Why Focus on Exercising the Brain? Just like an un-exercised muscle will lose strength, “unused brain tissue leads to a loss of brainpower”.
Physical fitness is very important and for that, you should exercise your body regularly to keep your muscles strong and in shape. This sounds very familiar, and most of us know about it. What we often fail to consider is that mental fitness is just as crucial, and the brain requires regular exercise to stay healthy and work efficiently.
The Brain is a Muscle
The brain inside our skull is a muscle. Muscles need exercise – when we work out, we strain and exercise our muscles to develop them, make them stronger. If we stop exercising or doing any physical activity, our muscles will become weak and lose their strength. Mental activity or thinking exercises the brain muscle. If we do not use our brain to think regularly, do not put our brain in stimulating and challenging situations, our brain tissues will lose their power.
Benefits of Mental Exercise
There are different areas with different functions of our brain muscle and we can perform a mental exercise to strengthen every part. Otherwise, for lack of practice, unused brain tissues will get atrophied.
The concept of neuroplasticity or the muscle-building part of the brain states that the brain can change throughout the lifetime of an individual. That is, the brain muscle can change and adapt, like plastic. Our brain is almost like a wired circuit, and the different thoughts we have, or mental activities we carry out, form their paths in the brain. The more we think about something, the more that path grows. If we change our thinking, paths get changed and a new path is formed. This means that we become better and stronger at the things we regularly or often do, while the things we don’t do, i.e. the pathways that we don’t use, fade away.
Thus mental exercise is essential to make sure that you keep your brain active and do not let any part of your brain lose its power. The benefits of mental exercise are both short-term, such as heightened concentration, improved memory, increased mental clarity during stress, etc. as well as long-term, such as preventing diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Mental Exercises for You
Activities such as reading, practicing mental math, trying new experiences, playing board games like chess are some of the best mental exercises. Chess and the Asset Approach is very useful for achieving all the benefits of mental exercise, among others. It is necessary to take care of your brain and use it to its full potential by performing mental exercises regularly and improve yourself.
