Keep The Mind Sharp With These Brain Exercises

The brain is a powerful organ. It's also one of the most difficult organs to keep healthy. When you think about it, we use our brains all day long and sometimes don't even realize it.

There’s an old saying, “use it or lose it,” that is often used in relation to our physical health. However, it can also play a role when it comes to thinking about our cognitive health.

Physical exercise is important, but mental stimulation is invaluable, too. While you might focus on doing strengthening exercises for your muscles and bones as you age, it’s also important that you boost your brain’s cognitive reserve as you get older, too.

Bench presses and lateral raises just won’t cut it when it comes to strengthening your brain, though. You’ll have to do some special brain exercises in order to stay mentally limber.

The best way to exercise your brain and to improve your brain health is by getting creative! Whether that means trying new things like painting or cooking, reading books on something outside your comfort zone (or even outside your usual genre!), or solving puzzles every day to boost memory, there are lots of ways for you to get more out of your gray matter.

Use Your Opposite Hand

An easy way to strengthen your brain is to do something out of the ordinary. Try doing things with your non-dominant hand (of course, this won’t work if you are ambidextrous!).

Do it for as long as you can - if possible, keep it up for an entire day. If you’re left-handed, open doors and perform other tasks with the right. If you’re right-handed, use the left! It’s as simple as that, but believe it or not, this basic task can have major implications. It will cause your brain to put down new neural pathways and require you to rethink everyday tasks.

Can’t remember to use the opposite hand? Try fastening your watch to the other hand - it will remind you that you need to switch things up.

Make Lists- But Only Use Lists as Backup

Lists are fantastic tools that can be used for all kinds of purposes. They can help you remember what you need to do or things you need to pick up at the store. They can also be used to help you associate things with each other. 

You can use lists for function or you can create some just for fun - either way, creating lists is a good way to strengthen your brain. You can make a list of all of your favorite foods or make lists of the places you’ve traveled to in your life. Whatever the case may be, start making those lists! 

Using lists to keep track of things you need to do, groceries you need to pick up, and other important items is a great way to stay organized and stress-free. However, the problem with using lists is that it is all too easy to become over-reliant on them.

To avoid this, try using lists only as backups. Do your grocery shopping from memory and then double-check the list after you’ve finished your shopping but before you check out. You can even make a game out of it by seeing how many items you can remember! This is a good way to boost your brainpower without losing track of all the things you need to do or buy.

Memorize Phone Numbers

Cell phones are wonderful when it comes to helping us stay connected to friends and family. The downside of cell phones, though, is that they store all of our contact information so we don’t have to use them.

There’s really no need to memorize phone numbers anymore - after all, we have these fancy gadgets that will do it for us! However, if you really want to improve your mental sharpness, consider memorizing a few phone numbers. You may find that this helps you think more clearly and remember all kinds of information better later on. Try to learn one new phone number a week until you get the hang of things - or until your mental address book is complete!

Learn New Things

Boredom is the enemy when it comes to exercising your brain. You need to actively work to try new things!

Whether it’s learning to play a musical instrument or just joining a choir, learning something complex and new (like music!) is a great way to stay sharp.

You can also learn a foreign language. The intensive hearing and listening involved in picking up a language help stimulate the brain - and an extensive vocabulary has also been linked to a lower risk for cognitive decline.

If music and languages aren’t your thing, don’t worry. You can exercise your brain in other ways. You might try to refine your hand-eye coordination by learning new hobbies like painting, knitting, drawing, or puzzling. You can even learn a new sport!

Consider trying out a new athletic exercise that requires both the body and the mind for bonus points - think things like golf, yoga, and tennis.

Eat Up!

Though not technically an exercise, exactly, having a nutritious diet is a good way to stay mentally sharp.  

A trick to exercise your brain you might not have thought of is to take a cooking class. By learning how to cook a new dish or type of cuisine, you can involve a great number of senses, from taste to touch, smell to sight, and involve several different areas of the brain.

When you sit down to eat that dish, try to identify all the individual ingredients in the meal. Bonus points if you’re able to use and identify subtle spices and herbs!

Exercise Regularly

Remember how earlier, we told you that physical exercise wasn’t what was needed to keep a healthy brain? That’s true - to an extent.

While exercise won’t cut it all the way when it comes to maintaining good brain health, it’s important for keeping you physically healthy - and that ties into your emotional, mental, and cognitive health, too.

Physical exercise, even as little as ten minutes of low-intensity exercise each day, has been associated with increased activity in the hippocampus of the brain. This region is known for its involvement in remembering events and facts and in creating new memories. So get moving!

