Learning how to keep your brain healthy is just as necessary as taking care of your body. However, you have to know how to do it. It seems that by doing many things every day, even more than we can or should assume, the daily whirlwind already keeps our minds in shape. In reality, what happens is that we confuse hyperactivity and exhaustion with having a toned and well-exercised mind.
Therefore, we have outlined 6 simple habits to help show you how to keep your brain healthy, well-activated, and ready to face the challenges of everyday life without altering your daily organization to a great extent. Try to put them into practice little by little, they are within anyone’s reach and, with consistency and perseverance, they will have a positive impact on your health.
How to keep your brain healthy and active
1. Practice some sort of intellectual activity
We all know how exhausting our daily lives are and how, when we get home every afternoon (or evening), our must-have ally is the remote control. Sometimes, watching TV, especially a light program that simply entertains us, is a good way to relieve intellectual pressure on our already busy heads.
However, it is important that you include in your habits some activity that stimulates you on a deeper level than pure entertainment. Reading is the paradigmatic example of activities that require some cognitive effort compared to watching television, which is usually more bearable since it requires virtually no imagination.
Relax, to know how to keep your brain healthy you do not have to fight with a brainy book that bores you or that you do not understand, it can be a fun one that accompanies you for a while every day on your way home. On the other hand, doing puzzles even if you are not on the beach lounger can be another option, there are more or less elaborate ones and can range from a word search for children to sudoku.
You always have the option of visiting exhibitions, planning and executing an activity you’ve never done before or watching documentaries or movies on topics that interest you if you can’t resist the influence of television.
How long has it been since you’ve been to the theater or any other kind of show, and don’t you think it’s about time you did? Besides being very rewarding, it’s a good way to stay active beyond passively pressing the remote control when you’re bored or when you get home and are absolutely numb.
2. Meditate
We have already mentioned this many times. Exercising your ability to consciously attend to your inner and outer reality is a habit that, beyond its pleasurable effects, has a positive impact on your brain activity and polishes step by step, thanks to continuous practice, some aspects of your mood and personality.
Remember that the practice of mindfulness influences the approach you use to judge and evaluate the events of your daily life, calms the maze of your thoughts, and increases your kindness, improving your daily interactions and relationships. It also helps you in your performance, as it increases lucidity and allows you to process the information you receive better. Yes, meditating is not just sitting quietly for a few minutes to see what happens: connecting with yourself by practicing mindfulness also allows you to strengthen your mind.
3. Train your creativity
Knitting, moving some furniture around, making a gift for someone with your own hands, coloring mandalas (which in turn can help you meditate), cooking a new recipe (a simple one, if you are a beginner) … are activities that can help you learn how to keep your brain healthy.
Don’t externalize everything. Sometimes habits as simple as carefully picking your groceries yourself and feeding yourself things that go beyond a simple snack require you to practice planning and execution skills that are much more elaborate than they seem.
Think of new projects: a museum you would like to visit, a trip you have in mind -or a short getaway, which can also be very fulfilling-, a course you would like to take… Set yourself challenges that are manageable but complex enough to get you “hooked”. Once you have them in mind, start with them.
We insist, do something you’ve never done before, even if it’s a walk through an unknown neighborhood in your city (you’ll probably never come back if you don’t find anything interesting there, but it can make a significant change if you do and, in any case, that day your brain will thank you for the dose of novelty). Transiting the unknown, even literally, is also being creative.
4. Keep your house clean and tidy
Furniture, papers, clothes, junk. No, it’s not about obsessing over the slightest lint running down your hallway, or reliving nightmares as a teenager when one of the deadly sins you could commit was to have to make your bed and your stuff chaotically distributed in every corner of your room.
It is something more subtle. The order of our outer world, that is, the space we occupy and inhabit, is often a true reflection of the order of our inner world. Okay, we all know that our disorder is a kind of paradoxical organization of things in which everything has its assigned place, a place that, miraculously, you yourself know all about… until you need an hour to find that T-shirt that can’t be found or to check if there is an envelope in which you can send that document urgently without wasting any more time.
Let’s face it: if the distribution of objects has a sense and order, the impact on your mind -and on your mood- is much more positive than if the feeling you perceive around you is one of dirt, idleness, or chaos. So, from the fridge to your desk, from the bed to the sofa, maintaining an acceptable level of tidiness and cleanliness will help you feel better, be more efficient… and find everything you are looking for in those spaces more quickly. This is one of the key elements on how to keep your brain healthy.
5. Have an active social life
It is an old axiom of psychology: the human being is the most complex stimulus that exists… especially for another human being. This has multiple applications and one of them has to do with health. Yes, you heard it right, mental health can be measured, among other things, in terms of the health of our friendship, family, couple, or other relationships.
A little bit of solitude is fine and, in fact, it is important that you know how to spend time with yourself without anxiously seeking the company of others. However, remember -especially if you are a person who tends to isolate or withdraw into yourself- that human interaction is one of the things that keeps the complex machinery of our brain oiled.
Then again, there’s no doubt that communicating with your pet and enjoying the time you spend together is great… but don’t lose perspective. Talk to people, make time for them and meet them, share activities -if possible pleasant ones- with your peers.
Reflective silence is wonderful, but human beings are designed to converse, meet and help each other. Continued and rewarding social contact is a really healthy habit. When you deal with other people you open yourself to the possibility of learning new things, having fun, getting help, seeing new places. Interpersonal contact, in any form, is one of the simplest and most natural methods of stimulating our minds.
6. Get into sports
Sport, besides entertaining you, exhausting you, modifying your body on the outside, and facilitating human interaction if you do it with other people, also modifies your body on the inside. And no, we are not only talking about your cardiorespiratory capacity or the strength of your muscle fibers but also about the effects on your brain as a result of those kilometers on the treadmill or the workout you do every week on the rowing machine.
Remember that physical exercise, especially if it is intense, releases a series of chemical substances that act as neurotransmitters, i.e., they activate the transmission of information from one neuron to another. It is true that, technically, the brain is not a muscle that you train like someone who increases the size of their biceps doing weights, but it is an organ that you can also exercise and keep in shape through proper and controlled physical exercise.
How to keep your brain healthy with ifeel
These are just 6 ideas that can help when learning how to keep your brain healthy. We encourage you to practice them and, if they are not suitable for you, find others that will help you to wake up inside. Remember, if you are struggling to find other alternatives you can always contact a professional psychologist, such as the ones at ifeel, to help you get through this and offer personalized advice. Your health will thank you for it and, as that TV commercial said, it will show on the outside.
