Want a Better Brain? Neuroscience Says 1 Simple Habit Improves Cognition and Helps You Live Better Longer

How important are things like this in your life?

Besides being some of the keys to well-being and contentment, scientists who study the brain have long theorized that these kinds of activities also help build your “cognitive reserve” over time. 

What is cognitive reserve? Harvard Medical School describes defines it as, “your brain’s ability to improvise and find alternate ways of getting a job done.”

The concept was first examined during the late 1980s, when researchers who performed autoopsies on people who had no symptoms of brain disease before they died had nevertheless had physical brain changes that were consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.

The theory was that the reason these people never showed symptoms and were able to live normal lives was that they’d accumulated a big enough cognitive reserve during earlier life to offset whatever damage Alzheimer’s had otherwise done.

It’s a compelling concept, and another good reason to do things that are good for you independently, and that make you feel better.

But now a group of researchers in Sweden say they’ve developed evidence suggesting that high levels of stress can actually undo the benefits in terms of cognitive reserve that all of those positive habits create.

Writing in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, these researchers say they examined the cases of 113 participants in a memory clinic in a Swedish hospital, assessing the association between cognitive reserve, biomarkers for Alzheimer’s, and cognition.

Specifically, they looked at both physiological stress (measured quantitatively by looking at cortisol levels in saliva) and psychological stress (measured more qualitatively).

They found that while cognitive reserve did increase cognition, psychologically weakened the association.

As lead study author, Manasa Shanta Yerramalla, researcher at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society of Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, put it:

Now, let’s acknowedge some limitatoins. First, this wasn’t an enormous study. Second, we also have to consider our old friend, “correlation vs. causation.”

It’s possible for example that people with higher levels of stress might also happen to have another commonality we haven’t identified, and that this other commonality might be linked more directly with lower cognitive reserve.

As an example that the researchers themselves identified (and good for them for catching this), it might have to do with lack of sleep. Stress can disrupt sleep, and lack of sleep can in turn disrupt cognition, as we’ve all experienced.

They did try to control their experiments for participants who might have used sleep medications, but the Swedish researchers didn’t control for other related things — like for example, tracking people’s sleep habits.

Regardless, this isn’t the only reason to try to control stress; it’s simply an additional one.

At the outset, as the Mayo Clinic summarizes, excess stress can lead to health problems ranging from high blood pressure to heart disease, heart disease, and risk of stroke, along with obesity, diabetes.

Moreover, as we’ve seen recently in other research, simply venting and sharing the degree to which you feel overstressed can lead the people around you to perceive you as less competent — which can make your life more difficult and paradoxically more stressful.

For most of us, the solution probably isn’t to avoid situations that can cause stress — no risk; no reward — but instead to make a habit of managing stress better, and prevent it from taking over our lives. 

There’s nothing more fascinating than the human brain, how it works, and the little things you can do to improve it. Memory and cognition are always at the top of the list.