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Most people are familiar with the saying, “use it or lose it”, but how can you use your brain effectively so that avoid “losing it”?
In short, keep challenging your brain because just like performing the same physical exercises over and over, your brain will experience very little benefit from performing tasks that it has already mastered. Even if these tasks were challenging for your brain at one point, your brain will plateau or decline unless you continue to learn new things.
According to Neuroscientists and their detailed findings, if you want to avoid “losing it”, you should choose activities that meet certain conditions to keep your brain fit.
The following are the types of activities that can help you “use it” effectively:
- Try Something New
Your brain is a machine that is fueled by learning and you can keep your brain fit when you continue to learn and develop new skills. - Challenge Yourself
The activities you engage in should challenge your mind and demand your full attention in order to boost chemical changes. - Crawl and then Walk for Progressive Gain
All of the activities – even old ones – you engage in should be performed at your threshold in order to keep your mind continuously improving. When you are starting a new activity, it is okay to start at an easy level, but you need to push yourself to your limits each step of the way to ensure you are maximizing your efforts. - Engage Your Great Brain Processing Systems
The activities you engage in should force you to make fine distinctions on the information you receive from your senses such as hearing, feeling or seeing; so that you are challenging your brain on refined levels in order to make the most of your brain’s abilities. - Reward Yourself
The activities you engage in should offer some sort of reward upon successful completion in order to maximize brain improvements. Rewards magnify improvements in the brain by ramping up chemical production that contribute to good spirits as well as memory and learning. - Surprise Yourself
The brain machinery that makes you alert and bright will get a good workout when it encounters new, surprising and positive experiences. So surprise yourself and your brain will thank you!
At first glance it may seem like a challenging task to find activities that meet the conditions above although you may be surprised to find out that a lot of new activities will actually meet most of them. Regardless of the activity from learning a new language or taking up dance lessons, as long as you put in the right amount of effort and make sure that you challenge your brain with something that gets increasingly harder with levels and engages your individual brain systems then you are sure to “use it” effectively and not “lose it”.
