How can you build neuroplasticity to rewire your brain?

Repeated habits can rewire the brain, psychiatrist Dr Sanjay Chugh explained on the Doctor Vs Internet podcast. His advice highlights how simple daily exercises can improve focus and memory.

In Short

• Repeated actions strengthen neural pathways, much like exercised muscles grow thicker
• The brain can keep adapting through life, though age and effort matter
• Aerobic exercise, music, languages and coordination tasks help create fresh circuits

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections or by changing and improving the existing ones.

Before the concept of neuroplasticity was pioneered, it was believed that the human brain was largely formed and fixed in childhood. But when you learn a new language or a new skill, or practise a behaviour repeatedly, it activates some specific neural pathways. Over time, the more we repeat these tasks, the stronger these pathways become.

On the latest episode of the Doctor Vs Internet podcast with Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor, leading psychiatrist Dr Sanjay Chugh said, “If the brain wires were like muscles, the more you use a particular set of wires, the thicker they become.”

Building neuroplasticity aids brain function like learning and memory, allows people to adapt better to environmental changes, and also supports recovery from brain injury. It can help manage mental health conditions better, and also supports tasks related to focus, planning, impulse and distraction management, and organisation.

REWIRING THE BRAIN

You can rewire your brain and build new neural pathways throughout your life, but the process takes effort and time. It involves deliberate, repeated habits, patterns and behaviours over time so that the intended pathway becomes more dominant. But, there are limitations to how much you can rewire your brain, which includes your age and how much effort you put into solidifying one behaviour.

The good news is, there are easy tasks you can include in your everyday routine to create new neural pathways. Some of these are:

1. Aerobic exercise: strong evidence. 30–45 min of moderate-intensity cardio (brisk walking, cycling, swimming) 3–5x per week
2. Learning a musical instrument
3. Learning a new language
4. Learning new skills that need coordination: like juggling, skipping rope, dancing
5. Changing your regular route
6. Finger opposition sequencing: A. Touch each finger to your thumb in order (index, then pinky, then reverse), progressively faster. Then do it with both hands simultaneously but out of sync. B. Place your hand flat on a table. Lift each finger individually while keeping the others pressed down (start with the ring finger).
7. Non-dominant hand training for everyday tasks like: brushing your teeth, stirring coffee, writing, eating with chopsticks if you don’t normally use them
8. Practising origami

It is also important to remember that neuroplasticity works both ways, and if you feed it negative patterns and habits like chronic stress, the brain will become hardwired to remember it.

Dr Chugh explained this with an example of a child in class X. “Someone offers him a cigarette. He smokes a cigarette, likes it, doesn't like it, whatever. A few days later, someone else offers him another cigarette. This time, he probably ends up liking it a bit. So, one cigarette becomes two cigarettes. Two cigarettes become three cigarettes. Three become five cigarettes become a packet. And today, we say that he's addicted to smoking.” The brain’s ability to stick to harmful behaviours if repeated underlines the importance of conscious choices.

IMPORTANCE OF NEUROPLASTICITY

Neuroplasticity is important to maintain brain function, like learning and memory, to adapt to environmental changes, and to recover from brain injury.

Working memory becomes stronger with neuroplastic training. It can allow people to retain and process information more quickly.

With consistent practice of neuroplastic exercises, the brain's executive functioning improves. This includes tasks related to focus, planning, impulse and distraction management, and organisation.

Researchers, like Jeffrey Schwartz from the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, have also propagated the use of neuroplasticity methods for relief in mental health conditions like anxiety, depression, substance abuse, obsessive-compulsive disorder and everyday mental health challenges.

In everyday life, practising neuroplasticity can make habit formation easier, because new routines can be encoded into behaviour more efficiently when the brain has been trained to accommodate new things. It also accelerates learning, not only of language and instruments but also concepts, procedures, and other skills.

- Ends