The brain is similar to other body organs and muscle which needs attention and care. The brain workout means improving your reasoning power, intelligence, and cognitive abilities.
There are many ways to improve your overall intelligence before doing anything.
Every brain gets change as the age increase and depending on age the mental functions and capacity also get change. But it is important to know that you can improve your cognitive power at any age. There are certain workouts which can help you to prevent cognitive decline and manage brain functions.
Here are the ways to give your brain a workout.
Play a Brain Game
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Brain games are certainly fun activities which challenge your brain. These games entertain you as well as improve your brain power. They create pressure in your brain to think hard, plan, strategize and remember the information which helps to win against opponents.
Play brain games such as crossword puzzle or sudoku to give your brain a workout. Research has discovered that engaging your brain reading or solving puzzles helps to stimulate your mental health and boost the production of new synapses in nerve cells. It also helps your brain to develop a new connection in cells.
It means generating new cells helps to backup brain power. There are some other activities such as drawing, pottery, painting, and sculpting help brain ability to promote plasticity and enhance synaptic connection in the nerves.
You can also play IMAX video games, VR adventure games to improve your creativity and stimulate your mind.
Consider your brain cells as spark plugs in a car which will get gunky and rusty if left uncleaned and decline its performance. If you don’t stimulate your brain cells frequently by reasoning, acting with some challenges, then it will get tight in their functionality.
Here are the benefits of brain games
- Enhance memory
- Improve reaction time
- Increase cognitive abilities
- Improve concentration levels
- Increase understanding power
Learn to plan your things without any help from others.
Brain games seem very simple, but they influence your brain in a massive way. Simply engage yourself in the games to prevent memory loss and degeneration by constantly working with the brain.
Here are the games list for brain
Card games: This game is the best and easy game to keep your brain active. You can increase your brain memory power by creating a strategy and memorizing patterns.
Puzzle games: Games like Sudoku need to solve puzzles and require creative thinking to find a solution which challenges your brain.
Computer games: There is a huge range of computer games available this day in which you can get engaged.
You can also play with your kids and grandkids to challenge yourself in a good way.
Practice Memorizing
Give a warm-up workout to your brain. Try to do something new every day such as listening to the new song, memorizing a cell phone number, learn new vocabulary word, learn a quote. Try to quiz yourself every hour to see if you remember it or not. Initially, you may feel it, as a waste of time but it is a very useful workout for your brain.
The brain also works similarly like mobiles phone and computer to store memory but in a more powerful way. Memorizing things is a great workout for the brain and helps to increase memory power.
Join cooking class
Cooking is good for your brain. While cooking, your brain finds easy to sense smell, sight, touch, and taste which uses different parts of your brain.
Cooking classes will be all about cooking a delicious and satisfying yourself. As you enjoy cooking, you will release most of the stress from your brain. Watch out for unhealthy things and cooking full of nutrients food. Do try to share with other people what you cook which gives you a joyful experience and a good workout for your brain.
Switch your hands
Give rest to your primary hand and use the non-dominating hand for some time. It indicates your brain to overdrive and makes you recollect about every move. You will not be unable to use both hands equally, but it provides a hard workout to your brain.
Learn a New-Sport
Learning a different sport like golf or tennis stimulates your brain and give it a workout to get involved. Just like how you discover something, your brain also works on discovering a new sport.
Take a New Route
While going to market or job you have an easy and same route every day. Taking a new route can give your brain a workout to visualize new things and learn about the new route and remember it for next time.
Read a Book Aloud
Many people find reading loud embarrassing to read anything out loud. It is the best workout for your brain to understand words while speaking. The more you read every day will help your brain to learn and remember.
Practice meditation
Meditation is the best workout to relax your brain. You can make your brain active in a certain situation, and after that, your brain needs to relax as much as possible restore its functions to adapt to new things next time. By meditation, you will learn how to maintain mindfulness and enhance your memory, response time and thinking ability.
Practice a Creative hobby
Creativity is a natural healing process for your brain health. Involve yourself in creative activities such as writing, knitting, painting, playing scrabble which helps to calm your brain similar to meditation.
Creative activities are a great workout for your brain which keeps stress free all the time. Even doing the thing which brings interest in you helps to increase your creative power and you will get expert in such activities. Do creative activities in a group of people or friends to enjoy it more.
Learn a new language
Another workout for your brain is to learn a different language. According to the research of US-Penn-State-University discovered that learning a new language will change the cell formation of the brain and generate a network to pull it more efficiently. This improvement can happen at any age.
