Stressed? Studying? Perimenopausing? AH-HA! Nootropic Stacks Are Light Bulb Moments
First things first! Einstein wisely said that he never kept anything in his head that he could look up - so bookmark this page and you don’t even need to thank us later!
How often does tumbleweed blow across the desert of your memory recall?
You know the sensation - it’s on the tip of your tongue and yet you can feel your inner librarian scouring your memory banks, frantically looking for the ah-ha moment so you can answer the boss’s question. Or, you’re in an exam, you’re searching for something to serve up to the blank page in the hope of marks but your brain feels like a vast, echoey cathedral hall. Even having a night with the girls sounds like a weird quiz show - you know his name, married to what’s her face, was in that TV show with the guy with the hand!
We all know the feeling of being left standing by our memory as we click our fingers and look to the heavens in a desperate attempt to shake a memory loose. We’ll be damned if we have to use the word thing-a-ma-jig again. Don’t you just wish there was a way to boost, what do you call it, again, ah, yes, cognitive performance.
What is cognitive performance, anyway? It would be good to get that known!
We get it - the phrase cognitive performance makes many of us glaze over and stop reading, so let’s put it more simply and use everyday words. In short, cognitive is a fancy-pants word for what is known. Couple it with performance and we get a description of how our brains use what we know, recall what we know and add to what we know. So, now you know!
Most of the time, your cognitive performance outsmarts even A.I. You can bust out the lyrics to a tune you haven’t heard in forever. But, somehow, you can’t remember whether your best friend’s birthday is February or March, and worse, on which day - the 3rd or the 4th, which is it? And knuckling down to gen up for that promotion opportunity has you finding out that the more you try to study, the less goes in. Then it all comes to a head when you forget to pick up your eldest. Yup - that’s the sort of sub optimal cognitive performance that gives us sneaky cause for concern - am I losing my mind?
Failure to Recall - are WillPowders Nootropic Stacks Worth a Whirl? We Think So!
Of course, on the days our memory acts like an external hard drive we inadvertently left on the bus, it’s easy to think we’re either losing the plot or that we are somehow lacking the moral fibre to be better organised in our heads. But there can be many reasons why our memory lets us down. Most of the reasons are fairly easy to spot and give us a starting point for choosing the potential of nootropics.
Here’s five ways a nootropic stack and fresh approach might stack up for your cognitive function:
One: Stress, anxiety and low mood
This little trio go hand in hand, right? Any testing time in your life could also compromise the way your memory functions. When your brain senses you’re under immediate stress, it isn’t really bothered about trying to form long term memories or work out the optimal way to create a spreadsheet because if the tiger eats you, you won’t be needing any memorable souvenirs! Of course, we understand that our limbic brain, old reptile that it is, is all about sensing potential threat. But, in the 21st Century, most of the time, its sensors are skewed. Sending a sensitive email to the wrong person at work doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your house and be homeless by tomorrow. But Old Reptile Brain thinks it will. That bad boy is going to step in and prioritise the fight or the flight or the freeze rather than helping you order and process other data in your day.
A WillPowders Stack for That:
Short Term: AH-HA contains lemon balm, a plant mentioned in many a pharmacopeia for its benefits to anxiety and stress management. Lemon balm’s properties ‘appear to be consistent benefits to low mood and anxiety across the lifespan’ meaning, it’s a good all rounder nootropic at any age. It’s also been in line-ups for mitigating stress and its effects on cognitive performance, ‘since cognitive performance can suffer under acute stress, lemon balm may help to buffer against feelings of stress and therefore stress-induced cognitive decline’.
Longer Term: Consider having Hydrolysed Bovine Collagen Peptides for keeps in your daily life. Now, it might seem odd in a nootropic stack, but happy hormones like serotonin and melatonin rely on the amino acid glycine. Our friends the mice had increased serotonin when their glycine consumption was increased. Glycine supplementation has also been shown ‘to improve both memory and attention in young adults’, so it could be a good all rounder for learning time.
