How can I sharpen my thinking skills?

Intelligence isn’t limited to those with a high I.Q., there are methods to boost your cognitive ability and be more effective in various professional and personal activities. You just have to start by changing your daily routine and you’ll notice the change.

In this brief guide, we’re going to answer the question “How can I sharpen my thinking skills?’’ how to train your brain and its benefits.

How can I sharpen my thinking skills?

Create new experiences

Everything new is a stimulus that induces an increase in intelligence. The novelty creates new connections in your brain. This is because you have to go through a thought process to absorb new information, understand it, and incorporate it into what you already know.

Get used to doing brainstorming exercises. Entrepreneurs are often plagued with more ideas than time to deal with them. Get in the habit of considering more alternatives than you’re used to and doing them.

Meditation

Meditation increases intelligence in the sense that it makes us more awake, better observers for what’s happening outside and within us. This isn’t a simple assessment, but a conclusion backed by studies by Dr. Herbert Benson: Meditation Research Pioneer. In several experiments, monitored through MRIs, it has been shown that the brain works better after doing a meditation session.

Get regular physical and mental exercise

Physical exercise oxygenates the brain and improves its function. It’s also a way to reduce stress and to do mental hygiene. Mind and body are always united. A healthy body is the essential condition for having a healthy mind that is in a position to increase its capacity.

It’s also important to do mental exercises regularly. Try to stimulate your memory by trying to remember phone numbers or specific information. It’s also good that you do the simple math operations manually. playing chess, doing crosswords, and similar activities are very positive for increasing intelligence.

Look for the hard way

When we go the easy way, we may save time, but we also contribute to the atrophy of some brain capacities. In general, we want everything to have a “step by step”, that it isn’t necessary to think, but that others think for us.

This may be true in various circumstances, but it’s also positive that we sometimes choose the difficult path. Don’t look for the instructions, but deduce the way to reach a result. That makes you more creative and smart. It also increases your confidence in yourself.

Get enough and adequate rest

It’s never enough to insist on something that is increasingly evident: rest is as or more important than work.

• The brain, yes or yes, needs pauses so that it can function properly. If there is no rest, the consequence is an exhausted brain, which works in mid-gear and its ability decreases.
• Rest includes three aspects: active breaks during work, sleep time and leisure time. All these dimensions are of great importance. Active breaks are a daily protective measure to prevent burnout.
• Sleep is essential for the brain to process the information it has absorbed. And leisure time is absolutely necessary to maintain long-term brain function.

Connect with all kinds of people

Just as it’s important to expose yourself to new situations, it’s also important to come into contact with different types of people. Each relationship challenges you to see, capture and understand the other’s point of view and this ends up increasing intelligence.

Friends of different ages, backgrounds, beliefs, etc. are worth having. If you only associate with people who look like you, you significantly limit your field of expertise. With this you also set limits to brain exercise.

Learn a new language or play an instrument

Learning a new language is always a great challenge. It isn’t easy, especially when it comes to a language very distant from the mother tongue. But precisely this difficulty makes it an excellent way to increase intelligence.

When you learn a new language, you exercise many intellectual functions at the same time. The same is true when you learn to play a musical instrument. In both cases, functions such as attention, memory, coordination, analogies, etc. are put into play.

According to various studies, one way to increase our intelligence is by working our creativity, mental flexibility and the way to solve problems in an innovative way.

Increasing intelligence is always possible. While it’s true that we’re born with genetic determinations that incline us to be more or less intelligent, it’s also true that the brain is an organ endowed with great plasticity. This means that it changes, that it’s modified according to experience, training and our openness to learning itself.

There is no consensus around the definition of intelligence. For some it’s the ability to learn, to innovate, to give original answers to everyday problems (Charles Spearman, 1930). For others, it’s the ability to apply knowledge (David Wechsler, 1960)

Perhaps the most universal definition is one that defines it as the ability to find new solutions to old problems. On the other hand, there are several models that understand that intelligence should be understood more as a set of intelligences, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, logical intelligence, etc., than as a single one (Howard Gardner, 1990).

Intelligence, therefore, isn’t only applicable to professional activity. In one way or another, being smarter also helps us to be happier because it makes us better able to overcome difficult situations.

Train your brain with mental gymnastics

You’ve probably heard a lot about the importance of exercising, eating right, and living a healthy lifestyle. True?

To be in good physical condition, both now and in the future, we have to take care of ourselves and adopt what we could call a “preventive” life philosophy, where our actions today will result in a general state of well-being throughout all our years.

