One of the less comfortable facts of human hardwiring is that the ability to concentrate generally hits a peak in early adulthood and then starts slowly going south. Fortunately, however, the same depressing research that says middle-agers are more easily distracted also indicates we can actually do something about it. Here are six surprising scientifically-backed ways to boost cognition and concentration.

1. Unleash your inner Picaso. A recent study shows that doodling while listening can actually improve concentration and recall, probably by keeping the mind engaged enough to prevent it from simply checking out and wandering off into a daydream. Doodling creates a minimal cognitive load – enough to stave off daydreaming, but not enough to shut down processes like listening and recall. So what seems like mindless doodling while performing a dull task can actually be a defensive tactic that improves concentration.

2. Paint the room red. Or maybe blue. Science has long recognized the importance of color to mood – green is peaceful, yellow is cheerful, etc. Red has been mainly linked to things like sexuality and aggression, but a recent University of British Columbia study indicates that both red and blue can provide a substantial boost to cognitive activities. According to the study, tests showed that red enhanced performance on attention-demanding tasks, while blue gave a boost to creativity. Source

3. Drink wine and eat chocolate. It sounds too good to be true, but a team of Oxford researchers say micronutrients found in both wine and chocolate can enhance concentration, improve test scores and slow the progress of age-related cognitive decline. According to Science Daily, both wine and chocolate (and tea as well, but where’s the fun in that?) contain a sub-class of subclass of dietary polyphenols called flavonoids, and flavonoids appear to be good for the brain.

4. Doze off. On purpose. Studies show that naps as short as five minutes long can improve alertness and concentration and enhance memory processes. And if that’s not enough to banish nap-guilt, here’s some happy science: we appear to be biologically programmed to sleep for a short period in the middle of the day. So the next time you find yourself fighting a surge of mid-afternoon sleepiness, give in. Source

5. Wake up and smell the the peppermint. But lay off the ylang-ylang. The scent of peppermint has been found to enhance memory and increase the ability to concentrate, whereas ylang-ylang impaired memory and lengthened processing speed. In terms of subjective mood peppermint increased alertness and ylang-ylang decreased it, but significantly increased calmness.

6. Raise the roof. Bizarre as it seems, recent research supports the idea that ceiling height has a significant effect on cognitive processing. Study participants given a memory test in a high-ceiling room did better on concentration-demanding free recall tasks (tasks in which they’re not given any recall cues, like categories).

It’s no myth that on average, weight goes up and fitness levels go down as we get older. But there’s nothing that says you have to be average – especially as being average in the area of middle age fitness is putting yourself at significantly higher risk of illness and even death.

The largest-ever long-term study of physical fitness change in United Stated clearly illustrated the correlation between aging, weight, and fitness. The study, conducted by the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research, monitored over 2,000 men and women at four research sites across the United States, starting when the participants were 18 to 30 years of age. The participants’ fitness levels were tracked for twenty years as they moved from young adulthood into middle age … and the news wasn’t good.

As age increases, fitness and activity levels plunge …. and risk factors soar

As the participants aged, their physical activity dropped by an average 18 percent. This change set off an alarming domino effect: by the end of the study the participants’ physical fitness levels had declined by an average 28 percent and their weight increased by an average 20 percent. According to the researchers, these changes put the participants at significantly greater risk of illness and death.

KPNCDR Associate Director for Clinical Research Stephen Sidney said the study unmistakeably showed the importance of staying physically active as we grow older. Noting that though we can’t control aging, he stressed that our level of physical activity definitely is something we can control. And the degree to which we do maintain fitness in middle age can play an enormous role in determining our health and well-being for the rest of our lives.

Mid-life fitness clearly shown to reduce risk factors

In recent years science has shown that a host of natural aging-related changes once considered inevitable can be reduced, delayed, or offset by maintaing a healthy weight and moderate-to-high physical activity level. Slowing of the metabolism, loss of muscle tone and bone density, reduced flexibility, and even cardiac ailments and irregularities have all been shown to respond dramatically to a regular regimen of increased physical activity. Higher levels of fitness also correspond to lower incidence of non-insulin dependent diabetes, osteoprosis, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease.

