Here are my 10 recommendations for generating limitless brain energy.

For each tip, please rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much attention you are putting into that specific area. You may be surprised by your answers.

1. A GOOD BRAIN DIET

Resiliency expert Dr. Eva Selhub often likens the brain to a highperformance vehicle. “Like an expensive car,” she writes, “your brain functions best when it gets only premium fuel. Eating high-quality foods that contain lots of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants nourishes the brain and protects it from oxidative stress—the ‘waste’ (free radicals) produced when the body uses oxygen, which can damage cells.”1 She goes on to note that when your brain is forced to run on inferior fuel, it can’t possibly do everything it was built to do. Refined sugar, for example, contributes to impaired brain function, leads to inflammation, and can even cause depression (something you might want to consider the next time you reach for a tub of ice cream to contend with a tough day).

In my podcast interviews with Dr. Lisa Mosconi, neuroscientist, integrative nutritionist, and author of Brain Food and The XX Brain, she explains why the dietary needs of the brain are different from those of other organs. “The human brain requires 45 distinct nutrients to function best.

While most of these nutrients are created by the brain itself, the rest are imported from our diet.”2

Since we know for sure that there’s a direct connection between a good diet and a healthy brain, it’s essential that you feed your brain with the best food nature has to offer. On the page opposite, you’ll see a list of my top 10 favorite brain foods. (For a quick video on how to memorize this list, go to www.LimitlessBook.com/resources.) If you’re the kind of person who hates hearing you need to eat your vegetables, employing this list might require a bit of an adjustment. But there’s some good news, because there’s evidence to show that your brain runs very well with a little bit of dark chocolate in the mix. Remember, what you eat matters, especially for your gray matter.

KWIK START

What are your favorite brain foods? How can you incorporate one more into your daily diet?

THE TOP 10 BRAIN FOODS

Avocados: They provide monounsaturated fat, which helps to maintain healthy blood flow.

Blueberries: They protect your brain from oxidative stress and reduce the effects of brain aging. There have also been studies that show they can help with memory.

Broccoli: A great source of vitamin K, which is known to improve cognitive function and memory.

Dark chocolate: This helps your focus and your concentration and stimulates endorphins. Chocolate also has flavonoids, which have been shown to improve cognitive function. The darker here the better, as the darkest chocolate has the least sugar, and we’ve already talked about how sugar is something to eat sparingly.

Eggs: They provide memory-improving and brain-boosting choline.

Green leafy vegetables: These are good sources of vitamin E, which reduces the effects of brain aging, and folate, which has been shown to improve memory.

Salmon, Sardines, Caviar: They’re rich in omega-3 essential fatty acids, which help reduce the effects of brain aging.

Turmeric: It helps reduce inflammation and boost antioxidant levels while also improving your brain’s oxygen intake. There’s also some indication that turmeric helps reduce cognitive decay.

Walnuts: These nuts provide high levels of antioxidants and vitamin E that protect your neurons and protect against brain aging. They also contain high levels of zinc and magnesium, which are really good for your mood.

Water: Your brain is about 80 percent water. Dehydration can cause brain fog, fatigue, and slower reaction and thinking speed. Studies show that well-hydrated people score better on brainpower tests.

I met Mona Sharma when she was featured on Facebook’s Red Table Talk as the nutritionist for Will Smith and his family, alongside Dr. Mark Hyman. She shared with me how “the foods we eat can have a big impact on our energy, the quality of our health, and the function of our brains.

Focusing on key ingredients like good quality omega-3 rich fats, vegetables loaded with antioxidants and phytonutrients, and spices to enhance our digestion and focus, and can support both short- and long-term brain function.” Here’s a sample day of some of her go-to recipes to optimize brain power and vitality:

MORNING BRAIN TONIC

MORNING MAGIC SMOOTHIE

BRAIN BOOST SALAD

EASY ROASTED SALMON & BROCCOLI WITH SWISS CHARD

COCOA-CINNAMON-GINGER “HOT CHOCOLATE”

1. BRAIN NUTRIENTS

As we’ve discussed, diet affects brain function. But what if you aren’t able, because of your schedule or lifestyle, to regularly eat a rich brain-food diet?

