Mariner has been confronted by old age. Check out a few thousand articles on YouTube (Junk University) to learn old folk skills from muscles to money to religion. If the reader isn’t a socially active person, it is easy to become TV-bound in a recliner. If the person is retired but has no significant, time-consuming hobby or cause, the brain gets lazy. Here’s mariner’s Junk University advice – the overall objective is stay linked to your immediate outside reality.
BODY
Five times each day for two minutes,stand erect and lock your knees. This gesture improves posture and brain concentration. When you take your daily walk, don’t look down – keeps the balance function working and improves posture. Walking a half hour outside the house every day is a famous recommendation from everyone. Just being outside the house can be beneficial.
Always when picking up anything close to the floor, squat, don’t bend. This gesture strengthens and stretches the whole body and may be the secret to getting up from laying flat on the floor.
Squatting, lift something heavy from the floor to a table then put it back on the floor. Barbell weights are convenient but a tabletop sewing machine can work or two ten pound dumbells – anything heavy enough to be a bit of a strain. Keep the back as straight as possible by spreading the knees. Do this twice every morning.
THE BEHAVIORAL MIND
Behavioral mind means dealing with tasks involving the five senses as they deal with your real world. Mariner’s metaphor is ‘anything to do with driving the bus’. Simplest example for all adults: not remembering why you walked into a room. Virtually all behavioral issues are linked to a lapse in memory. Mariner cited one of his own lapses in a recent post: he starts to put his coffee in the refrigerator instead of the microwave. This lapse is caused by distraction within the brain ; consciously, we try to think of two things at once – which only the subconscious brain can do.
A common thing to strengthen your attention span is to do puzzles – any kind of puzzle. Like all the activities mentioned, do it daily. Most of these lapses can be reduced by deliberately making the brain do lateral thinking. Another challenging exercise is to prepare a meal which has unusually elaborate, multi-step recipes.
Force yourself to completely finish one task before starting another one – even tiny ones.
THE REASONING MIND
Reasoning mind is the brain processing abstract thoughts, evaluation of real world circumstances, relationships, and emotional self evaluation. Real world circumstances require staying in touch, consciously knowing the status of friends and family, staying involved with your community.
Those who like to read have an advantage. Read some nonfiction on purpose; being able to rationalize new thoughts is a brain skill. Mariner understands the pain of traveling but go somewhere new every once in a while – the brain actually likes to explore.
You can’t stop the aging process but you can help keeping it pleasant.
Ancient Mariner