And it’s not just the body that benefits from middle age fitness – it also significantly reduces the risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and other mood disorders.

The encouraging news is that it seems it really is never too late to start. A regular regimen of physical activity leads to increased fitness at any age, resulting in remarkably positive physical and mental health improvements in even the very old.

Is it possible that something as simple as a daily morning jog could offset the effects of aging?

Could stopping by the gym a few times a week enhance sexual performance and increase libido?

Could hiking, biking, swimming, or just lifting weights in the garage be the “cure” most midlife men are looking for?

According to a recent study by the New England Research Institutes, the answer is a resounding “yes”.

The study, which followed 1,667 men ages 40 through 70 for 16 years, indicated that as men age the importance of weight control through regular exercise becomes vital. The reason? Because even moderate increases in weight led to major decreases in the production of testosterone, the primary male hormone.

As weight and BMI go up, testosterone production goes down

Most people are aware that there is a normal age-related decline in testosterone production, but in reality the amount of age-related decrease is surprisingly small. In normal healthy men testosterone production generally decreases about one percent per year after the age of 40. But the New England research revealed that as the Body Mass Index or BMI rose into the level of obesity, the production of testosterone dropped off dramatically. In fact, moving from a non-obese to an obese BMI category was linked to a reduction in testosterone equivalent to 10 years of aging.

Low testosterone linked to a host of mental, physical, and sexual problems

Low testosterone levels undoubtedly play a role in many of the symptoms and syndromes associated with male aging, male “menopause”, and the classic male mid-life crisis. Low levels of this crucial hormone are believed to contribute to a host health conditions, including diabetes, osteoporosis and impaired sexual function.

Both mental ability and sexual function are markedly effected by major drops in testosterone levels. A French study by the Saint-Etienne University Hospitals found that lower levels of testosterone are definitely linked to measurably poorer results in cognitive tests.

Other studies have demonstrated that low testosterone is linked to Alzheimer’s disease, but it is still unclear whether the drop in testosterone levels lead to the disease or are a result of the disease process.

Good nutrition + regular exercise = fitness over 50

While changes in diet and lifestyle play an important role in maintaining a healthy weight (and therefore a healthy production of testosterone) in middle aged men, research is reaffirming that at midlife exercise is absolutely crucial. In addition to promoting weight loss, fitness over 50 has been repeatedly proven to dramatically lower most major health risks and to increase energy, alertness, and libido.

Do-It-Yourself is indeed a Big Freakin’ Deal for anyone having a Midlife Crisis – it can be an invaluable resource for alleviating some pervasive midlife problems. Putting up some shelves or fixing that shaky stair railing builds more than your property value. It can also build your mental sharpness, physical fitness, personal attractiveness, and self esteem.

Here are five ways in which DIY is particularly good for people over 50.

1. It helps you stay sharper longer. Mastering new skills is just about universally recognized as one of the best, most effective ways to forestall age-related cognitive problems and keep the ability to remember, concentrate, and focus in top shape. Figuring out how to install a ceiling fan can be as valuable a mental workout as sitting down with the Times Sunday crossword.

2. It increases your activity level. On average, activity levels drop by more than 18 percent as we move from young adulthood into middle age. This decline in physical activity is believed to be at the heart of more alarming statistics: by middle age, the norm seems to be a 28 percent decline in physical fitness levels and and a 20 percent increase in weight.

Not only does increased activity have a significant positive impact on both weight and general fitness levels, it has also been shown to dramatically decrease risk of illness and death. In addition, older adults with higher activity levels are far less prone to cognitive problems like dementia, and are less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Perhaps most interestingly of all, higher activity levels seem to be powerfully related to positive physical appearance characteristics, like youthfulness, vitality, alertness, strength, and sexuality. Mowing your own grass can improve a lot more than your house’s curb appeal – it can be a powerful enhancement to your own curb appeal as well.

