Your intellectual growth is crucial to maintaining a sharpened focus, a sound memory, and the ability for critical thinking. It is something that must be nurtured from a young age to old age in order to think with clarity and sound judgment. Intellectual wellness is to the mind as important as physical wellness is to the body. People need to maintain both to live their best lives.
Intellectual wellness can be defined as actively working toward an optimal intellectual state. This doesn’t mean that you need to generate the brain power to become the next Albert Einstein or pay off a billion dollars in student loans trying to become the world’s next polymath. Rather, it’s about thinking critically, being open to new ideas, expanding your knowledge base, and even working toward better understanding other people’s perspectives. There are lots of ways to navigate your intellectual growth.
Read Books
Reading is one of the most traditional and authentic ways that people gather information. It is also one of the most common habits shared by successful people. Reading improves focus, communication skills, memory, and even empathy. Whether you’re dealing with fiction, nonfiction or even trying to decipher a set of instructions, taking information from the page to the brain is challenging.
Reading can also improve your mental state and reduce stress. Of course, it also helps you to learn new things that can help you to succeed in work, relationships, hobbies, or other aspects of your life. You might consider choosing things to read that challenge your worldview or that can expand your experience and knowledge. This could be the morning newspaper or War and Peace.
Exercise
Exercising is one of the important companions to intellectual development. It helps the brain as much as it helps the body. Researchers have found that aerobic exercise appears to boost the size of the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain associated with verbal memory and learning.
Studies also show that exercise stimulates the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which supports the growth of new connections in the brain. Investing in a few hours of exercise every week can enhance your learning, sharpen your memory, and improves overall health.
Be Social
Human beings are hardwired for connection. Spending time around other people is not only a way to boost your happiness quotient, but it also necessarily forces you to expand your worldview by experiencing different perspectives.
The deeper the connections, the better. When you surround yourself with a network of friends, family, and acquaintances who will challenge your ideas and help you to develop new ones, your brain benefits. The scenarios can be anything that you like, from cooking classes to hiking to joining a trivia league.
Be Curious
Curiosity defines a person’s intellectual ceiling. When you run up against something that challenges you, do you give up or do you remain curious? If you remain curious, you strive to solve the problem, learning about yourself, about the process and about the particular problem to overcome.
Google is the perfect tool for the curious mind. The next time you hear something that is being presented as a fact, check it out yourself. The more you know about a thing, the better prepared you are to engage in a discussion about it.
Curiosity can also yield achievements on the artistic front. If you want to learn how to write a poem, you can simply study a poetic technique, view some examples and then try your hand at it. The same could be said for painting, cooking or any other intellectual endeavor.
When it comes to navigating your intellectual growth, be careful not to get pigeonholed into a purely academic scenario. While diving into academia can be fulfilling and incredibly enriching, whether you’re studying Shakespeare or pi, don’t eschew the rest of the world. Cognitive and intellectual development is as broad as you’d like it to be. By focusing on how the brain changes to meet the needs of a given scenario, you are effectively stretching its capabilities.