Exercise for your brain
One recent Friday afternoon I spent some time, as I often do, enjoying “Happy Hour” at the assisted living center where my mother lives. This is an opportunity for me to practice being fully present, to set aside my busy, multitasking mind, and listen to my mom and her lovely friends.
This week, as I sat trying to pay full attention even as my mind was leaping forward and backward to my busy schedule, it occurred to me that due to changing technology, this late-life phase may be completely different for me and my friends in 25 or 30 years. And it boggles the imagination to think of how my children will age in 50 or 60 years!
The impact of screen time on children is often published, but how will it impact us when we reach our ninth decade? My mother and her friends experienced smartphones and social media (if at all) relatively late in their lives. Yet for this age group 4 hours or more of screen time (including television viewing and computer use) is linked to increased Alzheimer’s disease and all-cause dementia. (Yuan et al, 2023).
As we age, how can we address the changes screen time is making in our brains? One way is mindfulness. Studies have shown that daily meditation may be able to slow-down degeneration in crucial areas of the brain (Dwivedi et al., 2021). Mindfulness meditation can be like a gym for your brain, with short term and long term benefits for your mental and emotional fitness!
Want to learn more about meditation? Check out our mindfulness training.
Sources:
Dwivedi, M., Dubey, N., Pansari, A. J., Bapi, R. S., Das, M., Guha, M., Banerjee, R., Pramanick, G., Basu, J., & Ghosh, A. (2021). Effects of Meditation on Structural Changes of the Brain in Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment or Alzheimer’s Disease Dementia. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 15, 728993. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.728993
Yuan S, Li W, Ling Y, Huang X, Feng A, Tan S, He N, Li L, Li S, Xu A, Lyu J. Associations of screen-based sedentary activities with all cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease, vascular dementia: a longitudinal study based on 462,524 participants from the UK Biobank. BMC Public Health. 2023 Nov 2;23(1):2141. doi: 10.1186/s12889-023-17050-3. PMID: 37919716; PMCID: PMC10621115.
