As we all know, there is a lot in the news these days about staying young. Quite often, this surrounds the physical side of youthfulness though. It involves the ways in which you can keep your skin young, or the ways in which you can turn to a plastic surgeon to help you along your way in other regards.
What a lot of this advice doesn’t look at is the mental side of staying young. We’ve all heard about the age of your brain, and there are concerns that as you get older this capacity gets smaller.
As such, today’s article will look at some of the tips you can tap into in a bid to stay on top of your mental age.
Turn to physical activity
OK, we might be focussing on the mental side of exercise for the purposes of today’s post, but in some ways this interlinks with the physical elements as well.
This is because it has been found that exercise prompts benefits to your brain as well. It is something that increases the number of blood vessels that are carrying oxygen to the brain. Ultimately, with more oxygen available, the brain is going to function much more efficiently.
Give your brain a training session
Once upon a time this would have sounded ridiculous. Now, it’s something that is almost embedded into modern-day life. We’ve touched upon physical exercise, but your brain needs a workout as well.
Over the years various studies have shown that when you put your brain to the test, it stimulates new connections between the cells in there. Considering the fact that these are the connections that tend to weaken as you grow older, this is of paramount importance.
So, what sort of steps can you take? You can look towards simple things like puzzles, just to get your brain thinking and out of its comfort zone somewhat.
Plan your brain use strategically
Again, it’s something that may have sounded ridiculous a few years ago, but there comes a time where you have to be a little more strategic when it comes to the use of your brain.
Ultimately, it needs to rest from time to time, and not be preoccupied thinking about tasks that really shouldn’t be bothering it. All this means is that you should be using the likes of planners and diaries just to keep on top of things, and make sure that your brain isn’t burdened with the task of storing information that it really doesn’t have to.
Every day is a school day
It’s a bit of a cliché, but something else which can ensure your brain doesn’t age as fast as you might like is ensuring that it is always learning.
In a similar vein to the second point, make sure that you are always getting your brain to pick up new things. It has been found that if you keep challenging your brain, it gets it into the habit of staying active. In our advanced years, this is obviously one of our big aims.
