THINGS THAT ARE BAD FOR YOUR BRAIN
SLEEP DEPRIVATION
In repeated studies of participants who went 24 hours without sleep, “cognitive functioning and response speed were equivalent or worse than if they had a blood alcohol content of .10 percent [.02 percentage points higher than the legal limit for drunk driving],” Shane says. (The National Institute of Medicine estimates that drowsy driving is responsible for nearly 20 percent of serious car-crash injuries.) And you don’t need to be up for 24 hours straight to be impaired. Other research has shown that the cumulative effect of consistently getting six or fewer hours of sleep can lead to similar results.
ALCOHOL
It’s not because drinking kills large numbers of brain cells, as is commonly believed. Rather, alcohol significantly diminishes the production of new cells. A 30-year study from the United Kingdom found that having as few as two to three drinks per day does long-term damage to your brainpower.
SUGAR
Although your noggin needs glucose to function, too much has been shown to have detrimental effects. “In teens, just one soda per day was associated with a decline in test scores,” says Palinski-wade. Too much sugar may also accelerate aging of cells, according to Harvard Medical School.
MIGRAINES
Brain scans of patients with common migraines or migraines with aura (symptoms that occur before the onset of the headache) found that they were 34 to 68 percent more likely to experience white matter brain lesions than those who did not have migraines, according to researchers from the University of Copenhagen. Some tiny brain lesions are nothing to worry about, but others may be associated with multiple sclerosis, stroke, tumors, and other diseases.
MULTITASKING
“Multitasking hijacks your frontal lobes, the brain’s higher-order thinking center,” says Sandra Bond Chapman, PHD, the founder and chief director of the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas at Dallas. “You think you are doing two or more tasks at the same time, but your brain is actually switching rapidly from one task to the other,” causing you to take longer to do each one. Multitasking reduces creativity, increases errors, lowers your ability to focus on what is most important, and increases problems with sleep, stress, and memory, she says.