Originally published on simplenews.co.uk
Most people are familiar with physical exercises and how they can improve their body’s strength and functions. Business development professional Fahim Imam-Sadeque says that this same approach can be taken to your brain.
Many people would love for their brains to fire on all cylinders all the time, but they aren’t quite sure how to do this. There are many ways to build your mental muscle and maintain optimal brainpower.
Here are some tips on how you can accomplish just that.
Meditate
Meditation used to be considered an alternative form of “medicine,” but today, most people understand just how valuable and beneficial the practice can be.
Plenty of studies have been conducted showing the immense benefits of meditation. For example, one conducted by New York University and the company Journey Meditation found that daily meditation can enhance your mood, attention, emotional regulation and memory.
Another found that mindfulness meditation can help people engage neural pathways that can help improve mental flexibility and skills of self-observation.
Be Positive
Positive thinking results in a brain that’s much more effective. So, when you’re feeling down, you may hear people tell you to “look on the bright side” or to simply be positive.
Those are very generic and often-overused phrases, but there’s a lot of value behind them. Everyone has negative thoughts from time to time. If you’re able to train your brain to reframe these negative thoughts into positive ones, you’ll improve your brain function.
An important way to do this is to become self-aware and practice it. If you’re feeling like there’s no point in trying, for example, literally list out the reasons for trying. Once you see all these reasons written out in front of you, it makes it easy to see why you’re doing what you’re doing in the first place.
This may seem a little silly, but it’s very effective at turning negative thoughts into positive ones.
Read Consistently
Countless scientific studies point to the importance of reading as it relates to enhancing cognitive function. Reading also helps increase your brain’s attention span and improves your language skills.
Reading doesn’t have to be boring. On the contrary, it can be a lot of fun, and you’ll learn a lot of things while you do it. The interesting thing is that the topic of your reading isn’t as important as the fact that you are reading consistently. In other words, you don’t need to read an encyclopaedia to increase your brain function.
So, pick a topic that interests you and read a little bit every day. Also, try to make at least some of your reading in paper format, rather than on digital devices.
Try New Things
One of the best ways to train your brain to be more effective is by challenging yourself. And one of the best ways to do that is to try new things.
As Fahim Imam-Sadeque explains, when we learn something new, we not only get a great sense of accomplishment when we succeed, but we also gain a lot of valuable things along the way.
Failure often goes hand-in-hand with trying new things. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to succeed flawlessly on your first try at something with which you’re unfamiliar.
When you fail, you must persevere if you want to succeed. Learning to work through your challenges and look at a problem from different angles will build your brain functionality.
Then, as you build this functionality, you’ll reap the benefits in other aspects of your life that you already know well.