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How often have you heard the saying “healthy mind, healthy body”? It speaks both to the impact your physical health can have on your mental acuity and the impact mental issues such as stress and depression can have on the body. The response to this is usually to focus on diet and exercise, but what about the mind? Just like your biceps and glutes, the brain is a muscle that needs to be trained to become stronger, healthier, and improve function.
To work your mental muscles, you need to think about brain training, also known as cognitive training. Brain training activities are designed to flex your cognitive muscles to improve memory, attention, executive function, reasoning, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving skills. Like the best athletic training, the best brain training activities should be regular, increase in intensity as your ability improves, and results should be measurable over time.
While brain training is important for everyone, it can be especially crucial for remote workers and digital nomads who lack the structure and focus provided by dedicated office space. The need to jump in and out of tasks in changing environments, fit in work with other activities, and adapt to new environments full of distractions can all be made more manageable through brain training.
Benefits of Brain Training
While there are many benefits to brain training, including increased memory, improved mood, and shorter reaction times, some of the biggest benefits for digital nomads and remote workers include:
Boost Productivity: Improve focus and task efficiency
Brain training can boost productivity, making it easier to complete tasks faster and often better. Improved focus allows you to stay on task for longer with fewer distractions that pull you out of “the zone,” required for deep work. Better memory and problem-solving skills make it easier to pull together the pieces you need and reform them into something meaningful for your purposes. Quicker and more confident decision-making skills mean less time lost to doubt and indecision.
Enhance Adaptability: Handle unexpected challenges with ease
The ability to adapt to unexpected challenges, whether they be professional problems or issues related to travel, location, and culture, is essential, especially for digital nomads. Brain training can help improve cognitive flexibility, which makes it easier to think outside the box and come up with new and creative solutions. It can also improve stress management, which makes it easier to keep a level head to make smart decisions in stressful situations.
Reduce Stress: Build mental resilience for work-life balance
One of the main killers of productivity and creativity is stress, as it reduces the effectiveness of our decision-making, makes it harder to imagine possibilities and opportunities beyond the obvious, and can undermine focus and concentration. The improved stress management that comes with brain training can reduce the impact of all these stressors. People who engage in brain training also often display increased confidence and motivation, making them more resilient and adaptable.
Prevent Burnout: Recharge mentally and sustain energy levels
The digital nomad lifestyle is often a work-hard, play-hard lifestyle as you balance keeping up with deadlines and career goals while enjoying wherever you are. Both digital nomads and remote workers can also struggle to “switch off” at the end of the workday as the divide between “work time” and “personal time” becomes blurred. This is all a recipe for burnout. Brain training has been shown to help people better maintain their mental energy levels and draw clearer boundaries for a more balanced work-life dynamic.
Online Tools for Brain Training
If we accept the benefits of brain training, the next question is how to train your brain. There are many different options. Everything from doing a jigsaw puzzle to engaging in Tai Chi can work the brain. But now that neuroscientists are gaining a deeper understanding of how to train the brain, there are several excellent apps out there that can be used as both training tools and to track your progress. Here are our top picks.
Lumosity
Lumosity is a set of neuroscience-based games designed to work memory, attention, and problem-solving. It takes tasks that have been tested in the lab and makes them into fun games, with different levels for different brains. The app also interprets your results and offers actionable feedback to improve your cognitive abilities.
Lumosity offers a free membership with access to a limited number of games, and subscriptions then start from US$59.99 per year.
Elevate
Elevate offers more than 40 games that are skilled-focused and designed to boost productivity, self-confidence, and specific skills such as writing and math. As you train, the app adapts to your skill, always productively pushing against your current limits. There are also built-in tools to measure your performance in different skill areas.
Elevate offers a seven-day free trial, after which US customers can expect to pay US$9.99 per month or US$39.99 per year. Costs differ depending on region.
BrainHQ
BrainHQ from Posit Science offers specialized exercises for memory, attention, brain speed, people skills, decision-making, and navigation. The training program they offer is the culmination of 30 years of research into neuroplasticity, so they can offer fun games that learn from you and are never too hard or too easy. Choose between short 5-minute bitesize sessions and longer training sessions, depending on what suits you.
BrainHQ starts from US$8 per month and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee if you don’t enjoy the program.
Peak
Peak Brain Training offers gamified challenges that test and improve focus, memory, problem-solving, and mental agility. You are taken through your activities by a personalized AI coach who tracks your progress and provides motivation. The games have been developed by big names in cognitive science at Cambridge, Yale, UCL, and King’s College London, making it a top pick for British brain trainers.
There is a free version of Peak, but to unlock all the benefits you will need a Pro pan, starting at US$4.99 per month.
Duolingo
While Duolingo is not specifically a brain training app, learning a new language is one of the best brain training exercises and one that travelers will appreciate. You can learn more than 30 languages with bite-size lessons that accumulate language knowledge organically.
The free version of Duolingo works well, though it limits your daily lessons when you get questions wrong. The paid version starts from US$47.99 per year.
How to Incorporate Brain Training into Your Routine
Just like exercise, brain training requires consistency to see gains. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long, you can see the benefits with just 10-15 minutes a day 5-7 days a week. You can also do the work on your smartphone or computer, so there is no need for special gear or a trip to the gym.
Despite being relatively accessible with few barriers, many people struggle to make brain training a habit. Here are a few tips for integrating brain training into your schedule.
- Only commit to 10-15 minutes when you are just starting. While you may want to do more, taking on too much at the beginning will make you more likely to quit if you don’t manage to fit it in.
- Schedule a regular time each day when you know you have the time and few distractions. Doing things at the same time and in place each day is one of the keys to forming an automatic habit that will lead you to reach for your brain training app without even thinking about it.
- Reward yourself when you complete a session. Another key to building habits is rewards, as the brain’s desire to stimulate the reward center will subconsciously motivate you to commit to a habit. The reward can also be small. Often the points and stars you can earn in brain training apps are enough. But if you need more, make your daily cup of coffee or sweet treat as your post-training reward.
- Give yourself consequences if you miss a session, but don’t beat yourself up. If you miss a session after a two-week run, you aren’t starting from day one. You are still doing great!
Start Training Your Brain
Cognitive health is important to everyone, but actively working to improve your brain health can be especially important for digital nomads who often lack stability and routine, must constantly switch between tasks, and must adapt to new environments and challenges regularly. But brain training won’t just help you in the short term as you try and juggle the challenges of work and travel. It is an effective tool for long-term brain health in older age.
While research can detect the effects of brain training on individuals after just five weeks, most studies suggest that it takes three to six months for an individual to start identifying and feeling the benefits of brain training. Of course, this means the sooner you start, the sooner you will see results.
Research also suggests that brain training works best as part of an overall healthy lifestyle, which in addition to diet and exercise means getting enough sleep, and reducing stress by taking regular work breaks and calming the mind through practices such as yoga and meditation.