Learning a new language helps to increase your thinking ability and memory power. The people who know two languages can be able to concentrate better and don’t get disturb with distractions than those people who speak only one language. It happens because the brain has language learning flexible centers and develop new cells in the brain to strengthen the natural ability of the brain to focus.
Use memory for drawing a map
When you visit a new place and return back to home, try to remember and draw the map of that place, point all the noticeable things around. Do this brain workout whenever you visit a new place. It will help to enhance your memory and thinking power.
Drawing a map by remembering helps to create brain cells in an effective way. The brain cell has a primary nucleus with connections which flow out like a river. It is a mind map which has a central idea to create different mental power streams.
Once you complete drawing a map what you remember, compare it with an original route. Do you feel surprised things which are missed? If you draw easily then try to draw unfamiliar area such as a different country map which activates different parts of your brain.
Test your taste buds
Try to recognize different things such as ingredients, herbs, and spices in your food.
Sensing smell and taste are different things of organs. There are chemicals in food called Tastants which are detected by taste buds comprises of unique sensory cells. When these taste cells are stimulated, it will send signals to a specific part of the brain which activates the conscious for taste perception.
Likewise, special cells in the nose hit a smell, airborne odor and stimulate cell protein available in hair-like cilia on the sensory cells and signal a neural response. Eventually, the signal signals and taste and let you detect the food’s flavors. Therefore, let your brain to detect the taste which can be a good workout for your brain.
Workout
When you engage your muscles, you are actually advancing your brain. Doing exercise helps to promote oxygen in your blood cells of the brain which are responsible for reasoning. It means a yoga session, treadmill run, and a brick wall helps to circulate fresh blood to the brain to keep it working.
Doing workout also helps to produce new nerve cells and also increase different brain cells connections called synapses.
Additionally, doing workout helps to reduce blood pressure and manage your blood sugar, relieve emotional stress and lower bad cholesterol.
Eat a Clean Diet
Eating clean and healthy is necessary for a healthy brain. You can prevent the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia by eating Mediterranean food such as nuts, fish, vegetables, unsaturated oils, and fruits.
During middle age, if you left your high blood pressure untreated, then it may develop cognitive decline as your age increase. Make a good choice of foods and maintain its cleanliness to manage blood sugar spikes and blood pressure. Diabetes also causes to induce the risk of dementia.
Clean eating is a tricky concept. Most people plan a diet, exercise and also count the calories but skip knowing about the food they are eating. Many people do not care about the foods whether it is clean, or not.
Eating clean is about whole foods which should not be processed, handled, or refined.
Having clean and well-grown vegetables and fruits are required to reduce the risk of persistent disease including type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, and obesity. The fiber content in the whole product helps to get microbiome which are good bacteria found in the gut. It helps to lower the risk of autoimmune disease and fight with infection and pathogens by improving mood.
You may like to add cleanest whole grains in your diet which are least processed such as wild rice, quinoa, oats. You can also eat whole grains with sliced avocado or a bowl of pasta.
Avoid added sugar foods for good brain health. The American-Heart-Association suggest that taking around six teaspoons each day for women and nine teaspoons for men. To clean eating cut down your added sugar by stopping sweet content like candy, soda drink, and baked goods. Even you need to check the label of healthier foods such as yogurt, cereal, and tomato sauce. These products are packed with fat, fiber, protein and added sugar which affects.
Limit alcohol
To have a healthy brain function, you should try to avoid alcohol and cigarettes. The substance nicotine causes to effect on the synaptic plasticity and reduce brain cell growth. Alcohol consumption can enhance the risk of dementia.
Many parts of your brain get affected when you drink alcohol. The frontal lobes which are responsible for making decisions and choices will help to suppress due to alcohol drinks. It is the reason the drunk people lose their control, oversharing, overeating or acting risky behaviors.
A linked set of results occurs because the amygdala of the brain gets suppressed. The amygdala is known for fighting organ for detecting danger.
Stay Around Others
Surrounding yourself with other people helps your brain to stay active. Maintain a social life and create a friend network to give your brain a level of flexibility. Have a strong social connection which helps to reduce your chance of developing dementia.
Interacting with different people in everyday life challenge your memory power and influence your brain to stay active. It totally not matters if the person you are talking with is your friend or stranger.
According to the brain analyzation from University-College of London discovered that 125 college students who had more Facebook friends had larger brains in the scan. Especially their memory power and emotional response was high.
Getting social means not only about Facebook or Instagram but having social interaction in real life with friends and far family members.
