How to Maximize Your Cognitive Abilities

Your brain does a lot of quiet work. It holds a friend's birthday, keeps you sharp during a meeting, lets you follow a conversation without losing the thread. Most people treat that capacity as fixed, something that either holds up or slowly fades. It doesn't have to. If your focus, memory, or concentration feel duller than they once did, coping is not the only option. A handful of small, repeatable changes can sharpen how your mind works and carry over into nearly everything you do.

Start with movement. The word "exercise" makes a lot of people picture something grim they have to drag themselves through, and that image gets in the way. What actually matters is just being more physical. A short walk, a few squats while a commercial plays, a stroll after dinner: all of it feeds your cognitive function. Aim for about an hour of this kind of activity across a day if you want the full payoff, but there is no rule that it has to happen in one block. Five or ten minutes at a time, scattered through a packed schedule, adds up and still counts.

Being around people helps too. Chat with a stranger in line. Call your parents more often than you do now. Social contact wakes the mind up, and people who stay connected tend to be happier, which matters because happier people run into fewer cognitive problems. So when someone asks you out for a drink or a party or a night of board games, go. Your memory and your mood both benefit from the company.

Sleep is the one almost nobody gets enough of. Most adults run short night after night, and the usual objection is that the schedule simply won't allow more. Try reframing it in small pieces. Wake up ten minutes later, go to bed twenty minutes earlier. That is half an hour of extra sleep your brain uses to recover and recharge, and because it is split across both ends of the night, it barely touches the hours when you need to be alert and productive.

Brain games have a point, within limits. You have probably seen the ads or stumbled onto an app promising to train your mind, and the claim holds up as long as the games are the right ones. The good ones push your brain the way a workout pushes a muscle, keeping various mental abilities in shape and building them up over time. Fifteen minutes a day is enough to start feeling a difference.

Then there is stress, which you have heard about endlessly, and for good reason. Stress is one of the surest ways to make thinking feel sluggish. When you are carrying a heavy load of it, that load occupies room in your head and crowds out the mental work you actually need to do. Bring the stress down and your memory and focus come back stronger, and the everyday tasks that felt like wading through mud start moving again.

Put these into practice now and within a few weeks the difference in your mental sharpness should be noticeable. Keep going and the gains compound. The real work is turning them into habits, because habits are what hold the higher level of functioning in place over the long run. None of this asks much of your time, which is exactly why it sticks, and the same changes tend to improve the rest of your life while they are at it.

Reference: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/