Senior Health and Fitness -
The Secret to a Young Brain

The brain’s basic function is to learn new things and put them to use.  In fact, to function optimally, your brain needs a steady diet of new ideas and skills, just like your car needs gas and the government needs taxes. 

Your life generally follows three phases in regards to learning new information and skills:

Youth – Most of your childhood was spent learning thousands of new skills so that you could one day be self-sufficient.  Crawling, speaking, walking, reading, writing, math, sports, driving, you get the idea.  Your brain was constantly being forced to learn.

Adult – By the time you’re 18, learning new things takes a back seat to using the skills and knowledge you already have.  You continue to refine what you already know, and you may still learn new things, but it is not required. 

Older Adult – In the retirement years, we systematically whittle away at our skill-base.  For one reason or another, you stop doing a skill, either because you don’t have to anymore, it’s too hard, or you just don’t want to do it.  We may still occasionally learn a new skill, but that can be few and far between.

The brain wants to learn new things; that’s what it’s meant to do.  As you get older, and you stop learning new skills and even stop doing many of the skills you had previously learned, your brain starts to deteriorate.

Why should it keep in tip-top condition if you’re not going to use it?  Most people view this backwards.  They think their brain deteriorates because they’re getting old, therefore causing them to not be able to learn and retain new skills.  But it’s the other way around.  Not learning new things allows the brain to deteriorate, which subsequently makes it harder to learn.

In your youth, new skill acquisition is a necessity.  You have to be able to walk.  You have to be able to talk.  You have to be able to read.  After a certain age, you have all the skills you need to function.  At this point, new skill acquisition becomes a choice rather than a necessity.

The obvious question, then, is Are you choosing to exercise your brain by learning new things, or are you choosing to just do the things you’re good at?  Furthermore, in regards to the skills you do have, are you slowly but surely losing command of them because you aren’t using them anymore?

Here’s two things to do to keep your brain in shape:

1. Think of the skills you do have that maybe you haven’t been using lately.  Start to use them again.

2. Feed the brain.  Learn new things.

Here’s a list of things you can do:

• Buy a book on a new subject you think will be interesting.
• Take a class at the local community college.
• Buy an exercise video.
• Go to a public lecture.
• Take piano lessons.
• Volunteer at a hospital.
• Try a new machine or class at the health club.
• Take up a new hobby like model airplanes.
• Visit a new website and learn how it works.
• Learn how to dance.
• Get a new program for your computer and figure out how to use it.
• Buy an ethnic cookbook and cook food you’ve never even heard of.
• Browse the library’s magazine rack and pick up something that covers an unfamiliar subject.
• Learn a new card game online.
• Watch the Discovery Channel.
• Learn a new word and use it in a sentence a few times the next day.

Just remember, it’s OK to try something new and do it poorly.  It’s not OK to stop trying new things because you’re afraid of doing them poorly.

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