Exercising Your Mind: Why Keeping Your Brain Healthy is Essential and How to Do It

Everyone knows that staying physically active helps to keep the body functioning at its best. Physical exercise and staying fit play an essential part in reducing the risks of many diseases. As you get older, it’s particularly important to maintain safe levels of activity to ensure you stay feeling vital and live a long life. Exercising your body to take the best care of it may seem like an obvious thing to do to maintain your health. However, the importance of exercising the mind is something that’s often overlooked. 

Keeping your brain active is essential at every age. As a child, every day is full of learning experiences and opportunities to keep your brain active. But when you reach adulthood and leave your school and college days behind, there are usually fewer opportunities to maintain an active brain. This often means you need to make a conscious effort to keep your mind busy. Keep reading to find out why keeping your brain healthy is so important and discover some of the ways you can ensure your brain stays active.

Why Keeping Your Brain Active is Essential

Many people are concerned about the possibility of their cognitive abilities declining as they grow older. Issues such as forgetfulness, confusion, and struggling to concentrate can have a huge impact on your quality of life. But you don’t need to simply accept that this is what will happen as you age. Experiencing cognitive decline as you age doesn’t need to be inevitable. However, to prevent it, you will need to actively take steps to protect your brain.

Regardless of your age, your brain has the ability to keep generating new cells and forming new connections. This means that it’s never too late to make a positive difference to your cognitive health. Taking care of your cognitive health by keeping your brain active throughout life can help you to delay symptoms of cognitive decline. 

How to Keep Your Brain Active

Now you’ve seen some of the reasons why keeping your mind active is so important at every stage of life, it’s time to start sharing some of the ways you can keep your brain busy. 

As discussed above, keeping your mind active becomes especially important when you get older and there are fewer opportunities to put your brain through its paces. The good news is that keeping your mind active doesn’t need to be a chore. Struggling to find the energy to go to the gym to keep your body active can feel like a real effort. But activities that keep your brain in great shape are often a lot of fun. Here are some ideas to get you started on your quest to a long-term healthy brain:

Play Online Games

When most people think about activities to keep the brain active newspaper crosswords and wordsearches are often their first thoughts. There’s no doubt these letter puzzles can get your brain thinking, but they’re not the only puzzle challenges that can keep your mind active. Playing online games can also be a really beneficial way to keep the cogs turning each day. Online games such as sudoku are an excellent way to put your thinking and reasoning skills to the test and are a fun way to pass the time. Playing online allows you to select your sudoku difficulty level, so you can start with easy sudoku puzzles and once you’ve mastered them, build up to increasingly more challenging puzzles.

The great thing about using online games to exercise your brain is that you can play them on your phone. So, you can enjoy a quick few minutes of daily brain training on the go, wherever you are.

Continue Learning

If the last time you attended a class was back in high school, returning to your studies may be a little intimidating. However, it’s never too late to learn something new and you’re sure to reap the rewards for doing it. 

Learning something new doesn’t have to mean attending college and studying for a degree (unless that’s what you want to do).  Learning anything new is beneficial, regardless of whether or not it’s academic. Maybe you like the idea of learning ballroom dancing, or want to take art classes; developing new creative skills can also help your brain to form new connections. 

Learning something new can benefit your brain in many ways. Learning a new language can be useful to your executive functions, while taking drawing classes can help build your fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, and engage both the right and left sides of your brain.

Keep Being Sociable

If you needed an excuse to get out and meet up with your friends, this is it! Regularly socializing can have a really positive impact on both your brain and your health in general. Research shows that spending time around friends can help to reduce the risks associated with dementia and even helps people to score higher on cognition tests when compared to people who have low levels of social connectedness. 

So, something as simple as regularly meeting up with your buddies for a coffee and catch-up could be really beneficial to the health of your brain, as well as giving your mood a boost, too.

Start a New Hobby

A new hobby can bring together the best of many activities that are great for your brain. This is because taking up a hobby allows you to learn new skills, meet new people, socialize regularly, and pass the time in a way that keeps your brain busy.

If you feel stuck in a rut, a little bit bored, or simply want to bring some added excitement into your life, a new hobby is a great way to do it. Gaining a new hobby is an excellent way to engage your attention and provides you with a new topic to research and learn all about. So, if you’re looking for a fun way to boost your concentration and potentially meet new people who share similar interests, taking up a new hobby will help you to achieve this. 

Your choice of hobby doesn’t matter too much. You could take up gardening, embroidery, photography, or playing the guitar. Whichever hobby you choose will bring cognitive benefits and help you to keep your brain active.

Stimulate Your Mind

Providing your mind with plenty of stimulation is crucial to keep it active. Each of the above suggestions will play a role in helping to keep your mind healthy, but there’s still more you can do to protect your cognitive abilities. Providing stimulating experiences for your brain comes in many forms, simply choose something that interests you the most. The great news is this can include entertaining activities such as visiting the theatre, reading books on a variety of subjects, taking part in quizzes, keeping up with reading the daily news, or even completing jigsaw puzzles.

Making a continued effort to keep your mind healthy is something that can make a huge difference to your quality of life. Forgetfulness and reduced ability to perform everyday tasks don’t need to be an inevitable side effect of growing older. Instead, you can start taking action now to help slow down potential cognitive decline and enjoy all the benefits of a healthy, active mind.

Whether you choose to play online games, learn new skills, socialize more with friends, take up a hobby, or do a combination of all these things, there are many enjoyable ways to keep your brain stimulated and active.

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