The single most important thing for brain health is constant challenge. After retirement, people often let their lives shrink, which damages neural pathways. The fix: regularly take on new, moderately difficult tasks that force your brain to build new connections.
How has your deep dive into the workings of the brain influenced your personal life, your habits, your lifestyle?
The most important thing you can do for your brain is to challenge it all the time. We all know people who, let's say, get to retirement age and their lives really shrink and they're not doing anything new. That's the worst thing you could do for your brain. The most important thing is to constantly force it to build new bridges and roadways by taking on new tasks that are somewhere in between frustrating but achievable. For any listeners who have retired parents or grandparents, make sure you're really encouraging them/forcing them to do that. And if they say, oh, I do Sudoku or whatever, that's fine, except as soon as they get good at it, they have to quit that and do something else. So one of the main things where my life on a daily basis is influenced by— because I always try to switch things up, even stupid stuff like just parking on a different side of the driveway and switching the art on my walls and driving a different route home from work every single day. And just constantly doing things like that is really important for brain health.
The Library of Minds: Brain Coach: How to Stay Sharp When AI Does the Thinking | Jim Kwik
