Brain-Training Games: 5 Ways to Keep You Mentally Sharp

Do you have trouble focusing, feel scattered, or experience forgetfulness? If yes, your brain needs some mental workout. Like physical fitness, mental exercises are necessary to improve memory, increase mental capacity, and help delay cognitive decline.

The best part is that taking care of your mental fitness isn’t as complicated and exhausting as losing fat and building muscles. You can easily improve your brain performance through brain games! Here are five budget-friendly yet fun and brain-boosting games to try:

Scrabble

This board game does more than vocabulary enhancement. It has elements of focus and strategies, too. Specifically, it requires you to focus on the options you leave for other players and strategically place letters on fields where you can get higher scores quickly. All of these sharpen your mental capacity to solve problems while under pressure.

Since it can help boost one’s brain capabilities, Scrabble is often recommended to patients with cognitive impairments. Research has shown that the concentration and critical thinking required in the game can help patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. These mental tasks may help activate the inoperative part of their brains and slow down the progression of the diseases.

Scrabble enables players to interact with each other as well. This is beneficial in many ways. Social interactions can widen your perspectives. They’re also fun and stress-relieving, so they’re not only good for your optimal well-being. Note that long-term stress adversely affects your cognitive performance, resulting in irreversible negative changes in your brain.

Boggle

Boggle is another word game but more of a game of a pure test of wits and skills than chance. Unlike Scrabble (where players randomly pick letters), the players in Boggle will all have the same letters from the beginning of the game until the end.

As a multiplayer vocabulary game, Boggle has similar mental benefits to Scrabble. It can improve your language skills, quick-wittedness, focus, concentration, social interaction, and ability to recover from stress, anxiety, and depression. However, more improved logical thinking skills can be seen more in Boggle in Scrabble.

Boggle is more fast-paced. It typically lasts only three minutes, while Scrabble ends within 10-12 minutes. With a shorter time limit, the game forces you to form words more quickly and efficiently, sharpening your problem-solving abilities.

Online Games

In today’s digital age, most things are digitalized, and games are no exception. There are countless online games nowadays, including board games, card games, arcade games, and other video games. There are even casino tables online.

Unknown to others, these online games aren’t only fun but can also do wonders for your brain. They also can provide a defensive measure against cognitive impairments and other neurodegenerative disorders, such as dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Strategy-based video games, in particular, can greatly improve higher-order cognitive skills, including evaluative thinking, systematic decision-making, and brainstorming. Even if the games aren’t strategy-driven, they can still prompt mental stimulation and improve memory, concentration, and problem-solving skills.

However, many don’t prefer online games primarily because they can negatively affect your eye health and cause pain in your neck and shoulders. Although these are true, they only happen if you indulge in prolonged online gaming sessions. In other words, they can be prevented with better time management and self-control.

Rummikub

Another game that has been recently digitized is Rummikub. It’s a very old tile and multiplayer game, but it’s a fun and effective way to work your brain out in a mix of strategy and luck.

Playing Rummikub is similar to a Rummy card game, except it comes with tiles, not cards. Players only have the tiles in turns, typically in sets of at least three or more. The first person to place all tiles on their rack wins.

Although the rules are relatively easy, the board continually changes. You also have to keep generating ways to add and rearrange tiles to the board,  requiring you to pay close attention to the game. These brain functions can help improve your pattern recognition, sequencing, logical and planning skills, and even basic math, which all can boost your mental capability.

Puzzle Games

Sudoku, crossword, and jigsaw are well-known brain-boosting puzzles. Sudoku, in particular, has been used as part of neurorehabilitation and cognitive remediation therapies. The mathematical intelligence, problem-solving, and decision-making needed in the game can help improve the brain of patients with Alzheimer’s and other neuropsychiatric disorders.

Crosswords have the same mental benefits as other language-based games. However, they’re known to help make the brain younger, and there are scientific bases for it. Studies have shown that people constantly playing these games have better mental sharpness, more accurate memory, and faster grammatical reasoning.

Jigsaw puzzles are a popular way to improve cognition and visual-spatial reasoning. Due to the images on the puzzles, they’re recommended to enhance concentration, memory, creativity, and productivity. Once these brain functions get better, skills for recall, originality, and stress management will also be greatly improved.

Final Thoughts

Brain-training games are good ways to keep cognitive decline. They often require cognitive functions from both the brain’s left and right hemispheres, which help make the brain young and functional. Hence, it’s safe to say that the more you play these games, the healthier your brain will be.