Feeding & Exercising Your Mind

Coming out of the holiday season, we’ve all had lots of practice feeding our bodies – usually too much and not very healthy. January marks a common and popular starting point for improving our health habits—focusing on what we eat and exercising the body. During this time, it can be easy to forget about health habits for our minds. After finishing their formal education, many people shelve learning and feeding the mind to the back of their to-do list. However, this shouldn’t be the case. If you’re looking to improve your life, you should aim to feed and exercise your mind as often as you do your body. Here are a few simple ways you can get started today.

Feed Your Mind: 

• Read. Rather than wasting away your evening hours on social and other media, spend at least 30 minutes every day reading a physical book.
• Listen to podcasts. Many experts have podcasts that can teach you anything you want to learn, and you can do it while cleaning, driving, walking, and more. 
• Deep thought practices. Do you ever seek out different opinions to challenge your beliefs? This is a great way to learn about your true values and have new thoughts about the world around you.
• Say no to mental junk food. Avoid books, news articles, apps, films, and other input that promote mindlessness or negative thoughts and feelings. Focus on feeding your mind healthily and positively.

Exercise Your Mind:

• Practice Meditation. Meditation is like weight training, but for the brain. Practicing at least 10 minutes of meditation every day has been proven to have numerous positive benefits to your mind and mental health. 
• Mental puzzles and strategy games. These are a mental workout that stimulates both sides of the brain – the left, more logical side, and the right, more creative side.
• Creative thinking. Use writing prompts, create a mind map, daydream, doodle, etc.
• Learn a new skill. This increases the density of the brain white matter, which in turn helps to improve your performance in different tasks and develops more neural pathways that allow you to learn better and stave off dementia.

Our minds need to be constantly nourished and exercised for our mental and emotional wellbeing and cognitive function. For more fun ways to feed and exercise your mind, check out these products: Unclutter Your Mind Book, 399 Games, Puzzles, & Trivia Book, Wordwise Dice Game, After Dinner Amusements – Odd Fact Out