Habits that can Improve your Brain Power
We could all do with a little boost of brain power. It might be that you wish you could remember a little more and a little more often. Or you might be trying to train your brain to give you hour-long focus sessions. Our brains are much like other muscles, and they love to be worked out frequently.
But if you’re skipping brain-feeding activities for things like scrolling TikTok (although there is a lot to be learned there) for hours, then you aren’t going to be using your brain to its full potential.
So here are a couple of activities that have been proven to help your brain power.
Puzzles & Games
You don’t just have to sit for hours doing Sudoku, no. Instead, there are hundreds of games that will work. Puzzles and games often require us to make decisions and guesses and figure out clues before moving on to the next part. Here are a couple of games that have been shown to have a positive impact on the brain:
- Sudoku – both online and by using the Sudoku puzzle books
- Chess – play against the AI with Chess.com, or buy a chessboard and play with friends and family in real life.
- Poker – number games like poker are great for our brains, grab a deck and play with family, or play with poker software online which offer a variety of different game modes to flex the strategic mind.
- Jigsaws – Jigsaw puzzles work our brain’s pattern-finding skill out, and you can play these online or start with a less complicated one until you can complete the single shape ultra challenging jigsaws
- Scrabble – words games are incredible for building our vocabulary and recalling words; Scrabble is a classic, although there are other options now.
Focus
Do you find yourself multitasking often? And feeling like you achieve so much more when you do? Studies show that multitasking, tab switching,, and switching between work and social media slow your speed considerably. For every task switch you perform, your brain takes 20 minutes to get back into the flow of getting it right.
You need to book an uninterrupted time to do things well and allow your brain to get into its focus flow.
Many say that a four-hour time slot of focus is ideal, but you can start by setting shorter 20-minute focus slots with 5-minute breaks. You will do as much as you can in the 20-minute timers and walk away for 5. This type of timer is called the Pomodoro method and is one of the most popular ways to train your brain to have short bursts of high productivity and function.
Stress Reduction
A stressed body and brain will equal a lower work pace. Because there are so many other things going on, your brain won’t be able to function to its highest capacity.
People who work in high-stress environments and those who wish to have a high level of productivity will make sure that they have times in the day when they get their cortisol levels in check. Cortisol is known to impact short-term memory, and this will lead to a more difficult time with things like recall.
Here are a couple of ways to keep your stress in check:
- Daily walks
- Yoga
- Playing games
- Walking away from work for a few hours
- Meditation
- Sports
- Massages
Everyone has their own method to reduce stress levels; find one that works for you and build it into your daily routine.
Music
Music has a significant impact on our bodies, and one of the things that have become popular in the last few years is listening to music designed to unlock specific brain waves. There are a few options for using music to unlock your brain power:
Binaural Beta Waves, 13 Hz +, ideal for focus
- Alpha Waves are between 8 and 12 Hz
Alpha waves are used to keep the brain in a relaxed state, while Beta waves are what we experience during our waking states. You can find some incredible curated Binaural music playlists on Spotify, YouTube Music, and more.
You should experiment with both options until you find the one that produces the best work for you or where you see an increase in the time that you can concentrate.
What is the long-term value of increasing your brain power?
We use our brains in a million ways every moment of the day, but many of us are looking for ways to produce a higher quality of work at a faster rate. Improving our brain power functions can help us to solve problems faster and look for the most efficient way to achieve our goals.
Those are short-term reasons to improve our brain power, but longer-term working with your brain could mean that you are more likely to decrease the chance of cognitive deterioration like dementia.
