Save Your Brain... Exercise!

I recently watched the West Wing fourth season episode titled The Long Goodby, originally aired in January 2003. I just loved that TV series, by the way, and am re-watching it on my Kindle via Amazon instant video. This touching episode was unusual in that it was set mostly outside of Washington DC, and dealt almost completely with C.J. Cregg's father and his worsening Alzheimer's disease. This kind of "loss of cognitive functioning" is something I think most of us worry about. Even if we don't "get" Alheimer's disease, older adults tend to lose at least some brain volume and show some degree of memory loss as they age. That's scary.

But I just read a good-news article that gives me a reason to feel less concerned about these kinds of potential changes. It reports a study showing, with concrete physiological reasons, that aerobic exercise really is good for brain function. It looks like exercise not only helps maintain cognition, but can actually improve it, even in seniors. The important and encouraging takeaway from the article:

"These theoretically important findings indicate that aerobic exercise training is effective in reversing hippocampal volume  loss in late adulthood, which is accompanied by improved memory function."

The article is titled Exercise Training Increases Size of Hippocampus and Improves Memory. It reports specifically on the effects of exercise on the brains of older people (average age well over 60), and makes it clear that if you aren't getting regular aerobic exercise, such as brisk walking, you're passing up an opportunity to keep your brain working well and to stave off deterioration and even dementia.

The hippocampus, according to Wikipedia, in case you didn't know (I didn't) is a critically important part of our brains. It's two parts reside in each of your brain's two halves and together they are very involved in memory function, especially conversion of short-term memory into long-term memory, and also in spatial memory and function. The hippocampus tends to decrease in volume as people age, and is the first part of the brain to show shrinkage and impaired function in early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

This one-year study demonstrated that seniors who participated in moderate (high-intensity workouts not required) aerobic exercise, just three times a week, not only retained hippocampal volume, but on average increased it. The control group only did stretching exercises, and instead showed decrease in hippocampal size.

Now, I already walk quite a bit, several times a week at least, just to get to the store and to my volunteer tutoring appointments. But I'm often carrying a heavy book bag or towing a load of groceries. I'm not sure how "brisk" my walking usually is.. not very, I'm afraid. I'm thinking that I need to add in some more truly aerobic exercise - faster walking, or even the aerobic video DVDs I have accumulated but rarely use.

Last summer I was gung-ho on Weight Watchers, and in an attempt to accumulate "activity points," and thus be able to eat a bit more, I went out for a 30-45 minute brisk walk every morning. It  became part of my routine, a habit. I took Petey for his walk later in the day - he likes to stop and sniff everything too much to make him a good companion for even moderately aerobic walking. When the cold weather hit in the fall, I gradually stopped the morning walks and my exercise was once again limited to just my "utility walking," I guess you could call it, and short, slow walks with the dog.

Monday I wrote about my current early-morning routine. After reading this article, I think I'm going to add exercise to it. After a quick shower, I'll pull on some sweats, a t-shirt or sweatshirt (depending on the weather), cushiony socks, walking shoes, and of course my MP3 player, and get in a nice walk before the rest of my day starts.

New Morning Rituals in Retirement

I have a morning routine, as most people probably do. One of the nice things about being retired is that my mornings are rarely at all rushed. It's unusual for me to have anything scheduled before 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. I remember the rush-rush workday mornings vividly though. Rush to get up and shower, get dressed, dry hair, fix and eat breakfast, multitasking all the while. Now I go at a more measured pace, and it's lovely. No more multi-tasking.

A few of my first things, after getting up and finding my robe and slippers are fixing a large mug of coffee with soy milk, wandering out to the sun porch to peer through the glass and see if the paper has been delivered, and sitting down at my computer (on the dining room table) to check "stuff." I sit looking out on trees and a park, so there is a very pretty view. I love how it changes with the weather and seasons. Currently there is a lot of lush, green spring leafiness, reminding me that I really need to do a major pruning of the hedge. Oh well... yawn... too early for that.

