Challenging your brain is more important than most of us care to think. After all, long days tend to leave us wanting to do nothing more than checking out for a while and trying really hard not to think about anything that will be too much effort. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but you need to make regular time devoted to doing something that makes you think. This has numerous benefits to your mind over time. No one takes the time to tell us these things though. Knowing that you need to challenge your mind regularly may be the key to helping maintain healthy cognitive function throughout our lives though. We’re going to take a closer look at the benefits of challenging your mind regularly so that you can see for yourself what all it can do for you at all stages of your life. You might be surprised what it can do for you in the long run.

Memory Management
Routinely challenging your brain is highly useful when it comes to ensure your memory is functioning properly. That’s because challenging your brain tends to involve both remembering and recalling things consistently. This is doubly true if you’re engaged in an activity such as learning a new skill or working on a creative project where consistency is important. These are actually two very good ways to actually challenge your brain fairly regularly. We’re not advising that you write, paint, or compose a masterpiece, but the simple act of engaging in a creative hobby is frequently a challenging activity on more levels than one. It requires a distinct amount of activity from the mind that many other things don’t. Memory benefits highly from this routine challenging of your mind, but you there other benefits for you to claim as well.

Building Your Reserves
Routinely putting your brain through challenging activities is also important for helping your brain learn to manage stress effectively. Challenging it is, in many ways, another form of stress being placed on the mind. The difference is that you can call off this source of stress at any point and switch to something that isn’t negatively impacting your mental health. This repeated exposure and management of stress helps you to be more mentally hardy when it comes time to deal with the sources of stress that you can’t turn off. In effect, routinely challenging your mind leads to you coming into intuitive understandings on how best to manage stress to ensure your overall mental health. This is important at every stage of life given how much of a negative impact stress can have on us at any age. Notably, this is an excuse to remember to get outside of your comfort zone. Learn a new language or skill. Talk to people with different beliefs. Learn about the world. All of these challenge your mind and pave the way towards great mental resilience.

Mentally Healthy
Better memory and stress management are incredibly important as they end up helping to support long term mental health. Exercising your brain by challenging it helps it continually form new connections that keep it working smoothly. We need our brains to stay resilient and flexible as we age to ensure we get the highest quality of life out of things as we age. Mental deterioration is one of the things that tends to scare a lot of us as the gradual losses associated with age begin to set in. The fear tends to lead us to begin to isolate ourselves to a degree and that doesn’t help in keeping our mental health up. Regularly challenging your mind by learning skills can be done in classes. These not only help keep your mind challenged, but keep you socially active as well. These threads of connection end up contributing even more to your overall mental health and ensure life remains enjoyable even if our memory becomes a little less than perfect.

Routinely challenging your mind is probably one of the best things you can do for your mental health. It keeps you alert and helps to build mental resilience for the times when it would be otherwise tough to go forward. It doesn’t hurt that challenging yourself facilitates overall smoother cognition over time either. So do yourself a favor and remember to do something that challenges you fairly regularly. Think of it as an investment in your mental future.