Two: Sleep deprivation
Stands to reason that poor sleep is going to affect cognitive function, right? Which means we have to take a look at how sleep shows up or doesn’t show up in our daily lives. Serotonin is linked to the production of melatonin, our sleep hormone. With this in mind, whatever you choose to do for your serotonin, and you can have a quick recap of our discussion above for that, is also benefiting your melatonin production.
A WillPowders Stack for That:
Short Term: While L-Theanine is often used to soothe the nerves and calm the mind, it tends to be overlooked in sleep hygiene. However, being sleep deprived often means we reach for that extra coffee and, before too long, if we are caffeine sensitive, we’ve had one too many after our cut off time and we’re back to lying awake beckoning like a beached Siren for the good ship Sleep to come and wreck itself on our shores. One solution might be to consider the role that L-Theanine can play in this scenario. WillPowders Calm contains L-Theanine that, under clinical trials, demonstrated, ‘significantly decreased perceived stress and light sleep, improved sleep quality and enhanced cognitive attention in the studied population’.
Longer Term: Keep going with the Bovine Collagen (our peptides are Award Winning!) as collagen peptides have been linked to better sleep in this study, as well as improving cognitive function. However, collagen peptides don’t have tryptophan (but what they lack in tryptophan, they make up for in glycine!). Adding one of our delicious protein powders to your day offers your body the full suite of amino acids, as well as macrominerals. Making sure you have tryptophan in your diet could mean that your body has a boost in producing melatonin, certainly the animal kingdom seems to tell us so and there is a call for further human study from very promising starts for tryptophan taking centre stage.
Three: Perimenopause and menopause
Cognitive (mal)functions are very well evidenced for anyone in peri- or menopause - medically and empirically. All sorts of folklore persists: moving from one room to the next seems to wipe memory banks, trying to nail down a key noun in a sentence is now a thing of the past, feeling hazy with any task that demands your performance is now de rigeur … There’s a very straightforward article here that gives you more details about memory in this stage in life.
This is a time when it is all too easy to think that something early onset and sinister is encroaching on your mind. This article has a comparison table taking you through more natural cognitive glitches as we get older and the nature of those that are to be investigated further. To put your mind at rest, you’re unlikely to be in sharp decline (but, of course, speak to your healthcare professional if you are concerned).
A WillPowders Stack for That:
Shorter Term: Integrate products that contain Ginkgo Biloba, Panax Ginseng, and Phosphatidylcholine which are all nootropics that can help to improve memory, reduce anxiety, and enhance concentration. We’ve welcomed these into AH-HA, which is our nootropic stack that improves cognitive performance, supports brain function and improves memory recall. There is evidence to suggest that having time on these plant extracts and then time off them means that your brain doesn’t get too used to them, which could mean the effects tail off. Keep your brain guessing! But, of course, take a look at those weeks in your diary where you need to be on your A-game, no ifs, no buts! If you’re caught with your pants down and you have some days when mental clarity and focus will be key, then try a WillPowders Brain Powder. There’s plenty going on in our Brain Powders, which you can read more about in Nootropics, New You! and Switch Your Brain to Swoosh, but taurine is specifically believed to have protective properties for the brain.
Longer Term: MCT Oil is of interest to scientists for the role it might play in cognitive function as it allows the brain to be fuelled by medium chain triglycerides rather than glucose. As we get older, our brains can become less adept at utilising glucose for fast energy so it might be useful to swap to fast energy from MCT Oil; without the white knuckle ride of chasing the next carbohydrate. MCT Oil from WillPowders is a C8 MCT Oil. One study exploring supplementation with MCT Oil suggested ‘The supplementation of a regular diet with MCT is a promising approach to improve cognitive functions in healthy individuals’ and that ‘MCT supplementation may be recommended as a preventative measure to help sustain cognition before the decline. Healthy younger subjects may benefit from MCT supplementation to the same extent as healthy elderly subjects, if not more’ with the elderly cohort experiencing improvements in cognitive testing.
