Brain Health – 5 Ways to Keep the Mind Sharp as You Age

5 Ways to Keep Your Mind Sharp After Age 50

Brain Health – 5 Ways to Keep the Mind Sharp as You Age. Let’s be honest here – when was the last time you walked into a room to get or do something, and then forget why you went there? We chuckle, we shake our heads, we backtrack until we finally remember, and then go about our business. When sharing with friends and laughing about our forgetfulness – we most often refer to them as “senior moments”. And as funny as they may seem at the time, significant memory loss is not an unavoidable part of getting older – these “senior moments” can become bigger moments.

5 Ways to Keep the Mind Sharp After Age 50

1. EAT HEALTHY – fill your diet with plenty of NUTS – eating nuts on a regular basis strengthens brainwave frequencies associated with cognition, healing, learning, memory and other key brain functions; FISH – salmon has Omega-3 fatty acids; GREEN VEGETABLES – such as kale, spinach, collards, and broccoli that are rich in brain-healthy nutrients like vitamin K, lutein, folate, and beta carotene (research suggests these plant-based foods may help slow cognitive decline); GREEN TEA – is rich in polyphenols and antioxidants which improve alertness and focus; EGGS – contain B vitamin nutrients and choline which helps regulate mood and memory, and BERRIES – especially blueberries that are filled with antioxidants which have shown to improve brain cells and delay short-term memory loss.

2. EXERCISE – not only is exercise good for your heart and to build or maintain muscles, it also improves your memory and cognitive skills (kind of explains why some say how working out or exercising helps clear their minds – it is so true). So get moving … either with a fitness class, exercising at home (see my 30 Day Workout Plan for Beginners), swimming, tennis, yoga or by just walking 10-15 minutes a day.

3. BEAUTY SLEEP – the National Sleep Foundation says if you’re between the ages of 26-64 you should get 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night. I personally have no problem falling asleep, it’s just staying asleep. So things you can do to help get between 7-9 hours a night are: don’t drink alcohol 4-6 hours before bed; avoid caffein and stimulants like coffee, pop, chocolate and cigarettes 4-6 hours before bed; and don’t eat big meals before bed as the food can irritate your stomach and keep you awake.

KEEP YOUR BRAIN ACTIVE

4. MENTAL ACTIVITY – keep your brain sharp by stimulating it. My thing is I LOVE CROSSWORD PUZZLES and do one every day. But there are other ways to keep your brain stimulated and that’s with: (this one’s my favorite)

MUSIC – according to Hopkins Medicine “If you want to keep your brain engaged throughout the aging process, listening to or playing music is a great tool. It provides a total brain workout.” Research has shown that listening to music can reduce anxiety, blood pressure, and pain as well as improve sleep quality, mood, mental alertness, and memory. So grab your favorite CD, turn on your favorite cable music channel, or power up your radio and start listening, singing and dancing around your house. You’ll be amazed as to how much you remember the words to those songs you listened to years ago.

LEARN HOW TO PLAY AN INSTRUMENT. There are plenty of “learning” avenues and free tutorials at our fingertips today, especially YouTube – which is my absolute favorite. If you’re like me and have musically inclined children, pick up their guitar or sit behind a piano and just learn – teach yourself. I’ve always said MUSIC IS GOOD FOR YOUR SOUL.

STIMULATE YOUR BRAIN WITH:

5. RINSE AND REPEAT – some people just have great memories, they retain everything. I’ve never been one like that, even when I was young and in school. But what has worked for me and how I learned to remember things I’ve heard or read, is I repeat them out loud and I write them down.

“The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers” ~ by Daniel Schacter

There’s a great book called “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers”, click the link for a copy, where Harvard psychology professor and researcher Daniel Schacter identifies several common memory flaws that healthy people of all ages can experience. Here are a few that may become more pronounced with age:

TRANSCIENCE: You are most likely to forget information soon after you learn it, and there is a tendency to further forget facts and events over time. But memory has a use-it-or-lose-it quality: if you call up and use a memory often, you are less likely to forget it. Transience might seem like an indication of memory weakness, but brain scientists regard it as beneficial because it clears the brain of unused memories and makes way for newer, more important ones.

ABSENTMINDEDNESS: This kind of forgetting occurs when you aren’t paying close enough attention in the first place. You forget where you just left your coffee cup because you didn’t focus on where you put it in the first place. You were thinking of something else, and your brain didn’t encode the information securely. Absentmindedness is also forgetting to do something at a prescribed time, like taking your medicine or keeping an appointment. One way to avoid this problem is to identify things that can serve as reminders. For example, if you need to take certain medications at breakfast, make a habit of putting them next to your coffee cup at the table.

BLOCKING: Someone asks you a question and the answer is right on the tip of your tongue — you know that you know it, but you just can’t think of it. This is the most familiar example of blocking, the temporary inability to retrieve a memory. Blocking doesn’t occur because you weren’t paying attention or because the memory has faded from your brain. In many cases, it’s blocked by another, similar memory. For example, you call your older son by your younger son’s name or vice versa. Memory blocks become more common with age and account for much of the trouble older people have in remembering names. The good news is that about half of the blocked memories can be retrieved within a minute.

So I guess the take on this is not to worry – we forget things of unimportance to us, forget things we have no interest to us and therefore don’t often use, or aren’t paying attention to (which brings me back to “things of unimportance”), or just making space in your brain for new data. I remember once asking my husband a question and he just stared at me for a minute and I was like “Hello – did you hear me?” And his response was “I’m just checking my file cabinet for the answer” and then proceeded to answer my question. This gave us both a great laugh but it’s true. The information is there in your brain – you just have to use it often otherwise it takes a good second or a good minute to come to light. Nothing to worry about

So I hope you got some good information from the above. Let me know what you do to keep your brain active. Tomorrow I’ll be writing about how to improve our MENTAL HEALTH. Until then CIAO 🙂