The sure-fire way to exercise your brain—break your routine!

The sure-fire way to exercise your brain—break your routine!
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Get walking. It keeps your brain fit.

It’s human nature to stick to our day to day routines. Not only are they comfortable and easy, but they offer the calming illusion of control and stability. The problem with routines, however, is that they also numb our minds. The monotony of the familiar does little to stimulate our senses or feed our souls.

A perfect example of this is our daily commute.

Traveling the same way time after time actually puts our brains on autopilot: It’s easy to navigate back and forth in a dreamlike state, with little awareness of what’s actually around us. Contrast this with a conscious choice to take a new or unfamiliar route on the way home, experiencing different sights, smells and sounds. Chances are, the experience will be way more memorable.

The very act of engaging in a routine activity in a novel way is enough to create new neural pathways to keep our brains “fit”. There’s even a science behind this: It’s called “Neurobics”, aerobic exercise for the brain. Not only can engaging in neurobics actually make us smarter, but it could stave off diseases such as Alzheimer’s. The more we generate new brain cells and connections between them through-out our lifetimes, the fewer chances we have of mental decline.

As it turns out, exercising our brains can be just as important as exercising our bodies.

It’s a philosophy we take seriously at my company, Sidekix. As a smart walking navigation app we do more than get you to your destination. We offer a more interesting route for you.

The idea is that there are often multiple ways to get from point A to point B, and often trying a different way offers a completely different experience. Rather than walking the same boring path, Sidekix offers route choices that are based on your interests—such as culture, fashion, or food--that is what you want to see and do along the way. Not only does the app help you experience your city in a different way, but its novelty provides a big enough “jolt” to the brain to help keep it healthy.

It’s a small change (Sidekix will never take you more than a few minutes out of your way), but one that breaks up your routine, and apparently makes you smarter--and healthier--to boot. Not to mention the fact that the act of walking itself is the easiest form of exercise, proven to boost creativity, increase concentration and improve problem solving abilities.

Ultimately in science—as in poetry—taking the road less travelled really does make all the difference.

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