Research has shown that particular nutrients have a direct effect on your cognitive ability. I always prefer getting my nutrients from real, whole, organic foods. Talk to your qualified health practitioner to learn what you might be deficient in.

In my podcast episode with Max Lugavere, author of Genius Foods, we discussed the benefits of supplementing with phospholipid DHA—your brain uses this to create healthy cell membranes.3 This is important because our cell membranes form all the receptors involved in mood, executive functioning, attention, and memory. B vitamins have been shown to improve women’s memories. Curcumin, the nutrient found in turmeric, can forestall cognitive decay. You can get a list of nutrients and their effect on the brain from the National Institutes of Health website.4

There are natural sources for all of these nutrients, but getting all of them into your diet might not fit your lifestyle or your palate. The good news is that supplements are readily available for all of these (though not all supplements are created equal; make sure to do some research). You can also combine these with the brain foods discussed in this chapter to give your brain the fuel it needs. For a list and links to my favorite brain supplements, go to www.LimitlessBook.com/resources.

1. EXERCISE

“Exercise changes the brain in ways that protect memory and thinking skills,” writes Heidi Godman, the executive editor of the Harvard Health Letter. “In a study done at the University of British Columbia, researchers found that regular aerobic exercise, the kind that gets your heart and your sweat glands pumping, appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning.”5

I can almost hear some of you complaining or making excuses as you read that last paragraph: Exercise is boring. You don’t have time for it. You can’t afford a gym membership. But the simple fact is that exercise is enormously valuable if you want to unshackle your brain. Think about it: When you’re active and moving, you feel sharper, right? Some of us even need to move around in order to get our brains operating at top efficiency.

That’s because there’s a direct correlation between exercise and brain function. And you don’t need to become an Olympic athlete in order to keep your brain sharp. There’s lots of evidence to show that even 10 minutes of aerobic exercise a day can have enormous benefits.

As your body moves, your brain grooves. Check out a few of my favorite exercise videos at www.LimitlessBook.com/resources.

KWIK START

Set your phone alarm to remind yourself to move for a few minutes every hour.

1. KILLING ANTS

Dr. Daniel Amen, a clinical neuroscientist, author of the bestseller Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, and a frequent guest of ours, came home one night after a particularly bad day at the office dealing with suicide risks, angst-ridden teens, and dysfunctional couples to find thousands of ants in his kitchen. “It was gross,” he wrote. “As I started to clean them up, the acronym came to me. I thought of my patients from that day—like my infested kitchen, my patients’ brains were also infested by the negative thoughts that were robbing them of their joy and stealing their happiness.

The next day, I brought a can of ant spray to work as a visual aid and have been working diligently ever since to help my patients eradicate their ANTs.”6

ANTs are “automatic negative thoughts” and, if you’re like most people, you place limitations on yourself in the form of these thoughts at least some of the time. Maybe you tell yourself that you aren’t smart enough to learn a skill that you’d really like to have. Or perhaps you repeat on an endless loop how pushing yourself to accomplish something is only going to lead to disappointment.

ANTs are everywhere, and there isn’t enough ant spray in the world to get rid of all of them. But eliminating them from your life is an essential part of unlimiting your brain. The reason for this is simple: If you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them. If you regularly tell yourself that you can’t do something, or that you’re too old to do something, or that you don’t have the smarts to do something, you won’t do that thing. Only when you move on from this kind of destructive self-talk can you truly accomplish what you want to accomplish.

KWIK START

What is your biggest ANT? What could you replace it with?

