How do you feel?

I certainly don’t consider myself “old.” To be honest, I am not sure what age qualifies as old today. I think that being old is more associated with a mindset. That said, I am obviously not in my twenties anymore, and my body occasionally reminds me that it is not as flexible as it used to be. Getting older is a fact of life. No matter how much we would like to avoid it, the clock will continue to tick and we will grow older. There is no stopping that process.

This realization sends some of us racing to the nearest plastic surgeon to nip, tuck, pull, and stretch everything back into something resembling what used to be, while others of us wear our age like a medal of honour. Like most of us, I hope that I will age gracefully, but I do hope I can keep my mind snappy and youthful.

Fortunately, staying fit mentally is an attainable goal! Our brains don’t age the same way our bodies do. In one Harvard study, researchers compared the differences in brain activity between younger and older subjects focusing on the firing between the front and back of the brain in each group. This front and back mechanism is called the “default network” and is activated when we need to use our memory. As you would imagine, twenty-year-olds had the best responses when it came to this part of the study. The older subjects tended to have a weaker connection in their “default network.”

Yet surprisingly, nearly half of the older adults maintained brain activity that was similar to the twenty-year-olds. Personally, I am thrilled with this news. Scientists attribute this younger, fit mind in an older body to good old-fashioned exercise, meaning cognitive exercise in this case. And they proved it by putting a group of 75-year-olds through several months of rigorous mind exercise. And after that, the subjects exhibited the memory abilities of people many years, sometimes even decades, younger.

So, the more you exercise your brain, the better it will work and the longer it will last. Mental exercises that can help you build brain cells are reading, doing math, and playing games that call for strategy and matching. And your home computer is a good source for this material. There are loads of brain boosting workouts available online right at your fingertips. Just do a Google search! You can play them on a computer, tablet or phone device.

You could even consider adding brain exercises to your daily physical regime. I myself happen to like Sudoku. It never hurts to start early when it comes to taking care of yourself. After all, we have one brain and one body, so it makes sense to try to keep them in good shape.