Just as we take care of strengthening our muscles and protect our heart, walking or biking, we should also take care of the health of the brain, which is one of our vital organs and to which we do not always pay much attention, especially if we are very young boys.

By breaking the routine and the schemes that the brain already knows, with the application of these exercises, our “machine” sees the need to think in a new and different way.

If we always do something in the same way, the brain no longer has to think how to do it, because it becomes a mechanical action, almost a reflex action. However, by making small changes, the brain immediately has to find a new way to adjust and solve what is required to be completed, and it is precisely in this process that it “trains” and adapts.

For example, if a person who writes or uses the “mouse” with the right hand tries to do it with the left for a certain time, he will activate areas of his brain that are not activated when he usually does it with the usual writing hand.

Is mental gymnastics for everyone?

According to studies, although the average age at which people should start practicing these techniques is from 60 years, the earlier they begin to apply and the longer they are used, it has been seen that people are more likely not to only to keep your memory intact, but also to prevent or delay the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Some suggested exercises to exercise your brain are:

• Read.
• Write.
• Memory games.
• Crosswords.
• Anagrams.
• Letter soup.
• Word games.
• Card games.

What are the benefits of exercising the brain?

Mental activity helps the brain stay in shape. Contrary to what was traditionally thought, continued brain stimulation has been shown to promote the development of new neural interconnections, making it possible to compensate for natural deterioration due to age. Reducing the risk of cognitive impairment.

These are the 4 best benefits of exercising your brain

Helps generate more neurons

For a long time, scientists believed that the brain was the only organ in our body that wasn’t capable of generating new cells, called neurons. Even today this is something that many people believe.

However, it’s not true, in a process called neurogenesis, the brain is capable of generating new neurons, and one of the factors that favors this process is precisely aerobic exercise, according to research carried out in mice.

Improves the ability to concentrate

In a world where there is always a stimulus to distract us from whatever we are doing, it seems that exercise can help us stay focused more easily.

That concluded a study published in 2004 that analyzed the concentration capacity of people who were fit, versus those who were not, as well as that of people who had started training a few months earlier versus those who led a sedentary life.

Improves long-term memory

Several studies have shown that there is an important relationship between physical exercise and long-term memory. One of them showed that individuals who exercised for a period of half an hour four hours after having studied and learned something, remembered it better. However, they found no significant effects if the exercise was done right after the study session.

Another study looked at the same question by dividing its volunteers into three different groups, and asked all of them to memorize as much information as possible from two paragraphs of text. 

One group was shown the text after training, another before, and the third was not asked to train before or after. The results showed that the group that had trained before reading the text remembered it significantly better than the other two.

Helps maintain gray matter

Gray matter is the substance of which our brain is made, responsible for the transmission of data and therefore the agility of thought. Age and some diseases destroy and reduce the amount of gray matter in our brain, and it seems that exercise helps keep it in good condition.

A study published in 2013 concluded that adults who regularly engage in aerobic exercise have denser and more complete gray matter than their sedentary counterparts.

So, is it possible to sharpen my thinking skills?

Yes, to be successful in life, you need a flexible mind that reacts faster to problems, and you need to be able to understand what comes your way.

With some practice, anyone can increase their knowledge, hone their intellect, and learn new skills. There are many ways to improve your cognitive abilities and expand your mental capacity.

When the brain isn’t stimulated, like our whole body, it tends to weaken, this is why we should all try to spend time learning something new every day, the more we learn and the deeper our understanding, the better the performance of our brain. and more we increase our learning capacity.

Physical health isn’t the only one we must take care of to enjoy a good quality of life. Our brain must also exercise, especially in adulthood, to stay fit and prevent brain deterioration associated with aging.

At a scientific level, it’s proven that performing mental exercises continuously stimulates brain plasticity. Although we may not realize it, in our daily actions, whether reading a book, driving to work, cooking allows us to exercise our neurons. In this way helping parts of our brain to remain in perfect condition, making us more intelligent

FAQSs: How can I sharpen my thinking skills?

In this brief guide, we answered the question “How can I sharpen my thinking skills? how to train your brain and benefits.

So, are you ready to sharpen your thinking skills?

If you have any questions or comments please let us know.

References

Kim, L. (2016, April 8). 7 Simple Daily Habits to Sharpen Your Intelligence. Retrieved October 2, 2020, from Inc.com website: https://www.inc.com/larry-kim/7-simple-daily-habits-to-sharpen-your-intelligence.html

Sharpen Your Thinking: 25 Ways to Hone Your Thinking Skills. (2018, January 10). Retrieved October 2, 2020, from RapidStart Leadership website: https://www.rapidstartleadership.com/sharpen-your-thinking/