Honest advice: Reading exercises your brain

There are certain activities that are very bad for your brain’s health. Being stuck in front of the television is one, especially if you’re watching something that’s disturbing. Watching disturbing shows can affect your sleep and your day. If you watch a horror movie, the chances are that you’re either going to have bad dreams about whatever monster you saw or you’re going to be scared of being in the dark or going to the bathroom at night. Whatever horror you saw in a movie that night, you start to imagine that it’s going to pop out at you in the dark. But watch a comedy or sci-fi movie, because it’s light on the brain, it’s not going to send you into a terror.

Other activities that are bad for the brain are incessant computer games that are intense in nature or full of grotesque violence. Playing them for a short period of time, like half an hour to an hour, is fine, but kids who’ve been playing them non-stop, for days on end, have been known to succumb to seizures. Other activities that are bad for the brain are staring at your phone screen, scrolling through your social media feed, not getting enough sleep or sleeping too much, not eating properly or missing meals, eating too much sugar and not drinking enough water. All these activities either make your brain foggy or so overactive that it’s difficult for it to focus on important things.

There are, however, activities that are good for the brain by actually enhancing its function. Eating foods such as salmon, walnuts and avocados, and anything with good fats and omega 3 are good for the brain’s electrical impulses. Getting the right amount of sleep is imperative and just as important is sleeping at the right time every day. It’s also important to exercise your brain by playing the right games such as crossword puzzles, word games, Sudoku and chess. These games force your brain to think, something that stops happening when you allow it to go into a trance by watching television or scrolling through your social media feed. You need to stop using a calculator, or your phone’s calculator, to do simple maths. Try to do it in your head, especially if it involves addition and subtraction.

Try to read a physical book for pleasure instead of being on the computer or phone all day. Try to read a novel or newspaper whether it’s a light-hearted story or intense news. Both types of reading have a positive effect on the brain’s activity and the body in general. But it seems that our brains weren’t initially programmed to read, that’s according to experts. That’s why learning to read is such an effort for children, otherwise they’d pick it up at the first attempt. Nevertheless, reading a physical book has enormous benefits on our brain’s neurons which are so stimulated by reading that they even form new connections because of the exercise they’ve being given. This is literally exercising your brain cells.

But you might wonder if reading on the phone, tablet or computer is the same as reading a physical book or newspaper. Research says it’s not. Reading something from a computer or phone is a markedly different activity from reading an actual book or newspaper. For one, it’s very easy to get distracted by an incoming message or email plus it’s very tempting to keep looking at your Instagram or Facebook Feed. Your attention is divided and so you can’t really focus on the reading part. The latter is better for the brain than scrolling through endless messages and feeds. Therefore, whatever exercise you give to your brain, albeit briefly, is somewhat wasted and ineffective. Reading on your device is a bit like going to the gym to do a real workout but you run into a friend so you spend most of your time slowing down and chatting, and you didn’t get your workout in.

Reading has profound effects on your body too. It can make you feel sad, worried, disturbed, scared and happy. You might like or dislike a character who seems almost real but of course he’s not.