Four: Alcohol
We reckon we’d all struggle to find someone who doesn’t make the link between blotto drunk and cognitive impairment. But, many of us might not factor in more moderate drinking and its effects on long term cognitive performance. Researchers at Oxford University, in the UK, conducted a long term piece of work, published in the British Medical Journal, with 550 non-alcohol dependent adults into the long term effects of drinking and concluded that ‘Alcohol consumption, even at moderate levels, is associated with adverse brain outcomes including hippocampal atrophy’, a condition researchers described as ‘a form of brain damage that affects memory and spatial navigation’. The thing here is that we need also to consider that ‘Cognitive health is directly affected by liver health’. If the liver’s busy sifting the alcohol out of your blood, it’s maybe not looking after the hormones that support your cognitive function. With this in mind, reducing alcohol intake is always an option so swap an evening drink out and swap an ElectroTide in for its contribution to normal energy metabolism and aiding the reduction of tiredness and fatigue at the same time - it might be just the ticket. We're also more than a little bit chuffed with our delicious Kombucha Range as a refreshing, lightly effervescent drink and a gut loving powerhouse.
A WillPowders Stack for That:
Short Term: If you do fancy a tipple every now and then, make sure you’re being a liver warrior and protecting that bad boy with some WillPowders Rise and Shine. There are plenty of ingredients in there that are linked to liver health, a breakdown of which you can find in Rise and Shine the WillPowders Way and Love Your Liver.
Longer Term: While we all make excuses so that we can have that drink now, if this is happening all too often then we could be storing up trouble for our cognitive function in our older years. Starting a commitment to your WillPowders Way How to Guide might be just the thing for keeping sharp as a tack as you age.
Five: Underlying illnesses
Modern life and its stressors tend to make us feel off colour a lot of the time and so it’s easy to forget to check in on how you’re doing both mentally and physically. It’s worth knowing that other factors might be compromising your memory recall and cognitive performance.
Other more infrequent factors might include things such as:
- infections like UTI’s (consider oregano oil if you can’t get antibiotics as promptly as you’d like);
- hearing and vision problems - if the information you were trying to take on board was impaired because you couldn’t hear it or see it as well as you might, then this affects the immediate processing of the information and so how it is laid down in memory, too;
- thyroid conditions - it’s worth checking if you have other symptoms of thyroid disease and talking to your health practitioner;
- chronic pain conditions - when all your attention is absorbed in managing gnawing pain, you’re not firing on all cylinders when it comes to computing the times tables, so to speak. Long term conditions additionally create stress and sleep loss as pain is often more pronounced in the evenings.
A WillPowders Stack for That:
Think both short term and long term. A WillPowders Way is to have a series of non-negotiables like our Award Winning Hydrolysed Bovine Collagen and C8 MCT Oil taking a role in your everyday nutrition. If you’ve got a commitment that you need to perform at, UTI or no UTI (you know how it is - wear the right underwear), then have AH-HA capsules in the remedy cupboard as they contain ingredients that work particularly well in short bursts for cognitive performance.
Keep pushing the medical profession when it comes to longer term chronic illnesses and pain - often you only end up at the pain management clinic after demonstrating resilience to being treated as though your mind isn’t attached to your body. It is, and pain management know it better than anyone with their multi-disciplined approach. Alongside keeping going for answers that the medical profession may have, try a spicey anti-inflammatory for everyday support. Turmeric, curcumin and their little helper pepperine bring a great legacy of anti-inflammatory properties with them. You can try WillPowders Spice and take a peek at some of its properties in Spice: A Turmeric and Curcumin Life Saver.
Have a little eye and ear MOT - lots of ophthalmic stores also offer testing for hearing loss. It’s like a spa day for the senses, well almost!
All in all, there are ways to help support cognitive performance and memory recall
Downshifting stress and supporting mood where possible are brilliant places to start. Working on your Zeds and reducing alcohol consumption will help longer term. But the power of a nootropic stack is not to be underestimated. We can’t promise we can make you a character from Limitless at WillPowders, but we can signpost to get you round some of the roadblocks for brain fog.
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