We are human, and we only have to become social at some point in life. Many times, when getting a problem such as loss of job, love or family member causes us to cut off from our social life which creates more depression in the brain and affects its functions. The increased social interactions in such situations help to find ourselves and understand others better.
You will feel happy when you help someone. That is how your brain become sharp and flexible. Therefore, you can join NGO, social clubs.
Track your blood sugar
Even If you don’t have diabetes then also will be huge fluctuations in your insulin levels sometimes that can dull your brain’s ability to respond on time. It also limits your peak performance. Some research tells that frequent insulin resistance raises the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
On the other side if you have constant low insulin levels, then your pancreas will limit the hormone production and your memory power also get reduced.
Get Regular Sleep
To give your brain a workout, getting sleep at night helps on your HPA axis. The HPA axis comprises consists of your hypothalamus, adrenal glands, and pituitary. This system regularly monitors your stress levels and help you to determine how and when to respond in a situation.
There is an important connection between stress and sleep. Sleep disturbance causes to affect your ability to control the stress and limit your brain ability to perform certain functions. Getting poor sleep causes to affect normal cortisol generation and disturb your HPA axis.
A complete 7 to 8 hours sleep is important for a healthy brain and body. It should be without frequent disturbances such as noise, temperature, and urination. When an individual suffers from anxiety, sleep deprivation, and depression, then it will impact on your emotional level and premature your brain age.
Maintain a schedule and plan to get at least 7 to 8 hours each night to give your brain a workout and perform its function in a proper way. When you have a complete sleep, then your brain will be able to restore itself and awake you without any headache.
Getting complete sleep makes your brain to feel fresh to learn new things and perform better during sleep deprived. A well-rested brain is capable of solving the problem three times more than people who don’t get enough sleep.
There is another connection between sleep and memory. When you sleep your brain consolidate the all-day time memories and provide you neuroplasticity which is an ability of the brain to reorganize itself and create new neural connections for learning. It is a part of a human to adapt things.
Another important mechanism which improves memory by good sleep through helping your brain to rearrange optimize acetylcholine levels. Acetylcholine is a crucial neurotransmitter for memory formation.
Eat Fish
Add fish to your diet to have the best workout for the brain. You can add a variety of fish in your diet such as tuna, salmon. If you are unable to eat fish, try to consume fish oil on daily the basis as a supplement. The mechanism of fish oil helps to improve the ability of the brain and increase brain functions performance at a better level. It works to improve the blood flow combination to the brain. It helps to reduce inflammation and promote the immune system by supplying omega-3 and omega-6.
Reduce Inflammation
Sometimes your body has to fight with toxins, inflammation, and chemicals which makes your certain tissues inflamed which can be inside of your body or outside. This inflammation condition negatively impacts on your brain performance.
You can reduce brain tissue inflammation by consuming omega-3 fats and plenty of antioxidants. Improving your inflammation helps your brain workout in a better way and promote its ability to react and perform.
A normal immune system has a natural ability to balance your condition between non-inflammatory and inflammatory agent. In some cases, the immune system becomes stuck at a high level which is known as chronic inflammation.
Improper inflammation from longer time can result in tissue destruction or damage. This frequent tissue damage can cause you a cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative ailment, cancer, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer disease and another type of dementia.
Go, Solo
While dealing with a tough work situation try to think alone and gather your own ideas before getting in to brainstorm sessions. The psychological traits such as intelligence and outgoingness are so different and impossible for different individuals.
You can change and have a new environment of doing things and sharing your ideas. Like this way, you will develop more new cells to form a regular circuit. All you need to do is to make sure you are enjoying and feeling good which helps your brain to get a workout.
Stay Hydrated
Keeping yourself hydrated helps to make your brain perform in a more efficient way. While doing sweating activity for 90 minutes like workout may cause you dehydration and make your brain to shrink away from skull sides. It is equal to one year more aging than actual age.
According to the study of U.K in 2009 shows that the teens who worked out with heavy sweat, their brain scan shows that it worked harder during the workout and it took more time to complete its normal work.
Keeping yourself hydrated helps your brain functions directly. Insufficient water in the body also affect your brain and leads various health problems such as blur focus, mental fatigue, sleep problems, headaches, depression, and anger.
Generally, the human body depends 70% on water, and every organ needs water to complete its function including the nervous system and brain.
Your brain is an important organ which is responsible for providing you energy. Water plays an important role to provide you energy by proper brain functions. Enough water supply in the body helps your brain to think faster, focus better and be creative.
The above are the best ways to give your brain a workout. Regular doing brain workout will make you feel happy, and pride and your mental health also get better.