The Aging Mind: What Is Within Your Control
With aging comes more health risk factors. It’s essential to keep yourself inspired and engaged to continue to live a long and healthy life. These day to day lifestyle changes help you stay in motion.
Staying Active
Going for daily walks, movement, aerobics, stretching, and strength training are all ways you can exercise and engage your mind. These allow you to stay in tune with your body and check in with yourself and use your brain to be an active participant in the world around you. The movement also helps prevent blood clots, which can lead to other health issues.
Getting Enough Sleep
According to the National Sleep Foundation, Adults from 18-64 should be getting about 7-9 hours of sleep a night, and adults 65 and older should be getting around 7-8 hours of sleep a night for a healthy adult. Under special circumstances sleeping an hour more or less may be acceptable.
Not Smoking
According to Healthline, referencing a 2017 study, the longer you smoke, the more you increase your risk for age-related brain volume memory loss. Smoking results in poor memory makes it harder to think and learn and is linked to increasing one’s risk of dementia.
Keep Learning
A way to keep your mind sharp is by connecting to your inner student. Be in a state of being open and interested in learning and seeking out new information continually. Staying curious will keep your mind sharp.
According to Harvard Health Publishing, always striving to be more educated is associated with better brain functioning at an old age. Challenging your brain and being on a quest to search for new information is said to help maintain brain cells and engage communication throughout them.
Use All Your Senses
Work on using all your senses to keep your brain active. By exercising as much of your mind as possible, you can strengthen it. This helps your brain retain memory.
Believe In Yourself
Myths and doubting oneself can contribute to memory decline. Older learners do worse on memory-related tasks when they expose themselves to negative stereotypes about aging. When receiving complimentary messages concerning aging and memory, they perform better on memory tasks.
When people feel that they are more in control of their memory functions, they are likely to maintain and improve their memory, making their memory even better. By believing you can improve and working towards improvement, you increase your chances of keeping your mind sharp.
Prioritize Brain Use
Make it a habit to use your brain and partake in other brain activities. Exercising the muscle that is your brain keeps your brain’s areas sharp, therefore reducing your risk for dementia. Be selective towards what events you set your mind to remember. By setting reminders and notes about where you left things, brain space can be focused and used on more critical tasks.
Repeat What You Want To Know
Give yourself time. Constant repetition will ensure the memorization of a topic. When you want to remember something you read, repeat it. It reinforces the memory or connection and improves your ability to recall it at a later time.
Repetition can help you remember important information. Repeat what you want to know.
Space It Out
Repetition is an important learning tool; however, it could have adverse effects when not spaced out properly. Space out material that you are repeating. Disengaging your mind onto another task, taking a nap or a break are all good ways to help solidify what you learned in your brain and make recollection and memory more effective.
Engaging your brain and partaking in healthy habits can increase your quality of life as you age.