Improving Brain Health

As rates of Dementia and Alzheimer's increase, it becomes quite important to pay attention to your brain health. Here are some great ideas to keep you sharp!

As technology advances, we have more and more “convenience” factors that require us to use our brain less. One example most can relate to is that we don’t have to remember phone numbers any more, since they’re handily in our phones. For those of us over age 40, you can probably remember when you learned and retained multiple phone numbers. Nowadays, many people couldn’t tell you more than a few numbers and some don’t even know their own families’ numbers! One that really hit me personally over the last few months is how much I have grown to rely on GPS. My 2003 van does not have GPS, and it was shocking to me how much I have just tuned out and let the GPS do the work! When I was in my 20’s, I was a military wife, and the Navy moved us around every few months. Of course, no GPS in those days, so you had to get maps of the area to figure out how to get where you were going. As we traveled to and around new cities, I was the co-pilot and navigator, riding with an open map in my lap and trying to plot the best routes. Not an easy task when you’re driving around an unfamiliar city, figuring out the routes on the fly! But exercises like navigating and learning phone numbers really help to keep us mentally sharper.

If you don’t want to give up the modern conveniences, here are some other things you can do to work your brain:

Brain Gym- These 26 exercises are designed to promote brain/body coordination. The program was developed by Paul and Gail Dennison in the 1980’s and has been used to help people with learning, focus, and memory. YouTube is a great resource for these! Here’s a simple one I found, to give you an example.

Puzzles- We’re all familiar with this one! Challenging yourself to think and solve a crossword puzzle or “find the differences between these 2 nearly identical pictures” (Remember Highlights for Children magazine?), playing Scrabble or putting together a jigsaw puzzle all are legitimate brain exercises.

Games- Games like Clue, Monopoly or card games similarly challenge memory and cause us to think ahead to plan moves. Way more fun than vegging in front of a TV!

Bird watching- A 2026 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience demonstrated that people who get into birdwatching actually showed physical improvements in their brains. They had higher cellular density and more compact tissue in brain regions responsible for working memory, spatial awareness, and object recognition. Birdwatching involves learning sounds and pairing that with observations of the tiny details of each bird to be able to differentiate them. Birders also have to look carefully to find birds in trees or grasses, which is not as easy as you might think! Seeing or hearing birds was also linked to reduced stress, lower blood pressure, and improved mood. This is a new hobby of mine personally, and I highly recommend it! If you’d like to try it out, a great starting place is the Merlin app from the Cornell University Ornithology department. You turn it on, it listens to the bird songs, then displays the image of the bird, helping you to identify and look for the birds around you.
Your brain, like most other things in your body, obeys the “Use it or Lose it” principle. I could write about the many supplements that can help, like Lion’s Mane, Fish Oil, or Life Extension’s Senolytic Activator (all available on our Fullscript site) and these are all quite helpful. But without actually USING your brain you cannot optimize its health.

So, let’s reinstitute Game Night, work a puzzle and watch the birds, plants and other amazing creatures in our environment. I’d love to hear what YOU do that keeps your brain active, too!