It is important for everyone, young and old, to get physical exercise. There are many benefits to your body by getting around 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. Some of these benefits include maintaining a healthy level of body fat, keeping your cardiovascular system in shape, helping to improve your emotional wellbeing, as well as improving your overall physical appearance. With a healthy diet, combinations of these benefits can reap dividends like reduced risk for all kinds of diseases including heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, some of today’s highest mortality rate diseases.
The importance of exercise on your body is nothing new. This is common knowledge that everyone these days knows. What a lot of people don’t realize is that as it is important to exercise your body, it is equally important to exercise your mind.
As a home health agency, we care for a lot of older people that have cognitive impairment due to age-related memory loss. Our brain and its metal function change as we get older. Many people fear that these changes will leave them a shell of who they used to be. Yet, age-related memory loss is not inevitable. The exercise and healthy eating that you normally do to keep your body in shape will also help to keep your mind in shape. In addition, you can also engage in mental stimulation.
Mental stimulation is the process of building a cognitive reserve with novelty, variety, and challenge. The idea is that you use mental exercises to build up and strengthen the reserve of connections in your brain. So, if and when your brain changes with age, your brain can use the built-up reserve to better cope with the changes.
This sounds like it involves a lot of boring repetitive work, but just as with physical exercise, it can be fun. Some ideas for mental stimulation include playing or learning to play a musical instrument, learning a new language, doing challenging math in your head, building projects that involve measurements, reading, even playing video games. So, as you can see, keeping your brain in shape isn’t as hard as it might seem.
As a home health care provider, we hope that all the patients that we care for can take advantage of mental stimulation. Get out there and try something new and challenging. You will thank yourself, and it might just be fun!
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