What have I told you that your brain is literally shrinking right now?

Starting at age 40, there are two key brain areas that lose about 5% of their cells every decade.

Your hippocampus, that's responsible for memory.

So the prefrontal cortex is executive function in planning and reasoning and

decision making and inhibiting inappropriate behaviors, all that. And so every decade, 5%. So just picture

that. That's like losing randomly items of your favorite clothing just disappearing from your

closet or entire file folders on your computer. Yeah, not exactly the pep talk you are hoping for on a Tuesday.

But don't worry, this is not a doom spiral.

It's more like an invitation because there is something you can do about it.

I've been obsessed with brain hacks since I was a kid.

I fully was taken by the idea of mind over matter. It was my

whole strategy for years and I swear I used it to outgrow asthma. I have this core memory in

eighth grade. We were running the mile in PE and I started feeling that tightness in my chest

like I couldn't get a

full breath in. My PE teacher looked at me, pretty freaked out, holding out my inhaler like,

take this, but I didn't. I just took these long, deep breaths and kept repeating something in

my head like, my lungs are healing themselves. That's the last

time I really remember having an asthma attack. Maybe something small came up later, but nothing

that stuck. And after that, I even became a cross-country runner. That moment changed the way I thought

about what the mind can do. And it really made me wonder how much of what we accept as just the way we are could

actually change.

I feel so blessed to live in this time in existence because science is catching up to so

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