What should you do to keep your mind sharp?

Have you ever gone through a situation where you just entered into your kitchen for some work and suddenly you forgot for what purpose you visited that place? Or you are searching for your phone everywhere in your house and that phone is in your pocket. Worst case, you even fail to recall your friend’sname during a conversation.

All these things happen due to memory lapses and it can happen at any age. This can also be a sign of early dementia and can increase the risk of dementia. There are a lot of ways to keep your mind active and sharp. Here, I have enlisted some of the strategies which can protect and improve our memory to some extent.

Have a look at some of the ways to sharpen our brain:

• Meditate on a regular basis: One of the best ways to protect and strengthen your brain is to meditate on a regular basis. We are not saying that you need to spend all your time on it. You can just meditate for about 15 to 20 minutes.

• Prefer to eat a healthy diet: Do you know that our brain plays an important role to store our memories when we age? Eating unhealthy foodcan damage our brain vessels and thinking capability. You should try to avoid saturated and trans fats in your diet.

• Practice for cognitive training exercises: Start playing brain games like chess, sudoku, quizzes, to stimulate your thinking along with hand-eye coordination. Doing this will definitely sharpen your mind.

• Be a good listener: Learn to listen to other people. How can it help you? Listeners on average are smarter than people who keep speaking all the time. Listening can give you a new perspective on things and will make you think on that perspective making you sharper.

• Sleep well: Sleep deprivation can affect your mental ability, degrade your thinking capability and spoil your communication skills. It’s better to have proper sleep averaging 7 to 8 hours. You can take small naps if you have some emergency and you have not taken a proper sleep. Don’t make it daily habit though.

There are different things that you can do so that you can keep your mind sharp at all times. First, you need to pay more attention to your health. When was the last time that you tried to do physical exercises? The healthier your physical body is, the healthier your mind is going to be. Make an effort to keep learning new things. Even simple facts will allow you to stay sharper. Try to use all of your senses.

The more senses that you use, the more that you can remember certain memories. Always try to use your brain. If someone needs to learn how to use a map, then volunteer to do it. Even if you do not know how to do it now, the new learning can be useful for your brain. Map-reading is also a skill that you can use from time to time.