6 Tips to Avoid Holiday Brain Drain and Own the Holiday Season

 

 

The holiday season often brings with it a dizzying array of demands – shopping, baking, parties, cleaning entertaining and travel, to name just a few. One report shows that consumers spend about 15 hours on holiday shopping, and about the same amount (15 hours on average) attending holiday parties, gatherings or events with friends or family. It’s also estimated that Americans spend about 7.4 hours on average traveling to or from their holiday destinations.

 

With so many demands it can become stressful and it may be difficult to remember all you want and hope to accomplish.

 

 

Recent reports show that 69% of Baby Boomers are concerned with fighting the mental signs of aging – and that can be more evident than ever around holiday time. Experts say we should think of our brains like a bank account. Every time we learn something new, play a challenging game, or read a book, we’re depositing into that account – this is a concept called ‘Reserve’.

 

Some simple ways to make it easier to remember several pieces of information is to put it into chunks; for example, instead of trying to remember these numbers: 2, 7, 5, 3, 8, 7, try to remember this instead: 2753, 87. Your brain can retain more information if you group items together than if you think of each number as a separate piece of information.

 

You can also remember some things by attaching meaning to them; for instance, to remember items to purchase at the grocery store, make a sentence out of the list. For example, the turkey ate bread and peanut butter before she laid eggs and drank milk.

 

Other tips to improve brain health:

• Connect with friends and families: relationships tend to buffer us from stress of daily lives
• Sleep: it plays a critical role in keeping our brains functioning well
• Take brain health supplements: can improve memory and recall in healthy adults

 

Dr. Mike Dow, Ph.D. joined me to discuss the issue of memory recall and brain drain during the holidays and offer advice for improving and boosting your brain. Dr. Dow is a New York Times bestselling author and psychotherapist who has written several books and has appeared as a guest on several TV talk shows including Today, Dr. Oz and The Doctors.