One of my recent articles gave a statistic from the sports psychology world stating that it requires about 5 positive comments to overcome 1 negative comment when coaching young players. This means that negative comments carry a lot more weight in the mind of a child than do positive comments.

Most people lack real confidence

But this extends far beyond young athletes to most of the population. Most people dwell on criticism or a bad experience far more than they think about praise or positive experiences. This all comes back to the beliefs that you have implanted in your brain throughout your life.

If you continually tell yourself that you are no good at something then your brain will pay a lot more attention to the evidence to support that viewpoint than it will to evidence that contradicts it. Your brain is always trying to uphold your beliefs.

Since most people have limiting beliefs, they are more focused on negative feedback than positive feedback and that’s how the whole 5 to 1 (positive to negative) ratio gets established – 1 negative piece of feedback is as powerful as 5 positive pieces.

Seeing the sunny side of life

I ran across a couple of papers this week in Psychological Science and The Journal of Neuroscience showing how brain activity that controls this, changes as we get older. Our brain circuits that filter your positive and negative experiences actually rewire as you age.

When we are younger, our brains allow negative information and bad experiences to go straight to our automatic responses. We don’t think about them too much or evaluate them before we allow them to affect us. On the other hand, positive feedback and good experiences get some extra processing by the ‘higher functioning’ part of our brains before we allow them to effect us. The positive stuff has to pass through a filter before we believe it but the negative stuff doesn’t.

As we age this begins to reverse. Our filters of the negative stuff get stronger and our filters of the positive stuff get weaker. We allow positive stuff to affect us more easily (in a good way) and screen out some of the negative stuff. We don’t spend so much time dwelling on criticism and accept more praise.

This is just an average description of the whole population. Of course, there are people that are good at filtering out the negative stuff early in their life and others that never get good at it. There are people that take complements and praise very well at a young age and others that never learn how to accept it.

Speeding up the process

So the question becomes, can we do anything to accelerate the process? Can we ‘train our brains’ to become better at accepting positive stuff and better at filtering out negative stuff without having to wait until we get to our elder years?

I believe that you can. There are certainly things that you can do directly to pay more attention to feedback that will boost your confidence and dismiss other experiences that tend to bring you down. There are also many indirect things that you can do to support the health and maintenance of your brain.

This comes back to performance concepts that I’ve discussed before. Your brain is in a constant state of remodeling itself. It is up to you whether the new updates you make on a daily, weekly and yearly basis will be the same as the old ones, or improved.

You can ensure that your new updates are physically stronger with the basic nutrition, sleep and physical and mental exercise needs – or not. You can also ensure that your new updates perform better by working on your ability to think for yourself and replacing some of your limiting beliefs with empowering ones.

Over time, this will strengthen your filters to deal with all your negative experiences and allow more of the positive experiences to get through. Science shows us (as discussed above) that our brain circuits have a natural tendency to improve on this front as we get older, but the speed at which you do it and the final levels that you reach are up to you.

Focus on the good feedback and your health, and the brain circuits that control your positive beliefs will literally get stronger and faster. This will increase your confidence and your ability to control your own life.

This is not going to be an article about all the good foods you should eat and the stuff you should avoid. Many articles, including some of my own, have already beaten that horse. Most people know that carrots are better than cheeseburgers and I’m not going to get into that again at this time. What I want to do instead is give you a different perspective on the value of nutrition in improving and maintaining brain fitness – and what that really means.

Data supports the value of healthy foods for improving performance on intelligence tests and for reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Foods like fruits, vegetables, red wine (or moderate use of other alcohols), chocolate, soy protein, fish, olive oils, and others you have heard about, seem to help your brain.

We don’t know what we don’t know

The difficulty comes when scientists try to break down these foods and purify the specific natural chemicals responsible for their good effects. Usually, these types of experiments fail, although there are a few successes. But do you really care that it’s the polyphenols in fruits or the bisdemethoxycurcumin in tumeric that seem to be the active players? It’s not like your going to take some blueberries into your home chemistry lab and isolate the ‘most important’ ingredient – you’re just going to eat a handful of blueberries.

Imagine an alien coming down to Earth and trying to figure out what the most important part of a car is. Is it the wheels, the spark plugs, the axle, what? Obviously, all these parts work together to make the car drive and none of them work without the others. You don’t need to understand how an internal combustion engine works in order to drive your car from point A to point B.

The real value of quality nutrition comes from all of the good foods working together. Usually when we try to take them apart, the effect disappears. I’m all for high quality multi-vitamin supplements and take them daily myself. However, when you see all of the ads for highly purified specific components touting to improve your memory, your sex life or whatever you have to be careful. We simply don’t know enough yet about all the different healthful components of our food. Any good nutritionist or reputable nutrition company will tell you that supplements are never substitutes for a quality diet.

