Mental Fitness page The Fitness Habit Website 

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Mental Fitness  

The brain is the "muscle" of conscious intelligence. Just like the muscles in the rest of  your body, it develops and gains strength during youth, reaches a peak, and then can either be maintained over the rest of your life, or be allowed to degenerate and lose capability and agility. 

The old phrase "use it or lose it" is familiar to people involved in physical fitness and sports. Muscles that aren't used lose their strength and waste away. People who don't keep fit lose not only strength, but quickness and agility in using what they have left. The remedy is to keep on working and stretching your physical (and mental) muscles throughout your life.

The commonly recognized ill effects of an "out-of-condition" brain are poor memory, slow thinking and difficulty in learning new things. But it's worse than that. Recent medical research indicates that people with inactive minds are more prone to contracting devastating brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Staying mentally active is important  in terms of preserving your quality of life, your independence, your longevity and in not becoming a burden to your family.

When should you start a program of regular mental exercise? If you're in school learning new things and exercising your intellect daily you probably don't need it. If you are early in your work career and learning a lot of new practical things, you may or may not benefit from additional mental exercise. If, like most people, you are established in your work and the learning curve has flattened out - you would be wise to start a mental exercise program. If you are retired from regular work - you need a program of mental exercise.

There is nothing inevitable about the loss of mental ability with age. The way to maintain it is analogous to the way physical strength is maintained - by exercise. This page will focus on mental exercise, but it's important to be aware that research on mental aging shows that physical exercise itself (as covered on the other pages of this website), has a positive effect on combating mental aging.

As I see it, there are three  main areas or levels of action you can take to preserve your mental capacities.

1) Combat medical conditions that can directly damage the brain. 

A bad lifestyle with emotional stress, unhealthy food, drugs (legal or not) and drink can damage your brain. If you use alcohol and other drugs, or plug up the vessels supplying the brain by eating bad fat foods - you damage it. Excessive emotional stress can result in high blood pressure, which can lead to a rupturing of blood vessels in the brain creating what's known as a "stroke" with a permanent loss of some brain functions, or death.

Strokes are an important source of mental debilitation - and not only in older people. Most strokes are caused by buildups of arterial plaque. In the most common case, some of this plaque winds up blocking blood flow to a part of the brain, resulting in the eventual death of the affected brain cells. Another risk is that arterial plaque buildups elsewhere in the body can create constrictions that make the heart pump more forcefully than it should have to. This chronically higher blood pressure can eventually rupture an artery in the brain similarly resulting in damage to nearby cells and loss of function. 

Keeping track of your blood pressure is a wise thing to do if you are over 45, or overweight, or have had indications of high blood pressure, or high blood cholesterol or if you have family members with any of these problems. With the right equipment, information and practice you can monitor your own blood pressure over time more effectively than your physician can.

The bottom line messages are these: 

• Don't use alcohol, tobacco and other powerful illicit drugs - over time they harm the brain.

• Minimize taking prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Even the common OTC decongestants can have negative affects on blood pressure and mental acuity.

• Don't eat fatty foods that over time cause blood artery plaque and constrictions.

• Learn to control and minimize your emotional stresses. There are some things worth getting in an uproar about, but not many.

• Physical exercise is an important factor in maintaining mental fitness.

• Develop the habit of using your mind regularly. If your regular activities don't work your mind, then do exercises.

2) Develop everyday habits of mental involvement. 

Don't be passive to your environment, be interactive with it. Even television can be passive or active in terms of your involvement. Most TV programs are pretty stupid and unstimulating, but there are exceptions. Quiz shows can get your mind active trying to come up with answers. NYPD Blue is an example of a drama that's fast paced, has several plot lines going and uses enough jargon that it can be a challenge to keep track of what's happening to who. The TV action program "24" is another example of a show that takes some effort to track closely.  Watching pro sports can be challenging in terms of keeping track of the rules and the different plays. You shouldn't just be a passive watcher, be active in following and evaluating what you're seeing.

Reading is an excellent way to work your brain, learn new things and entertain yourself. Get acquainted with your local library. Look for fiction and nonfiction books that might interest you. Pick out three or four each visit in the hope that at least one of them will engage your interest enough for you to enjoy reading it all the way through. As you read, get in the habit of pausing and asking yourself what has been covered so far. That makes you recall and evaluate the material. 

Playing cards with other people or with computer card games is good mental exercise. There are a number of pay-for and freeware games available on the internet that can be stimulating. The same goes for checkers and chess.

Even when driving there are things you can do for mental stimulation. If you're in a familiar area, try to recall street names that are coming up. Try looking at a sign, remember what it says, then make a mental note to recall it when you reach some point in the distance. Look at the license plate number of the car in front of you and try to recall it a little later. If you spend a lot of time in a car commuting or traveling, listen to educational tapes or books-on-tape instead of the usual brain deadening stuff on commercial radio. 

Form the habit of being mentally active. Ask yourself a lot of questions about a lot of different things, then look for answers. At the end of, or during the day, make it a habit to recall what you have done over the last day or two. Going back more than a day or two can be a real challenge. Keep learning things in your work and hobbies - don't fall into a rut. Maintain a mental attitude that is willing to question things that you now assume to be correct. Look for and get involved in new activities, hobbies and areas of interest. Associate with people who also do these things. Avoid people who live in a narrow world and who show little curiosity and interest in the things around them. 

Try this. Imagine a surge of light or energy flowing up spine into your brain and surging and spreading to all parts of your brain. Does this actually do anything to the brain? I have no idea, but it certainly makes it feel energized.

3) Planned exercises

Set up a program of regular mental exercise. Working crossword puzzles is thought to be one of the best techniques of mental stimulation around. But it shouldn't be the only exercise you do because there are other types of mental activity that are beneficial to other parts of the brain.

Here are some mental exercises. You should fit some or all of them in a regular daily mental exercise routine.

• Crossword puzzles. Get a book of them. Start at an easy level if you have to. The important point in this and other mental exercises is not how well you do - it's just to get exercise. Nobody has to know if you're good or bad at this stuff - just do it.

• Read material that is turned upside down. That's right - upside down- I like to do this first thing in the morning - it seems to get my mind going. Take a book or some other reading material, turn it upside down and read 3 or 4 lines.

• Math in your head. Work through some adding, subtracting, multiplication and division problems in your head - no paper. This is especially easy to do if you have a spreadsheet program. Use random numbers in the formulas  so the problems change each time you recalculate the sheet. (Try these Excel formulas in your sheet.) Put the answers down at the bottom out of immediate sight. Or use  a calculator. 

• Memory exercises using cards. Take a regular playing card deck. Take out 3 cards, one at a time, look at each, turn each face down, then recall them in terms of value, suit and order. Do it with as many cards as you can. Does it help to say the card in your head, or to just remember what it looks like?

• Chess, checkers etc. games.  If you use a computer game program, you don't need a partner. If the game is new to you, so much the better. Get a book or a game software program that you can use for self tutoring - a lot of these are available for chess and checkers.

• Get a book of mental puzzles or quizzes, or a college SAT test prep book. Get in the habit of working one or more puzzles or questions a day. The SAT test books are especially good because they make you work on problems that have some actual relevance, versus "brain teasers".

Additionally, consider taking a course in something useful or interesting to you, either online, at a university or a community college.

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