I check my calendar, then my e-mail. One rather new early-morning ritual I have gotten fond of is the daily email from A.Word.A.Day, a free service from Wordsmith.com. If you like words and reading, or just learning new words, this is for you. Personally, I've grown to love words, and it's fun opening up the A.Word.A.Day e-mail each morning and learning, or renewing acquaintance with, another unusual word. Each day's e-mail includes information, sometimes speculation, about the word's origins, and a sentence illustrating its use. A bonus is a new quotation at the end of the post, and their quotes are great. Each week has a theme - this week's is words that sound rude, but aren't. Last week's featured some unusual words of foreign origin, such as "boondocks" from Tagalog.

Actually, much of our English language, it turns out, came from other languages. It was instructive and fascinating to read about the origins of modern English, in order to help explain the language to my adult English-learner students. The large quantity of borrowed vocabulary explains our hodge-podge of spelling, grammar, and phonetic rules, none of which actually work well as rules and make pronunciation and spelling a nightmare for English learners. It constantly amazes me how well they do.

So... next in my morning routine comes Facebook and the news. I want to hate Facebook, but then there are the photos of grandkids and the occasional interesting post from others. I've learned to scroll quickly through all the ads. And I just found and joined a large Facebook group that actually is actually a great use of Facebook. It's a large (4,000+ members) open group about my beach city hometown, with strong emphasis on the past. Almost every day someone has posted an old photo or question or reminiscence about days gone by at the beach... it's a nice bit of nostalgia that I've quickly come to look forward to.

I still get a local print newspaper delivered to my door. In these days of waning readership I think local newspapers provide an important community service and that it's important to support them. Unless you live in a large city, local web news is likely to be neither complete nor comprehensive. But I do like to perform a morning scan of a few news websites, including the New York Times, The Daily Beast and Huffington Post. If you don't like my choices, don't worry - next week my list will be different. I'm very fickle about my news sources. I hardly ever look at The Drudge Report these days, for example, but I will surely be back.

Frankly, I think it is extremely important for us citizens to scan a wide variety of news sources. I don't trust any one of them, but by reading and listening to sources from the far right all the way to the far left, I think I get a clearer picture of what is really going on. I've noticed that this has made me a lot more tolerant of those who hold views different from my own. I think a lot of the polarization (red state, blue state stuff for example) is a result of many people only hearing or paying attention to one side of the arguments.

So by this time, I've usually also fed the dog and had a second mug of coffee. The sun is up and it's time to shut off the computer and really start my day. I've found in retirement that it's far too easy to just drift through the hours without much structure. Establishing new, more leisurely rituals like this has helped me, I believe, to add some relaxed structure to my days, although I'm still having trouble with a sense of not getting enough done. But that's another post.

More Free Cloud Storage

I heard another one of those scary radio ads recently, about how you could accidentally lose everything you store on your computer: e-mail, photos, letters, e-books, etc. I had a hard disk crash on me a couple years ago, so I know first-hand that you need to back up your computer storage. But there is so much free cloud storage out there that I don't feel the need to pay for the kind of backup service that was featured in that radio advertisement. In addition to the storage services I've written about, SkyDrive is worthy of consideration.

Microsoft's SkyDrive gives you 7 gigabytes (GB) of free storage, which is a lot. If you want, you can buy another 20 GB for $20 a year. Microsoft currently aims to have the lowest cloud storage cost of all the major players, so this is quite a good deal. You can use the storage for all kinds of files - it is not just for Microsoft Office documents.

When you sign up for SkyDrive, you also get free use (if you want it) of Microsoft's online Office suite, including Outlook.com for e-mail, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. These are simplified, basic versions of these Office classics, and you don't have to download or install them. You simply use the online (in the cloud) to create and edit documents, including documents that you created on your computer using installed versions of Office. These online versions will work for most of us, but may not suffice if you use, say, a lot of fancy formatting or elaborate spreadsheet formulas.

You can use SkyDrive just on the web, or you can download a Windows app for your computer, which will create a dedicated SkyDrive folder for  storing everything. Used this way, SkyDrive keeps everything in the folder backed up. If you change anything, it is promptly changed in the cloud, also. (In other words, it acts like Dropbox, but gives you more than three times as much free storage.)

