Learning a new language

Cognitive activities like crossword puzzles, reading or playing music may delay memory decline among people who eventually developed dementia.

It happens when a person is in a situation where they are anxious that they may conform to a negative stereotype aimed at his or her social group.

Positive stereotypes, or success on previous memory tasks, can help combat this negativity. 

Physical health plays an important role in ensuring that you are mentally healthy. 

You can stay healthy by eating well, getting adequate rest and exercise, and actively taking care of your physical health. 

Daily exposure to sunlight helps avoid depression.

Physical activity is also beneficial for the mind. Exercise boosts energy, reduces stress and mental fatigue. 

Obese people find it more difficult to pick apart spatial, item, and temporal memory, as well as the ability to integrate them.

If you're obese, you might be up to 20 percent more likely not to remember where you put your keys.

The diet of obese people degrades their memory and makes them more likely to overeat, a study revealed.

Making a meal more memorable may help to eat less bad stuff. If you watch TV while you eat, you'll eat more than planned.

Building a brain-exercise routine will probably be successful if it mirrors the most successful ways to create any other routine.

The answer to maxing out your brain’s performance abilities for the rest of your life lies in how you exercise it—just like your body.

• At work: Attack your big challenges first. Don’t waste your mornings with routine, repetitive tasks.
• At home: Take on more challenging hobbies. Do a crossword puzzle, play Sudoku, make home improvement plans.
• In relationships: Don’t shy away from difficult conversations with your partner or friends. Discuss big ideas and how to bring them to life.

When your eyes are closed, your brain isn’t working as hard to filter out visual information. So: 

• Use one screen, one browser window, and one computer program at a time.
• Keep your physical and virtual desktop tidy.

• BMI doesn't distinguish between body fat and muscle mass. Muscle weighs about 18 percent more than the same amount of fat. So, according to BMI, the muscled person is more overweight than a sedentary person.
• BMI is also not reliable to use on elderly adults, who continue to lose muscle and bone mass with age. An overweight older adult may appear to be within a normal BMI range.
• The BMI calculation is based on Caucasian body types and may not be appropriate for people of other ethnicities.

A person whose BMI indicates they are overweight or obese is generally considered unhealthy. But 2016 research suggested that this was incorrect for 75 million Americans.

• Researchers found that 54 million Americans that were classed as overweight or obese were perfectly healthy when they considered the cardiometabolic measures (blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, etc.)
• 21 Million people were classed normal in terms of BMI, but other cardiometabolic tests indicated they were unhealthy.

• I’m not that old:  It’s not about NOW but saving for your old days when you can no longer work full time. 
• I’ll wait for a lump sum is just an excuse to postpone planning or procrastinate.
• Assumed Family/External Support: It’s better to be prepared for eventualities and have contingency funds in hand.
• Financial Requirements Decrease: Medical costs increase with age. Inflation and other factors might also come into play.
• I will not live that long or I won’t retire: People tend to live longer, but they will suffer from medical ailments.

To have a secure and financially independent retired life during your golden years with regular post retirement income, a corpus of savings/investments and a safe shelter or home.

To change anything in the brain, you have to focus your attention on the task at hand. However, most find it challenging to concentrate for long periods of time without daydreaming.

Curb your wandering mind by working out the cause for the wandering. Procrastination is a psychological coping mechanism that kicks in during times of stress.

• The default mode network of our brain, responsible for mind-wandering and creativity, needs to be turned down when we want to work for any length of time.  
• The brain's dorsal attention network - the part that helps us make decisions and focus on a task - moves into action when we are deliberately focusing on a task.

When people are less able to focus for any length of time, they are leaning more heavily on the left hemisphere of their brain, while the right hemisphere is not working as hard as it should be working.

The prefrontal cortex of the brain is mainly responsible for goal management. It orchestrates attention, working memory and other cognitive resources to help us get what we want.

For a challenging task, briefly taking our minds off the goal can renew and strengthen motivation. Doing activities that rely on different brain regions is best to restore focus.

Exposure to nature restores the mind. One study showed better working memory scores for people after a walk in a natural environment, but not in an urban setting.

If you are unable to go into nature, find plants, fresh air or a fish tank. Sit down, take a deep breath, and notice the details of nature. Research shows that even looking at some pictures of nature can work.