Darling, give your brain a rest will you?

This is great advice as giving your very powerful human brain a rest is one of the best things you can do to maintain good mental health and this means more than just good sleep.

Our brains need physical exercise to rest and produce healthy brain chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and phenyl ethylamine. All of these yummy chemicals make us happy and help enormously to prevent dementia, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, aggression, irritability, the list goes on.

Meditation, yoga, tai chi or just breathing exercises also give our huge brains a rest by closing down the dominating organising part and letting the more spiritual relaxing part find a quieter order to life. (Visit a church and sit for a while and feel the calming effect, no mater your religious beliefs. This is a form of reflective meditation.)

Have you noticed how our brains also like to sleep around 2-3pm. Research has found all humans have the desire to rest at this time of the day. So the Spanish and Italians have got it right with their siestas!

If employers allowed staff a 20-minute catnap in the arvo, productivity would actually improve. After all, we are pretty useless anyway when we fight this need for sleep at this time.

Neuroscience, the study of how our brains work, shows us how we can help our own mental health by understanding it. For instance, our brains can only think of one thing at a time. If you are ruminating over depressive thoughts, think about other things, like that fabulous holiday you have always wanted, and, bingo!, depressive thoughts also take a holiday.

We can train our brains to change the way we think and how that affects us.

Human brains are a mixture of a reptilian, a mammal and another outer layer of high-functioning brain that includes the pre-frontal cortex — the part that does all our reasoning. Humans are not the strongest animal on the planet but we are certainly the smartest, hence our survival against bigger beasts.

The final outer section of our brain allows us to project into the future, consider the past, experience the present and even observe ourselves doing it all. Amazing stuff, but it also makes us very complicated animals, easily susceptible to mental health decline unless we know how to rest our brains. Next time you are having a big argument with your boyfriend/girlfriend, think about taking your brain out for a rest.

And just for the record have a look at this. Neuroscience also shows our brains are more active and creative between 9am and noon so using this time to go through emails wastes a very productive part of the day. Reading emails at 2pm would allow us to be much more productive and, let’s face it, it will not make any difference in communication.

Understanding our human brains’ need for rest is important to us all. When we allow our brains good sleep, exercise, reflective meditation and an afternoon nap we are making ourselves mentally healthy and able to cope and enjoy life better.

Ah, I now need a rest after all that thinking!

INFO: Gerry North is gay couples counsellor. Contact Gerry on [email protected] or 0411 368 142.