How does movement heal our brain?
There's a lot of interest in brain health. And especially when we're talking about mental health, it's very closely correlated. Movement can actually heal your brain and that is what we want to talk about today!
Movement Increases Blood Flow
Movement increases blood flow to all the parts of your brain. And what we are particularly interested in, for healing toxic stress, is increasing blood flow to the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain is where your wisdom, logic, accurate perception, and all the higher functioning comes from. Moving your body and increasing blood flow benefits your whole brain but also really helps your prefrontal cortex.
Movement Gets You Motivated
Movement helps us become more motivated! As soon as you engage in any kind of movement, your dopamine gets activated, and the motivation oftentimes will follow the movement. We usually think that we have to be motivated to move in order to get moving. But moving first will result in motivation.
Movement also makes our myelination process faster and more efficient. This means we can actually form all of our habits quicker when we have movement in our life because that myelination process is sped up. It's doesn’t just myelinate the movement neural pathways for us, it's myelinating a lot of different behaviors for us in a more efficient way,
A former client of Leina’s, who had a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, started to move her body every day. She eventually started running 5ks! And she was able to reduce her MS symptoms. 🙌🏼
Movement and Cognitive Abilities
The research on daily exercise and children is super interesting because it shows that it increases gray matter in the brain and gray matter is where the information travels in the brain. So it also improved their cognitive and motor functioning. If you're concerned about your own or your children's cognitive abilities, moving your body is one of the best gifts you can give to yourself. Try it together!
Neuroplasticity implies that we can heal our brain, we can change our brain. Our brain is not static as was thought for hundreds of years. It is changeable, malleable, and we can direct those changes through something as simple as moving our body. I find this so encouraging.
If you are feeling motivated and ready to make a healing change in your brain, we encourage you to take our free quiz: Do I have trauma or toxic stress?
