– With apologies to Deniece Williams and her 1984 song – “Let’s hear it for the boy”.
Many of us have gotten very good at monitoring our sleep and making sure we get seven to eight hours of rest every night. We have even gotten good at exercising 150 minutes a week and enjoying saunas and cold plunges. And most of us are vigilant about cutting down on sugar and ultra-processed take-away foods. However, despite all these healthy biohacking and longevity habits to help the body, I am concerned that many of us are neglecting our brains.
One of the healthiest patients I have met in the last few years was an energetic, sharp-witted ,76-year-old psychologist from New York, who visited our clinic just after the Covid pandemic. Being a New York psychologist can be a stressful profession and, although like many in that city, he walked every day, he did no formal exercise and there was certainly room to improve on his eating habits. However, what he had been doing for the past 20 years, was meditation, each and every day.
This association of regular meditation and vibrant health struck me at the time, and I was aware that although I do a lot of things right, I am not good at this brain calming habit of meditation.
We live in a frenetic world where the day might start with coffee, followed by a heavy gym session, a full day’s work, and a negotiation of heavy traffic that might include a school run. Lunch times can be filled with emails and WhatsApp messages, and downtime is often spent scrolling through social media updates, and news feeds. The result is a brain that gets pushed into a state of constant sympathetic fight-or-flight alertness.
I am the first to admit that I love the dopamine hit that I get from a coffee or an intense CrossFit class and I am also one to enjoy keeping up with medical and world affairs. However, if we take a moment to look at what this frenetic 21st century lifestyle is doing to our brains, it horrifies me. This constant fast-paced living is driven by hormones like adrenaline. This sort of catecholamine hormone is programmed to help us survive in what the brain sees as a hostile environment.
The effects in the brain is as follows:
- Our pre-frontal cortex is the front section of our brain, and is responsible for all of the considered, executive decisions that we make. Stress catecholamines break the pre-frontal cortex down, resulting in poor judgement and hurried, but often bad decisions.
- The Amygdala is a beautiful area at the base of the brain that makes us fearlessly spontaneous. It is this part of the brain that encourages teenagers to jump off high cliffs into water, or ride motorbikes off ramps. Stress hormones enlarge the amygdala, which might make us a little braver, but leads to anger outbursts and reckless behaviour.
- Lastly, the hippocampus is our memory headquarters and is the area that fails when Alzheimer’s disease strikes. Stress hormones break the hippocampus down causing poor memory and a patchy recall of what happened during the day. Clearly this damage also increases our long-term risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
When I stood back and looked at the effects of stress on the brain – anger outbursts, poor judgement, and forgetfulness, I recognized all three of these imposters in myself and realized that if I truly want to be healthy, I need to start looking after my brain.
Mindful meditation and the mind-body connection are two terms that have been bandied around for a long time. I have done a couple of meditation courses with the wonderful Dr. Simon Whitesman, but once the course completed, I found that life got in the way and the practice of meditation simply melted away. However, two things have since inspired me to return to this important habit.
Firstly, at our clinic we have a wonderful machine called an Omegawave. While you lie on a bed for two minutes, thinking calming thoughts, the Omegawave measures your brainwaves. Seeing the readout of what state our brain is in has proven to be a powerful tool to motivate people to take better care of their brains:
If your brain is calm and healthy, the Omegawave shows fast brain waves at the start of the test, slowing to calm brainwaves at the end.
If you are stressed and wired, the Omegawave shows very fast brainwaves at the start, and then the brainwaves continue in a fast, jagged pattern all the way through the test. This suggests stress catecholamines at play, actively breaking down the brain.
Lastly, and most worryingly, is the exhausted brain – the Omegawave shows slow, tired brainwaves at the start, which drop off even further into an exhausted state over the two minute test.
Secondly, it was Simon who offered me my lightbulb moment that at last explained the power of meditation. He shared that there is a wonderful area deep inside the brain called the insula. This is the area that connects the mind to the body. When we are stressed, the insula shuts down, allowing us to keep on fighting without feeling the pain of whatever we are going through. The danger is that with constant stress, the insula can permanently shut down, leaving us unaware of just how exhausted our body has become. The result is a brain that does not hear the warning signs of an impending heart attack, a cancer or an auto-immune disease.
Simon patiently explained that there is no pill that can activate the insula, no polyphenol to awaken it, and no peptide injection to magically enhance it. He explained that it is only the practice of mindfulness that will re-activate the insula. This means being aware of your five senses – your breath, your body, the smells, the sounds and the colours that surround you, preferably while in a calm, parasympathetic, meditative state.
If I were to choose one longevity activity that has impacted me the most in 2026, it is meditation. What has changed for me is what to expect from it. Rather like one should expect low-dose testosterone therapy to gently raise the mood (and not create a world class athlete), if we have accurate expectations from meditation, we are more likely to enjoy bit and come back to it. So, if I am becoming irritable and forgetful, I stop and ask myself what stress am I under and when did I last meditate? When I meditate, my expectation is that I am able to feel the stress of the day wash out of me, to feel my brain calm to a slower, happier pace, and the following day to feel that my decisions are more rational and my memory is somewhat improved.
So, as we come to the end of a busy and stressful year, that I why I say: “Let’s hear it for the brain”, and let’s hear it for meditation, which has the uniquely powerful ability to awaken the insula and restore the brain-body connection.
But where does one begin, you may ask? If you are not sure then can I suggest a 15-minute Omegawave appointment at the clinic as a powerful place to start. You will quickly gain an insight into the current state of your brain health and we will help you with a plan for what to do about it – whether it be supplements, hormone blood tests, mindfulness apps, or even a referral to a psychotherapist for one-on-one sessions to get this essential habit going.
To arrange an appointment, call Catia or Noreen 021 434 2564, or send a message via WhatsApp 074 447 4275
