🧠Brain Upgrade: Lifestyle Choices for Accelerated Learning

TUNE IN TO LEARN:  

Your brain physically reshapes itself every single day—but are you giving it what it needs to evolve in the right direction? 

Neuroplasticity, your brain's remarkable ability to remodel itself in response to experiences, doesn't happen automatically. It requires specific conditions that many of us unknowingly sabotage through our daily habits. 

Drawing from fascinating research with London taxi drivers whose brains physically grew larger in memory regions, this episode reveals the 4 lifestyle pillars that maximize your brain's ability to learn, adapt, and evolve. These aren't just theoretical concepts—they're practical strategies backed by neuroscience that can dramatically accelerate your personal growth. 

Whether you're struggling with learning new job skills, seeking to break old habits, or simply wanting to optimize your cognitive performance, these four foundations form the cornerstone of effective brain change.  

By implementing these science-backed strategies, you'll enhance not just what you know, but who you become.   

Transcript

Welcome to Change Wired Podcast

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey, guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Shurina. I'm your host and your change agent, helping you to use science, psychology, behavioral psychology, neuroscience, exercise, nutrition, health productivity, health productivity, lifestyle research all kinds of strategies, research methodologies that we, as humanity, are coming out more and more with to help you shapeshift and change and transition every single day into better, newer, more fulfilling version of self. And today, guys, we are talking about on our Wellness Wednesday we are talking about lifestyle choices that directly help your brain to change faster, literally reshaping itself, to help you adapt to the life you want to create better, to help you create more results, to help you get better, to help you learn faster, to help you adapt to the life you want to create better, to help you create more results, to help you get better, to help you learn faster, to help you accelerate your personal evolution. So today we are talking about science-backed strategies, what has been shown and proven to improve your brain's ability to adapt to changes, to learn to improve, to again shape-shift and evolve as a human being, to do what you're designed to do to change, to learn, to improve better. And also, I think what's very important is to understand when you don't do those things, things that you are worse at learning, changing and adapting. And then you might get yourself to a place where you hear something, you learn something, there is new information that is better at helping you to achieve your goals, but it just bounces back off you. Or you learn something and you simply forget and your memory doesn't work all that well and you're like yeah, I remember, I read something about that, but I don't remember. Or I remember having this conversation, but again I don't remember, I don't have the details. And then you kind of keep living the same day, the same week, the same months of your life, over and over and over again. So today we're talking about neuroplasticity. We are talking about this ability of our brain. What is neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity is the ability of our brain again to reshape, remodel, physically, change itself, to help us adapt to new experiences.

Speaker 1 2:43

There has been research and you can Google it, read more details quite a lot of experiments and research. The most notable ones are done with London taxi drivers when, in a short period of time, they would take people who wanted to become drivers. They would give them this learning experience when they would have to memorize all the routes, all the routes so they can take, without any GPS navigation, a person from the place where they pick them up to the place where they need to go. So taxi drivers would go through this vigorous learning experience and they measured their brain's different regions. There is this technology where you can sort of lit up the brain and you see different regions of the brain more and less active, and you can see, using again different technologies, what brain regions, how they change over time. And so they measured that while those taxi drivers or to-be-taxi drivers were going through this rigorous training and physically their brain increased size. In hippocampus, for example, the area of the brain that is in charge or involved in memory, in special memory, specifically like where things are and how to navigate things right. So that part of the brain was literally got larger, kind of like your muscle. When you work with strength, resistance, with heavy weights on your, let's say, biceps or on your legs, they increase. So the same happens to the brain. Your brain literally changes itself, remodels, rebuilds itself when it's given all the conditions that we're going to talk about, and that part of your brain works better, has more connections, has more nuance and because of that you are much better at that specific skill, like, for example, for taxi drivers navigating many streets of London, being really good at spatial navigation.

Movement and Exercise Benefits

Speaker 1 4:57

Four lifestyle factors that we're going to talk about today. Factor number one is movement and exercise. When we exercise, our brain creates the substance BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor. Don't ask me how it's made or why, but what researchers found is that when your brain releases it, it promotes growth of new neurons and new connections, which is needed to accommodate any learning, any change, experience, for you to evolve and get better right. So for those taxi drivers to actually grow new brain regions, to be able to better navigate streets of London, they needed brain-derived nootropic factor, and based on research, we can conclude that people who exercise probably got better at growing those brain regions than then have them to do better job as taxi drivers, because not all those people who go through this training actually make it till the end and become taxi drivers right. So exercise helps you grow new neurons and pathways and connections, so then you can get better at skill a lot faster. So exercise and what scientists recommend? 30 minutes three to five times per week swimming, biking, running, high intensity interval training. I personally exercise for 30 minutes every single day and I make sure that I have an hour of walking usually more, but that's my minimum to make sure that my brain is at its peak capacity, or as close to it as possible, to help me grow, change, evolve and move forward in my life, creating more quality and expanding my capacity.

