When it comes to staying healthy, it’s not just about working out your body. Your mind and brain are equally important, as they require activity to remain sharp. Thankfully, there are many activities and apps readily available to enable you to keep your brain engaged. While we once thought these activities had to be physical, technology and the COVID-19 pandemic have taught us otherwise. We now have a plethora of brain-training games and activities suitable for people of all ages. In this article, we will share a few fun activities and apps to keep your brain engaged.
Puzzles
Whether it’s the New Yorker’s Wednesday puzzle, the Washington Post’s daily crossword puzzle, coin puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, or chess puzzles, puzzles are a great way to stimulate your brain. Not to mention, tasking yourself to become a frequent solver can also boost your self-confidence because strategic intelligence is required to solve a random puzzle accurately. When you solve puzzles, you are engaging the two hemispheres of your brain: the left side that controls analytic and logical thinking and the right side that controls creativity.
Another great thing about puzzles is that they can be interest-specific. For instance, if you’re a geek, you can visit GeeksforGeeks for puzzles like riddles around the comics kingdom, coding questions, geometric algorithms, and puzzles that involve the puzzler finding the digits of a given number.
Online Games
Online games are increasingly taking on new approaches from merely being a source of relaxation and entertainment to being an avenue for reconnecting with friends and team bonding. Online games are not solely for relieving stress. They also create a generally good feeling, enabling a person’s brain to feel revitalized. Perhaps this is why more workplaces today are encouraging their staff to participate in such games.
Ironically, when played in moderation, online games do not negatively influence your productivity but increase it. However, if you worry about this, you could download a bookmarking app to your Google Chrome extension, Firefox, or whatever web browser extension you use for web browsing. A powerful bookmarking tool will help you organize all your web content, online games, audiobooks, reading list, reading queues, podcasts, social media posts, and playlists into different folders while maintaining an organized visual look.
You can use your bookmark manager on both Android and Apple devices for a better way to save bookmarks and bookmark websites. For instance, if you have an Apple TV, you can visit the Apple TV app to access and download the best bookmarking tools. Once downloaded, visit the Safari app, go to the Safari settings, and add bookmark organizer. The best thing about this is that you can now get a screen-time summary of the visited sites and family sharing options where you can easily share things like an interesting article from your iCloud drive.
Learning
The greatest trick to staying young is to never stop learning. After all, studies show that education and learning can help to delay the onset of dementia. This doesn’t mean you have to enroll in a formal class. These days, there are numerous channels through which a person can learn. A good example is TED, an app that boasts over 3,000 free presentations, allowing listeners from around the world to explore a wide range of topics in more than 20 languages. Duolingo is also another great app that you can use to learn foreign languages.
Remember that once you’ve mastered a skill, your brain can automatically perform that skill or activity and will no longer be compelled to build those critical neural connections. So, attempt new things that will challenge your brain to learn and improve.