Healthy Brain, Happy Life by Wendy Suzuki

Author:Wendy Suzuki
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780062366801
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

THE CLASS THAT REFLECTED MY LIFE

My “Can Exercise Change Your Brain?” class, a brand-new kind of hybrid course, represented the brand-new kind of challenges I was taking on in my own life. Not satisfied with continuing on my single-minded academic science track focused on the neurobiology of memory, now that I had tenure, I was starting to explore other areas of scientific interest to me irrespective of whether I had studied them before or not. I think I was just on a roll that started with the change in diet and exercise that I made in my life and how it had changed the way I felt in my body and the way I moved around in the world. It turns out that those changes also changed the way I saw myself. I started to see myself as strong, powerful (just like the affirmations that I was doling out in class), and able to make any change I could come up with in my life. And I was getting a little hint of that inspiration every single time I went to exercise class. In every class, in addition to the surge of all those good brain chemicals, I was reminded that I could push myself exactly as hard as I wanted to and feel the benefits in terms of my own strength and endurance. And this transferred to other exercise classes I was taking—from kickboxing to cardio sculpt classes to spin. And though these other classes didn’t incorporate the same kind of explicit intention practice, my own awareness and attunement to my emotional experience during those workouts was just as elevated as during intenSati. With all of this mental and emotional energy in the form of heightened motivation, I felt I could move mountains.

This inspiration not only affected the courses I developed but started affecting other aspects of my life as well. For example, while I started out developing the “Can Exercise Change Your Brain?” class as a kind of science hobby, there was a clear moment while teaching that first semester when I realized the topic was more than just a hobby for me. It happened when Omar, one of the students in that first class, came to talk to me about doing some independent research on exercise in my lab. Omar was a varsity athlete. In fact he was the starting point guard on NYU’s men’s varsity basketball team and no stranger to long, hard workouts. He was quiet in class but had a deep interest in the brain effects of exercise because of the time he spent in the gym practicing. Soon after class started he came to my lab asking about whether he could do a research study under my guidance in the lab. While the study we were doing as part of the class focused on the effects of long-term exercise (increased exercise for three months), Omar was interested in asking if you could see evidence of significant improvements in cognitive functions after just one hour of aerobic exercise.

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