Anti-Ageing Tips to Keep the Brain Young

 Anti-Ageing Tips to Keep the Brain Young

While there are many things you can do to stay healthy as you age, like eating right and exercising more to help prevent heart disease or other chronic conditions, it can feel harder to know what to do to preserve your memory. However, you can take steps to keep your brain young, too. Here are six things you can do that may specifically help your brain.

Move your body

Quick—what’s the number one thing you can do for your brain’s health? Differential calculus, you say? Chess? Chaos theory? Nope, the best brain sharpener may be … sneakers? Yup. Once they’re on your feet, you can pump up your heart rate. “The best advice I can give to keep your brain healthy and young is aerobic exercise,”. “I would suggest a combined program of aerobics and weight training. Studies show the best outcomes for those engaged in both types of exercise.” 

As we age, our brain cells, or neurons, lose the tree-branch-like connections between them. These connections, or synapses, are essential to thought. Over time, our brains lose their heft. Perhaps the most striking brain research today is the strong evidence we now have that “exercise may forestall some kinds of mental decline.” It may even restore memory.

Feed your brain

Another path to a better brain is through your stomach. We’ve all heard about antioxidants as cancer fighters. Eating foods that contain these molecules, which neutralise harmful free radicals, may be especially good for your brain too. Free radicals may break down the neurons in our brains. Many colourful fruits and vegetables are packed with antioxidants, as are some beans, whole grains, nuts, and spices. (Here are the other antioxidant-rich foods you should be eating.)

More important, though, is overall nutrition. In concert with a good workout routine, you should eat right to try to avoid diseases such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and high cholesterol, which all make life tough on your brain.

The same weight that burdens your legs on the stairs also burdens your brain for the witty reply or quick problem-solving. The best things you can eat for your body are also the best things you can eat for your brain. 

Use your brain 

Sorry to say, our brains naturally start slowing down at the cruelly young age of 30 (yes, 30). It used to be thought that this couldn’t be helped, but people of any age could train their brains to be faster and, in effect, younger. “Your brain is a learning machine,”. Given the right tools, we can train our brains to act like they did when we were younger. All that’s required is dedicated practice: exercises for the mind.

 Since much of the data we receive comes through speech, the Brain Fitness Program works with language and hearing to improve both speed and accuracy. Throughout your training, the program starts asking you to distinguish sounds (between “dog” and “bog,” for instance) at an increasingly faster rate. Though you may have started out slow, by Labour Day, you’re pretty nimble.

Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day, which has sold more than two million copies in Japan. No software out there has yet been approved by the FDA as a treatment for cognitive impairment, but some studies suggest that programs like Merzenich’s or other brain games may improve memory or even reduce the risk of dementia. The biggest finding in brain research in the last ten years is that the brain at any age is highly adaptable, or “plastic,” as neurologists put it. If you ask your brain to learn, it will learn. And it may speed up the process.

To keep your brain young and supple, you can do one of a million new activities that challenge and excite you: playing Ping-Pong or contract bridge, doing jigsaw puzzles, learning a new language or the tango, taking accordion lessons, building a kit airplane, mastering bonsai technique, discovering the subtleties of beer-brewing and, sure, relearning differential calculus.

“Anything that closely engages your focus and is strongly rewarding” will kick your brain into learning mode and necessarily notch it up. 

Stay calm

While challenging your brain is very important, remaining calm is equally so. In a paper on the brain and stress, that traumatic stress is bad for your brain cells. Stress can “disturb cognitive processes such as learning and memory, and consequently limit the quality of human life.” 

One example is a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is a primary place of memory formation, but which can be seriously debilitated by chronic stress. Of course, physical exercise is always a great de-stressor, as are calmer activities like yoga and meditation. And when you line up your mental callisthenics (your Swahili and swing lessons), make sure you can stay loose and have fun.

Give your brain a rest

Perhaps the most extreme example of the mental power of staying calm is the creative benefit of sleep. Next time you’re working on a complex problem, whether it be a calculus proof or choosing the right car for your family, it really pays to “sleep on it.”

In a study involving a video game, people who took a nap were twice as likely to solve the puzzle in the game in comparison to those who stayed awake. The theory is that the sleeping brain is vastly capable of synthesising complex information.

Laugh a little

Humour stimulates the parts of our brain that use the “feel-good” chemical messenger dopamine. In fact, laughter is pleasurable, perhaps even “addictive,” to the brain. But can humour make us smarter? The jury is still out, and more studies are needed, but the initial results are encouraging. One study found that humour could improve short-term memory. The study compared people who watched a funny video to those who sat without any distractions and tested their memory. People who watched the funny video not only scored better on the memory test, but as a bonus, they had less of the stress hormone cortisol. (Here are some anti-ageing secrets that may help you add healthy years to your life.)