1. A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT

A 2018 piece in the medical journal The Lancet identified that “air pollution might cause 30 percent of all strokes and thus might be one of the leading contributors of the global stroke burden.” It went on: “Given the strong association between stroke, vascular risk factors, and dementia, the suggested link between air pollution and dementia is to be expected.”7 The air you breathe is critical to the way your brain functions. If you’ve ever been stuck in a room with a smoker, you know how hard it is to even think while you’re breathing that toxic air. Conversely, if you’re hiking in the mountains and take a deep breath from the crisp, clean atmosphere, you can feel your senses thriving.

If you live in a factory town or a big city with pollutants everywhere, there isn’t a lot you can do about the air around you. Fortunately, there are devices available to clean the air in your home and in your office, and you can make an increased effort to get to cleaner spaces more frequently.

A clean environment goes beyond air quality. Removing clutter and distractions from your surroundings will make you feel lighter and improve your ability to focus, so take time to Marie Kondo your mind and remove any unnecessary stuff.

KWIK START

What is one thing you can do today to clean your environment?

1. A POSITIVE PEER GROUP

Your brain potential is not just related to your biological networks or your neurological networks; it is also related to your social networks. Who you spend time with is who you become. Motivational speaker Jim Rohn says that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

Whether you believe that or not, I don’t think any of us can disagree with the notion that the people around us have a meaningful influence on our lives. A recent Temple University study showed that people (specifically teenagers in this study) act differently when they are alone than they do when they are with others. In reporting on the study for The New York Times, Tara Parker-Pope said that “Dr. Steinberg [one of the authors of the study] notes that the brain system involved in reward processing is also involved in the processing of social information, explaining why peers can have such a pronounced effect on decision making.”8

Because of this influence, those you spend time with have a genuine effect on brain function. Certainly, they affect your self-talk, as most of us tie at least a part of our beliefs to the beliefs others have about us. But they can affect everything from what you eat to how much you exercise, to even how much sleep you get. There are lots of books out there dedicated to helping you distinguish people who are good for you from people who are not, but for the purposes of this chapter, just take a few minutes to think about who your peers are, how much influence they have on your life, and how this affects your desire to unlimit yourself.

KWIK START

Who is someone you need to spend more time with? Reach out and make a date with that person now.

1. BRAIN PROTECTION

This probably goes without saying, but protecting your brain is critical if you’re going to make the most of your brain. You have only one brain. If you were given only one car to use for the rest of your life, how well would you treat that car? You would take care of it as if your life depended on it.

Accidents are unavoidable, but putting yourself in situations where brain injury is less likely improves your chances of avoiding the worst. Hardcontact or extreme sports are not ideal if you want to make the most of this precious asset. Driving 20 miles an hour over the speed limit all the time on your motorcycle isn’t advisable, either. If you love these things too much to give them up, at the very least take as many precautions and use as many safety tools as you can.

1. NEW LEARNING

One of the most important things you can do for the health of your brain is to keep learning. We are all capable of expanding the capacities of our brains, even as we get older, which we discussed when we talked about neuroplasticity in Chapter 3.

What this means is that, as long as we keep learning, we continue to create new pathways in our brains. We keep our brains plastic and supple, capable of processing new information in relevant ways. This is especially true if we give ourselves genuine challenges in our learning. Attempting to master a new skill, to discover a new language, to embrace parts of your culture or the cultures of others that are new to you all keep those neurons firing and creating new pathways. By increasing the ways you use your brain, you increase the capabilities of your brain.

KWIK START

Create an ongoing “To Learn” list. What are some things on that list?

Write two down.

1. STRESS MANAGEMENT

We all experience some level of stress in our everyday lives, sometimes a great deal of stress. Whenever we experience stress, a hormone known as cortisol is released to alleviate the physical rigors of stress on our bodies. If this happens occasionally, it’s not a problem, but if it happens with great regularity, the buildup of cortisol in our brains can lead it to cease functioning properly.

But there’s more. “There is evidence that chronic (persistent) stress may actually rewire your brain,” says a piece on the Harvard Health Blog.

