Improve Mental Health with Brain Exercises

We generally tend to lead our lives within a fixed routine. Tasks like cooking, driving, cleaning do not require us to exhibit our mental strength. Just as you take steps to ensure your body is fit and healthy, you need to do brain exercises for your mind to remain healthy.

These monotonous tasks do not provide our brain with enough stimulation, which is needed to keep our brain active and functioning well.

Here are eight ways to not only achieve brain fitness but also make your day enjoyable and exciting:

Meditation

Beginning your day with mediation is one of the great techniques for brain exercises. It helps you feel refreshed overall and energized. According to studies, mindful meditation is highly effective. It stimulates new neural pathways, thereby improving your self-observational skills and helping you increase your mental flexibility.

Besides, meditation has also been found to help improve your attention span and focus, empathy, and even build your immunity. Moreover, it has also been observed that meditation has the power to enhance your working memory's capacity, thus helping you keep your brain sharp.

Use non-dominant hand

The most effective techniques for brain exercises are those that are not necessarily easy. Using your non-dominant hand or the hand you don't usually use is one of the interesting ways to increase your brain sharpness.

For instance, if you use your right hand for most tasks like brushing your teeth or even gardening, try doing that with your left hand. Since your brain is used to your dominant hand, using your opposite hand is challenging and one of the great brain exercises and stimulators.

Try crosswords

Indulging in crosswords or Sudoku or playing games like Tetris for approximately 15 minutes is another effective technique for brain exercises and a fun way to challenge your brain. These activities can significantly help you improve your brain's speed and memory and your analytical skills since they rely on logic, word skills and maths besides also being fun.

Studies have found that crosswords improve your attention span and focus on desired tasks while enhancing your working memory, cognitive abilities, and overall functioning.

Eat healthy

Studies have found a link between green leafy vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, fish, and olive oil in your diet and improved brain sharpness, cognitive skills, and overall mental health.

Regular intake of these foods reduces the risk of Alzheimer's by more than 50%. Eating healthy is thus extremely good for achieving brain fitness and maintaining good brain health.

Body fitness = brain fitness

Exercise helps you achieve brain sharpness and fitness and prevents your brain from ageing fast. When you do physical exercise, it is as good as your brain indulging in activities. A study found that doing physical exercise and thus indirectly doing brain exercises reduces your risk of experiencing dementia and cognitive impairment.

Doing exercise such as walking or doing push-ups has been found to increase the generation of new brain cells, thus enhancing your brain's sharpness.

Learn a new skill

Learning a new skill, such as playing the guitar, is a great brain exercise. You associate with the task and employ your skills while learning new ones. Multiple areas of your brain get activated when you try something new.

When you start learning something such as a new language, a new hobby, or how to play a musical instrument, you not only stretch your mind, but your skillset gets expanded as you continually learn to do something novel while becoming more proficient.

It rejuvenates your brain, challenges it to work differently, and is suitable for achieving brain fitness.

Read books

If you are interested in reading books, try reading genres you don't usually read. For instance, if you don't read biographies or history books, try reading them. When you deviate from your usual reading style and experiment with other ways, it is as good as a brain exercise where your brain tries visualizing different time eras, people, and cultures.

Additionally, you would also make your brain exercise when you recollect the stories you read, retell them, and share your perspective with others. It challenges your brain to connect the words and lives portrayed in such accounts with the surrounding reality.

On the other hand, if you don't have an interest in reading books, try cultivating the habit by starting with at least a book with less than 100 pages and a genre you think you may find interesting, such as fiction.

Try changing routine

Bringing a change in your routine is refreshing and helps you achieve brain sharpness by stimulating your brain to be active. When you take steps to modify your schedules, such as reducing TV time and using the time for activities such as gardening, taking a different route—whether shorter or longer—while going on a walk or shopping- is good for your brain.

You can make simple changes to your routine, such as using your other hand to open doors or switch on buttons, doing dishes differently, eating with chopsticks instead of spoons or forks, or learning to use one. Suppose you wish to make the change extreme.

In that case, you can try making plans for trekking or exploring and visiting a public place in your neighborhood. Visiting sites that are not too far by car but you haven't been before can be a good option, too. These activities are excellent brain exercising strategies.

Summing It Up

There are many techniques for brain exercises to help your mind be active and prevent it from ageing faster. Indulging in the activities suggested above can help you train your brain to be active, thoughtful, and alert and ensure great mental health.

Also, ensure you protect your health and save yourself from medical hassles and expenses by getting health insurance today.