You have a great job, a great family and life is looking good. But are you keeping your mind active, or are you allowing it to stagnate? It is important to do a wide range of mentally challenging activities to keep your mind in tip-top condition, but there are other aspects of your life and lifestyle that can have an impact too.

Continuous Learning

When you learn a new skill or a new piece of information, or get to grips with a new activity, your brain literally grows. It forms new synaptic connections between your neurons. These connections are the key to intelligence, memory and information processing, so the more you have, the better. The key is to learn new things, not just revisit old ones:

1. Reading. Read about current affairs, buy a daily paper, read books on a wide range of topics. This will not only improve your understanding of the world at large, but it will improve your ability to recall relevant information.
2. Interact Socially. Interacting with other people in an intellectual or social context (without alcohol) helps you to maintain and improve your social intelligence.
3. Learn a New Skill. Learn to play the guitar, or how to write fiction, or how to paint. These skills improve your ability to observe and learn from observation.

Puzzles and Games

Playing crossword puzzles and doing other mentally stimulating activities has been shown to be a key determinant in reducing the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

4. Play Puzzles. Puzzles, particularly word and memory puzzles, keep your mind active as well as improving your vocabulary and linguistic ability.
5. Use a Brain Training product. The key in choosing the right product is to find one that is challenging and entertaining. Challenge is necessary to keep your mind active, and if it’s fun, it’ll be easier to keep playing it regularly. Beware of simplistic exercises – if you find it easy, it’s unlikely to be beneficial.

Physical Activity

Physical activity has been shown in numerous studies to have substantial mental health benefits. It is known that exercise relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety, and exercise has been shown to improve brain function and may even protect against dementia.

6. Stay Active. If you can, walk or ride a bike instead of taking the car for short trips. Use the stairs instead of the elevator.
7. Take up a Sport. Do gym classes, or go running, or play a ball game. Exercise increases your levels of brain-derived neutrotrophic factor, which helps brain cells survive longer.

Healthy Eating

Healthy eating is important for physical health, but it has been shown to be important for a healthy mind too. Healthy eating can prevent cholesterol from building up and reducing the blood supply to the brain.

8. Eat Plenty of Fruit and Vegetables. Fruit and vegetables contain essential nutrients for healthy brain function. They also contain anti-oxidants which help protect your brain cells from damage.
9. Don’t Eat too Much. Overeating can lead to hypertension which damages the blood vessels in your brain, and can cause diabetes which also lowers brain function dramatically.

These top tips will help to you keep an active and healthy mind, and will help alleviate stress, anxiety and depression too.

It seems that half the people I talk to about brain training believe that it doesn’t work. My intuition is different, and although I haven’t done a peer-reviewed study, there are good reasons for suspecting that it may have some positive effect. First though, I need to point out what I mean by brain training working.

If people are suddenly expecting to become more intelligent and creative and better at all mental activities, just by playing a puzzle or game, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. This isn’t going to happen (since we don’t have a scientifically accepted definition of intelligence, it wouldn’t be measurable even if it did). I would, however, point out three areas in which you might expect brain training to offer improvements:

1. General number skills – these are used from day to day for everything from working out which shop gives you the best deal to having some intuition as to which cell phone deal is right for you, or how much tax you owe.
2. Word and language skills – the ability to recall words and to use them in a particular context, or even to understand and recognise a particular word is vital for communication in the digital era.
3. Short-term memory skills – such as remembering the items on a to-do list without writing them down, or remembering what to buy without having a shopping list or personal organiser to tell you.

Now with these modest but important goals in mind, here is my list of 5 reasons why brain training ought to work:

1. You can improve your number skills by doing arithmetic. A big part of working out sums in your head is remembering them. So you don’t need to work out what 7+9 is, because you (hopefully) remember the answer. Clearly any puzzle or game that offers simple number practice is likely to improve your skills in this area. With multiplication, this is particularly important, which is why you learned your times tables in school.
2. You can improve language skills by playing word games. When you come across a word you don’t know, you tend to look it up. But even if you don’t do this, there is a distinction between so-called active and passive vocabulary. Active vocabulary means the words you use every day, and passive vocabulary means the words you know the meaning of, but don’t use. The more you see and interact with a particular word, the more likely you are to use ourselves. So you would expect word games to improve your passive vocabulary, if nothing else.
3. Short term memory skills are to a large extent pre-determined by biology. Very few people, hearing a list of numbers recited quickly, will remember more than about 9 of them (the average is 7). This does not mean that you cannot remember lists of more things that that. The way in which most people do this is to use “tricks”, where the items are associated with something else, or remembered as part of a pattern. Obviously, most tricks which work in a memory game can translate to you remembering a shopping list. Playing a memory game therefore encourages you to get used to methods for remembering things.
4. You often hear people saying things like “the brain is a muscle”, and while I have no real time for that, it seems intuitively plausible to me that keeping your mind active expands or maintains your cognitive abilities. So you would expect that sufficiently challenging games and puzzles would help to keep you sharp.
5. Lastly, and most importantly, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the brain can be trained. Most people call this “learning”, and anyone who ever went to school or even learned how to talk or write has experience with this older, more prosaic form of brain training.