Mental Fitness:

Morphing Goals

 

In the fourth week of my mental fitness program,  I'm embracing more ambitious goals for self improvement. ... Cutting Pfizer off the dole... clicking on orange rhinos... Scrutinizing the muenster cheese...

 

by James A. Bacon

 

I started the kSero Executive Program a month ago with the most modest of goals: Let's see if the mental fitness regimen would help improve my focus and concentration a little bit. I was looking for a bottom-line payback. I would judge the program a success if it improved my mental focus enough to boost my workplace productivity by, say, 10 percent.

 

Now it's turned into so much more. I'm determined now to make fundamental changes in my lifestyle -- nutrition, exercise, sleep, daily routine -- that will help me lose weight, lower my blood pressure, kick my blood pressure medication and, ultimately, live a longer, healthier life -- and, oh, along the way, increase my physical and mental energy. That's the last thing I expected when I walked through the doors of kSero's Center for the Mind in Innsbrook back in May. But that's where the experience has brought me.

 

Not everyone entering the Executive Program should expect to share those goals, Dr. Susan Hardwicke told me, kSero president and director. "That's what it morphed into for you. You moved in that direction because it's what you need, and kSero helped you realize it. It doesn't necessarily [do that] for anyone else."   The Executive Program typically lasts about four weeks. If the client wants to continue under kSero's

Read Part I in the "Mental Fitness" series. Read Part II in the "Mental Fitness" series. Read Part III in the "Mental Fitness" series. To find out more about the kSero Corporation Executive Program, contact Susan Hardwicke at (804) 360-5976, or visit the kSero website.

tutelage, then that's always an option. I'm choosing to continue. My program hit a detour when the calcium/magnesium supplement that Hardwicke recommended apparently interacted negatively with my blood pressure medicine, a calcium channel blocker, and sent my numbers through the roof. kSero and I spent a lot of time talking about nutrition, exercise and metabolism and didn't make as much progress in the cognitive training aspects of the program as we'd hoped.

 

I guess I've gotten hung up on the blood pressure medication. I've always had a distaste for drugs: They cost money and have unpredictable side-effects. Nothing personal against the pharmaceutical companies, but I don't have any desire to be paying Pfizer an annuity for the rest of my life. Trouble is, all the adult males in my family have high blood pressure, and my doctor suggested that there might be a genetic component to my problem. Given the fact that I was already in reasonably good shape for a 53-year-old man, he said, he doubted that a change in lifestyle would make a difference.

 

I'm determined to prove him wrong. Maybe most people can't kick the Norvasc habit, but I'm not "most people."

 

Reinforcing that conviction is the fact that I feel better. The kSero program is working for me. A measurable fact: I've shed eight pounds in the past four weeks, even though weight loss is not the purpose of my nutritional regime. Another measurable fact: I'm picking up the pace on my elliptical machine, moving at higher speeds for longer periods of time. Yet another measurable fact: my blood pressure, which I check daily, has shown slight improvement. I still have a long way to go before I think about flushing the Norvasc down the toilet, but I've budged the needle in the right direction. If I can sustain my program another year, who knows...

 

How about my original goals -- improving mental focus and stamina? I have no way to objectively measure my workplace performance. All I can do is tell you what I feel. I know I have more physical energy -- I don't start nodding off after six or seven hours on the job as I did before, especially after nights when I didn't get a good sleep. I also perceive that I have more mental energy. After concentrating for long periods on my writing and editing -- both taxing enterprises -- I require fewer and shorter mental time-outs. 

 

If I didn't believe the kSero regimen was beneficial, believe me, I'd go back to my breakfast cereals, bagel sandwiches, soft drinks and sauce-laden pastas in a heartbeat. But I'm not going back. I know I'm on the right path.

 

The Executive Program has a cognitive training component, which I described briefly in last week's missive. During this week's session at the kSero center, I spent more than an hour seated at a work station, blazing my way through a battery of PC-based exercises that tested different mental capabilities.

 

Typical was one drill in which rhinos and bears of different sizes and colors popped up on the computer screen. The instructions were to click the computer mouse if the animals matched the color on the border of the screen. You get penalized if your reaction time is too slow. I found half of the exercises ridiculously easy, struggled a bit on four others, and flamed out miserably on a tenth. It'll take a while before I master them all.

 

Hardwicke assured me that repeating the exercises and moving to successively more challenging levels will improve my pattern recognition skills and processing speeds, and that the training will carry over to other activities. She supplied me with a disk of the "Captain's Log Cognitive Training System" -- which touts itself as a computerized "mental gym" -- to take home. In my weekly "action form," she recommended spending 2 1/2 hours per week on the mental gymnastics.

 

She added one more note to the list of recommendations, which grows ever longer each week: Pay closer scrutiny to the sodium content of the food I eat. Particularly worthy of attention is the deli meat and cheese that I consume with my lunch sandwiches. If I'm going to get my blood pressure down, she insisted, I'll need to curtail my salt intake.

 

No more muenster cheese? No more Boar's Head turkey pastrami? Argh, the hardship, the pain!

 

Hardwicke was mildly sympathetic. She knows it is difficult to change habits formed over a lifetime. That's why she didn't ask me to go cold turkey -- like the proverbial frog in the pot, she turns up the heat slowly enough that I don't hop out.

 

Her most important message is this: We have power over our own lives. "Some habits may interfere with your cognitive function and health," she said. "Understand the choices you make. Make your choices consciously, not unconsciously."

 

-- June 28, 2006