This is an excerpt from the Low Waste Christmas Workbook. It’s packed full of ideas that will help you have an ethical and sustainable holiday.
“Exercise your brain
You may find that some chores take longer if you have extra people to feed, use extra washing up or laundry time to do some brain exercises to create new ‘grey sludge’ the stuff of thinking!
Current ideas in all things to do with the brain are that even though some of our cells die as we age, we can create completely new brain matter by having new experiences and learning new things.
New pathways can be created by very simple challenges to how our brain usually does things – for example, try brushing your teeth with the ‘wrong’ hand.
This free way to exercise your brain can be done daily and is actually harder than it sounds!”
What else can you do?
Meditate
This research suggests that meditation can engage new neural pathways, making your mind more flexible.
Learn something new
TED has a really cool browsing interface that lets you choose a topic and a duration of a talk. It throws up some totally fascinating stuff. (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment Design, just to save you a Google).
Use your memory
The Bright Focus Foundation has some surprisingly tricky games on their very informative website which is about their research into Alzheimer’s disease, macular degeneration, and glaucoma.
Be sociable
Socialising works the brain hard because we need to juggle so much information going in and out. I suspect face to face interaction is better for our brains because we have to literally think on our feet. If we are talking online we have breathing space to react and we don’t need to deal with visual social cues. Either way, talking to people is good for you.
Join in with the conversation in the less-stuff Facebook group to share your ideas. I’d love to hear how this works for you.
Countdown to Cosy is a collaboration with The Frugal Family – check out what they are up to on their website www.thefrugalfamily.co.uk