3 Easy Ways To Strengthen Your Brain

You may go to the gym for your body, so why not workout your brain too? Sure, you use it all day, yet look around you at the incidence of Alzheimer’s and dementia disease. Not to mention a focus challenged society crammed deep in the digital stratosphere. Your brain is actually at risk of being burned out due to a life of perpetual data bombardment. 

The Association for Psychological Science (APS) reported in 2016,

“Burnout is now recognized as a legitimate medical disorder by much of mainstream medicine and has even been given its own ICD [International Classification of Diseases]-10 code (Z73.0 – Burn-out state of vital exhaustion). Many of the symptoms of burnout overlap with the hallmarks of depression, including extreme fatigue, loss of passion, and intensifying cynicism and negativity.”

These 3 easy ways to strengthen your brain may help with slipping memory, concentration, fatigue, mood, and lots more. Give them a try before you collapse from brain burnout at work like editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post who told Oprah Winfrey in an interview (as reported by APS), 

“I hit my head on my desk, broke my cheek bone, got four stitches on my right eye,”

Stay Puzzled

Challenging your brain with puzzle building is an activity that significantly helps an array of beneficial habits which include: hand/eye coordination, focus, and problem solving.

The study, ‘Jigsaw Puzzles As Cognitive Enrichment (PACE)…’ by German scientists published in the journal Trials stated,

“…as visuospatial [visual perception] dysfunctions are common in neurocognitive diseases such as mild cognitive impairment and dementia – especially due to Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and posterior cortical atrophy – lifelong jigsaw puzzle experience might be one out of many cognitive activities that may contribute to a delayed clinical manifestation of neurocognitive disorders.”

Try all kinds of puzzles, kinetic and digital, for a fun pastime that keeps your brain firing on all cylinders. 

Feel the Music

When your brain experiences music, many parts of it react. When you play an instrument there is an even higher activity that lights up on MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). A 2014 study of the brain and how music affects its performance was published in the journal Nature Research which concluded that,

“Listening to music that is liked or a favorite song affects functional connectivity in regions involved in self-referential thought and memory encoding, such as the default mode network [DMN]and the hippocampus…[] whether it is Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, [] Allison Kraus or Eminem, we show here that this similarity of experience manifests in the brain by engaging the DMN.”

Make an effort to listen to your favorite music when you can and you could experience more brain use that may have some significant result such as better problem solving, more focus, and enhanced memory recall.

Get Cursive 

The digital age has stolen much of what some people remember as simpler times. One rapidly devolving practice is handwriting. Whether writing letters and mailing them to friends and family or jotting down your thoughts in poems, lyrics, or free association, writing by hand may be disappearing. 

At first it might seem archaic to continue handwriting when you can easily tap in a few words, or abbreviations of words, to get your point across in an e-mail or text. Yet, according to one study, use of the written word could enhance your brain activity. It may help ward off age-related memory loss, stunted recall, and challenged focus slowly creeping up on.

Psychology Today reported that,

“…scientists are discovering that learning cursive is an important tool for cognitive development, particularly in training the brain to learn “functional specialization”[considered a hallmark of efficient processing which affects sensation, movement control, and thinking]. Brain imaging studies reveal that multiple areas of the brain become co-activated during the learning of cursive writing of pseudo-letters, as opposed to typing or just visual practice.”  

Keep a notepad by your bed and write down (in slow cursive) thoughts before going to sleep or dreams you may remember upon waking the next morning. You can also surprise a friend or loved one with a handwritten letter sent in the mail. Either way, get your cursive back on to give your brain a fighting chance. 

Try these 3 easy ways to strengthen your brain. They can be implemented just about anywhere at any time enabling for a mind stimulation that, if maintained, will keep you healthy and ahead of the curve.