5 Winter Indoor Activities to Engage the Brain

Do you suffer from Winter Brain? You won’t find this syndrome in medical books, but many people swear they lose their edge, feel like a dullard, and become less sharp during the winter season.

It’s true. Winter’s gray days can affect our gray matter. Because it gets dark early and the temperatures outside are cold, many of us choose to stay home, grab the remote, an afghan, and a box of Mallomars, and spend the evenings watching B movies or reruns of Friends rather than keeping active and engaging our brain in more challenging pastimes.

According to National Geographic, “The more you exercise your brain, either by performing mental tasks or by learning new things, the greater the changes in brain connectivity.” Listening to music, reading, working out, and learning to play an instrument all help to keep our brains challenged.

Here are five more fun ways to boost your brain power and ward off Winter Brain before it happens.

Puzzle up in front of the fire

Crossword puzzles, brain twisters, Sudoku, KenKen, KenDoku, jigsaw puzzles, acrostics, even word search puzzles all help to poke a lazy brain into action and improve moods and mental acuity while banishing boredom.

Get your game on

There’s a reason we say “play a game,” because games are fun. Injecting play into our lives is often hard to do, but brains profit heavily from play. Board games, card games, online computer games, and game apps for our tablets all tweak and tease our brain cells and shake up and wake up a hibernating brain.

Unearth your old Rubik’s Cube and see if you can solve it, or see how high you can build a stable tower with Jenga blocks. Patience, balance, physics, and the added tactile stimulation of manipulating the game pieces add more intellectual juice to a brain that’s thirsty for action.

Choose chess over checkers or bridge over rummy to supersize intellectual arousal and challenge a brain that’s sleepy and slow.

The Wall Street Journal says even action-based video and computer games boost brain power. “A growing body of university research suggests that gaming improves creativity, decision-making and perception,” according to a recent article. Some researchers even believe that gaming can improve one’s ability to drive at night, and that skill comes in handy in the winter when darkness often appears to descend shortly after lunch.

Feed a hungry brain with a hobby

Take that pansy needlepoint kit out of the closet and put it to good use. Any time you need to concentrate, focus, and think, you engage your brain directly, and brains love attention. Whatever your hobby is - wood carving, model making, coin or stamp collecting — as long as you need to focus, concentrate, and think, your brain will keep active.

Feed a hungry brain while you feed yourself

Experimenting with new recipes or cuisine gives your brain food for thought. All your senses are involved in the act of preparing a meal, and they’re especially pleased when the food is something new and different. So try Thai, eat Ethiopian, or lunch on Lebanese, and increase your knowledge of ethnic cooking and please your palate as well as your brain.

A word a day keeps the brain fog away

Words wage war on Winter Brain. Build your vocabulary and you build your brain power. New words excite brain cells and add flavor and zing to your daily communications no matter what season. Visit Vocabulary.com daily and watch Winter Brain melt away. It’s one of the best and most enjoyable vocabulary-building sites on the Internet, and you can sharpen your language skills and rev up your brain power while you anxiously wait for the first signs of spring.