10 Daily Bad Habits That Will Damage Your Brain

The effects of alcohol on the brain depend on how much and how often a person drinks and their age. Heavy drinking is never good for the body, especially the brain, and the result is bad in both the long term and short term. Moderate drinking leads to short-term impairment that you can tell when you cannot fully control your speech and actions when you are drunk.

The long-term impairment that alcohol does to our brain is even much more to count. That includes difficulty in walking, blurred vision, slurred speech, slowed reaction times, and impaired memories. And alcohol can also damage the brain of the baby if you consume it during the stage of pregnancy. Drinking during pregnancy can lead to a range of physical, learning, and behavioral effects on the developing brain. For both the mother and the baby, of course.

Our brain is the largest oxygen consumer in our body because brains control almost everything in the body. When you inhale polluted air on a daily basis without protection, there will be bad consequences. The main one is the decrease in the supply of oxygen to the brain which leads to a decrease in brain efficiency. Also, polluted air also damages your body and your respiratory system as well which is very harmful to your health.

The solution is to wear a mask when you go or walk past an area with polluted air like factories. Smoke from cars is also bad to inhale because the amount of harm is not any different. Try to live in a healthy area, or cover your nose to avoid direct contact or inhaling the polluted air.

Each person has different sleeping habits from one another, some are good while others are not. So when you cover your head when you sleep, there will be an increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide. It also decreases the concentration of oxygen which may lead to brain-damaging effects. As a matter of fact, we should not cover our faces while sleeping because it blocks incoming oxygen. It also makes you inhale your own carbon dioxide which you exhale in the same blanket that you cover. So no matter how cold you get, limit the blanket up to your neck or your nose.

Too much sugar is never good, too much of anything is never good actually. Too much sugar will interrupt the absorption of proteins and nutrients causing malnutrition and may interfere with brain development. That will lead to slow progress of the brain as well as regular headache from the slow brain development.

Thinking is the best way to train our brains, and mental activity or neurological stimulation can enrich the mind. Education, occupation, social, and leisure activities are all important contributors to mental stimulation which leads to the increase of blood flow, oxygen, and nutrients. It also acts as a signal which promotes the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic growth factor.

Without or lacking brain stimulation thoughts can cause brain shrinkage which affects your performance as a whole. You will become less active, more quiet, slow in making decisions or interpretations, and many more. Then, it will result in depression and boredom due to the shrinkage of mechanism neurons and the brain. Once you are not as active as you used to be, depression will be the first thing to happen.

There are many ways to stimulate your brain, and even doing exercise is good for the brain. Running and swimming are great for the health of the brain because they increase your heart rate. When your heart rate increase, the body pumps more blood to your brain which keeps it healthy and active. Playing games or hanging out with friends involves a lot of speech and thinking which also helps.

The only time that our busy brain gets to rest is when we sleep which is why sleeping is important. That is why when we get to sleep early at night, we tend to feel fresh in the morning. However, the deprivation from sleep as a habit will accelerate the death of brain cells. Even worse, sleep deprivation can also lead to a permanent loss of brain cells which is very bad.

In the study, the researchers found that sleep deprivation makes it difficult for brain cells to communicate effectively. When that happens, it can lead to temporary mental lapses that affect memory and visual perception. In other words, you will find it harder from day to day to recognize or see things clearly without enough sleep. The more dead cells we have in our brain, the less it functions.

There are many bad consequences resulting from overeating because eating too much is never good. Eating too much always results in being overweight or an increase in cholesterol if you consume unhealthy food on a daily basis. As for the brain, overeating will cause the hardening of the brain arteries which leads to a decrease in mental power.

If you look in a broader sense, you will gain weight when you eat too much. When you gain weight, you will feel bad or stressed out because you worry about your appearance. Eating too much will also lead to irregular sleeping habits, you will get hungry and eat more when you can’t sleep. It is a very unhealthy cycle that damages your health little by little which is something you should consider changing.

We always hear the phrase that says “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” That is actually true because first of all, you have no meal in your stomach while sleeping for the whole night. So you need to eat to bring energy to yourself as you work or study in the morning. Then the coffee lovers will say nah all I need is a cup of coffee in the morning. Now listen to this.

When you have the habit of not having breakfast, you will start to have a lower blood sugar level. The longer your habit lasts, the more symptoms will appear. That includes headache, restlessness, fatigue, and you will start to feel heavy in the head and get tired easily. Low blood sugar level leads to an insufficient supply of nutrients to the brain causing brain degeneration.

The advice is to have breakfast regularly no matter if the amount is big or small. If you get up late and have nothing left in the fridge, at least have some fruit. The idea is to fill something in your stomach instead of just water or coffee for the whole morning. Skipping breakfast once in a while is okay, but doing so too often is one bad habit to change.

We all know that smoking is bad for your body, especially the lungs, but smoking also damages the brain. As we all know, cigarettes contain nicotine which is a substance that is both addictive and dangerous. Nicotine also contains some substances that cause multiple brain shrinkage which is absolutely bad. That is why many smokers have a high chance of having Alzheimer’s as they get old.

When you are not feeling well like having a headache, flu, and other types of sickness, you should rest. Working hard or studying hard with sickness can lead to a decrease in the effectiveness of the brain. It is not different from overusing the brain more than you should when it is time to rest. The harder you try, the less effective you will become. If you develop that into a habit, it can also cause brain damage because the brain does not get to rest.

You might have a deadline to finish or important work to do, but always take some time to rest. Once you feel better, you can do your work with more satisfying results compared to when you are sick. Remember to always let your brain rest because once you use it too much, it will never work the same way again. You cannot do 5 years of rest to compensate for the time you overuse the brain, let’s not forget that.

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