General health and nutrition#

Your overall health and nutrition has a significant impact on how well you learn and remember. I cover more detail of some specific parts of health and nutrition in other parts of this chapter, however some key points for good health and nutrition include:

Eat a varied diet. Ensure that you get a balanced mix of foods. General advice may be to “eat less meat, animal fat, salt and processed foods” and “eat more fruit, vegetables, and fish.” Recent research also suggests using more plant-based oils in your diet. This includes oils such as olive, canola, soy, corn, sunflower, peanut and other vegetable oils.
Get regular exercise. Even basic exercise such as a regular walk has many health benefits. Exercise helps control weight, blood sugar and cholesterol levels. It improves cardiovascular fitness and circulation, and helps manage blood pressure. It helps the immune system. It also helps stimulate a sense of well-being and reduces the risk of other mental disorders such as anxiety and depression. With all these benefits, the “apple a day keeps the doctor away” quote should be “a walk a day keeps the doctor away.”
Relax more, stress less. Regular relaxation has many positive health benefits. It helps control stress. Excessive stress insidiously affects your physical health in so many ways, and not just mentally. Stress seriously affects your immune system, your endocrine system, your gastrointestinal system, and your cardiovascular system. There are many ways to control stress. See your doctor or web references if you believe you are suffering from excessive stress.
Deal with illnesses and injuries quickly. Many of us avoid visits to the doctor. This is more obvious in men. Most would prefer to wait until their arm falls off before thinking about seeing a doctor. Even seemingly minor injuries can impact you in ways you cannot predict. An example is an airline captain who turned up for work with an injured thumb. The first part of the flight finished easily, however during the second leg they met severe turbulence. The captain found that controlling the aircraft caused extreme pain in his thumb. He had to hand over to the co-pilot. Minor injuries can have unexpected impacts on your overall health and performance, so treat them early.
Keep a positive mental attitude and outlook. Having a positive mental attitude positively influences your overall health. Until recently, the medical field largely treated the body and mind as two separate entities that had little influence over each other. A relatively new branch of medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, now studies the links between mental attitudes and bodily health. Keeping a positive mental outlook provides better disease resistance, improves heart health and speeds recovery from illness. Some suggestions that help a positive mental attitude are to laugh more, use assertions, set and achieve goals, and avoid negative people!
Take responsibility for your life. Taking on more responsibility in your life can lead to better health, contrary to popular opinion. Many people associate higher responsibility to higher stress, illness and heart attack. There is an interesting paradox in this. Those who have more sense of control of the environment around them appear to have better health than those who resign that control to others. For example, the incidence of heart attack is higher in those with low levels of responsibility at work, rather than those in higher executive positions. However, when those executives retire the chance of heart attack goes up. It appears that retirement causes these once-powerful individuals to feel a loss of control over their lives.

Taking responsibility doesn’t necessarily mean you should immediately start striving for the boss’s job. However, you should begin to accept that where you are today is the result of the choices you have made. This is part of personal responsibility. You have either made a choice yourself, or you have chosen to give someone else control over a decision. If you allow others to make choices for you, they often make those choices based on their own self-interest. It’s up to you whether you allow that to happen. Those types of decisions have a significant impact on your physical and mental health, so choose wisely!

On the negative side of learning state, alcohol and some other drugs (such as ecstasy and marijuana) have a harmful effect on the general health of the brain. I suggest you:

Avoid excessive alcohol consumption. While small amounts of alcohol appear to aid overall health, excessive alcohol consumption has a definite and observable impact on brain size and construction. Binge drinking (consuming large amounts of alcohol at one time) can cause the most damage.
Avoid other psychedelic drugs. While drugs such as ecstasy and marijuana may appear safe, there are disturbing trends of long-term impacts on brain functions. These include decreased memory and learning capacity. If you want to use these drugs, I suggest you research and understand the full long-term implications. Unlike with cigarettes, in twenty years there won’t be any companies to blame (and sue) when we know the full effects.