Cognitive Wellness

Host Wendy Jones sits down with Lynn Breuer, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Dementia Practitioner, and Senior Director at Jewish Family Service of Metro Detroit, along with Beth Seelbach, Certified Dementia Practitioner and social worker, to discuss how aging affects brain health and what people can do to maintain cognitive wellness.

Lynn explains that while some cognitive decline is a normal part of aging, there are proven ways to strengthen the brain through neuroplasticity, lifelong learning, quality sleep, and intentional mental challenges. She also shares practical strategies for keeping the mind active and reducing risk factors associated with cognitive decline.

Key Highlights in this Episode:

• Understanding Cognitive Aging:Learn why changes in memory, focus, processing speed, and depth perception are common with age—and why they don't necessarily signal dementia.
• The Power of Neuroplasticity:Discover how the brain continues forming new neural connections throughout life and why learning new skills, languages, or instruments can help strengthen cognitive function.
• Challenge Your Brain: Find out why repeating the same puzzles or games isn't enough and why trying unfamiliar, mentally demanding activities provides the greatest benefit.
• Why Sleep Matters: Lynn explains how deep REM sleep supports memory consolidation, reduces amyloid production, and plays a critical role in maintaining long-term brain health.

Podcast Schedule: Tune in to Next Steps for Seniors with new episodes weekly!

Every Tuesday: Educational and insightful content to help you navigate the practical steps of aging.

Every Friday: Spiritual and emotional support to encourage your heart and mind.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Next Steps for Seniors with your host, Wendy Jones. Each week, Wendy brings resources and information to help guide you through those next steps with elderly parents and loved ones. If you have questions or topic suggestions, you can call us at 248-651-5010.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Good morning and welcome to Next Steps for Seniors Conversations on Aging. I am your host, Wendy Jones, and extremely blessed to be part of your journey of aging. You know, we try to plan for things in life, but at the end of the day, we just need knowledge, knowledge and power. That's what knowledge is. And we are very blessed to have two people in our studio today that are extremely wise. They've gone through a lot of experience in brain health, in cognitive wellness. We have Lynn Brewer, who is a licensed clinical social worker, a certified dementia practitioner, and a New England Cognitive Center Master Program Trainer. So Lynn's got some experience behind her. She is currently the senior director of several programs at the Jewish Family Services of Metro Detroit. Hi, Lynn. Hi, Wendy. So blessed to have you with us today. Lynn has been on the program years ago, but wow, what a wealth of knowledge she is, especially in coming into cognitive wellness. So I'm blessed to have you. We also have Beth. Beth, how do you say your last name? Salbach. Ah, yeah, I would have hammered that. Okay. And she is also a social worker certified dementia practitioner and has spent the majority of her career working with our elderly population in hospitals, nursing homes, and assisted living communities. So we're blessed to have two very fantastic women with me today. Because really, as we age, one of the things that we notice the most is our brain fog, is our memory, is our recall, right, Lynn? I mean, you and I've talked about this a thousand times. It just happens. It does, maybe a thousand and one times we've talked about it. So tell us a little bit about what happens with our cognition as we age.

SPEAKER_02 2:10

You know, I think the older we get, we all begin to realize that the stronger our cognition is, the better quality of life we're going to have throughout our aging years. But it's so important to understand that if we are blessed to live a long life, we will all experience some degree of cognitive decline. We might notice changes in our memory or that it's tougher to focus our attention and tune out distractions. Our visual spatial fields can change, which make us a little more prone to a one-step down fall because we don't have quite the same depth perception. And we process information a little bit more slowly. We need time to think things through. What I'm so glad to be here today to share with everyone is a little bit of reassurance because to have we all need it, right? To have slight changes in all of those areas is completely normal. It's just signs of an aging brain. No more shocking than if we start to need reading glasses at a certain age or develop a little bit of arthritis. But just because it's normal doesn't mean that we just need to let it happen. We want to be as proactive as we can about keeping our cognition in top shape.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Well, and we've heard different different words like neuroplasticity, for example. And I don't, I don't know exactly what that means, but I know you do.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

You are right about that. So neuroplasticity, we hear it on television ads and things like that, is really wonderful. It refers to the fact that our bodies and our brains have a built-in capacity to do small bits of rewiring, to make new little neural connections, to adapt and change over time. We used to think that we only have this capacity when we're very young because it's dependent on stem cell production. I don't know when you were raising your children. When I was raising mine, we were told to expose very young children, like birth to three years old, to music, classical music and foreign languages. Sign language, yes, all of it. Exactly, because stem cells are rapidly developing at that time. But now, decades later, enough people have had PET scans and MRIs of the brain that we know that we produce stem cells our entire lives. So we should still be doing this. Absolutely. And and how neuroplasticity works is that under the right circumstances, it guides those stem cells to go where they're needed. So you might see this in the body. If someone has had, God forbid, a stroke, and maybe they had weakness on one side of their body or some speech difficulties, but over many weeks of work through speech therapy, physical therapy, they recover those abilities. It isn't as if damage didn't happen. There's still damaged areas, but those stem cells were directed to the areas of damage to make very small little new neural connections.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

I absolutely love this. We unfortunately are creatures of habit, right? So we do the same thing. We get up in the morning and do the same thing. We, I mean, very rarely do we step outside of our box as seriously as we're 80 years old, right? It's even harder. But what you're telling us to do is hey, step outside of your box, do something different, create something new, right? Even playing an instrument. I mean, would that help too? Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:42

