Invest In Your Brain: How I Reset My Brain at Harvard (and Why It Matters for Your Kids)
I graduated from Harvard with a Master's in Education!
Investing in your brain isn't selfish; it's strategic. After two years of empty nesting, I returned to Harvard in my 50s to reset my brain. This year was a privilege and a deliberate choice.
After years as a board-certified radiologist and full-time mom, I hit a wall. Empty-nesting. Isolation. And a sense that I had so much more to give through my business and personally—but no roadmap to get there.
I knew I needed a drastic change. While not everyone can take a year off, initiating change doesn't always require uprooting your life. Sometimes, it begins with a single decision: introducing new inputs to your brain.
📚 Embrace a new idea
🧠 Develop a new habit
💬 Engage in a new conversation
These simple steps can ignite transformation.
Experience-dependent neuroplasticity dictates that your brain rewires based on exposure, a concept applicable to adults as well, not just children.
In this week's MindBodySpace episode, I delve into:
The reasons behind my midlife relocation to Cambridge
How altering your space—be it physical, mental, or emotional—can reshape your brain
Our initiatives to facilitate family discussions on the brain through Brain Boss and Brain Bun
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Invest in Your Brain: How I Reset My Mind at Harvard
By Dr. Juna Bobby | MindBodySpace
After 22 years of showing up for everyone else—patients, kids, work—I finally asked: What would happen if I showed up for my brain?
So I went back to Harvard. Not to prove anything. But to reset. To change my input, shift my environment, and give my brain the novelty it craved.
What I discovered—and what science confirms—is that your brain changes based on what you expose it to. This is known as experience-dependent neuroplasticity, and it’s the reason I spent a year walking across Harvard Yard, sitting in MIT lectures, and diving headfirst into learning.
Why I Needed a Brain Reset
After years as a board-certified radiologist and full-time mom, I hit a wall. Empty-nesting. Isolation. And a sense that I had so much more to give through my business and personally—but no roadmap to get there.
I knew I needed a drastic change. That’s when I made the leap: back to Cambridge, to take courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and cross-register at MIT Sloan. I attended conferences across the Harvard campus and MIT. I surrounded myself with new people—many of them half my age.
One of them was Jasmin Hemdani, an engineer at Oura. (Listen to our podcast) Her story inspired me, and reminded me that the brain loves change—at any age.
The Neuroscience Behind Growth
Research shows that the more novel, complex, and socially rich your experiences are—even in midlife—the more protected your brain becomes against cognitive decline.
This is due to something called cognitive reserve. The more knowledge, skills, and connections you build, the more pathways your brain has to work with—even if some functions decline with age.
In other words: the more you know, the stronger your brain stays.
Your Space Shapes Your Brain
Where you spend your time. Who you talk to. What you consume—on your screen, in your home, and in your habits.
These aren’t just lifestyle choices. They’re literally building your brain structure.
This episode and blog post is about how Your Space Matters. Your brain is collecting data from everything around you. And if you change your space, you change your mind.
How I'm Paying It Forward
During this past year of deep reset, I also started building something new: Brain Boss and Brain Builders—our subscription-based tools for families who want to raise resilient, self-aware kids.
Out of this mission came Brain Bun, our neuroscience-inspired plush doll that teaches calming through play. It’s part of our larger mission to make Brain Talk a normal part of family life.
We’re launching:
- Brain Builders for little kids
- Brain Boss for tweens
- Plan to SOAR for teens and up
- Resilient Youth, a digital course coming July 2025
You can join the newsletter and get on the waitlist for Brain Bun and Zen Cloud at mindbodyspace.com/2025waitlist.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to move to Harvard to reset your mind. You just need to say yes to something new.
Listen to a new podcast. Read something outside your comfort zone. Take a different path on your walk today.
Just like your child’s brain, your brain loves change too.
Until next time, stay curious. Stay resilient. And know that you’re building the brain you’ll live in tomorrow.
—Dr. Juna
👉 Subscribe to the podcast: mindbodyspace.com/podcast
👉 Get on the list: mindbodyspace.com/2025waitlist
#BrainHealth #Neuroplasticity #MindBodySpace #HarvardMom #BrainBoss #BrainReset #ParentingTools #WorkingMoms #EmotionalResilience #Entrepreneur #Stayathomemom #EducationalNeuroscience
Transcript:
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2025.06.18 Ep # 145 MBS Podcast
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Hi there. Welcome back to the MindBodySpace podcast. I'm Dr. Juna Bobby, and this is where we explore how to raise resilient, curious, emotionally grounded kids and how we as parents can grow right alongside with them. Today I wanna share something deeply personal, why I went back to Harvard much later in life to get yet another degree.
not because I had to, but Because I knew that I really needed to reset my brain. You see, I'm empty nesting now and after years of clinical work as a board certified radiologist, and mainly After years of practice, I realized that I didn't have forever with my kids, and I decided to go part-time and really focus on enjoying every single minute with my kids, but now they're gone
and I'm empty nesting.
so after two years at home, trying to work from home and just getting my stuff back together after 22 years of. not really putting myself first. I realized that I needed a major reset for my brain,
so it wasn't really only about going back to school, but it was also shifting everything, you know, my environment, my input, the people surrounding me, my habits, because when your space changes, your brain changes. And I can vouch for that. I know that this year transformed my brain and gave me a hard reset.
