Brains at Work

01/10/2026

There’s no shortage of advice about looking after your brain.

One day it’s a supplement. The next it’s a brain-training app, a particular food or a morning routine that apparently everyone should be doing.

If you’re trying to look after your brain as you get older, it can be difficult to know which advice is worth your attention.

I understand why people feel overwhelmed by it. You want to do something useful for your brain health, but you don’t want to spend your time and money trying every new thing you come across.

This is where I think it helps to ask a different question.

Rather than “What else should I be doing?”, start with “What does the evidence tell us, and how does it apply to my life?”

Something can sound convincing in a headline without being the right next step for you. Understanding the evidence helps you make informed choices instead of feeling you need to do everything.

That’s a big part of my work: taking what we know about the brain and making it understandable and practical for everyday life.

If you’d like to start looking after your brain health but aren’t sure which advice to trust, I have some free information to help you find your starting point.

Send me a message and I’ll point you towards it. 🧠

30/09/2026

Now, that doesn’t mean Call of Duty is good for everyone’s sleep, or that the game was improving his sleep.

The monitoring simply showed that his body’s response was different from what they’d assumed.

That’s why I’m careful about giving people a list of things they should or shouldn’t do.

General brain-health advice can be useful, but it doesn’t tell us everything about how one person responds. Sometimes we need to look more closely at what’s happening for them before deciding what needs to change.

What helps you switch off in the evening that other people might find surprising?

29/09/2026

Ever got to the bottom of a page and realised you haven’t taken in a word of it?

You go back to the top, start again and find yourself in exactly the same position. 😂

It’s tempting to think your memory is letting you down, especially if you’ve started noticing little changes in how well you concentrate.

But there’s a difference between taking information in and remembering it later.

If your attention keeps drifting while you’re reading, the information might not be going in clearly in the first place. That doesn’t automatically mean there’s a problem with your memory.

Think about what’s happening around you when you struggle to concentrate. Are you trying to read while keeping half an eye on your phone? Is your mind running through everything you still need to do? Are you simply tired?

Those things are worth noticing before you decide your brain isn’t working as well as it used to.

This is why I’m interested in understanding what’s going on for each person, rather than jumping straight to a generic brain-health tip.

When this happens to you, is it usually because your mind is on ten other things, or does it happen even when you feel ready to concentrate?

18/09/2026

If you’ve ever experienced sleep paralysis, you probably don’t need me to tell you how frightening it can feel.

Your mind is awake. You know what’s happening around you.

But your body hasn’t quite caught up yet.

Here’s why. 🧠

During REM sleep — when much of our dreaming happens — your brain temporarily reduces movement in many of your muscles. It’s a normal part of sleep and helps stop you physically acting out your dreams.

Sometimes, though, you become aware of your surroundings before that temporary muscle inhibition has switched off.

That strange overlap between sleep and wakefulness is what can leave you feeling conscious but unable to move.

It usually only lasts a short time, even though it can feel much longer when you’re experiencing it.

Knowing what’s happening won’t necessarily make it pleasant, but understanding that there’s a brain explanation behind it can make it feel a little less alarming.

If it’s happening regularly or causing you concern, it’s worth speaking to a healthcare professional.

Follow for more simple, practical explanations of what your brain is doing — and why. 🧠

17/09/2026

His partner blamed Call of Duty. He said it helped him switch off. 🎮

So who was right?

Surprisingly, he was.

When we looked at what was actually happening in his body while he played, he was moving away from a fight-or-flight response and towards physiological relaxation.

In other words, for him, Call of Duty really was helping him switch off.

That doesn't mean I'm about to start prescribing Call of Duty as a sleep strategy. 😂

But it does demonstrate something I see again and again in my work: what we assume should be helping or hindering someone isn't always what's actually happening.

In this case, I was able to use Firstbeat Technology to assess his stress and recovery over time, rather than relying on assumptions about what a relaxing evening should look like.

And that's one of the reasons I don't love generic, one-size-fits-all advice.

Sometimes we need to stop guessing and look at what's actually happening for the individual.

Whose side would you have been on before seeing the data? 👀

15/09/2026

11/09/2026

Somewhere along the way, being tired became something of a badge of honour.

We stay up late to finish the work, get up early to fit more in and tell ourselves we’ll catch up on sleep when life gets a little less busy.

The problem is that your brain doesn’t see sleep as the unproductive part of your day.

Most healthy adults need at least seven hours of sleep regularly, with many functioning best somewhere around seven to nine hours.

And during that time, sleep is supporting many of the things you need your brain to do the following day, including attention, memory, learning, emotional regulation and decision-making.

So perhaps needing enough sleep isn’t something we need to become better at pushing through.

Perhaps we need to stop treating it as the first thing we can sacrifice when life gets busy.

🧠 You don’t need to earn your sleep by finishing everything first.

Send this to someone who needs that reminder and follow Brains at Work for practical, science-backed ways to understand and look after your brain.

15/05/2026

Looking back at my life and where I am now, I never expected to end up here.

After leaving cardiac care I knew I still wanted to be a physio and I still wanted to make a real difference, so when I started working with people who'd had brain injuries, strokes and Parkinson's, I got excited about it.

I began researching and investigating everything I could find. I became a bit of a brain nerd if I'm honest, because the brain is just so extraordinary. The way it adapts, recovers, rewires itself completely blew me away. There is so much more to learn about the brain.

That curiosity has never left me, 😬 Every single day is still a school day.

13/05/2026

In my line of work I speak to lots of people who've taken a holiday to relax, but when they return, they feel just as stressed as they did when they left. They end up feeling deflated, because they had relaxed, rested, & switched off, and came back thinking they will feel better, but they don't.

Here's the thing, when you're burnt out, your brain has actually been running on stress hormones for so long that it's changed the way it functions. Your nervous system is stuck in survival mode.

A holiday will give you a break from the triggers, but it doesn't reset your nervous system. So the moment you walk back through the door, your brain picks up exactly where it left off.

It's a bit like taking the batteries out of a smoke alarm because it keeps going off rather than finding the source of the smoke.

Rest is important. However, burnout needs something more than that.

I do find it intriguing how our brain functions. Has that ever happened to you?