Why You Should Be Challenging Your Brain

We live in an age where physical exercise is being strongly pushed, and we know how important it is for our health, appearance, and the development of our muscles. Did you know, however, that it may be even more important to exercise your brain? Like the rest of the muscles in your body, your brain responds well to exercise, and if it gets none, will grow weak and suffer. Whereas physical exertion pushes and develops the rest of your body’s muscles, mental exercises are needed to test your brain and help it develop full and healthy. In general, any form of strategy game, puzzle, studying for school, or problem-solving tasks work the brain well, and can have tremendous benefits. Those who exercise their brain regularly will experience short-term benefits such as enhanced problem-solving abilities, the ability to think faster, improved reasoning skills, and improved logical and reasoning skills. Over the long term, one will experience increased memory, and the brain will be able to respond quicker and perform more complicated tasks. Most importantly, you will be protecting yourself form the development of brain-related illnesses, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

There are things out there that you will encounter in daily life that will actually hinder your brain’s function and make it weaker. These things, although unavoidable, can be controlled to an extent by you, and it is important that you limit them to keep your brain from slipping into a mundane, unhealthy state. Stress and anxiety work against the brain, and impede your ability to think rationally. Elevated stress levels put strain on the entire body, and the brain is no exception. If you are constantly in a state of high anxiety, it is important that you seek as much time as possible to relax and allow your body to slip back into a normal state of existence. Also, a life that is driven by routine, and which lacks variety, spontaneity, or challenge is an extremely harmful environment for the brain. The brain is designed to learn, reason, and adapt, and loves to be challenged. If it is not tested, it will very slowly degenerate. This can lead to serious illnesses down the road.

Fortunately there are a lot of ways to stimulate and strengthen the brain. As we’ve established, the brain thrives on having to work and adapt to new things. For this reason it is important that you keep in mind that working one kind of puzzle over and over is not going to be very beneficial. Your brain is actually divided up into several areas. All of these areas need to be challenged, or any benefit is going to be minimal. A word problem, for example, is going to exercise a completely different part of the brain than a math problem or a strategy game. So how can you work all of these answers? It’s actually simple – the key is to avoid routine. Changing up the puzzles that you do is extremely important. Keep different kinds of puzzles, tasks, or problems on hand and randomly perform them over time. This makes sure to test all areas of your brain and provides the brain with the kind of spontaneity that it likes. There are a lot of paper puzzles out there, but new forms on computer programs are actually some of the best. These have the most variety and are designed to test the brain in many areas in many different ways. Difficulty levels also help increase the stimulation for the brain, and are used to make the program just the right level for the user. Video games of certain form are also very effective, particularly ones that focus on strategy, problem-solving and decision making skills.

When exercising your brain, keep in mind that variety is best. Always try to avoid routine as much as you can, in your exercise and in your daily life. Your brain is capable of remaining active and "young" for a very long time, but this is only possible with appropriate exercise, like any other muscle. Find activities and challenges that you enjoy, and avoid ones that are too hard for you to complete – you want them to be challenging, but not so hard as to be frustrating. You want to avoid those high stress levels, and provide a good working environment for your brain.