11 Exercises To Get Your Brain In Shape
Keeping your brain young, fit and in full swing is as easy as changing your watch. Here are the exercises to train all the capacities of your mind
The elements that keep a brain young are many and interdependent, and a decrease in any of them can cause a rapid aging effect.
To avoid this, we can do maintenance exercises and improvement of the capacity of observation (perceptions, attention and concentration capacity); the different memories (sensory, geographic, prospective …); the intuition; the reasoning; the connection between the two cerebral hemispheres; planning capacity; stress management; the creativity…
How to keep your brain young and fit
With these simple exercises we can keep our brain in shape and train its different capacities.
1. Turn around business as usual
Do the Larry Katz gymnastics to keep your brain in shape. They are neurobic exercises that consist of completely changing what we always do, our routines.
Doing the exact opposite of our automatic actions has been shown to force the brain to create new synapses and stay young. As easy as changing the wristwatch, going to work in different ways or writing with a clumsy hand are just a few proposals. You can invent yours
You can also opt for Paul Dennison’s kinesiology gymnastics that proposes movements that increase blood flow to the brain and improve communication between the hemispheres.
2. Write down your intuitions
This is a talent increases with experience but can also be practiced. A good exercise to observe the psychological profile of public figures, our relatives or acquaintances to try to make predictions about their intentions and their future behavior.
Keep a “journal of intuitions” that arise to avoid possible interpretations a posteriori. Check the successes and try to refine your aim by reviewing your failures.
3. Train your geographic memory
You can train it by learning transport networks: visualize the plan of the subway lines or the roads in your environment and then try to draw them. Or make a sketch of the distribution of the buildings you frequent or put the location of all the establishments in your neighborhood on the map …
4. Prospective memory
If you already have the habit of writing down what day and time you intend to do your pending tasks, take advantage of it and, before consulting what is written , make an effort to remember it without looking. If you are consistent, your retention capacity will improve.
5. Improve your attention span and concentration
Both are kept in shape –along with sensory memories– with games and hobbies : sudoku puzzles, crosswords, solitaires, card games, dominoes … People who live alone have a world of possibilities for long-distance relationships with games of everything kind that offers the Internet.
6. Train your sensory memory
Among all your senses, discover what type of memory is the most reliable for you (visual, auditory …) and give it priority, even if you accompany it from the rest. When you have to remember complicated lists or references, resort to an indexing trick.
7. Ability to reason
Do brain training exercises; discuss current affairs with your family and friends; read and write your reflections; join a book club …
8. Ability to plan
Train it by writing down the steps planned for your projects and trips. Avoid improvisations and it is essential that you analyze the foresight failures later.
9. Stress management
Don’t shy away from positive stress (eustress); it is not necessarily bad, it will keep you young if it stays in the correct limit of activation of your energies. Of course, eliminate excess (distress) with meditation, yoga or controls of physiological variables.
10. Creativity
It is an essential characteristic of a young brain and comes from curiosity, from being open to news and changes. Therefore, look for new aspects in what you live, imagine new ways of doing things. Although they may not always work, you will experience the pleasure of breaking new ground and that is more than enough. Train this kind of pleasure
11. Optimism
The most defining characteristic of a young brain is optimism, the vision of the hopeful future, the famous resilience of Boris Cyrulnik: overcoming the frustrations and mistreatments of life; not stay licking the wounds; digest traumas and push them aside so that you can look forward with hope, joy, and good humor.
