St. James Place Helps Keep Your Brain in Balance
John Lopez started his career as an activities therapist, working in long-term care and psychiatric facilities. But somewhere along the line he saw the possibility of doing more with his training and started thinking about what would eventually become his Brains & Balance program. “I kind of developed my own thinking as to how activities should be utilized therapeutically,” he says. “I did that while working for our local parks and recreation department, where I stayed for over 20 years. When I retired from there, I decided it was time to put those ideas I’d been thinking about into action.”
But it was something a bit more personal that really spurred John on. “When my mother moved into a long-term care facility, I recognized the need for something they didn’t provide, so I started developing a well-rounded program I felt would promote attention and concentration, short-term and long-term memory and executive functioning. That was in 2017.”
Developing the Brains & Balance class
With his mother and other seniors as inspiration, John began to formulate what became his Brains & Balance class. He continued developing a program he believed would help the seniors he was working with. “My passion is working with older adults, doing this program because I see a benefit in it. The three biggest issues you see with older adults is either fear of falling, fear of losing their cognitive abilities or fear of financial difficulties. I can help with the first two of those, which is why I decided this was the right road for me. Fortunately for the residents, the one thing I can’t help with, the senior staff at St. James Place can and does help with.”
John considers the Brains & Balance program a work in progress, one he’s always playing with and tweaking. “There are always new residents moving into St. James Place,” he explains. “No one wants to hear or do the same thing over and over again. Obviously, there are certain exercises I’ll repeat as they lend themselves to bringing back. But I’m constantly working on new things. I’ll see something that lights a spark. So, I keep my creative juices flowing by making sure I bring something that can truly be of benefit to each of our residents.”
Techniques
John sees his Brains & Balance classes as having multiple benefits. Although his classes are first and foremost geared toward helping residents maintain the active lifestyle St. James Place encourages, it also allows him to bring his sense of creativity to the work. “I have a basic format regarding the Brains & Balance classes,” he says. “We’ll start out talking about what day of the week and month it is, but I’ll take it a little bit further. I tell everyone, ‘Okay, don’t look at your watches or phones. Tell me what day today is.’ It’s amazing. Everyone always thinks for a moment because when you’re in a community like this, every day is a weekend, it’s a little bit different. To have ‘orientation’ you need to know today is Friday the 17th.”
Continuing his thought, John gives an example. “If you’re on vacation for two weeks, you can lose concepts of time. We have to stop and figure out how many days we have left in, for example, July. We’ll figure out how many days we’ve used this year. Then we’ll subtract that total from 365 days to figure out how many days we have left. We’ll go through a mental visualization exercise, as well as a little technique we call chunking. You think, ‘how am I supposed to figure out how many days are left in the year, and how many we used? By using chunking, we figure out how many days were in each particular month. We dump those together and, after a while, everyone kind of gets the idea.”
John also believes that humor helps keep residents minds attuned. “I like to do a bad joke of the day,” he says. “In Louisiana we call that the ‘bad joke du jour.’ I’ve been collecting bad jokes for years, so I’ve got hundreds of them. Research shows that when people are in a good mood and enjoying themselves, it promotes learning. I follow that up with what I call ‘history trivia.’ I’ll discuss three different things from history that are kind of off the wall. Later, at the end of the hour, I’ll ask them questions about what we talked about earlier, asking them to answer who, what, when, where and why. It can be very effective. I end the class with deep breathing exercises. Research shows the best way to help clear the mind is diaphragmatic breathing.”
John’s Brains & Balance classes also include using physicality. “All my activities begin as chair-assisted,” he explains. “While sitting, we do a couple of different exercises that I rotate through with concentration and attention exercises. After that, we do standing exercises. We’ll do three or four of those. The initial one is called jive toe tapping. I’ll play a song, facilitating it with a PowerPoint presentation where residents look at the screen where there are arrows and exits to show them when they need to tap their feet. This is a weight-bearing exercise.”
As noted earlier, John is constantly tweaking the program. He also mixes the Brains & Balance classes with a Balance Lab, a Brains Gains class that consists of cognitive activities and drills, and one of his most popular classes, one he simply calls ‘trivia.’ “It’s a cognitive exercise,” John says, “but we do it as a group. I do that class once a week and it averages around 25 residents.”
Sharing the wealth
John, who sees the development of the Brains & Balance program as an organic process, has also created a website, CogworxABC, to share his work and findings with others. “Doing this work is my passion,” he says. “Anything can spark an idea. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night thinking of something and write it down. If I don’t, I won’t be able to go back to sleep. Here at St. James Place, caring for the mind, body and spirit is really promoted. I’m a firm believer that if you’re enjoying what you’re doing and you’re in a good environment, good things will happen. Between the residents and staff, we’re incredibly lucky. We all work together for the betterment of all. Being able to contribute to that is everything. What more could you ask?”
We can’t think of a thing.
If you’d like to see what makes St. James Place home for so many seniors seeking an active retirement, call (225) 314-5857 to arrange a personal tour.