It was once a common opinion that brain function peaks during early adulthood before gradually declining and eventually leading to brain fog and lapses in memory during old age.
Now, however, it’s a widely accepted idea that a person’s lifestyle is a major factor when it comes to cognitive decline. People are also more aware that things like poor diet, chemicals, toxins, stress and lack of sleep can negatively affect the way the brain functions.
The opposite is also true in that a healthy lifestyle can do wonders for your brain like promote neurogenesis, a process where the brain gives birth to new neurons. Recent studies have proven that the brain’s memory center AKA the hippocampus, can regenerate through an entire lifetime provided that it’s given the tools to do so.
The good news is that these “tools” are mainly lifestyle-based and don’t require you to spend cash on any medical procedure or any expensive prescription medication at all to boost your brain and your memory. All you need to do is to simply try out these following tricks.
5) Eat Right
Your diet plays a huge role in maintaining good memory. Fresh vegetables and healthy fats are essential. Foods like celery, broccoli, durry, walnuts and cauliflower contain antioxidants and other helpful compounds that promote brain health as well as stimulate the production of new brain cells. One healthful fat for brain function is coconut oil. According to studies, two tablespoons of coconut oil can supply you with 220 grams of medium chain triglycerides or MCT, which helps as a preventive measure against degenerative neurological diseases.
4) Exercise
Whenever you exercise, your brain’s nerve cells release what’s known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a type of protein that triggers other chemicals that promote neural health and improves cognitive function. Exercises like strength training and high-intensity interval exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by stimulating nerve cells to multiply and strengthening neuronal interconnections.
3) Get A Good Night’s Sleep
According to a study dine in Harvard, people are 33% more likely to figure out and infer connections among distantly related ideas after sleeping. Countless studies have also proven that sleep can not only strengthen your memories, it can also actually help you “practice” your performance skills learned while you were awake (it’s a process called consolidation).
2) Don’t Multitask
Although the point of multitasking is to simultaneously do as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, research has shown that doing multi tasks to only leads to more mistakes, less concentration, and less efficiency.
According to studies, it takes about eight seconds to fully commit a piece of information to memory, so if you’re busy talking on your phone when you put down your car keys, it’s highly unlikely you’ll remember where you put them.
The nex time you find yourself trying to do 3 tasks at once, stop yourself and bring back your attention and focus to the task at hand. Doing this will not only help you get things done, it will also make you less prone to errors.
1) Play Brain Games
Not challenging your brain with new information can actually cause it to deteriorate. The good news is that according to a study about brain plasticity, you can reverse brain degeneration by simply providing your brain with appropriate stimulus.
Playing brain games is one of the best ways to challenge and boost your brain skills like reading, comprehension and memorization. Experts advise though that you should only spend about 20 minutes a day on these brain games (and only five to seven minutes on each game) as spending longer amounts of time on a game can weaken the benefits.
