Is there anything you can do to improve your own brain function in just a few minutes a day? New research suggests that the answer may be yes. Five to 10 minutes of daily brain training can significantly improve your brain health, no matter what age you are. And the longer you continue this daily habit, the more your brain improves, with no apparent ceiling on the benefits. Those are the results of a study by researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Brain Health. Researchers followed about 4,000 participants to see if a small daily brain training session could make a difference to cognitive health, as peer-reviewed by the journal Scientific Reports. After three years, the results are clear: It can.
Back in 2020, the center created the Brain Health Project. It’s an open-ended study that anyone can join via its website or app. Its purpose is twofold. First, it aims to help people of all ages improve their brain health with a combination of education (encouraging them to avoid multitasking, for instance), brain exercises, and one-on-one coaching for those who want it.
Beyond crossword puzzles
What kind of brain training exercises did participants do? These weren’t crossword puzzles or the kind of fun games you might get, say, from AARP. These were exercises designed to strengthen your cognitive muscles. For example, the first exercise in the app is to take a short piece of text you are reading that day, go through it, and cross out unimportant information, as a way to filter out the non-essential and reduce overload.
The project’s second aim is to measure whether this kind of intervention actually can improve people’s brain health. With that second goal in mind, the researchers created the Brain Health Index, an assessment that participants complete when they first join the project and every six months thereafter. The Brain Health Index measures participants’ thinking skills, connectedness to others and sense of purpose, and their emotional balance. All three elements are components of good brain health. The researchers saw marked improvement in Brain Health Index assessments for the majority of participants who took the training, especially those who did so every day. “This study challenges the prevailing narrative of inevitable cognitive decline, suggesting instead that brain health can be proactively cultivated at any age,” the researchers write.
How to improve your own brain
How can you get this kind of brain improvement for yourself? Look for research-based ways to exercise your brain, which may be a bit less fun than doing a crossword puzzle. The exercises at BrainHQ, for example, have been shown in studies to improve cognitive health. So have things like learning to play a musical instrument, studying a new language, and dancing. Doing any of these, especially on a daily basis, is pretty much guaranteed to improve your brain health.
Another key component of the Brain Health Project is education about how the brain works, and how lifestyle changes can help or harm it. To gain that knowledge, consider following the work of neurosurgeon Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent and the author of Keep Sharp: Build a Better Brain at Any Age.
And there’s another option: You could join in the Brain Health Project yourself. It’s open to any adult who is generally neurologically healthy, understands English well enough to follow the instructions, and can see and hear well enough to follow the program’s visual and audio content. Whatever option you choose, it’s smart to do something. There’s probably no self-improvement you can do more powerful than supporting your own brain health.
There’s a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or tip. Often, they text me back and we wind up in a conversation. (Want to know more? Here’s some information about the texts and a special invitation to a two-month free trial.) Most are entrepreneurs or busy executives who know just how essential it is to preserve their own brain health. And that it’s well worth the investment of five or 10 minutes a day.
—Minda Zetlin
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This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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