Your Brain on Yoga

The Alzheimer’s Society of Canada predicts that by 2030, nearly 1 million people will be living with dementia.  You might be thinking, “Well, not me.”  And I wish that for you.

However, a proactive approach would be to adopt some daily habits that reduce the chances of developing it.  There are Yoga techniques that have been proven to: *

• improve sleep
• increase our wellbeing
• enhance mood with less anxiety and depression
• reverse memory loss
• enhance executive function (mental skills that enable us to plan, focus attention, juggle multiple tasks)
• improve memory in those with mild cognitive impairment, and early Alzheimer’s Disease

* from the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation

How do I know that Yoga works to help the brain?

A few years ago, I started to notice some changes, like nouns disappearing when I was in the middle of a sentence.  If you’re over 60, you might be familiar with this phenomenon.  Then I started noticing issues with short-term memory, and my ability to retain information for more than a second or two.  This retention ability was decreasing, and I found that alarming.

I increased my cardio-vascular exercise, added a B-12 supplement after hearing that 40% of people with dementia are deficient in B-12, and recently I eliminated sugar from my diet.  (It wasn’t that hard, because of the delicious replacements that I found.)  I started taking  a mushroom supplement. The nouns came back, but the short-term memory problems persisted.

Then I started a specific Yoga movement/breathing technique called Kirtan Kriya. After practicing this 12-minute meditation for 10 consecutive days, there was a noticeable improvement in my ability to retain a list of information, long enough to transfer it by hand from one paper to another.
I was thrilled!