Some exercises to make your mind sharp
Just as physical workouts help in building body muscles, a healthy lifestyle with regular targeted brain exercises can increase the strength of your mind. Doing these exercises can help boost your memory, concentration, and focus, which can make daily tasks easier; they keep your brain sharp. However, these exercises are not conventional. Think of them as additions and alterations to your lifestyle habits.
Switch hands from time to time while doing daily chores
If you are right-handed, try using your left hand while doing regular day-to-day activities. You can switch hands for brushing your teeth, for using your computer mouse, or laptop touch-pad, and more. Using your non-dominant hand can increase the activity of your brain. This will obviously be extremely hard in the beginning, but this difficulty will ensure a good exercise for your brain.
While solving jigsaw puzzles, the brain uses many cognitive abilities
Additionally, working on a jigsaw puzzle is an excellent way to strengthen the brain, because during this, the brain has to utilize multiple cognitive abilities. This is because when you are solving a jigsaw puzzle, you have to look at different pieces and figure out where can they fit, in order to make the larger picture. This challenge helps your brain to become stronger.
Reading books aloud can enhance your imagination
Reading books aloud can enhance your imagination. During one of the demonstrations of brain imaging, it showed three different brain regions lighting up when the same word was read, spoken, or heard. If you don't want to read aloud to yourselves, read to your partner/kids.
Meditation improves focus, attention, memory
One brain exercise that is currently trending because of the spike in stress disorders is meditation. Meditation not only calms your mind, but as scientific studies have found out, it can help engage new neural pathways to improve self-observational skills and increase mental flexibility. Some researches also suggest that meditation can improve attention, focus, and may even increase memory capacity.
Draw a map after visiting a new place, add neighborhoods
There is one rather unconventional exercise that you can try. After visiting a new place, draw a map of the area using your memory. Expand this exercise by adding adjacent areas like the neighborhood. When you try to remember the details, many areas in your brain become active. You can also draw a less familiar area (maps of continents) from memory, and label them.