When it comes to brain fitness, good nutrition is simply the way to supply raw materials to the brain so that it can do the job it is designed to do. Eat the right stuff and let your brain work it out. All of the foods listed above contain hundreds or thousand of different kinds of molecules that the brain uses to run smoothly. There is no single ingredient that is better than everything else.

Good food for good thoughts

The more quality materials you give your brain, the better it works. That translates to clearer thinking, better problem solving and increased intelligence and IQ. The more junk you give you brain, the more you gunk it up and that leads to lethargy, increased odds for dementia later in life and a general feeling of blah today – it’s that simple.

You have heard all the healthy food advice in the past. You know what’s good for you and what’s not. If you want to get smarter now and keep your brain sharp into your older years then quality nutrition is something you need. If you don’t care about maintaining your brain function then don’t worry about it. One of my favorite pieces of advice that I have heard is “only brush the teeth you want to keep”.

Here’s another way to think about it. The brain is constantly undergoing construction and demolition. You are building new circuits and taking old ones down all the time. If you are using high quality building materials and have quality tools (through good nutrition) then your new circuits will be stronger and last longer. As we age our construction equipment and tools age as well. But if we keep our repair shops stocked with quality raw materials (good nutrition) then we keep our tools in good working condition and continue to build good circuits. If we don’t (poor nutrition) then our construction equipment and tools begin to fail, our circuits don’t get built correctly, we start to forget things, don’t feel as sharp as we used to and we increase our chance of dementia.

Nutrition is a key part of the brain fitness formula. Simple errors in judgment about what to eat today, compounded over time can only lead to regret. Whereas, simple disciplines today to eat good stuff will lead to life-long vibrant brain health.

When it comes to the fitness of your brain (or your body) variety is key. Your brain health depends on many factors including: everything you put in your mouth; the physical and mental activities you choose to do or not to do; the amount of rest and reflection you allow yourself; and all the stuff you tell yourself in your own head.

If I had to sum up how to get the healthiest and fittest brain possible in one word, it would have to be ‘variety’. This applies to all the things I mentioned above, which I will be getting into in detail over the next several weeks. These are the cornerstones of your brain fitness and help to improve the general intelligences of your brain. Yes, intelligences, plural.

How smart are you?

Many people think of intelligence as your IQ or ‘book smart’. Really, this is only one kind of intelligence. Other major intelligences are also your emotional intelligence (EQ) and your physical intelligence (PQ). The great thing is that you can improve all of your intelligences with effort.

Your EQ, popularized by Dr. Daniel Goleman, is your ability to control your own emotions and read the emotions of others. It is a major factor in your social skills – how well you interact with other people. Are you responsive or reactive? If you are sharp as a tack when it comes to Einstein’s theory of relativity but have no idea how to hold a conversation with another human being, you would have a high IQ but a low EQ.

Your PQ is your ability to control your own body. This breaks down into conscious control – coordination, strength, flexibility and balance, and unconscious control – how well your internal systems respond when called upon. How good of a job does your brain do at controlling your heart rate, disease-fighting immune system, and appropriate hormone responses to eating, stress, excitement, challenges, etc. Your physical intelligence is how well tuned your body machine is.

These are all important factors in leading a successful life. Your IQ will help you solve life’s challenges, your EQ will help your daily interactions with others and your PQ will help you stay healthy and fight disease of all sorts.

EPIQ Performance

Your brain is the master integrator of everything you do, feel, think and experience and the fitness of your brain determines your IQ, EQ and PQ. The more you work on the different aspects of brain fitness the better it all comes together.

Not only that, but each of these intelligences helps the others as well. For example, the better your PQ, the better your hormone stress response system works, the easier it is to keep your cool and the better your EQ gets. Also, staying calm in challenging situations gives you a better chance at clear thinking and problem solving and increases your IQ.

This is only one example of probably thousands of ways that your intelligences work together. The more you work on your brain fitness the better they all get. It all comes back to variety. Using nutrition, physical and mental activities, appropriate rest and positive thinking to improve your brain fitness and improve all of your intelligences.

Over the next several weeks I will be writing about the roles of all of these brain fitness promoting behaviors in increasing your intelligences, EQ, PQ and IQ – you can remember them as EPIQ (pronounced ‘EPIC’) performance. The goal is to increase your EPIQ performance in all aspects of your life as much as possible.

A focus on brain fitness will allow you greater success at work or business, improved relationships and improved brain and body health. Improving your brain fitness will help you move from where you are today to where you want to be.