Sleep: The Memory Consolidation Stage

Speaker 1 6:56

The next one sleep Guys. No matter what you learn throughout your day, whether those are physical skills, job skills and your life skills, if you don't sleep well, you actually just like with exercise and gains in the gym, actually most of the gains are done while you sleep, and so if you don't sleep well, you constantly deprive yourself of good quality sleep or your sleep schedule is irregular. That also plays a role, a big role. Sleep is your memory consolidation, your growing stage. Again, when you exercise with weight in the gym, your body also builds things up during sleep. For me personally, when I exercise more, when I go through intense periods of studying, I notice that I need more sleep, like I literally need more sleep. So instead of waking up, let's say, before four, when I got my seven and a half hours of sleep, I might wake up at 4.30 or even closer to five, getting closer to nine hours of sleep. When I go through intense periods of either training or learning or both.

Speaker 1 8:13

All the learning most of it happens during sleep. They did a lot of research, actually, when they would make people learn stuff and then they would deprive some people of sleep the next night and some people would get all the sleep that they needed and so consistently, no exception, people who get all the sleep that they need remember more and better when they're tested the next day on the knowledge that they learned the day the previous day. Right. So sleep is your knowledge building, experience building, change, personal evolution, stage of your life. So when you shortcut your sleep, you make yourself a much more. You make yourself into an inefficient learner. It's kind of knowledge comes into one ear and goes out of the other ear. So sleep is a crucial factor in your capacity to learn, adapt, remember what you hear from other people, from your experience. So sleep is when you solidify that knowledge, make it become part of you, and when you change and you grow. So sleep to learn and to grow.

Mindfulness and Meditation Practices

Speaker 1 9:24

Then we get into mindfulness and meditation. That also in research good quality research consistently has shown that people who meditate 10-15 minutes a day, people who meditate consistently, who engage in some sort of mindfulness practice which is, at its core, a practice of focusing your attention, and without focus, without attention, we actually can't learn. So in order to learn, we need to pay attention, and so mindfulness and meditation probably helps the most. Nobody really knows, like it's hard to test, but mindfulness and meditation works really well, probably because your capacity to pay attention and focus gets better. And back to the notion that your brain reshapes itself based on experience. Specifically, prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain, the learning, the decision-making, the creativity part of your brain gets denser, so that grain matter with all of the neurons actually get denser. It's like becoming, instead of a spongy cake I don't know, it becomes this dry bread where everything is just condensed and you have a lot more neurons and people seem to get better at focusing, at paying attention, which is needed with an essential skill set to learn and be able to get any information in your head in the first place. So Learning, Meditation and mindfulness are practices that will enhance your brain's capacity to learn, to pay attention, to focus which also is problematic for many people and then also to learn and, as a result, to get better, evolve and move forward. So meditate.

Speaker 1 11:17

I personally meditate every morning for 15 minutes a day. I do priming Tony Robbins Google it if you don't know what it is. And then also at midday I usually do yoga, nidra, when I do body scan, focus on different parts of my body. So that's another mindfulness practice that I do every day. And then usually right before sleep, I do some breath work which helps me to fall asleep, to fast-treat, to sleep better, to not wake up, to not go to the bathroom and just have one solid chunk of sleep. So three moments in my day when I do these mindfulness practices, which probably have grown my brain's density and amount of neurons I have in prefrontal cortex quite a lot. Maybe that's why people believe, and I do notice, that I have a good capacity of keeping long-term front of my mind and stay disciplined and not be tempted by a lot of things with short-term gratification cycle. I've been meditating since I was 13, which is 24, 25 years, and so my brain probably have grown some density in my prefrontal regions which allow you to then make long-term decisions and then prioritize learning and then also to pay attention while learning and all of these things to just say that you're going to get better at learning, evolving and moving forward in life. So meditate or do some other mindfulness practices. Recommend a dose 10-15 minutes a day.

Nutrition: Building Blocks for Your Brain

Speaker 1 13:05

And the last but definitely not least, guys, one of my favorite things that I feel is often forgotten when people talk about learning, and it is nutrition. So nutrition, specifically eating more fruit and vegetables, for those antioxidants which help to protect the brain from its own activity and to stay healthy, which is needed to keep learning and build those neurons and protect them. So eating more antioxidants, eating things like omega-3 fatty acids, which literally build your brain brick by brick. Without omega-3 sufficient amount of them, your brain can't build certain structures to maintain the growth of new neurons. So I feel that in our learning literature and research, this aspect is not that often talked about. That your brain's quality also depends like your brain is not made of thin air. It's also built from what you put on your plate, and the brain actually is the most sensitive organ to nutrition. When it comes to blood sugar regulation, when it comes to how much inflammation is there in the brain, how brain can protect itself, how brain can build new structure out of materials that you put on your plate.

