Brain exercise improves your mental health

Puzzles, video and board games are indoor games that demand little investment. Besides being fun to play, they are also a way of promoting mental health and stability.

Performing mentally-stimulating tasks, for example, providing answers for a puzzle game, stimulates the growth of brain cells and repairs damaged ones, thereby warding off old age mental diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s.

The games may have low impact on the body, but leave mental alertness in tip-top condition to both young and old.

Played on a board containing 64 squares arranged on an eight by eight grid, chess the two-player game is known to improve concentration, creativity, memory, problem-solving skills, increased performance in reading and promotion of foresight and planning.

According to chess.com, a study done on 4,000 students exposed to chess showed an improved performance of both boys and girls after four months of playing chess.

The game is known to involve all brain cells because players are required to think critically about their next move as they look to conquer the opponent.

Chess Club

Those who wish to go professional can join the Nairobi Chess Club, which engages members in competitive and social events. Charges are Sh1,500 for gold and Sh600 for silver membership.

Scrabble is an educational tool and a social game that improves ability in spelling and vocabulary skills. It plays two to four players, who score points by placing tiles correctly to construct words that flow left to right in rows or downwards in columns.

Although it can be played by adults, and especially those trying to learn a new language, it is more popular with kids.

It teaches them how to spell and improve their vocabulary, stimulates brain ability, helps them develop hands and eye coordination besides training them patience and how to be team players.

Sudoku is a puzzle game that easily gets players hooked. Some ardent players buy newspapers every day to get their daily dose of action and follow up on the previous day’s answers.

Attention span

The alphabetical and number Sudoku puzzles can be played by people of all ages and involves placing the missing numbers and letters in the right place. Playing the game improves the attention span and triggers stronger cognitive skills.

Crosswords are problem solving puzzles that require one to use provided clues to complete a table with letters that form words horizontally and vertically. Like the Sudoku, crosswords better a person’s reasoning ability and increase their attention span.

Draughts is a board game played by two and involves diagonal moves of identical game pieces. A player captures the opponent’s piece by moving over them.

Although video games are addictive and can trigger depression and aggression, there are a number of benefits that they portend.

A study by the American Psychological Association found video games to improve players’ moods, promote relaxation and ward off anxiety, strengthen a range of cognitive skills such as spatial navigation, reasoning, memory and perception.

In addition, the games were found to improve a player’s capacity to think about objects in three dimensions, just as well as academic courses designed to enhance these same skills.

The advent of computers and the internet has made the aforementioned games more accessible, with individuals getting the option to play against the computer itself or rivals in other countries.  

New online games have also been designed, some of which sell on the premise of improving mental fitness.

For instance, Brain Curls is a combination of games designed to improve a player’s observation skills, memory and alertness while Fit Brains game was designed by neuroscientists is said to promote mental health of people through brain fitness exercises.