Nail Your Neurochemistry to 5X Your Results
In a previous article, I spoke about the importance of optimising the basics. The premise was simple – you can improve your cognitive abilities and performance in everyday tasks by focusing on five key pillars. They were:
Sleep
Exercise
Nutrition and hydration
Sunlight
Mindfulness and breathing exercises
And although I stand by them, there’s something important happening beneath the surface that I failed to talk about last time.
It’s neurochemistry.
You see, the above pillars are so effective because they have a profound effect on what’s happening inside your brain. Each of them has the power to kick your cognition into a new gear.
*Disclaimer: I'm not a biologist, neurologist, or any kind of gist. For the following info, I’ll be leaning heavily on information provided in ‘Why the F*ck Can't I Change?’ by Gabija Toleikyte. It's the perfect blend of informative and practical – I highly recommend giving it a read.*
The 3 Levels of Brain
You probably wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that your brain is an extremely complex organ. It has many different interconnecting sections all with different functions.
Thankfully, despite this complexity, the different sections can be broadly categorised into three basic levels: the lizard brain, the mammal brain, and the human brain.
The Lizard Brain (The paleo-reptilian complex) – responsible for vital functions such as breathing, digestion, and heartbeat. The lizard brain keeps you alive but doesn't do much else.
The Mammal Brain (The paleo-mammalian complex) – responsible for the majority of your unconscious mental processes. The mammal brain enables you to acquire skills and habits, constantly tracks potential dangers, and triggers emotions to push you towards certain behaviours.
The Human Brain (The neocortex and prefrontal cortex) – responsible for executive functions such as rational thinking, problem solving, analysing, reasoning, learning new information, creativity, and decision making. Basically, anything you have to think your way through requires the human brain.
From those brief summaries, there are two important things you need to understand.
The first is the energy requirements of each of the different sections. You see, as the sections of the brain increase in complexity, they also increase in the amount of energy required to continue functioning.
This is important because the lizard brain, which is responsible for keeping you alive, has to be functional 24/7. If the lizard brain shuts down then your heart stops pumping and you die. Thankfully, due to the low energy requirements, the lizard brain has no issue working without breaks.
Conversely, the human brain is much more complex and therefore demands huge amounts of energy to function properly. It's for this reason that people often find it harder to think and solve complex problems in the evenings when they’re tired. They’ve already used up most of their energy reserves and need to sleep to replenish them.
The takeaway for all of this is simple. You have more cognitive power at your disposal when you're fresh and well rested. Plan your day accordingly.
The second thing to understand here is that, although most of your cognitive abilities come from the human brain, emotions originate in the mammal brain.
This is because, just like many of the lizard brain’s functions, emotions are critical to survival and need to be available 24/7. Let’s use fear as an example. If you encounter a predator in the wild, being lax and emotionless is likely to get you eaten. Instead, an immediate and powerful fear response will get you to run or hide, which could potentially save your life.
The mammal brain’s lower energy costs allow it to prioritise your survival in this fashion whenever necessary, even when you're exhausted and low on energy.
Now, keeping all of this in mind, let's move on and talk about neurotransmitters.
The Chemicals in Your Brain
Now, let's talk about how all the different sections of your brain communicate. One of the primary ways is via neurotransmitters – little chemicals that act as instructions and bounce between neurons, telling areas of your brain what to do. Pretty much everything you think, feel, and do is in response to neurotransmitter activity in your brain. Pretty crazy, huh.
It’s currently believed that there are over 100 neurotransmitters working in the human brain (the exact number is unclear), each with their own distinct purpose.
But there are five that you need to know about: serotonin, dopamine, glutamate, oxytocin, and GABA (Gamma-aminobutyric acid). Let’s go through them one by one.
Serotonin
Serotonin puts you in a good mood, helps you get decent sleep, and helps mitigate and manage pain.
Much like what we discussed earlier with the human brain, serotonin levels tend to be higher in the morning and deplete throughout the day. If you’ve ever found yourself in a bad mood at the end of a long day, this can probably be attributed to serotonin depletion. This also explains why we often feel better in the morning – a good night's sleep has refreshed our serotonin levels.
Dopamine
The famous one, dopamine creates a feeling of pleasure and a sense of motivation towards things that have previously given pleasure. Simply put, dopamine is what makes eating the chocolate feel so good AND what drives you to go and get more chocolate when you run out.
This motivation can also push us towards things that we assume will result in pleasure even if we haven't tried it before.
Glutamate
Glutamate has a wide range of functions, including: working memory, long-term memory, planning, paying attention, talking and listening, and pretty much anything that’s cognitively demanding.
Oxytocin
Also known as the love hormone (it’s both a neurotransmitter and a hormone), oxytocin creates a sense of attachment, trust, and love towards other people. It’s released when we make love, cuddle, hug others, pat pets, or generally engage in physical contact.
GABA
GABA helps us manage our thoughts and minimise mental overload by dampening the activity of neurons. Essentially, it helps us manage anxiety, see things clearly, and block out background noise. If you’ve ever felt like your brain was scrambled and too many things were happening at once, you may have been short on GABA.
So, that’s a quick outline of some of the key neurotransmitters. This information should help to give you a better understanding of how your brain is working on a day-to-day basis.
But as important as this understanding is, it’s only one side of the coin. You also need to understand how to regulate the levels of each of these neurotransmitters.
After all, it's one thing to recognise that if you're feeling down then you're probably running low on serotonin. It's another to understand how to increase those serotonin levels to make yourself feel better.
Regulating Your Brain Chemistry
Influencing your brain chemistry is actually quite simple. It really just boils down to performing actions that have been shown to increase or decrease neurotransmitter levels.
So, let’s talk through some of the key activities you need to be doing to help you regulate your brain chemistry and improve your cognition:
Exercise – No surprises here. Everyone in the self-improvement space is harping on about the importance of exercise, but for good reason. On top of the physical benefits, exercise increases neurotransmitter levels across the board, reduces stress, and produces BDNF (Brain-derived neurotrophic factor) which supports a wide range of cognitive processes.
Sleep – Probably the most important activity of all, sleep helps your brain repair itself and replenish energy stores and neurotransmitter levels for the next day.
Breathing exercises – These have been shown to increase GABA and reduce stress hormone levels, dramatically lowering stress and anxiety. As for what breathing exercises might look like, I recommend box breathing:
Hold your breath for 4 seconds
Exhale for 4 seconds
Hold the outbreath for 4 seconds
Breathe in for 4 seconds
Repeat for 2-5 minutes.
Physical touch and relationships – Produces oxytocin, which improves mood and reduces stress.
Nutrition – Neurotransmitters have to come from somewhere and in most cases, that somewhere is our food. If you aren’t eating a broad diet of nutritious foods, your brain won't have the basic building blocks for the neurotransmitters it needs.
Rest / breaks – Something else to keep in mind for the workaholics out there is that our brains aren't designed to go 24/7, at least not the parts that do the heavy lifting. When you keep using the same neurons for hours on end (i.e. working at something without taking breaks), your brain will tire and your neurotransmitter levels will slowly deplete. On top of sleep, breaks from the activity can give your brain time to replenish its energy stores.
This final point should be a key takeaway here. As much as Instagram hustle culture has us convinced, we really aren't designed for constant grinding.
Hard work is important of course, but it needs to be supplemented with a healthy amount of down time. High level athletes know this better than anyone. The very best are remarkably good at switching on for a game and then switching off again when it's time to rest.
That’s one of the things that makes them so badass. Learn from it.