Our brain is one of the most amazing part of your body. It has creative ways to express thoughts and emotions, coordinates movements from chopping veggies to running an obstacle course, stores your most precious childhood memories and helps you solve complex puzzles too. But it’s easy to take those powers for granted.
Both brain and mental function changes with age. Mental decline is common, and it is one of the most feared side effects of aging. But cognitive impairment is not inevitable. Here are 12 ways you can help strengthen and enhance your brain function.
1. Get Mental Stimulation
Research has shown that brainy activities stimulate new connections between nerve cells and may even help the brain generate new cells, developing neurological plasticity and building up a functional reserve that provides a guard against future cell loss.
2. Healthy Heart
The most important strategy is to work with your doctor to stay on top of your cardiovascular health. It is important to keep blood moving easily through your heart and blood vessels. High blood pressure, high cholesterol levels, smoking, and diabetes all increase the risk for developing neurodegenerative diseases by impeding blood flow to the brain. A healthy, active lifestyle will go a long way toward keeping your blood flowing and avoiding several problems.
3. Importance of Physical Exercise
Research tells that using your muscles also helps your mind and makes it stronger. People who exercise regularly increase the number of tiny blood vessels that bring oxygen rich blood to the area of the brain that is responsible for thought. Exercise also aids the development of new nerve cells and increases the connections between brain cells. This makes the brain more efficient, plastic, and adaptive, which translates into better performance in aging people. Regular physical exercise also lowers blood pressure, helps blood sugar balance, improves cholesterol levels and reduces mental stress, all of which can help your brain as well as your heart.
Exercise boosts blood flow to the brain which can increase the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory, which naturally shrinks with age.
4. Getting Quality Sleep
A great way to keep your brain working well is shut it off for 7-10 hours a night. Sleep is the most important thing you can do to reset the brain, as it allows it to heal, and to restore mental health. New studies shows that during sleep, the brain clears out toxins called beta-amyloids that can lead to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
5. Good Diet
Good nutrition both helps your mind and body. For example, people that eat a diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts, unsaturated oils (olive oil) and plant sources of proteins are less likely to develop cognitive impairment and dementia. A diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids, low in saturated fat, full of the nutrients found in leafy green vegetables, along with whole grains can help keep your brain healthy throughout your life.
6. Care for Your Emotions
People who are sleep-deprived, anxious, depressed, or exhausted tend to score poorly on cognitive function tests. Poor scores don’t necessarily indicate an increased risk of cognitive decline in old age, but good mental health and restful sleep are definitely critical goals for healthy living.
7. Scrub Off Your Worries
Write down any concerns and a quick to-do list for the next day to help settle your brain. Our racing thoughts provoke much anxiety and stress. But if you try to write it down with pen and paper, it tells your brain it doesn’t have to be concerned about those things while you sleep. This way you get better sleep and calmer mind.
8. Meditation
Not only will 10-15 minutes of mindful meditation calm your brain and make it easier to sleep, meditation has been shown to reduce anxiety, depression, fatigue, and confusion. Meditation can help people with insomnia by helping them fall asleep and stay asleep. It also helps with inflammation in the brain. Many people find not only do they sleep better, they can focus better and are not as anxious as well.
9. Digital Detox
Commit to the same bedtime each night, and turn off all electronics and screens at least 30-60 minutes before you hit the pillow. Shutting off from technology for a short period of time can improve sleep and concentration, reduce stress, improve memory, enhance happiness, and even help with your mental health.
10. Improve your Blood Pressure
High blood pressure increases the risk of cognitive decline in old age. Practice lifestyle changes to keep your pressure as low as possible. Simply stay fit, exercise regularly, limit your alcohol, reduce stress, and eat right.
11. Be Social
Instead of watching Netflix or scrolling Facebook, try to spend as much time as you can with friends as when you’re socializing, the blood circulates to several different parts of your brain as you’re listening and formulating responses. And when you’re connecting with friends and family, you’re less likely to get depressed. Depression can hamper how well your brain works. If you’re depressed or anxious, the brain becomes so occupied with what-ifs and worries that it’s not able to give 100% to learning new things. Strong social ties have been associated with a lower risk of dementia, as well as lower blood pressure and longer life expectancy.
12. Try Out New Things
Building new skills throughout your life like how to cook food, how to play a musical instrument, even learning the rules of new games or traveling to an unfamiliar place helps keep your brain healthy by continuously creating new connections between brain cells.
Challenging your brain essentially creates a backup system. Various neural circuits are used with more and more intellectual stimulation you have. And the more circuits you have, the harder it is for the changes associated with neurodegenerative diseases to manifest. It’s more helpful to master real world skills than to play online mental enhancement games as people improve on the specific tasks in those games, but that doesn’t really relate with real-world activities.