“Scientists have learned that animals that experience prolonged stress have less activity in the parts of their brain that handle higher-order tasks—for example, the prefrontal cortex—and more activity in the primitive parts of their brain that are focused on survival, such as the amygdala. It’s much like what would happen if you exercised one part of your body and not another.

The part that was activated more often would become stronger, and the part that got less attention would get weaker. This is what appears to happen in the brain when it is under continuous stress: it essentially builds up the part of the brain designed to handle threats, and the part of the brain tasked with more complex thought takes a back seat.”9

With such clear evidence that stress can be debilitating to your brain, finding ways to reduce or avoid stress becomes critical. I’m going to offer a number of suggestions in this area over the course of this book.

KWIK START

What is your favorite thing to do to cope with stress? When was the last time you did it?

1. SLEEP

If you want better focus, you need to get good sleep. If you want to be a clearer thinker, you need to get good sleep. If you want to make better decisions or have a better memory, you need to get good sleep. According to the National Institutes of Health:

Quality sleep—and getting enough of it at the right times—is as essential to survival as food and water. Without sleep you can’t form or maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn and create new memories, and it’s harder to concentrate and respond quickly. Sleep is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other. In fact, your brain and body stay remarkably active while you sleep. Recent findings suggest that sleep plays a housekeeping role that removes toxins in your brain that build up while you are awake.10

The takeaway: getting enough sleep—and getting enough quality sleep— is essential if you’re going to make the most of your brain.

Sleep Is Not a Choice

I know there are lots of people out there who say they don’t need a lot of sleep, or that they don’t have time for sleep, or even consider it a point of pride that their lives are so full of activity that they “have no choice” but to sacrifice sleep. That’s a mistake, and, if you’re one of these people, it’s something I want you to reconsider right now.

“Sleep is crucial to overall health and daily functioning,” writes Dr. Jean Kim, a psychiatrist and a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at George Washington University. “Increasing evidence has tied lack of sleep to a host of mental and physical disorders, including increased depression,

irritability, impulsivity, cardiovascular disease, and more. One study noted that sleep actually functions as a sort of laundry cycle for the brain, where during sleep, blood vessels (and lymphatic channels) in the brain hyperperfuse and flush out metabolic buildup from the day and remove neurotoxins and distribute components that enhance cellular repair.”11 In his TED talk about sleep, Dr. Jeff Iliff of Oregon Health and Science University takes the “laundry cycle” metaphor even further. He notes that, while we’re awake, the brain is so busy doing other things that it doesn’t have the capacity to clean itself of waste. The buildup of this waste, amyloid-beta, is now being linked to the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

“When the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn’t have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that’s accumulated throughout the day.”12

A little later in the talk, Iliff warns against doing something that so many of us do: sacrificing sleep until we get a chance to catch up. “Like our housework, it’s a dirty and a thankless job, but it’s also important. In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that’s at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow.”13

So, if you’re one of the many people who have convinced themselves that there’s a level of nobility in getting by with minimal sleep, it’s time to revise your thinking. There’s simply too much to gain from a good night’s sleep (including what you can learn from your dreams).

Getting through the Night

It’s one thing to say you’re going to get a good night’s sleep. It’s another thing entirely to accomplish it. About a quarter of all Americans experience some level of insomnia every year.14

There is, however, very strong evidence connecting exercise to sleep, even among chronic insomnia sufferers. A study performed by Dr. Kathryn J. Reid and others found that aerobic exercise had strong positive results on a group of participants who’d previously regularly encountered sleep problems. “Results from this study indicate that a sixteen-week program of moderate intensity aerobic physical activity plus sleep hygiene education is effective in improving self-reported sleep quality, mood, and quality of life in older adults with chronic insomnia,” the authors wrote. “These results highlight the potential of structured physical activity programs to improve the effectiveness of standard behavioral approaches for the treatment of insomnia, particularly in a sedentary older adult population.”15

A group at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine built upon this study by drilling down on the data gleaned and then studying the interconnection between exercise and sleep. What they found is important to consider: exercise is not a magic pill. If you’re having trouble sleeping, you can’t solve the problem with one session at the gym. They found that, even after two months, the effects of exercise on sleep were minimal. But by the end of the 16-week study, the results were considerable, with participants getting as much as an hour-and-a-quarter extra sleep per night.16

So, there’s a clear connection between exercise and sleep, but you’re going to need to give it time. But, given the overall benefits of exercise on your health, committing to an exercise routine is always a good idea, even if you won’t feel the benefits on your sleep right away.

