If an employee is not intellectually challenged in a job, their brain will lose productivity, according to researcher Siegfried Lehrl. For example, unskilled 25-year-olds with dull menial jobs are actually significantly dumber than they were at the time when they left school. Another study focused on patients who were in hospital for tests and just lying there all day. Experts found a major reduction in their intellectual capacity: after one week in bed, their IQs had dropped off 5 points and they were many as 20 points more stupid after three weeks.
"Routine is the enemy of intellectual development," says Lehrl, president of the German Society for Brain Training.
The good news is employees can train their brains with simple exercises, he says. Lehrl recommends doing something for the mind everyday, just like we wake up in the morning or eat something.
Every morning, we can work on a newspaper report and circle words that have a given letter combination, for example "er." In order to prevent repetition in terms of content, reports should vary, and so should letter combinations.
After 10 minutes, the brain will be fully loaded in terms of its productivity, Lehrl says.
Another exercise involves thinking about simple words and mentally turning them around. At the beginning, the words should not be longer than five letters. "Light" should thus be transformed into "Thgil." That trains the brain's main memory, the most important for human beings.
These exercises allow us to process information faster and to increase our memory span, which is the number of details we can hold in our heads at the same time.
Physical fitness also plays a role when it comes to staying on top of things mentally, Lehrl says. We should not eat too much sugar or fat, and we should move enough. We can get off the bus one stop earlier on the way to work and take a fast walk, climb stairs or ride a bicycle.
Moving allows us to think faster, which holds true even for actions like chewing gum.
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