Honestly, I don't use the online MS Office suite often, as I had already gotten in the habit of using Google Docs and Spreadsheets. But I have to admit - these free Microsoft cloud programs are really user-friendly, prettier, and have better help documentation than Google Docs. They will feel quite intuitive, especially if you are a long-time MS Office user. I find them handy for opening and editing Office documents if I am working on somebody else's computer.

And all these online Office programs, including the new web-based Outlook e-mail, have a beautiful, easy-to-read interface - better than Google for older eyes. I especially like the calendar. But I don't think Microsoft is as far along as Evernote, Dropbox, and Google in making it all accessible on a truly wide variety of mobile platforms. It doesn't work on my Blackberry, for example, and wasn't in the Kindle app store. However, there are apps for IOS, Android, and Windows mobile.

So here's how I use SkyDrive. I have it set up on my primary computer as a separate folder in Windows Explorer, with many subfolders. I store all my lesson plans and handouts here, because I always use Microsoft Word 2003 for this work. (I prefer the ease and accuracy of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) insertion, cropping, and placement of graphics into Word documents compared to any other word processing software I've used.) I also store some photos and miscellaneous letters. I've used less than 2 GB of the free 25 GB I got from Microsoft (I was grandfathered into this in some way I never figured out.) I like that everything is right on my computer, but is always current in SkyDrive's cloud.

But I use other cloud storage too, remember. I have 35 GB of free storage on Google, plus 20 GB for which I pay $4.95 a year for under a legacy plan. And Google gave me an additional 100 GB, good for two years, when I bought a Chromebook.

In addition, I clip and store a lot of web-based stuff on Evernote, which allows unlimited total storage but limits you to 60 megabytes per month in uploads. It's hard to say how much I have stored there, maybe 2 GB or so. I also have 3.75 GB of free storage on Dropbox. Amazon has given me free storage for 250 songs, plus an additional 5 GB of free cloud storage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's a total of 75 GB of free storage, not even counting the temporary stuff from Google and the songs on Amazon!

So as you can see, most individual users will be able to store all their computer files, with plenty of room to spare, on the "free" versions of the major cloud storage services. This may change over time, but right now... the price is right!

A Gratitude Experiment

The dogwoods are now in full, spectacular bloom. I took this photo on a morning walk during the rather soggy start to this week. When the dogwood petals start falling, you can think you're in the middle of a snow flurry! This morning we have a blue, blue sky with nary a cloud - spectacular spring weather once again.

As I've gotten older, I more and more appreciate the cyclical changes of the seasons and day-to-day changes in the weather. There always seems to be something to be grateful for. And since revisiting Law of Attraction philosophy this week, I've been thinking more about gratitude, and its psychological effect.

I kept a "gratitude log" several times in the past. I began the first one in response to something I'd been reading, perhaps SimpleAbundance by Sarah ban Breathnach. I continued for a while each time, but frankly, I found it a bit tedious. I kept writing the same things every day... my cozy warm home; the beautiful morning sunshine; my family; my sweet little dog; etc., etc. In retrospect, I guess I wasn't always feeling positive enough to identify a lot of new things to be grateful for each day. But still, I did find it comforting to simply recount the ongoing graces of my life.

Just always having "enough" is truly something to be grateful for, even for those of us with limited incomes. And I cannot really say that there has ever been a time in my life that I did not have enough, that I ever lacked something that I truly needed. Not once, not ever.

There have, however, been times when I did not accept things that could have made my life easier. I think here of the years during my career that I worked obsessively, put in so many hard hours, because I somehow felt it was required. But that "requirement," one that sucked up so much of my life during those years and kept me from doing the other things I wanted and needed to do, I saw later, was really a construction of my imagination. And of my ego, too, I guess. But I think I learned from that experience, and when the same situation arose more recently in my work life, I was able to recognize the problem and get myself out the situation much more quickly. It did tick off my boss, though, an indication that the problem was not solely of my making.

One thing I do know, quite surely, is that focusing on gratitude for all the good things in my life always makes an enormous positive impact on my mental attitude. I don't think I've ever been happier or more positive than during the times when I've taken a few minutes every day to dwell on what I'm thankful for, especially when I've written some of them down. I was so optimistic and upbeat during those periods - about my circumstances, people, and things that came up day-to-day. And I believe things really did go better for me during those times.It wasn't just in my head (although my better attitude undoubtedly influenced how things played out.)