Socialize and Tell A Story Each Day

Socializing is a wonderful way to stay connected to those we love - and to keep our minds sharp. After all, having strong social connections has proven to be one of the best ways to combat aging.

Take things one step further by trying to think up a story that you will tell people each morning. It doesn’t have to be a new story, either - it could be about something from your past. Either way, when you’re planning out the story you want to tell, try to figure out a way to make it more entertaining - either through humor, twists and turns, or sudden surprise endings.

Then, when somebody calls you or stops by your house, you’ll have something interesting to tell them about.

Observe and Get Out

How many times have you driven to work - and not remember driving there at all? You were probably distracted and while that’s certainly acceptable from time to time, trying to be more observant of your daily sightings and interactions is a good way to exercise your brain and stay mentally sharp.

Every day, try to pick a new, specific thing to observe. You might choose to look specifically at what people are wearing for clothes one day. The next, you might consider looking for individuals of certain eye colors.

Paying attention to these kinds of details, whether it's in person or via what you see on television or your computer screen, is a good way to give your brain something new to think about and focus on. It can also potentially serve as a great conversation starter - see the note above!

In your observations, you may even notice various problems that you might like to solve. This is another way you can exercise your brain - see if there’s a problem that needs to be solved. After all, this is how aspiring business owners find their passions. They see a problem that needs to be solved and then create a solution or a product to solve that problem.

Pretend you are starting a business and need to create something to solve a problem. Who are your competitors? What’s the market like? Do you have a budget? You can go all the way with this and actually become an entrepreneur, if you’re feeling extra motivated, but you don’t have to - just thinking through such a situation can help strengthen and form new connections in your brain.

Take a Different Route

Just as with the last point, when you constantly rely on habits to get you where you need to go, you’re going to be far less observant. A great way to exercise your brain is to change things up by walking or driving a different way to wherever you need to go.

It sounds simple, but even the slightest change in routine will help your brain practice directions and form new spatial memories. Try a new side street, walk through the grocery store in a different order - whatever it takes! Just be sure to change things up whenever you can.

Here’s something else you can try. When you get home, see if you can make a map from memory. Try to draw a map of the area you visited and repeat this exercise every time you go somewhere new. This is a good way to keep yourself mentally sharp.

Break The Routine

A little bit of routine is great. It helps us stay organized, remain stress-free, and to stay healthy.

However, you may want to consider breaking your routine a bit if you want to stay mentally sharp and exercise your brain. Have your favorite omelet for dinner instead of for breakfast! Run errands in the morning instead of before you go home at night. Shower in the morning instead of the evening.

Whatever your typical routine might be, see if there are ways you can switch things up. Even if you don’t implement these changes to your routine permanently, they are a great way to keep yourself sharp. You can take notes about how the change feels and then decide whether you’ll keep or ditch the new routine.

Read a Book

There’s no question about it - doing reading of any kind is a fantastic way to strengthen your brain. However, if you’re willing to think outside the box and step outside your comfort zone, you’ll find that reading can become even more enjoyable - and serve as a great workout for your brain.

Consider reading a book on a brand-new subject or one that’s set in a new location. You can choose to become an expert in something new each week or find a book that will purely be entertaining.  No matter what you choose, though, make sure you get reading!

Exercise Your Brain To Stay Healthy and Sharp

When you exercise your muscles you increase blood flow and oxygen which leads to an increased amount of endorphins being released that helps fight depression and anxiety.

Exercising your brain is just as important as, if not more than, exercising the rest of your body. The human mind needs to be exercised too!

There are many different types of exercises that can be performed on a daily basis in order to keep our minds sharp such as crosswords puzzles, Sudoku, or solving complex math problems.

In today's society, our brains are being pushed to the limit of their capabilities. With technology and social media constantly evolving it is easy to see why people feel as if they need a break from all the stimulation.

There are many different ways you can exercise your brain in order to improve and maintain your brain health. Consider the tips above to boost memory and get sharper over time!

Shana Thompson is a full time professional writer and editor. Shana has worked extensively in the fields of content marketing, on-page and off-page SEO (guest posts, backlink acquisition), and creative writing. As an experienced pro content writer, Shana has worked on several magazines, publishing companies and marketing agencies. Many recent projects have included everything from nutrition and health services, where a lot of research and citations were needed, to writing about health, sustainable, eco-friendly products.

Follow Shana at Shana Thompson

More Articles You May Enjoy