Exercises and Tips to Keep Your Brain Sharp After 60

Keeping your mind and body active beyond 60 is quite simple. All that is needed–at the risk of sounding reductionist–is setting aside a few minutes every day to do some small, engaging brain exercises. These tasks test your memory, reasoning skills, ability to understand visual cues and differentiate between various objects, and creativity. Daily brain workout also helps maintain your cognitive abilities. And here’s the best part; these exercises are designed to be fun and not feel like chores.

Brain Exercises and Activities for Cognitive Wellness

Word Search

You can purchase large-print puzzle books or use specialized apps, such as Vita Word Search, to do this exercise. It involves scanning the puzzle to locate hidden words in a themed grid of letters.

Playing word search improves your visual tracking, attention span, and pattern recognition. What’s more, it also helps you improve spelling, short-term memory, and problem-solving.

Word search works well as a 10-minute daily brain workout for seniors. You can also play this as part of a group. To make things more fun, choose themes, such as films, travel, and foods, that you enjoy. You can also time the challenge to increase the stakes a little.

Memory Recall Exercise

Similar to many other memory exercises for seniors, this one involves looking at a short list of five to ten items, studying it for a few seconds, and recalling as many items as you can.

While recalling the names on the list, your mind’s ability to store and retrieve information strengthens as your working memory remains active. To make this activity more fun, you can use objects around you or attempt the exercise again to compete against your own scores.

Mental Math Practice

Few tasks rack the human brain as much as math riddles and calculations. For mental math practice, you do not need any equipment or to make a list. You can solve simple calculations, such as tallying a bill, doubling numbers, or estimating inflation or compound interest rates based on current numbers.

Mental math sharpens your everyday decision-making by strengthening your numerical reasoning. Your handling of money gets better if you do this exercise every day. To make things fun, you can do mental math when shopping before checking your actual final bill.

Sudoku

The good old Sudoku makes this list, as it is still a classic brain teaser. In this game, you have to fill a numeric grid in a way that each row, column, and box contains numbers one to nine without any repeats. Few exercises test your patience, pattern recognition, and ability to break complex information into smaller pieces as Sudoku does. All in all, this game is a great answer to the question of how to stay mentally sharp after 60.

Mindfulness Meditation

At first glance, meditation may not even seem like an exercise, but it calms your brain like no other activity. All you do in mindfulness meditation is sit comfortably and just focus on your breath (or a single point of attention such as a candle or a tennis ball) for a few minutes.

Distracting thoughts will come and go, but eventually your control over them grows. As you become accustomed to meditating, you can maintain focus and acknowledge distracting thoughts without getting caught up in them.

Mindfulness meditation is the antidote to stress. It helps you concentrate for longer, handle your emotions better, and think more clearly.

Storytelling and Summarization

Some of the best brain exercises for seniors include an element of creativity. You can retell a short article, a memory, or a scene in your own words. While storytelling, you can skip past the unimportant bits and focus on the main points. Storytelling tests your memory and builds your communication skills. More importantly, it helps your brain organize information more effectively.

To make this task more fun, involve family and friends. Summarize a film you just watched, share a childhood story with each other, or record your thoughts in a small voice note.

This means that your brain has all the space you need to do things like learning the card game you always wanted to play or discovering how to play your first chords on a guitar.

Spot the Difference Challenge

This task involves comparing two similar images and identifying their small differences. You may find this challenge commonly in puzzle books, newspapers, magazines, or on the internet. Usually, the two images in this task are very similar. The differences are hidden carefully. You can take your time to find the differences before checking the answers.

Doing this challenge regularly can improve attention to minute details in your everyday life. To make this activity more fun, you can try themed puzzles that include nature, buildings, and festival scenes, or set a gentle time limit to make it more challenging for you.

Even when you turn 60 or older, your mind remains open to new learning and possibilities. Neuroplasticity helps keep your brain sharp and active well beyond your 60s.

Understanding Neuroplasticity and Self-Directed Neuroplasticity

Your brain is not a static organ that degrades over time. It keeps evolving throughout your life as you develop new habits and gain novel experiences. This ability to change and adapt in response to new information is called neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity involves your brain forming new connections between neurons when you learn a skill or live through a brand-new experience. As many studies show, neuroplasticity does not diminish entirely with age.

Tips to Use Neuroplasticity to Maintain Cognitive Fitness

Prioritize Quality Sleep

Among other benefits, sleep repairs neural pathways, clears toxins, and consolidates your memories. To enable neuroplasticity, your brain needs to be well-rested. To get consistent 7 to 9 hours of sleep every day, you can try certain tips:

• Sleeping and waking up at similar times every day
• Getting morning sunlight
• Getting your sleep environment right

Stay Socially Engaged

Social interactions are known to support memory and clarity of mind. Key brain functions such as communication and information reception can be stimulated through conversations. On top of that, social engagements help you make and maintain friendships for well-being.

Chase Unfamiliar Experiences

You may feel uncertain and nervous about trying something new. This includes traveling to unfamiliar destinations, engaging in conversations with strangers, and trying cuisines you have never had before. However, trying new experiences can rewire your brain, create new neuron-to-neuron connections, and keep your mind consistently active and sharp at any age.