The brain changes dramatically as you grow older, which can considerably affect your overall health. Mental decline is one of the most prevalent age-related disorders in Australia. It greatly impacts memory, concentration and decision making, causing everyday activities to become difficult. However, you can do many things to support and improve your mental health to retain your cognitive functions. Below we’ll list several ways to naturally increase brain power and help keep it in peak working order.
How Can You Naturally Increase Brain Function?
Like any other organ, the brain isn’t impervious to decline or damage. It’s under a lot of pressure, working around the clock to control the heart and lungs. Therefore, keeping it in excellent condition is a must, and here are a few simple methods to accomplish it:
Take C8 and C10 MCTs
C8 and C10 MCTs (medium chain triglycerides) are substances that can support faster and clearer thinking. You can obtain them from products, such as MCT Brain Power, to increase your energy and maintain focus for a lot longer. MCTs are easily absorbed by your liver and converted into ketones to fuel your brain and facilitate mental performance. With regular intake, you can help prevent neurodegenerative conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
Stimulate Your Brain
Research indicates that puzzles and other activities that involve brain activity can encourage new nerve cell connections and help generate new cells. This process helps develop functional reserves to safeguard against future cell loss.
Your brain can benefit from virtually any stimulating activity. Some of the most common examples include reading, taking courses, solving math problems, and word puzzles. Additionally, try to experiment with tasks that combine mental effort and manual dexterity, such as painting and drawing.
Try Mnemonics
Mnemonic devices are an excellent strategy for developing long-term memory and retrieving information from long-term storage. They’re especially useful for remembering long lists, like colours of the visible spectrum. For instance, the name Roy G. Biv would stand for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Forgetting crucial details becomes more prevalent as you grow old, and mnemonics are an easy way to help retain your memorisation capacity.
Chunking or Grouping Information
Chunking or grouping refers to dividing new data into several pieces to provide fewer bits of information. For example, remembering phone numbers is much simpler if the digits are divided into three groups (e.g., 02 9876 5432 instead of 0298765432). You can use many other tricks to memorise key details – figure out what works best for you and incorporate it into your routine.
Meditate
Meditation can have a huge number of positive health effects. Apart from lowering stress and blood pressure, it can increase grey matter in your brain. This substance declines as you age, which can negatively impact cognition and memory.
Research indicates that meditation can help tackle this problem. The technique can enhance short-term memory in both the young and the elderly. It can also work wonders for your spatial working memory to help keep you productive throughout the day.
Maintain Healthy Weight
Surprising as it may sound, maintaining optimal body weight is crucial for your brain health. Several weight aspects can be a considerable risk factor for mental decline.
Primarily, obesity can alter memory-associated genes, compromising your memorisation abilities. It can also trigger inflammation and insulin resistance, both of which can harm your brain. It’s also associated with greater chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease and experiencing dramatically worse memory performance.
To help ward off these aged-related illnesses, make sure to eat clean and maintain a body mass index within the average ranges.
Get Enough Sleep
Quality sleep is essential for many reasons, and brain health may be the most important. By allowing your brain to rest between seven and nine hours every night, you can help heal it and preserve your mental health. This enables you to reset your mind for new challenges and hold onto your cognitive abilities well into old age.
Don’t Neglect Your Brain
The brain is the centrepiece of your body, running the entire organism and providing abilities necessary for your daily activities. Hence, maintaining its health is imperative, and now you know how to do so. With food high in nutritional value, quality sleep, and memory exercise, you can stave off various diseases and slow down the potentially crippling effects of old age.