So my new intention, starting today, is to resume keeping a notebook with a list of "gratitudes". And this time, I'm going to focus more on finding new things to be grateful for, things that have come up during the last 24 hours, instead of just writing the same things over and over, worthy of gratitude though they may be. I will set aside a tabbed section in my organizer with plenty of fresh, unlined paper, and add to the list each morning. It will be an experiment of sorts, and I look forward to it. 

What is the Law of Attraction All About?

I downloaded a free e-book book from Amazon this weekend (it's now back to $2.99). It looked like a book about financial management, and since I want to learn more about this subject, and I've picked up some real gems from Amazon's list of 100 best-selling free Kindle books, I decided to try it. Well, I've only read a couple of chapters, but it seems to be mostly about the Law of Attraction (LOA) as it applies to personal finance. I may comment further on the book,  when I've finished, but I do want to comment on the LOA. It's been huge for the last few years.

 Link to Amazon Book Listing

Various permutations of the LOA attribute success, getting what you want and so on, to a process usually called manifesting. Manifesting is supposed to be a result of your ability to align your thoughts, vibrations, feelings, and/or internal images, with the Universe or God or something like that. So you don't so much get things as you manifest, or somehow assist the Universe, in creating them. On a first pass this seems patently ridiculous, doesn't it? But these books and movies, such as The Secret, are absolutely chock full of testimonials from people swearing that they, indeed, were able to manifest things such as Rolex watches, BMW's, and checks with lots of zeros in the amounts. So what's up with that?

Honestly, I'm not really sure. My opinion at this time is that it's mostly (or completely) about changing your own attitude. Your attitude is everything, and if there is any "magic" here, I think it may be in our ability to pick up attitudinal signals from people around us. For example, after reading a book on Positive Thinking years ago, I began to notice that when I was feeling positive and "up," strangers reacted very differently to me than when I was feeling "down." Even when I was down and made every effort to control body language, speech, and appearance, people still acted in accordance with how I really felt, not how I tried to appear to feel.

I remember a young woman who worked in my office. She was in no way beautiful. She had rather coarse features and was rather ethnic-looking at a time when that was not in vogue. But she seemed to believe she was a knock-out, and she totally projected that. Everything in the way she dressed, styled her long hair, and presented herself, said "beautiful lady." And men were very, very impressed. I've since noticed many other women with that "attitudinal beauty." I've also known a lot of women who had nice figures, good hair and features, but who did not project beauty, and were largely overlooked.

A second element is your own expectations, and what you will permit for yourself, what you will allow yourself to anticipate and strive for. If you don't believe in yourself, or in the world's ability or intention to provide for you, then you will tend to not see a lot of real opportunities, and you will have a pessimism-based risk aversion that prevents you from taking advantage of even the opportunities you do perceive.

I've read, and observed, that people's stations in adult life often mirror the socioeconomic levels in which they were raised. Men who were brought up by wealthy, entrepreneurial fathers are far more likely, regardless of education and intelligence, to end up at approximately the same level as their fathers. Men who grew up in poverty are much less likely to have achieved wealth. There are many elements that contribute to this phenomenon. However, attitudes, beliefs that support accepting for oneself this kind of achievement, and especially that support the effort required to get there, are probably near the top of the list.

Now, this is not what the LOA is supposed to be about, not at all. But, I've noticed that one of the almost-universal elements in LOA methods is a strong focus on gratitude. Becoming aware of all the good things that come to you, and that are in your life. Developing a strong concentration on these positive things, and a refusal to dwell, or do more than barely notice, the negatives. Learning to reframe negatives as positives. Isn't this actually a reworked form of Positive Thinking, with a strong overlay of magic?

Whatever it is, I believe it can work, if it results in people really changing their fundamental beliefs about themselves, their potential, and their abilities. And perhaps the element of magic makes it easier for us to buy into these new beliefs. By adulthood, most of us have formulated pretty concrete ideas of who we are and what we are capable of, of what we can have and what isn't for us, even though we think we'd really like it. I think the LOA method's primary role in change, then, is not invoking the help of some higher power, but in changing what we believe we are deserving and capable of.