So cognitively, I gave the body analogy, right? Yeah. Now if we switch to maximizing our brain's capacity for neuroplasticity, we want novel challenge. That means not so easy. Anything that's easy to do, our brains don't send out the signal that we need stem cells directed here because we can do it, but something completely novel that we don't know how to approach at all. Like being on the radio show today. I am building new neural connections as we speak. Exactly. But think of learning an instrument, like you said, it's a whole language immersion. You learn to read an instrument, excuse me, learn to read music. Right. You learn how to make sound and control that sound. And so that is a whole brand new experience. Learning any foreign language or relearning one you haven't spoken in many years is also a really novel challenge where people sometimes get confused. As I'll I have a lot of people say, but Lynn, I do cross thread puzzles every day.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

No, do you hear that too? I hear it every day. I honestly do. And my dad does it every single day. I know exactly what you're talking about. So tell me, does that not help?

SPEAKER_02 6:52

Well, it's good to stay busy versus doing nothing. But if we're trying to build new small neural connections in our brains and use our brains to their fullest capacity, if we do them every day, we know how to approach it. It's not novel for us. We'd be so much better off choosing a very different activity. Now, here's the catch. If someone does uh let's say word search, but they hate Sudoku, we tend to not like things we're not good at. So we need to be willing to try those things where we don't feel so confident, we don't feel as engaged because as we struggle through it, that's when we're building our neuroplasticity. It doesn't even matter if we get the answers correct on the puzzle. It's the process of our brain going, how do I figure this out?

SPEAKER_01 7:43

That's the powerful part. Let me ask you this question. What about sleep? Does that have anything to do with our brains as far as getting eight hours of sleep, for example?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Oh my gosh. Wendy, there's a whole host of lifestyle factors that influence our brain health. And we can come do a whole other podcast. We got four minutes.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

Well, we can handle this in this segment.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

We we can handle sleep. But before I answer your question, I just want to go back to that novel challenge again. I do want to say that if you live in an area that has cognitive training classes available, this usually isn't something on the computer. It's something instructor-driven that might meet a couple times a week, an hour at a time, maybe for eight to 12 weeks. That is proven curriculum for novel challenge. We're lucky to have that in Metro Detroit in our mind university program. But there are some cognitive training programs in many areas throughout the nation.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yes, throughout the country. Well, and it's interesting you said not on your computer. Everyone's playing these games on their iPhones and iPads, and so that's not as helpful.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

It's most of it is not as helpful. And I do it as well. I love to play Canasta, so I'm on my Canasta app when I have 10 minutes. It's good to be engaged in something, but there was a very large study done about 15 years ago that took a look at brain training games. And what they found is that while we do get better at the games, meaning I can shoot more targets in less time with greater accuracy, depending on the game, those improvements don't translate to the 3D world, meaning my visual spatial skills are better on the game, but I'm not less likely to trip in my real world life. There is um there is one online game that had a study done that proves very effective at speed of processing. I can't think of the name of it right now, but if someone wanted to Google speed of processing, computer game, um, the National Institute of Health study, I think published in 2014, highlighted that as being very effective. But a typical game, it's more for entertainment. Love it.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Now we have two minutes and 30 seconds. Talk to us about sleep.

SPEAKER_02 9:50

Okay. Sleep is so important. So all day long we are gathering memories. We're gathering some that are just incidental and some that we hope to keep with intention. And depending on how much time we spend concentrating on a particular thing, it's more or less likely to end up accessible to us in our long-term memory. But there's more we pick up in a day than we can possibly keep. When we are in maximum sleep, our brain is able to sort through and eliminate what we want to let go of as well as cement, process and cement in those memories that we have taken proper steps to hold on to. But there's more to sleep in brain health than just memory. So when we sleep in a deep sleep, because you know we go through stages all night, the longer we can stay asleep consistently at a time, those cycles get longer. And the the best sleep for our brain health is that REM sleep. REM stands for rapid eye movement. And that is the time when, among other things, we have the lowest rates of amyloid production. I'm sure you've heard of amyloid buildup of excessive amyloid has been linked as a correlation, not a predictor, but a correlation to Alzheimer's disease. And we produce amyloid all day. We can't do anything about that. But when we're in the deepest sleep, that REM sleep, we produce the least amount of amyloids than any other time in the day. So if we're not able to get into a deep sleep from stress, from needing to get up and go to the bathroom, from a medical condition like sleep apnea, we're just depriving ourselves, unfortunately, of what could be many hours of our 24-hour sleep wake cycle of very low amyloid production.

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Lynn, your knowledge is incredible. I cannot thank you enough. Just that 11 minutes of sharing that information has motivated me for sure. And I know our listeners right now, because there are things we can do. Everyone says, Oh, there's nothing I can do. There is. This is an opportunity. Step outside your box. I'm going to challenge each and every person to do one thing different a day. Well, I just want to say thank you both for this amazing message. I love that you're doing so much for our community and giving back to people. Share your phone number one more time for me.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

248-592-2313 and just ask to speak to someone about retirement reimagined.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

And there you have it. You're listening to Next Steps for Seniors Conversations on Aging. And remember, the next years can be the best years. Thank you for tuning in to Next Steps for Seniors. Our podcast drops twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays at 7 a.m. Find us on your favorite podcast platform and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To learn more about Next Steps for Seniors, visit us at Next Steps Number Four Seniors.com.