Your brain is one of the most important parts of your body and you should take care of it like it’s your child. Your mental clarity is one of the best predictors for success.

If you want to be successful, don’t ever neglect your mental health, don’t ever neglect your brain power and your mindset.

Not only you should prevent deterioration of cognitive abilities as a result of aging, but you also have the responsibility to at least maintain your brain levels of functioning at current levels so it won’t decrease as a result of laziness, chaos, and even toxins that might come in your way of having the mind of your dreams.

On top of all that, I am here telling you how you should strive for improving it (I’d add – on a daily basis)

Now you’re so confused: How the heck after what I told you in the paragraph above are you going to increase your brain power and become smarter despite Toxins, Chaos, Atrophy of unused part of the brain, Aging and so on?

Before you get a headache, let me help you with this.

How Do You Improve Your Brain Power and Become a Smarter YOU?

1. Read Books. Whether it’s a Kindle version or paper book. take advantage of people’s wisdom. There are so many great books to read, it’s a sin to not take advantage of them in the era of infinite sources of knowledge online. Books enrich you in two ways – it speeds up your ability to read and absorb new ideas, and it informs you about a certain topic. Thus, developing both your fluid and crystallized intelligence.
2. Write Things You’ve Learned. By writing things you’ve learned you hit two birds with one stone: you make sure you understood fully AND you reorganize your thoughts and connect new dots. By writing, you make your brain more organized and it helps to make order out of chaos and actually internalize what you’ve learned so it will be ingrained and available more strongly for future use.
3. Write About Your Day to Day Life. This is a tricky one since I already wrote about the importance of writing, so why am I mentioning it again? Well, pay attention to the difference – Your Day to Day Life. Exactly. Writing about your life experiences is another powerful tool. As opposed to the previous section about Writing about Things You’ve Learned – here I am advising to organize your daily interactions with people in your own words. It will allow you to better understand what had happened to you, why it happened the way it happened, what you could have done differently, what behaviors you have to maintain in order to keep what you were satisfied with and how tomorrow can be maximized in terms of you getting to your goals more efficiently.
4. Listen carefully to people smarter than you. It could be on YouTube, it can be on iTunes, on whatever platform you want actually. Choose podcast over music while commuting. Choose to learn something new on YouTube instead of pure entertaining that will give you nothing in return. By listening to other people with higher IQ than you who are articulated you sharpen your mind and new pathways in your brain are born. The more people you listen to the more perspectives you’ll have. Diversity is good, just make sure all of them are enriching and have solid logic sense. Stay away from gurus and charlatans who have an agenda.
5. Learn a new language. Nothing makes new connections between neurons faster than learning a new language from scratch. For example, I am not a native English Speaker. I speak Hebrew. For me, learning English was a highly challenging journey that definitely sharpens my mind and allowed me to understand many different things on a deeper level. Not only will you be exposed to a new world of thinkers and thoughts, but the way you arrange thoughts together and think will also change and thus you’ll be able to connect dots you haven’t connected in your native language and have some new epiphanies and mind-blowing moments on the way.
6. Be aware of your thoughts & Spend time Day Dreaming. I started to ask people who are close to me about the time they spend or don’t spend thinking about ideas, aka Day Dreaming. It appears to my surprise that not as many people as I thought actually spending THAT much time as I do on ideas. Which leads me to understand that it plays a part in my intelligence. Highly intelligent people spend time thinking about ideas in their leisure time.
7. Put yourself in an inspiring environment. Albert Einstein worked in a patent office only to get constant inspiration for new, fresh, innovative ideas. Needless to say how it affected him. A person is a byproduct of the environment he’s in. If you want to be innovative, be in an innovative environment, same if you want to be creative or stupid. You are where you are. As simple as that.
8. Travel. Traveling has the capacity to open your mind to new ways of life, new cultures, new thoughts, new ideas, new patterns that your brain will find challenging. It is also a fun experience, so I do see a lot of reason to travel, especially to places where people live differently from you. If you’re from the USA and you travel to Canada, it has less of an effect than if you would have traveled to South East Asia for example or South America. By traveling to a new place your brain becomes more flexible. As you adapt to a new environment, you literally unlock parts of your DNA that weren’t manifested yet, thus becoming a more “developed” human being than before.
9. Skip the Junk and Avoid Addictions. Addictions are not healthy, plain and simple. You better off have an addiction-free life instead of a roller coaster of bad habits that drag you down. Addictions shrink your brain, literally, and prevent you from fulfilling your true potential. By giving up addictions you let your brain heal from all the dopamine burnouts he had to go through and now you have time, resources and more focus to engage in other healthy brain activities.
10. Take Care of your Physical Health. Of course, we couldn’t end an article about brain power without mentioning the most important aspect – the physical one. If you want a healthy brain which functions at the highest levels – you must take care of your body. Do exercise, eat things that make you feel good. Be honest about it, don’t compromise your diet just because “science” determined it’s good for you. Go through trial and error and check out which foods give you the highest levels of mental clarity and focus.

Until next time,

-Gal.