Book Review Article on Micro-Resilience by Bonnie St. John and Allen P. Haines

COMBAT MENTAL EXHAUSTION WITH A DOSE OF EXERCISE

WARNING: NO SIDE EFFECTS

Next time you have a doozy of a day ahead of you, boost your mental performance with a dose of exercise.

What sets humans apart from other species is the ability to imagine, predict, make informed decisions and to organize our thoughts in complex ways.  These executive functions are so valuable and productive and may be the only edge workers have over robots and machines increasingly filling many human jobs.

For many years the ideals of ‘rest is for losers’ and ‘survivor of the most hours clocked’ seemed to be the motto of big corporations.  More and more, researches are showing that multitasking ourselves into oblivion actually reduce our intellectual abilities.  Daniel Kahneman, author of the influential book Attention and Effort has research results that show when our thought process is divided our ability to recall details diminishes.  We significantly reduce impulses for creativity, and we increase the risk for serious mistakes-all of which reduce the overall quality of our work.

When world-renowned neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki had a midlife crisis, she hit the gym.  She already knew the benefits of exercise on the body.  Following seeing improvements in her own intellectual abilities, she became devoted to researching the effects of exercise on the brain.  She now teaches that exercise protect our brains from age-related disease and enable us to use our prefrontal cortex more efficiency and effectively.   Overall, exercise generates significant same-day improvement in high-order thinking skills that remain measurable even after the exercise ends.  Benefits include faster mental processing, enhanced memory storage and retrieval, better selective attention, and more creative thinking.  

Next time you have a doozy of a day ahead of you, boost your mental performance with a dose of exercise.