So neuroscience has this powerful term. That you've probably heard of already. It's called experience-dependent neuroplasticity. It literally means that your brain changes and is kind of plastic and rewires based on what you are exposed to, the conversations you have, the books you read, the streets you walk on, they're all shaping your mind.
So. I made a big move. I went to Cambridge, Boston for a year, and I walked around Harvard Yard. I sat in on Harvard Business School conferences. I took classes at my home school, Harvard Graduate School of Education, and cross registered for all of spring semester at MIT Sloan Business School. I met people I would've never met had I stayed in my comfort zone, most of them half my age. And one of those people was Jasmin Hemani. If you haven't listened to the last episode with Jasmin, she is a woman in stem and An engineer at yes, the super cool super chic Oura ring. Jasmin, reversed her heart age just by using data from the Oura ring. So if you haven't heard it already, go to mind bodyspace.com/podcast and you'll find the full episode there.
Now let's go back to how we can change our brain. I wanna talk to you about how learning protects our brain. Research shows that the more complex, novel, and socially rich our experiences are, especially in our younger years and even in midlife, the more protected our brain can become.
researchers have shown that people with higher cognitive reserve. That's mental enrichment, meaning a lot of learning, a lot of life experiences had significantly lower rates of cognitive decline. So one theory is that you have so much knowledge and so much experience that even if you lose some memory, even if you have some cognitive decline, which might come along with aging, it really doesn't impede your life.
So literally pack everything into your brain as much as you can. So I went back to Harvard 'cause I wanted to work on my business. I wanted to take entrepreneurial courses and I wanted to know what was going on with AI at MIT and Harvard.
So, not only did I find all those things, I was able to also enrich my neural pathways, making my mind and brain more resilient for hopefully many more years ahead of me.
I named this episode. Your Space Matters because it really does
where you spend your time, what you're doing, what you're consuming on TV or on your phone, or even this podcast who you talk to. that's not just lifestyle. It's actually creating your brain structure. I'm
not gonna lie, the year had a lot of tough ups and downs, and change is hard, but the brain loves it so. If I can do this in my fifties, imagine what you can do or your kids can do.
If we can give them the tools to understand their own minds. that's what Brain Builder and Brain Boss is all about. It's a subscription series that I've been working on all year at Harvard and MIT for families to create a language of Brain Talk and parents and kids can talk to each other about their stress, their habits, and how to build emotional and physical strength your daily choices.
I wanted to give families a language that they can use to decrease the drama and increase resilience. so I'm continuing to build the tools.
And for that brain bun the adorable plush doll was born Brain Bun teaches kids and families alike to have this language of neuro literacy and brain talk that you can use in everyday life that decreases drama and increases physical and mental resilience.
Look out for Brain Bun and Friends coming up in. A new YouTube channel launching in August. It's for preschool kids and I'm gonna have a subscription series for families. We also have one of the friends here,
um,
meet Zen Cloud here, and you can get on the wait list for both Brain Bun and Zen Cloud. They will be launching in late fall early winter of 2025.
To bring brain talk to families and kids is not only my passion, but it's my purpose. We're building tools we all wish existed when we were growing up.
Brain talk should be a normal everyday language in everyone's homes. kids should know about their brains and about neuroplasticity and how to not only build on their brains, but to become the boss of their brains.
Everyone needs access to the advances in neuroscience over the last few decades, it could help us change our brain and change the habits that are the foundation of cellular resilience. I'm really excited about our weekly subscription content, which will be launching late July, August.
If you are one of the early founders, thank you for supporting us. You can get on the wait list for the official launch.
We have Brain Builders for little kids. brain boss for tweens and
Plan to soar for high school and up. and remember, it's not fluff. It's educational neuroscience for the modern family.
head on over to mindbodyspace.com/2025waitlist. Subscribe and share this YouTube channel and our podcast on Spotify or wherever you get it, to spread the word. A final word on reinventing yourself. if you've ever felt stuck, numb, or uninspired, and If you're human, you've been there, it's not too late. Your brain is waiting for something new.
You don't have to move to Cambridge or go back to school. You just have to say yes to novelty, to learning, to reaching out to people and places. next episode, I'll be talking to Dr. Jenny Woo. she's a Harvard trained educator, a mom and an entrepreneur, she's most famous for her emotional intelligence cards, which are bite-sized tools and games that have brought in over a million dollars in revenue. She's gonna share everything that she knows about being a mom and starting new businesses I got so much outta that conversation, I can't wait to see you there next week.
Go on over to mind bodyspace.com/podcast and sign up for the podcast newsletter so you won't miss any new episodes. In the meantime, take a walk down a different street, pick up a book on a topic you've never explored, just listening to this podcast that's already changing the way your brain is wired and what you think you are capable of.
Ask your kids today what their brain is doing, and bring the brain into everyday conversation. And until next time, remember that your brain matters and that your mind, body, and space is all interacting with your brain.
And Changing it for the better or worse. So why not choose better? And you being here listening to this is already choosing better. until next time, I'm Dr. Juna wishing you and your family wellness from the MindBodySpace podcast. ate,