5 Brain Workouts to Keep Your Memory Sharp during Menopause
Menopause can take a strong toll on your body, which sometimes may make you overlook the health of your brain. Though everyone knows regular physical exercise is essential for your hormone-balancing plan, strengthening the brain’s muscles often gets neglected. The best way to exercise your brain, and therefore improve your memory, is to implement day to day habits to keep challenging your brain.
Keep reading to discover five daily workouts that will help you keep your memory sharp during menopause.
Did you know?
If you were to line up all the blood vessels inside your brain, they would spread for over 100,000 miles.
1. Solve Sudoku Puzzles
Try to solve at least one Sudoku puzzle each day. Sudoku’s are found in mostly daily newspapers, so after you’ve caught up with the news, turn to the puzzle pages and give your brain its daily mathematical boost. As well as being great for improving your memory, Sudoku is a fun and interesting exercise, and will boost your skills with numbers, too. Start with the easy puzzles and work your way up to a more difficult and advanced level.
2. Switch Hands
Make sure both sides of your brain are roused from their slumber and made to work out by switching which hand you write with. When you use your right hand, the left side of your brain is exercised, and vice versa. If you commonly write with your right hand, try using your left hand at least once a day to scribble down a few words. Who knows, you may even teach yourself to become ambidextrous.
3. Pick Up a Book
Reading is one of the best things you can do to encourage your brain to stretch its muscles. Keep a good book on your bedside table, and head to bed half an hour earlier every night to get a daily read. Alternatively, if you are more of a morning person, settle down with your book over breakfast to give your brain and memory a boost to start the day.
4. Challenge Your Memory
Challenge yourself to daily competitions… against yourself. View your mental training as you would view training for a marathon. Work up your skills day by day, by attempting to memorize lyrics to songs you listen to, or testing yourself to see if you can remember a phone number you have just dialed in an hour’s time.
5. Help Your Body, Help Your Mind
Get into the habit of exercising your body daily. If your body is not in shape, then it will be difficult for your brain to be. Any efforts you make in implementing brain workouts into your day-to-day life will be negated if you neglect your physical health. Try to get into the habit of walking to work if it is close enough, and switch the lift for the stairs. These small changes to your daily life will do wonders for your body and mind.
Your brain is possibly the most important organ in your body, as it makes you who you are. However, it is easy to overlook how easily it can be affected by hormonal imbalance. Keeping your brain muscles active will greatly boost your effort towards endocrine harmony.
34 Menopause Symptoms. (2013). Memory Lapses. Retrieved August 15, 2013, from http://www.34-menopause-symptoms.com/memory-lapses.htm
PubMed. (2012). Memory loss. Retrieved August 15, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0003741/
British Broadcasting Corporation. Answers to questions about memory. Retrieved August 15, 2013, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/memory/no_flash_questions.shtml