Sharpen Your Mind Every Day by Doing These 5 Things
When you were still young and still in school, you were probably looking forward to the future when you wouldn’t have to stay at school. Now that you have graduated, you might have even resolved never to touch another textbook again.
But finishing school doesn’t have to mean that you’re going to stop learning. Even as you start working, there’s always an opportunity to learn. After all, learning is imperative for taking care of your brain.
It regresses when you let your brain go idle for a long time and let the flow of time get its way. Imagine a well-made blade left in a shed, going unused and unsharpened for an extended period. Rust starts to cover its entirety and loses the ability to cut effectively, rendering it almost useless.
Our level of brain power is not a line on a constant horizontal trajectory after it achieves its peak. On the contrary, it steadily drops after attaining its peak. You’re trying to keep your mind sharp because you’re trying to control how steep that downward line gets.
You might want to keep reading to learn more about why it’s essential to increase your brainpower and learn a few foolproof steps to sharpen your brain.
Why Should You Keep Your Brain Sharp?
Helps Gain Better Memory
A good memory contributes to attaining knowledge. With this knowledge, your intelligence and reasoning improve.
However, taking care of your memory is not just for retaining and remembering. Memories are a core part of your being; they have shaped you since birth and continue to do so now. Some parts of it may fade as time passes and can be akin to losing a part of yourself, particularly those from your younger years, but new memories—even better ones—will eventually replace them
Our memories are also interconnected with those of other people. Whether watching a movie with a loved one, working with a teammate, having monthly rituals with your long-time neighbor, practicing with your fellow bandmates, or other moments along those lines, they play a significant role in intertwining with the memories of other individuals. These memories are not just significant moments—with them come relationships and additional relevant information like specific aspects such as names, dates, times, and places, as well as other practical information.
Retains and Improve Cognitive Ability
For everyday tasks, especially problem-solving, cognitive abilities are crucial. Whether it’s simple or complicated, it requires substantial brain power.
Excellent cognitive ability means that you can process information faster and more efficiently. Thus, better understanding, interpretation, and more accurate recollection of new and known information.
Boosts Health and Wellness
Health pertains to both mental and physical aspects. A sharp and healthy mind prevents the onset of severe mental illnesses like dementia or Alzheimer’s. Or, if they already exist, they worsen as you age.
The Fisher Center for Alzheimer’s discovered that older people over 80 who engage in mentally stimulating activities have a slower decline in memory and thinking skills. In addition, these mind-sharpening activities play a part in preventing or at least lessening the damage caused by Alzheimer’s and dementia.
On the other hand, having many physical health problems can be bad for your mental health. Some of these mental illnesses can even affect the body. With a healthy mind, you can take better care of yourself, decreasing the chances of physical ailments.
On the practical side, having a sharp mind means being more aware of everything around you, which makes accidents much less likely to happen. It is also crucial to note that medical expenses skyrocket as the severity of the condition increases. Taking care of your health lessens the odds of being buried in medical fees.
How to Make Your Mind Sharper?
Just because cognitive decline is natural as you age doesn’t mean it is inevitable. You might lose a step or two, but you can prevent yourself from stumbling into a steep fall. Keep in mind the following ways to sharpen your mind.
Healthy Habits
Your brain is a part of your body. Taking good care of your body means taking good care of your mind.
Drink a lot of water. Dehydration impairs your reasoning capabilities by clouding your mind, slowing your response, and interfering with your ability to concentrate. Being dehydrated for an extended period of time may cause the brain to shrink, further blunting your cognitive abilities.
Keep yourself physically active. Exercise daily for at least 30 minutes. If your circumstances don’t allow it, take daily walks or lift small and portable weights even as you’re sitting in your office at work.
Maintaining good hand-eye coordination and a healthy body, especially in your twilight years, will do you a lot of favors.
Engage in Hobbies
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” states the proverb. No matter how simple they may be, hobbies are valuable activities to keep your mind sharp.
Your work shouldn’t take up all of your time, but at the same time, you shouldn’t have much downtime either. Your hobbies are a great way to keep your mind active while having fun and decompressing any emotional hurdles, thereby healing them and transforming them into healthier states. Keeping up with your hobbies is a great way to keep your mind healthy.
Participating in hobbies can help you feel happier and relieve stress at the same time. Clear thought is achieved by reducing the amount of strain placed on the mind. The newly acquired and improved abilities along the way are the icing on the cake.
Read More and Learn More
Reading keeps us engaged, makes us think, and gives us new information. While reading can also fall under hobbies, it deserves its section. Most therapists in this field suggest, especially if you want to learn how to increase brain power, that is making reading a habit always comes in handy.
Regular reading exercises your brain and strengthens the connection between neurons. These stronger connections then help you remember things faster and have a better memory.
A study that observed the latter concluded that readers build some sort of map of the material they read. This map updates and develops as they read more, building a mental library in which they gather information as they learn it and then find it quickly when needed.
Mental Exercises
Believe it or not, your brain also needs to exercise. However, this doesn’t imply that you must be lifting weights or doing your morning jogging but rather engaging in simple mentally stimulating activities, or “brain games.”
These brain-sharpening exercises have a similar effect as hobbies. But when you do mental exercises, you make them harder when they become easy or natural. Not that mental exercises always have to be challenging, but it helps.
Switching up these mental exercises every once in a while is highly recommended. The more variety there is, the more your brain can work differently.
There are many of these brain games—even more, when you add the ones on the internet to the equation. You can do classic brain games like sudoku, 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, and crossword puzzles. Perhaps you can challenge another in a game of wits with chess, scrabble, and a game of generals. You can even find logic puzzles that are made to look like detective mysteries and make you want to harness your inner Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot.
Don’t forget to take a break.
Yes, it’s good to keep the mind active, but it also needs to rest, just like your body does when doing strenuous activities. This is one of the easiest things to do to sharpen your mind, but it is very beneficial. Getting adequate sleep, practicing meditation, or simply basking in nature can do wonders.
Overworking your brain leads to a lot of strain and stress. You make more mistakes, miss some things, and develop gaps in your memory. You become overwhelmed and may develop tunnel vision due to that intense focus.
These breaks allow your brain to catch its breath and process the information it gathers while you are awake. Couple this with generous gulps of water for better results.
How to Keep Your Mind Sharp with the NOA app
Our brain is responsible for keeping us functioning, both internally and externally. As it declines, so does our overall ability to function.
How to increase the sharpness of mind, you may ask? The key to increasing mental sharpness is to strike a balance between these two. It is beneficial to keep our brains active while also resting. It can only contribute to the loop between mind and body, in which taking care of one is also taking care of the other.
If you’re unsure where to start or want to try other ways of sharpening your mind, why not give Noa Coach a try? Noa is an AI-powered online coach that helps you achieve your goals. Not only does it have the latest research in emotional and behavioral neuroscience, but it also has the best practice coaching frameworks and cognitive behavior coaching (CBC).
Strike up a session with Noa Insights’ conversational AI chat. Noa responds to various topics for casual chats or deeply intellectual conversations. Besides having conversations, Noa can coach you through developing and maintaining healthy habits to keep your brain active.
There’s also Noa Knowledge, another solution for your intellectual development. It encourages self-led learning that provides flexibility without sacrificing valuable quality content.
Let’s work on honing that sharp mind. Let’s chat.
