If you’re into health and fitness in any way, then you should be into keeping your brain as healthy as possible. It’s not just about what you eat, or what you drink, but it’s about the way that you use your brain to keep it exercised. Your brain is not a muscle, but it is a controlling organ of your entire body. It’s in charge of telling everything in your body what to do to keep you healthy. You also need to keep your brain fit with as much mental stimulation as possible to support healthy cognition. This can delay illnesses from occurring like dementia or Alzheimer’s, and healthy mental function can help your memory to improve, too.
It’s just as important to exercise your brain as it is to exercise anything else in your body, from using daily riddles to ensuring that you are keeping up with studying and reading the news, you can make sure that your brain is as healthy as possible. The good news is that there are plenty of ways that you can strengthen your brain function and ensure that you are able to think long into your 90s. Below, we’ve got 12 wonderful ways that you can strengthen your brain and improve your thinking.
Learn Something New
It really doesn’t matter how old you are, there is always room to learn new things. All you need to give yourself is 15 minutes every day to learn something brand-new. 15 minutes a day, every day, for a whole year, can make you an expert on the subject. There are plenty of great apps out there that you can use to help you to learn new things, from Duo Lingo to Wordle. Even things like playing with PlayDoh can help to improve your agility and your hand-to-brain coordination.
Develop Your Brain at Work
Ask for help developing your brain at work. A good way to develop in the office is to cross-train. Learn somebody else’s job and the new skills that come with it. You can even switch jobs with somebody else for a while so that you can learn several new skills and improve your brain function. It can be a surprise how well this could help you to learn new things and keep your brain feeling fresh and working.
Improve the Skills You Already Have
Improve the skills you already know how to do. Sometimes, repetitive mental stimulation can help your brain to function better and expand your basic skills. Your knowledge is going to improve when you work on common activities such as sewing or playing card games. You can read, paint and do crossword puzzles to really push your brain to new heights.
Slow Down on the Screen Time
You can do so much more for yourself when you are stepping away from the screen and doing something else. You don’t need to flood your brain with screen time, not when you can take the time to look into other methods of having fun. Reading actual books or looking at flashcards can get your brain away from your screen for a change and give your eyes a break from the screen lighting!
Limit Your Video Game Activity
Don’t play too many video games. There are plenty of games out there that can help to strengthen your brain, but action video games have patterns with them that aren’t always the best thing to have in front of your eyes all day long. Video games are good in moderation but not all the time, so limit how much you play and you’ll help yourself.
Join a Reading Group or a Club
Join a reading group or a club. One of the best ways to strengthen your brain is to share the load with other people. When you join a reading or learning group of some kind, you can get together and keep yourself accountable for your learning. Almost all mental activities that you can enjoy can be used to protect your brain. So if you love to read, joining a book club is a great idea because then you can have other people help you so that you are accountable for your own personal learning. Not only that, but you’ll be able to read books that other people love and you can discuss them together, and make new friends!
Practice, Practice, Practice
Practice perfect practice. Practice does never make perfect. Your brain doesn’t interpret the things that you feed into it, it just translates what you learned. Your brain doesn’t care if you’re becoming excellent in something, it just becomes excellent when you make sure that you don’t skip out on your practicing. Teaching someone to do something well at the start prevents them from developing bad habits. So if you practice perfectly, you’re going to make sure that you retain the information that you are learning and help your brain feel better.
Break the Routines
Breaking the routine of your life can help you to stimulate new parts of your brain in the same way that breaking your diet of a calorie deficit so that you could have more calories will break your diet. This can give your body a chance to reset, refresh, and start again. Doing the opposite of what feels natural to activate the other side of your brain can access both hemispheres. Writing with your other hand, or trying to learn by listening instead of learning by doing can help you to do this. Learning new words each day, or taking the time out to strengthen a relationship, can help you to build your brain back to its best. If you’re not used to submitting a new idea at work, give that a try several times and see how that works for you. Doing things out of the ordinary can help you to train your brain to do great things.
Compare How Things Work
One of the greatest ways to strengthen your brain is to learn how they work. Look at the way something that is so ordinary to you works on the inside and see the magic. This gives your brain a strength workout. Evaluating how different pitchers control a curveball or how many painters can see the ocean in so many different ways can help you to enhance your sensory ability and stimulate brain growth. That’s what we’re trying to achieve here with ways to strengthen your brain.
Visit New Places
To truly really enhance your brain, go and visit new places and travel to new and interesting areas that you haven’t been to before. This can help your brain and expose it to experiences and sights and people. Using a map, for example, opens up to stimulate the brain in new and different ways and exercises your parietal lobe which is responsible for the visual-spatial guidance that you benefit from every day.
Surround Yourself with Intelligent People
Surround yourself with intelligent people. If you are interested in learning new things, cultivate smart, intelligent friends. People can be contagious in a good way and not just because of Covid. You become like the people with whom you spend most of your time – they say you are who you hang with! Work on developing friendships with new and interesting people, where you can trade ideas and gain new perspectives. You could even stretch your mind if you are surrounded by fascinating people. When you play a game, for example, you have to play with people who are better than you.
Speak to a Doctor
Speak to a doctor. If you are worried about the way that your brain retains information, speak to a doctor to see whether or not you need any extra help with things like dyslexia or ADHD.
We hope you’ve found these 12 tips useful, we are going to be working on these areas in our own life, so let’s compare notes a few months down the line and see how we are progressing!
