Unlocking the Potential of Brain Health: Insights from GoMo Health and the Center for BrainHealth

By Cassandra Cousineau 
Manager, Strategic Content and Engagement, GoMo Health

Let’s face it: we live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with a stream of information that our minds need time to process and sort through. Our daily lives are filled with a variety of tasks, including personal and family duties, work responsibilities, and managing health issues. Additionally, social media can be a major distraction that consumes a significant amount of our time and attention, even when we have more important matters on which to focus. 

Most of us can relate. Coping with this sheer volume of information can be a struggle, and over time, it can lead to chronic stress in the brain. 

What is Brain Health?

Brain health is all about how well your brain is at doing its job. It’s not just about the capacity to learn and retain information; brain health also includes mastering motor skills, navigating emotional landscapes, and sensory discernment of touch, such as identifying textures and temperatures. A healthy brain ensures we can perform daily tasks efficiently and interact with our environment in meaningful ways.  

The Surprising Impact of Multitasking on Your Brain  

Multitasking involves juggling multiple tasks, often switching between them rapidly. It’s a daily, if not hourly, phenomenon where our brains navigate various activities simultaneously. When we engage in different tasks with distinct objectives concurrently, we are multitasking. 

As it turns out, multitasking is toxic to our brains. The next time you’re at your laptop, look at how many browser tabs you left open. Are they all for different purposes or projects? Jumping back and forth to different sites, documents, or emails is a form of multitasking. Browser tabs can be a good visualization of how your brain jumps from task to task when multitasking.

Research from the Center for BrainHealth® indicates multitasking can lead to: 

• Diminished fluid intelligence 
• Increased chronic stress 
• Impaired performance
    

Information overload can be stressful. That’s because for your brain, less is more! Reducing multitasking, even by 10%, can significantly improve brain health and productivity. 

Nourish Your Brain Through Health and Nutrition 

Did you know that you have two brains? Your gut is often referred to as your ‘second brain’ due to the very important role it plays in brain health. This is because the nutrients in the food you eat travel along the gut-brain axis, a communication highway that sends information from your gut to your brain. The information your gut sends has a direct impact on mood, cognitive function, metabolism, immune responses, stress responses, and overall mental well-being. 

According to Jordyn Leahy, a GoMo Health Project Specialist and Certified Integrative Nutrition Coach, to support brain health through your diet, focus on three simple things: 

1. Eat the rainbow. Having a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables in your diet ensures a wide range of nutrients and antioxidants. 
2. Include healthy fats. Omega-3 fatty acids such as fish, chia seeds, walnuts, and flax seeds play a crucial role in reducing inflammation, which supports brain health. 
3. Add probiotics to your daily routine. You can get probiotics from food sources such as yogurt, kefir, sauerkraut, and kimchi, or you can opt to take a daily probiotic supplement. Either way, you will be supporting a healthy gut microbiome which in turn, supports the gut-brain axis.
    

Bridging the Gap Between Dietary Habits and Cognitive Wellness 

GoMo Health has always believed in a whole-person approach to overall health and well-being. Our partnership with the Center for BrainHealth at The University of Texas at Dallas embodies this belief by emphasizing the significance of nourishing your brain through nutrition. Whether it’s the daily challenges faced by mothers, the physical and psychological impact for those with a diabetes diagnosis, or managing mind/body health for those managing cardiac disease, GoMo Health digital care management programs offer tailored strategies that improve physical health and enhance wellness and cognitive function.   

Focusing on the gut-brain axis and psychological connection between physical and mental nutrition has been transformative for GoMo Health programs. Leveraging groundbreaking research, we’ve deepened the effectiveness and reach of our initiatives and significantly impacted participants.  

For example, one of the most fascinating insights we’ve gained involves the remarkable impact of gratitude on brain health. Practicing gratitude doesn’t just feel good; it reduces anxiety and stress. Lower stress levels are associated with reduced risk of chronic stress-related health issues, including those affecting the brain, such as cognitive decline and memory loss. Gratitude also helps regulate cortisol levels in your body. Sustained high cortisol levels can lead to chronic inflammation in the body, including, you guessed it…the gut.

Brain Health Driving Programmatic Results 

The feedback from digital care management program participants across programs has been overwhelmingly positive: