N stands for Nature.
Nature is our great healer and balancer. When we’re tired, nature energises us. When our concentration starts to wane, nature helps our brain regain focus. And when we’re feeling stressed or anxious, nature helps us calm down.
Spending time in nature isn’t just a feel-good thing — it changes our brain and body chemistry. Engaging with nature lowers blood pressure, inflammation and cortisol levels, while simultaneously strengthening our immune system.
For our brain and body to stay healthy, we need to spend 17 minutes a day or 120 minutes a week in nature. Visit a park, forest or garden and enjoy it with all your senses. Children who live closer to green spaces have a lower incidence of ADHD.
But what I personally learned today was that you can do more than you think you’re capable of.
How?
To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘He who has a powerful why, can conquer any unknown how.’
In other words, if you have a big enough, compelling enough, powerful enough, emotional enough, motivating enough reason for wanting to achieve something, you’ll find it in yourself to achieve it — even if at the outset, you have no idea how.
The goal of a goal is not simply to achieve the goal.
The goal of a goal is to become a better, stronger, wiser, more loving person in the process. What matters more than getting to the destination is the person you become in getting there. And who I became today is someone who knows that YOU can be whoever you set your mind and heart to be.
So I encourage you to think of the letter N as not only standing for Nature but for Knowledge. I know that’s a K but it sounds like N.
Know that you can rise to the occasion — to whatever life asks of you — to whatever your healing journey requires of you. You can do it if it’s important enough to you.
Doing this trek to completion is unequivocally important to me because it’s about showing you that you can boost your brain no matter what your circumstances are.
Don’t believe anyone — be they a doctor, any health professional, well-meaning friend, or the media — if they tell you that you can’t improve your brain function. You most certainly can — at any age or stage of life. It’s never too early and it’s never too late. It doesn’t matter where you are in your brain health journey — wanting to be proactive about brain health in general — working on regaining brain function after a traumatic head injury — or wanting to reverse a diagnosis of dementia. You can make a difference.
To quote Confucius: ‘Those who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it.’
To learn more about the inspiring work of Dementia Adventure, click here.
Or to make a donation, click here.
This is a photo from Stage 8 (of 22 stages) of the 300+km Pekoe Trail.
For more photos of my time in Sri Lanka, click here.
If you’d like to trek the Pekoe Trail yourself, please contact Deen at srilankatrekkingclub.com
I highly recommend you do it in the recommended 22 days, not the high speed 14 days that I did it in! You can also choose to only do one or a few of the stages to get a taste of Sri Lanka’s glorious tea country. Happy hiking – it’s a fabulous brain-boosting activity!
Please share this Health-e-Byte with anyone with an interest in brain health or a diagnosis of dementia.
