Never stop learning.
We should keep ourselves mentally active. The current society continually reminds us of taking care of our body: eat healthy!, exercise more!, get active! but we cannot forget the other side of the scale... take care of our brain!
How do we take care of it? Training.
Read a book, do crosswords, take a course, study a language, play an instrument, make a puzzle, look for memory games... You do not need to do all these things, just pick one and put it into action for a while.
It is normal to take rest periods as we do with sports or when we go on holidays at work or at school. It happens the same with the mind, after we finish a course or any other initiative, it is good to rest but after a while we should start again our training.
And overall, try to take your mind out of the routine. For example, if you normally read, it is a good exercise; but you should force the brain to leave the comfort zone and make the effort of learning something new, the effort of thinking out of the box...
There are several ways of training:
Download any app to activate your memory.
Try to use your left hand instead of the right one.
Learn to play chess.
Make Jigsaws. It does not mean you have to make one jigsaw per month, it means that once in a while you do something different.
Try to remember the location of the things in your bedroom as they were in the morning. Do you remember everything? What was there on the desk?
On Sunday try to recall what you were wearing on Monday and what you had for lunch on Tuesday.
Our brain gets rusty if we do not use it. Make sure you keep it active!
Below you can see some pictures of my last puzzle, a replica of the Vermeer´s painting "The Milkmaid". Step by step and piece by piece, the small parts of the work become together in a great final result, as every challenge in life, even the most difficult ones.
Remember that Patience and Persistence are the clue of success, even over Intelligence and Talent.