3. It offers new challenges and enhances creativity. Feelings of boredom, disenchantment, and ennui are typical complaints associated with midlife crises, and the older we get the easier it is for an insidious “been there, done that” attitude to creep into the outlook. Health professionals agree that finding a new challenge is one of the best ways to shake that syndrome. Striving to meet a new challenge can also be extremely effective in lifting or even eliminating depression. This is particularly true when the challenge involves coming up with a creative solution to something that you’ve identified as having significant personal importance to you, like getting that damn dripping faucet to stop keeping you awake at night.

4. It gives you new achievements. Setting yourself an important but realistic goal and becoming truly invested in achieving it is undoubtedly one of the all-time best self-motivation techniques, and achieving a personal goal is a tremendous morale booster. Just deciding you’re going to take on that leaky faucet yourself can lift your mood, and actually doing it will increase feelings of self-determination, competency, independence, capability, and achievement.

5. It’s an absolutely unparalleled source of self-esteem. If there’s anything a lot more gratifying than the feeling of successfully completing a DIY project, it’s hard to imagine what it would be. Feelings of pride, ingenuity, personal achievement, and self-satisfaction can be surprisingly hard to come by some days …. but every time that light switch works or the back door doesn’t squeak, that’s exactly what you’ll feel.

If you’re finding that Saturday night cocktails are making for some miserable Sunday mornings, you’re not alone. As we get older our tolerance for alcohol may change – and if you don’t take that into consideration, you could be in for some whopper surprise hangovers.

Alcohol effects the central nervous system and changes the balance of brain chemicals. Normal metabolic and physiological changes related to aging can have a significant impact on our body’s ability to cope with these changes, so the same number of drinks that were fine at 30 can be a morning-after disaster in the making when you’re over 50.

Midlife women need to be particularly aware of this, since women appear to be more prone to hangovers than men, no matter what their age.

Moderation, of course, is the best form of prevention. But here are some other things that can help:

- Keep it clear. Colorless liquors like vodka and gin tend to be a little gentler to the body when it comes to after-effects. Red wine and malt liquors like whisky contain compounds that tend to produce more severe hangovers.

- Keep it sweet. Research suggests that drinking fruit juices or sugary beverages can decrease hangover intensity, so don’t use diet soda as your mixer.

- Eat before you drink. Having food (particularly fats, like meat or cheese) in your stomach when you start drinking can slow the body’s absorption of alcohol.

- Don’t try to cure it with coffee. The idea that some strong coffee will sober you up is a total myth – and even worse, the caffiene can lead to dehydration and actually make your hangover worse.

- No “hair of the dog” treatments. Having a drink to cure your hangover is like throwing gas on a fire to put out the flames. Depending on what stage of hangover you’re in, having a morning-after drink will either just postpone the inevitable or makes you feel a million times worse immediately.

- Forget the herbal hangover remedies. Mankind has been suffering through hangovers ever since alcoholic drinks were invented, and no real remedy has ever been found. As some very wise person once said, the only real cures for a hangover are time and death …. and when you have a bad one, the latter starts to sound good.

Most over-50s are fairly defensive about naps, which we tend to associate with either the very young or the very old. But in terms of effective anti-aging therapies, napping is hard to beat. There is solid scientific evidence that a brief period of mid-day sleep can provide a whole host of anti-aging benefits, ranging from enhanced cognitive function to decreased risk of cardiovascular disease.

Though we tend to see sleep time as limited to the overnight period, in reality we’re programmed to also enjoy a brief sleep during the day. We often write off that drowsy feeling we experience in the afternoon to a large lunch, or to having slept poorly the night before, but it’s actually a natural physiological reaction that happens whether we’ve eaten or not, or whether we slept well or poorly during the previous night. It’s simply a fact of physiology: sometime between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. most people experience a period of drowsiness, characterized by diminished alertness, memory, coordination, and mood.

The perfect antidote to this natural low is a nap. A brief afternoon sleep has been shown to significantly improve alertness, mood, and cognitive function for the remainder of the day, and it also reduces the stress that can lead to heart disease, diabetes, and perhaps even unwanted weight gain.

The key to turning a few minutes of shut-eye into an effective anti-aging tool is to nap efficiently.

- Plan your nap. Set aside a half-hour during which you won’t be taking calls, etc.

- Find a private spot. Worrying about being interrupted can make drifting off very difficult.

