Neuroscience tells us that novelty, or learning new things, keeps our brains healthy. That means that if you are a veteran crossword puzzler, doing tougher crossword puzzles will not necessarily make your brain’s neurons fire more actively. What you need is novelty, perhaps learning to write haiku (poetry) rather than doing sudoku. While novelty is good, neuroscientists also tell us that stress is bad for brain health. So, if you put pressure on yourself to write beautiful haiku and writing it only makes you feel like a bad poet, that trumps the benefit of novelty. So, to keep our brains healthy and full of firing neurons, we need to learn new things, novel things, but not things our boss tells us we have to be good at by next Thursday.

I’ve recently begun to sing again after thirty years of not singing. I have a trained voice. I was a church soloist, and a member of numerous community choruses. Then life and work got in the way. Singing was one thing I could give up in order to lead a somewhat sane life. Now I find that reading music again, creating harmony, and learning all kinds of contemporary songs makes me happy in a sustained way. I look forward all week to my singing class and sing with pleasure while I’m there. While singing is not strictly novel for me–I did, after all, sing as a much younger person–it does bring an old/new element to my learning without stress. Nobody cares if I sing well, and I love making music.

In Appreciative Coaching we encourage clients to review their past experience, to mine it for expertise and wisdom. We then encourage them to apply that expertise to a new situation, to take their past experience and retrofit it to something in the present or something they want to create for their future. Given the brain research we now have, we might also think of trying things about which we have not established expertise to create what we want, as long as the trying doesn’t also create stress. What would you like to try if nobody was watching and there was no pressure to be good at it? If this thing would add pleasure to your life, AND keep your brain healthy as you age, what’s stopping you? What activity, or process could add to your vision of the future, could enable you to do or be something you are not now? How can you make use of novelty in envisioning and realizing your dreams? On the other hand, what stressful activities that are currently part of your life could you lessen or stop?