5 Best Brain Exercises to "Air" Out the Mental and Emotional Rooms

The philosophy of A House With Four Rooms is to maintain complete wellness by doing something daily in your Physical, Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Rooms, even if you only go in to "air" them out, you must do something. I tend to do things in bursts: I exercise on my bike, treadmill, or elliptical for a short period of time; I read a chapter in a book; I practice daily meditations and prayer; I walk, and I journal. All of these activities let me "air" out my four rooms. Some of my activities keep me attentive and help me build skills; brain exercises are a fun strategy.

It’s important that you regularly exercise your brain to keep the neural pathways open and your memory sharp. The neural pathways are the parts of your brain which helps you recall information, solve problems and perform tasks that you’ve experienced in the past.

When you exercise your brain, you’re stimulating the pathways so they’ll stay vital and active. To accomplish the exercises your brain needs, you need to change your routine once in a while and learn and develop new skills. This can be fun.

Mnemonic devices are some of the best ways to keep your brain stimulated and active. Here are five of the best mnemonic exercises for your brain:

1. Acrostics – Acrostics involve making up a sentence where the first or last letter of each word represents the items you want to remember. One popular acrostic is, “E, G, B, D, F” – for “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” to remember the lines of the treble clef in music.
2. Visual – Like taking a picture with your mind. Make them colorful and three-dimensional to make the recall easier. For example, to remember who was president when the first Atomic bomb was detonated, you could picture Harry Truman in front of a huge mushroom cloud.
3. Chunking – This method is great for breaking up a long string of numbers into chunks that are more easily remembered. For example, telephone numbers are better remembered than a driver’s license number because they’re broken down into three chunks.
4. Acronyms – These are words formed by taking the first letters of the items you want to remember and creating a new word from them. For example, to remember a grocery list containing “Laundry detergent, Olives, Diapers and Eggs,” you’d form the word “L-O-D-E.”
5. Rhymes – Use rhymes you remember from school days or make them up yourself. You may have remembered the rhyme, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen-hundred, ninety-two,” to remember when the explorer began his fateful trip to the New World. Another favorite is School House Rock's "Conjunction Junction...What's your function."

All of the above methods are great ways to keep your brain in shape and to ward off such memory problems as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Keep in mind that the more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and recall information. This is a great lesson for students and I encourage you to share and challenge your family and friends.

Challenge yourself in different ways. Learn a new skill, language or sport. And, any exercise which requires you to use your hands can also exercise your brain. Take up a musical instrument or some type of needlework to work out the hand-eye coordination area of your brain. My children used the idea of building hand-eye coordination for reasons to play video games.

Most of all -- be mindful rather than mindless. Get off the couch and try something new.

What ways can YOU challenge yourself today? What's been on your bucket list to learn? Take a minute to share your response on the Facebook page: www.facebook.com/ahousewithfourrooms

I hope you'll have fun practicing these 5 brain exercises with your family and friends.

Cheers!

Lisa