June 28, 2024

Mind Power - 6 Lifestyle Choices That Support Your Cognitive Function

Cognitive function is a multi-faceted and interconnected series of factors that come together to give people the ability to work through complicated tasks, learn information, and interact with the world around them.

There are many factors impacting cognitive function: age, illness, co-morbidities, brain injuries or brain damage, and educational level. Assessing a person’s cognitive function is important because it can give crucial information about a person’s overall health.

Though cognitive function can seem hard to control, there are many ways to boost it and prevent its decline. In order to maximize a person’s compliance with a regiment to augment cognitive function, it is key to choose lifestyle changes that can be implemented gradually.

1. One of the most oft-repeated lifestyle changes that is recommended is to incorporate exercising regularly into your daily routine. Aerobic fitness in particular increases cognitive capacity by improving the health and plasticity of the nervous system.

Exercise also yields an increase in efficiency of physiological management of energy metabolism, making it one of the most powerful methods of addressing cognitive ability.

1. Another basic yet fundamental lifestyle change that yields significant gains and stability in cognitive ability is making sure to get the proper amount of sleep. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke report that adults need anywhere from 7-9 hours a night to be well-rested, perform memory consolidation, and maintain cognitive ability. Some benefits include an increase in memory recall and a decrease of mental fatigue.
2. An out of the box and unique way to support your cognitive abilities is by learning a new language. Bilingualism is a form of cognitive stimulation that integrates and arouses multiple parts of the brain, which is helpful in strengthening the neural network.
   Findings concerning the incorporation of learning a new language into a daily regimen are powerful: it has been shown to delay symptoms of dementia in study patients by 4 to 5 years.
3. Listening to music regularly is another simple lifestyle change that has a significant impact on cognitive function. Auditory stimuli, especially through music, has been shown to increase functional connectivity between different parts of the brain.
4. Playing games that challenge the mind are another way to improve cognitive function. Some examples include sudoku, chess, and checkers. These games all have elements of strategic planning, problem-solving, and critical thinking, all of which are key to improving and maintaining brain plasticity. Another way of using games to improve cognition is to play brain training games like Lumosity on a daily basis.
5. One final lifestyle change that can help improve cognition is to incorporate meditation and visualization into a daily routine. This type of intentional use of the brain reinforces neural connections and encourages the brain to process information in a unique manner that leads to overall improved cognition.
   Additional benefits include enhanced attention, memory, and executive function skills. This small yet meaningful change can yield a slew of benefits.

As people age, many are looking for ways to slow cognitive decline and even improve it. Though some decline is normal with age, there are many lifestyle changes people can make to encourage cognitive health.

By choosing changes that need to be implemented on a slow and regular basis, it is more likely that people will follow them long term. A combination of the exercises mentioned above are simple steps that will enhance cognitive function and improve one’s quality of life.

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