Habits you can build in your early 20's- 30's that will protect your brain from ageing.

Last night, I played hide and seek and Backgammon. And to my surprise, I won both games. One win could be attributed to my natural knack of squeezing into tight corners, but the other was a mixture of luck & mindset training.

You see, I’ve never played backgammon before, so I had a lot of barriers to success. For those of you who are unfamiliar, backgammon is a popular middle-eastern game. Akin to chess, it requires strategy and it is beloved by graying men. If you’ve ever traveled to a middle eastern country and wondered why old men huddled up around a wooden box in coffee shops & park benches it’s probably backgammon.

Learning a new game has many challenges, but the biggest is learning the rules to the game. As the backgammon rules were being explained to me, I felt the usual dread of feeling like you’re being spoken to in a different language, and the “uh-huhs’ and the deceptive nodding that portrays you understand what they are saying. 

I had a mental and bodily response that screamed “Oh noo, not a new game.” I also thought, “I’m probably going to be bad at this,” but I remembered my virtual teachers, Barbara Oakley and Carol Dweck who taught me that mindset is key to successfully learning new things.

So I let go of those worries. Well, more accurately, I noticed them without judgement, and they disappeared on their own, like Sam Harris taught me.

I kept moving on and reminding myself that I can learn new and complicated things. I relaxed my body, focused on the tasks at hand and in the end, I won.

Now, how does this story have anything to do with preventing brain ageing? Well, according to Harvard Health, trying new and challenging activities is a good bet for building and maintaining cognitive skills. This article was geared towards older individuals in nursing homes and the findings that when individuals practice new and challenging activities, they are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s and dementia.

I am 28 years old. I don’t necessarily need to start worrying about brain aging, however, I almost convinced myself that at 28 years old, it would be too difficult to learn a challenging game like backgammon. This reminded me of this study, and made me realize that at our age, we need to develop the habit of pushing through that doubt, wherever it arises. 

Because if not, by the time we are in a nursing home, whatever our habit was, it will have become our character. We’ll either be vibrant throughout our ageing, excited to adopt new hobbies and skills, or the fixed in our old ways and impervious to growth. 

So search for new and challenging games to learn and practice, or better yet, promise to never say no when given an opportunity to learn a new game.