What is Brain Fitness?
We often hear the phrase “use it or lose it” in reference to brain fitness. With the growing awareness of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, there is a greater concern for maintaining brain function and avoiding disease.
Brain Fitness is the state of brain health and mental well-being that makes you “fit” for life and work demands. It’s a fundamental measure of the brain’s ability to function efficiently and effectively during work and leisure activities, to be healthy, to resist disease.
Brain fitness can be protected and nurtured by lifestyle, by formal education, by being actively mentally engaged in life, and by targeted practices designed to challenge important mental skills.
Healthy lifestyle habits including mental stimulation, physical exercise, good nutrition, stress management, and sleep can improve brain fitness. On the other hand, chronic stress, anxiety, depression, aging, decreasing estrogen, excess oxytocin, and prolonged cortisol can decrease brain fitness as well as general health.
How to Improve Your Brain Fitness
1. Play Games
Brain fitness programs and games are a wonderful way to tease and challenge your brain. Suduko, crosswords and electronic games can all improve your brain’s speed and memory. These games rely on logic, word skills, math and more.
2. Meditation
Meditation is a powerful practice that can change your brain, improve your life, and the enhance the quality of your life. Daily meditation is perhaps the single greatest thing you can do for your mind/body health. Meditation not only relaxes you, it gives your brain a workout. By creating a different mental state, you engage your brain in new and interesting ways while increasing your brain fitness.2
3. Eat for Your Brain
Although there are very few medication drugs that help improve brain health, there are numerous lifestyle changes, food items, and nutrients that can help improve cognition, neuroplasticity, and thus help avert the development of brain diseases. Below are some of the foods to include in your daily diet.
Your brain needs you to eat healthy fats. Focus on fish oils from wild salmon, nuts such as walnuts, seeds such as flaxseed, and olive oil. Eat more of these foods and less saturated fats. Eliminate trans fats completely from your diet.
4. Tell Good Stories
Stories are a way that we solidify memories, interpret events, and share moments. Practice telling your stories, both new and old, so that they are interesting, compelling, and fun. Some basic storytelling techniques will go a long way in keeping people’s interest both in you and in what you have to say.
5. Turn Off Your Television
The average person watches more than four hours of television every day. Television can stand in the way of relationships, life, and more. Turn off your TV and spend more time living and exercising your mind and body.
6. Exercise Your Body to Exercise Your Brain
Numerous studies have shown that regular physical activity is associated with better mental health, including a reduced risk or incidence of dementia, reduced feelings of anxiety and depression, improved cognitive function, improved quality of life, improved sleep. Physical exercise is great brain exercise too. By moving your body, your brain has to learn new muscle skills, estimate distance, and practice balance. Choose a variety of exercises to challenge your brain.
7. Read Something New
Books are portable, free from libraries and filled with infinite interesting characters, information, and facts. Branch out from familiar reading topics. If you usually read history books, try a contemporary novel. Read foreign authors, the classics, and random books. Not only will your brain get a workout by imagining different time periods, cultures, and peoples, you will also have interesting stories to tell about your reading, what it makes you think of and the connections you draw between modern life and the words.
8. Learn a New Skill
Learning a new skill works in multiple areas of the brain. Your memory comes into play, you learn new movements and you associate things differently. Reading Shakespeare, learning to cook, and building an airplane out of toothpicks all will challenge your brain and give you something to think about.
9. Make Simple Changes
We love our routines. We have hobbies and pastimes that we could do for hours on end. But the more something is ‘second nature,’ the less our brains have to work to do it. To really help your brain stay young, challenge it. Change routes to the grocery store, use your opposite hand to open doors, and eat dessert first. All this will force your brain to wake up from habits and pay attention again.
10. Enroll in a Brain Fitness Course
Brain training is becoming a trend. A well-functioning brain creates more opportunities for success in each aspect of life. You can now dramatically expand your knowledge of brain optimization through proper training, sleep, nutrition, neuro-conditioning and flow state. Start your career a Certified Brain Fitness Coach.
Become a leading authority on brain optimization through proper training, sleep, nutrition, neuro-conditioning and flow state. You know how important things like mindset, focus, clarity, determination, distraction control and flow are to success: mental, physical or financial. A well-functioning brain creates more opportunity for success in each aspect of life.
Learn more about becoming a Certified Brain Fitness Coach
When you become a Certified Sleep Science Coach, you will learn how to help your clients dramatically enhance their metabolism, memory, creativity, immune function, hormone balance, hunger management, disease prevention, sports performance, accident avoidance, memory, reaction time, good judgement, surgery recovery, happiness and over 100 additional functions and behaviors.
Our programs are open to anyone with a desire to learn and help others. There are no prerequisites.
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