Dr. David Bardsley

So that 250-pound man can consume more alcohol without it ever getting to his brain than a 105-pound woman can.

Floods your body with two primary stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline, and they have a negative effect on your cognitive ability.

So anything you can do to reduce the amount of stress is good, anything that you can do.

And I tell people if they have significant stress or anxiety of depression, the best thing to do is to get some professional help.

Okay, what else?

Well, one of the very biggest ones is exercise.

And I shouldn't say exercise, it's the lack of exercise that leads to the cognitive impairment, the lack of movement.

Physical activity, vigorous physical activity is truly the rifle shot to improving your cognitive ability.

There are now thousands of studies, not hundreds, but thousands.

I've read over 500 myself.

Studies that show the improvement in cognition that occurs with vigorous physical activity.

And it has to be vigorous.

Unfortunately, a walk around the block with your dog isn't considered vigorous physical activity.

And that physical activity does two things.

It stimulates the growth of new brain cells, which we only discovered 20 years ago could occur.

For 100 years before that, neuroscience taught that when a brain cell dies, that's it.

It's gone forever.

You don't grow new brain cells.

But 20 years ago, they discovered for the first time that, in fact, we can grow new brain cells and we can stimulate the growth of those new brain cells.

And the single best way of doing it is vigorous physical activity.