Your brain, like all the other muscles in your body, needs exercise and training. Many people do not focus on training their brains. Do you want your brain to be in shape? By following the steps below you can improve the use of your brain, “exercise” your brain, and keep it healthy before it becomes too lazy.
Steps
- Try “investing” in a brain training video game. It is not the only way to train the mind, but there are people who think that this is the best method. Some examples of brain training video games are “Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!” for the Nintendo DS system, or “Brain Challenge” for the Apple iPod. These games supposedly work all areas of the brain, and can help you exercise it effectively.
- Include some basic problems and puzzles in your day to day. These problems can be basic arithmetic problems, brain teasers, crossword puzzles, or Sudoku puzzles, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just these. These problems require your brain to start working and not only help you train your brain, but can make you feel better in these fields of knowledge (maybe with practice you will become a chess master).
- Include exercise in your day to day. Exercising your brain is not the only thing that can help you improve, but exercising with other parts of the body is also beneficial. Physical exercise also has benefits in improving cognitive functioning, increasing the risk of developing dementia in the future, and other benefits. You will also be able to think better, so physical exercise is a good idea to improve your body before you start to improve your brain.
- Have a nice breakfast. Eating a proper breakfast can have a positive impact on brainpower. Children who have soft drinks and sugary foods for breakfast have been shown to perform better on tests of memory and attention. Eating a good breakfast every day will ensure that you have energy throughout the day to optimally exercise your mind and body.
- Limit the number of TV shows you watch. When you watch TV, your brain is deadlocked. In a scientific study it has been found that when people watch television the alpha waves of their brain increase in a passive state as if they were sitting in the dark. Watching television has been linked to poor performance. Why would you be looking to have something like underachievement in your life?
- laugh. Studies have shown that people who laugh and who have seen comedies are better at solving problems designed to measure creative right-brain thinking; however, there is a caveat to this: Humor can be distracting and can decrease performance on non-creative tasks.
- Learn something new . By learning something else, you are exercising an important ability of the brain such as the ability to learn. By looking on wikiHow, or any other site, you can learn something that will be useful to you in the future, and also help your brain.
- Don’t do things you don’t want to do. If you get bored doing mental math problems, don’t do them. You don’t feel like you have to do them just to improve your brain. If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t learn anything!
Advice
- Eating a nutrient-dense diet can help. There are studies that show that a diet rich in nutrients such as antioxidants and vitamins increases cognition and memory.
- Exercising your brain is not something you just have to do from time to time. Try to do something step by step every day. Like other types of exercise, they are only really effective if done more than once and repeated.
- Try fun mental tasks like reading a difficult book, learning a different language, or doing things with your other hand that you usually use like eating, brushing your teeth, writing a text, or playing an instrument. To start, work things from least difficult to most complex. This will be fun and will strengthen the connections (synapses) between the nerve cells in your brain.
Warnings
- Humor is fine, but it can decrease effectiveness on non-creative tasks.
- Don’t try to use your other good hand to perform potentially dangerous tasks, like cutting vegetables, driving vehicles, or that sort of thing. Please always use common sense.