There are varying ideas about how much exercise is necessary to affect sleep, but a commonly stated amount is 2.5 hours a week of aerobic exercise, coupled with some resistance work. “Brisk walking, light biking, elliptical machine, anything that increases your heart rate so that you can still talk while exercising but have to catch your breath every few sentences or so, is considered moderate exercise,” recommends Dr. Christopher E.

Kline of the University of Pittsburgh.17

Giving Your Mind a Break One of the many reasons why people have trouble sleeping, is not being able to get your mind to turn off. We’ve all been there: You have a huge meeting coming up, or something disruptive (either positive or negative) happened during the day, or you got a phone call just before bedtime that got you riled up. Your head hits the pillow, but you might as well be running laps around your house because your mind is busy with this inciting event. You wind up lying there for hours, and sleep seems as unapproachable as Everest.

Fortunately, you have a tool available to you at all times that can help you deal with this: meditation. The benefits of meditation are numerous (and there are many, many books out there that detail them), including everything from boosting immune function to decreasing anxiety to actually increasing your gray matter. One of those many benefits is helping with insomnia.

In a study performed by Dr. David S. Black and others, a group of older adults with sleep problems were introduced to mindfulness meditation through six two-hour sessions. By the end of these sessions, this group showed meaningful improvement with insomnia.18

If meditation seems foreign to you (and, if that’s the case, you’re in the vast majority, as less than 15 percent of Americans meditate),19 it’s likely because you’ve heard that meditation is difficult or that it requires you to completely blank your mind. Ariel Garten, creator of Muse, a headband that assists in meditation, clarifies that it isn’t about emptying your mind, but rather, “training your mind to be aware in the present moment.”20

She told me that you can choose any time and any place to meditate and that you can feel the benefits from it with as little as three minutes spent with eyes closed, taking deep breaths and then releasing those breaths, counting as you go. Another tool she advocates is focused attention, a super-simple process of placing all your attention on your breathing. When your mind wanders from your breathing (as it invariably will), just notice this and bring it back. This technique promises to demystify meditation for anyone who thinks you need to be a Zen master to get anything out of it.

Few of us are capable of locking our focus on one thing for an extended period, so it’s good to know refocusing is equally valuable.

When you regain your attention on your breathing, Garten says, “you’re exerting an important skill—you’re learning to observe your thinking.

You’re not caught up in your thoughts, but you’re in a process of observing that you’re thinking. You begin to recognize that you can have control over your thoughts and that you can choose what you are thinking.”21

Meditation can improve your sleep, even with these simple methods. My meditation coach, Emily Fletcher, author of Stress Less, Accomplish More has a unique process called Ziva Meditation. You can watch a full video of us going through her process by going to LimitlessBook.com/resources and we will walk you through it.

KWIK START

What is your top sleep tip? Write it down.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

Fueling your brain is fundamental to becoming limitless, and we have lots more to get to in order to make this happen. But first, let’s stop and focus on a few things from this chapter:

Put a shopping list together for all the brain foods you don’t currently have in your home. I realize that not all of these foods are going to be compatible with your palate, but really try to include as many as you can. Then take this list with you to the store.

Spend some time identifying your ANTs. What limitations are you placing on yourself? Give yourself a few minutes with this. What are you telling yourself you can’t do? Write this down.

Think about how you’d like to expand your learning. What have you always wanted to master that you haven’t found the time to master? Is it a different language? Computer coding? A new sales or marketing technique? What can you do to fit that into your life right now?