- Lie down if possible. Falling asleep sitting up is possible, but it generally takes much longer.

- Darken the room if possible; bright light has a tendency to keep us alert.

- Set an alarm. Science has divided sleep into five separate stages of increasing depth, and a good refreshing 20-30 minute nap takes us only into stage two, or light sleep. If your nap goes much longer than a half hour you are likely to enter deeper stages of sleep, which can leave you feeling tired and groggy when you awake.

It looks like the answer is yes. A University of North Carolina study on the effects of drinking coffee concluded that caffeine is a safe and reliable drug that could potentially play a role in the therapies against neurological disorders. It is even believed that drinking coffee could help prevent Alzheimer’s disease, one of the most wide-spread and devastating of all age-related disorders.

How coffee protects the brain
Coffee’s protective powers center on what medical experts call the “blood brain barrier”, a natural filter that guards the central nervous system against potentially dangerous chemicals that may be carried through the rest of the bloodstream. It is believed that high cholesterol levels in the blood have an adverse effect of this filter, weakening the barrier against these chemicals and leaving the brain vulnerable to damage.

The University of North Dakota study showed that after three months of a high-cholesterol diet, the blood brain barrier in rabbits that had ingested the equivalent of just one cup of coffee per day was far more intact than the barrier in those that had been given no caffeine.

Research on Alzheimer’s disease indicates that a weak or “leaky” blood brain barrier that makes cholesterol damage to the brain possible is among the factors that can trigger or contribute to the disease.

Caffeine shown to reverse Alzheimer’s symptoms
A recent University of Florida study even suggests that caffeine could actually reverse some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. The study used mice bred to develop symptoms of the disease, which were tested to confirm that they were exhibiting the same kind of memory impairment that human Alzheimer’s sufferers experience.

Half the mice were then put on a daily regimen that included the caffeine equivalent of five cups coffee added to their drinking water, while half the mice had no caffeine added to their water.

After two months both groups of mice were retested, and it was found that the mice that had been drinking the caffeine-added water performed significantly better on memory and thinking skills, actually testing as well as mice that had not been bred to develop dementia. The mice that had been drinking non-caffeinated water showed no improvement in the tests.

Even more encouragingly, it was found that the brains of the mice given caffeine showed as much as 50% reduction in levels of beta amyloid protein, which is the basis of the destructive plaque that builds up in the brains of dementia patients. The research suggested that caffeine had this effect because it suppresses brain inflammation that leads to over-production of the protein.

Experts warn that while these results are extremely positive, more research is needed to determine whether caffeine has the same effects on people.

Though research has shown that similar regimes have effectively extended the lives of a number of organisms including yeast, worms, flies, and rodents, there have been no large or long-term studies of how caloric restriction for anti-aging effects humans.

It is believed that caloric restriction triggers a survival mechanism in some organisms that normally have short lifespans, enabling them to outlive food shortages. Reducing the calorie consumption of young rodents by 30 to 60 percent increased their maximum lifespans by the same percentage, while reducing the calorie consumption of adult rodents by 44 percent extended their maximum lifespan by 10 to 20 percent.

In addition, rodents fed a restricted calorie diet also developed fewer age-related diseases, and the onset of those diseases was delayed. The studies also showed that calorie restriction effectively decreased the deterioration of nerves in the brain among animals with neural disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and stroke.

But Does It Work The Same Way In Humans?
While research on the effects of caloric restriction in humans is limited, a number of small studies show potential for health improvement. It has been suggested that caloric restriction for anti-aging may improve memory in older adults, and improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol level, and blood sugar have been observed.

These benefits, along with reductions in weight and body fat percentage resulting from caloric restriction, are known to help reduce the risk of a number of chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. But researchers stress that at this time there is no clear and compelling evidence that caloric restriction for anti-aging will extend lifespan in humans as it does in some other organisms.

Risk Factors Must Be Considered
Caloric restriction for anti-aging cannot be considered risk-free for humans, particularly those who are already lean. Excessive calorie restriction can result in hormonal changes, reduced bone density and muscle mass, fatigue, anemia, dizziness, depression, and lethargy.