Speaker 1 14:26

And no, pizza is not the same as eating salmon. Hopefully you know that by now. But it's not just how it looks or how it tastes. It's the ingredients, the molecules, like omega-3 fatty acids or certain amino acids, that your brain uses then to produce things like dopamine, which is essential for learning. The more your brain produces dopamine, the more you have the capacity to learn faster and memorize things. Dopamine is kind of like tattooing things in your brain. Knowledge sticks so much faster when you have more dopamine circulated in your brain. Knowledge sticks so much faster when you have more dopamine circulated in your brain, and nutrition is one of those natural ways.

Summary and Call to Action

Speaker 1 15:08

Natural nutrition meaning foods like salmon or sardines, when we're talking about omega-3s, or just, in general, fruit and vegetables with a lot of antioxidants. So nutrition is that little building material that allows all of the metaphorical or metaphysical or this concept of knowledge become a physical part of your brain. So nutrition makes this possible, the right kind of nutrition. And again, that's where the amino acids that things like dopamine are made of, or omega-3s, which are used to build certain structures to support the growth of your neurons, the inflammation level, all of these things they are super vital for your brain's capacity to learn, adapt, change and evolve, vital for your brain's capacity to learn, adapt, change and evolve and maintain a high level of learning intensity. So, nutrition, and again, some of the core things are eating a lot of fruit and vegetables. Not eating processed food, which increases inflammation, which keeps your brain inflamed, which destroys neurons and doesn't allow your brain to build and solidify neural connections. Also, eating things like omega-3 fatty acids, your fatty fish, or getting your omega-3 supplements made from algae oil, right from seaweed. Basically Eating other things, like your eggs, which have compounds that are also necessary for forming memories, for example, and for learning, for creating certain neurotransmitters that are needed to produce focus and attention, which are necessary for learning. So nutrition, specific nutrition specific, like, again, omega-3s, or eating enough protein that has all the essential amino acids. So nutrition is very important for building the structures that help your brain to create and maintain learning. So let's sum it up In order for your brain to learn, to help you grow your skill set, to help you adapt, to help you evolve, to help you become a better professional, a better parent, a better spouse, a better human being, develop emotional intelligence, develop leadership qualities, have more experience in your head to operate, to create better solutions or to figure out your business problems. For all of that, your brain needs to be great at learning, and lifestyle factors are super important for the machinery of your brain to work and to maintain your learning capacity.

Speaker 1 18:07

Move, keep moving, even short bursts of exercise. Let's say you sit on your computer, working on your computer and then you do 10 squats. That also counts and improves the ability of your brain to work, to learn and do everything that your brain does, all the amazing tasks. But 30 minutes of exercise three to five times a week at least, and obviously getting your steps in 8,000 if you are anyone below 60 years old and 6,000 if you are above 60 years old. So that's recommended, right? Not just 30 minutes three, five times per week, but also getting your steps in and keeping active throughout the day. Not putting your ass on the chair and sitting there for eight to 10 hours straight.

Speaker 1 18:51

Now, that is not a great idea, at least from the perspective of your brain. So fitness, then we get sleep seven to nine hours, and regularity of your sleep hours also matters. And don't forget, sleep is where all of your knowledge and learning solidifies. So if you learn something and don't sleep well, it's like you're throwing away half or more of that knowledge and you waste all of the time that you spent learning. So sleep. Then we get meditation, mindfulness, 10-15 minutes a day, which grows your prefrontal cortex, the amount of nuance you have there, and also helps you to get much better at focusing and paying attention, which is necessary for any learning to occur. If you don't pay attention, you aren't learning.

Speaker 1 19:37

And the fourth, the last but not least, is nutrition. Your brain is built of stuff that you put on your plate, and no pizza will not do. Your brain needs specific nutrients to maintain its fullest capacity to learn and adapt and stay plastic and evolve and grow as long as you are alive. Tony Robbins says in life we're either growing or dying. Well, these lifestyle factors and nutrition help you to get better at growing. So you're more and more awesome with every single day, with every single piece of information you learn, so you expand your capacity to do awesome things in life, grow professionally and personally, and so at the end of your days you're like, oh, I lived my life to the fullest and created some awesome experiences and developed myself into some amazing human being. So fitness, nutrition, mindfulness, sleep this is your foundation, like four legs of neuroplasticity of learning, of your brain's ability to change and evolve.

Speaker 1 20:51

Please do share this episode with at least one other person if you want all of us to get better at learning. Maybe somebody who you know don't pay enough attention to this, but they're really passionate about learning. So share this podcast with them and tell them. You know, if you're so passionate about learning, you might be missing out on a huge chunk of it because you don't do these lifestyle factors. Also, guys, it would mean a huge deal to me if you could rate review on iTunes, on Spotify, on wherever you find your podcast. Just put some I don't know message there, or five stars, whatever is the quickest and the fastest. That helps this podcast to go into more years. And, guys, thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in. So maybe, after this podcast episode, do a short session of mindful meditation, pay attention to your breathing for, let's say, five minutes, which will help you to grow more neurons in your prefrontal cortex, learn better, evolve and create better and better life experience. Thank you, guys, for tuning in. Till next time, keep learning, keep growing and stay change-wired.