You’ve got a spare 5 minutes before your next meeting: what do you do? Check your email? Scroll through a social feed? Head online to catch up with the news?
Or do you use this bit of extra downtime to boost your brain, productivity, and performance?
Just like any other muscle in the body, the brain needs to be worked, challenged, and kept active to achieve peak performance.
Those few minutes between your regularly scheduled programming can do wonders for your cognitive function. Here are some quick and easy exercises you can try.
1. Do a Crossword Puzzle
Solving a crossword puzzle is a great test for your vocabulary and general knowledge. It also challenges your memory and your ability to link pieces of information together.
“These features mean that crossword puzzles cause large areas of your cortex to be active and stimulate new connections in your brain,” explains Dr. Andrew E. Budson “The hippocampus will then remember those new connections,” which strengthens your brain.
The NYT Crosswords are a great place to start.
2. Solve a Visual Puzzle
Solving visual puzzles works the parts of your brain related to visual processing, spatial reasoning, and problem-solving.
Jigsaw puzzles in particular have been shown to help stave off cognitive decline in older people. Spending some time with a spot the difference, maze, or hidden object puzzle are a couple of examples. There are millions of puzzles available online through apps and websites like Jigsaw Planet.
And don’t worry if you don’t get it done in 5 minutes – often, solving a puzzle is like having an epiphany. Do as much as you can and when you come back to it later, the solution may present itself.
3. Learn a New Language
Research has shown that learning another language can boost cognitive function in multiple ways. Spending just 5 minutes on an app like Duolingo or listening to a language learning podcast can not only help you develop a valuable skill but can also improve your brainpower.
If you picked up 5 words a day, you’d have over 1,800 in a year – more than enough to cover the basics of many languages.
4. Count Backward
Focus exercises are designed to help you increase your ability to concentrate on a particular task. A simple one is to count backward from 100 – once you’re confident with that, try making it trickier by skipping numbers.
5. Do a Logic Puzzle
Logical thinking enables you to analyze situations thoroughly and identify likely solutions based on the data you have. Logic puzzles also encourage you to adopt a more flexible and objective mindset.
Here’s a list of 12 to get you started.
6. Find Alternate Uses
Pick an everyday object like a paperclip and then try to think of as many possible uses for it as you can in 2 minutes. Don’t worry if they’re a bit outlandish, that’s all part of it.
This is the Alternate Uses exercise, designed to stimulate your brain into divergent thinking (your ability to come up with lots of possible ideas).
7. Sketch Something
Doing a quick sketch activates many different parts of your brain. As well as using your motor skills to put pen to paper, you’re using visualizing techniques, memory, and reasoning skills to decide how best to reproduce the subject.
As the authors of a meta-analysis of the neural basis of drawing explain: “In contrast to simple motor tasks, drawing implies complex integration of a series of systems to transform a mental representation into a series of motor commands.”
If you need a prompt, try drawing one of the items on your desk.
8. Stretch
Doing some exercise will activate different regions of your brain and get more oxygenated blood flowing, enabling you to function more effectively. And because one of the biggest factors influencing brain health is physical health, doing this regularly could also help to improve and safeguard your cognitive functioning in the long term.
9. Use Your Non-dominant Hand
Try eating a snack, writing a memo, or doodling with the hand you wouldn’t usually use. While there are currently no scientifically backed advantages to being ambidextrous, neuroscientist David Eagleman believes that using your non-dominant hand for everyday activities like brushing your teeth is still worthwhile as it switches up your routine and presents your brain with a novel challenge.
10. Do a Number Puzzle
Number puzzles, like sudokus, are often touted as one of the best ways to keep your brain limber. Like crossword and jigsaw puzzles, they have been shown to improve cognitive functioning in older people. They are a test for your working memory, visual processing, and logical thinking skills.
There are plenty of sites with unlimited free sudoku puzzles you can play during your free time.
11. Try a Recall Test
Are you someone who struggles with memory? Use AI or a word generator to get a list of unconnected words, then try to commit them to memory. To help, Dr. Gary Small recommends creating a story that links them together. You could also use the memory palace technique and imagine them in a familiar location.
Take another 5 minutes later in the day and see how many words from the list you can recall.
12. Play “Guess the Song”
Who remembers Heardle? Music trivia games like this (which give you a snippet of a song and ask you to identify it) gently stretch those parts of your brain that handle auditory processing and memory.
Listening to the track in full (whether you guess right or not) could also give you a boost as staff at the Johns Hopkins Medical School explain that music provides a “total brain workout.”
13. Meditate
A 5-minute meditation or mindfulness exercise might not seem like much but, if you do it regularly, it could make a big difference to your brain. Meditation, the act of training your awareness for a clearer mental state, has been shown to promote growth in the hippocampus, improve focus, and rewire stress pathways.
Bonus if you can do this outdoors and get the added creative benefits of nature for the brain.
14. Practice Constrained Writing
Whether you’re responding to a message from a friend or doing some journaling, give yourself a challenge of writing it in under 5 minutes. Or to make it even more fun, try imposing a strict wordcount, write without using the letter E, or create an acrostic (where the first letter of each line spells something out).
Constraints like this force you to abandon your habitual ways of thinking and engage the parts of your brain related to problem-solving.
15. Practice Visualization
If there’s a skill you’re trying to master or a goal you want to achieve, spend 5 minutes picturing yourself doing just that. Visualizing an action activates the parts of the brain that would be activated if you were performing it, allowing you to rehearse and strengthen the relevant pathways.
Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart explains that visualizing can also help to direct your selective attention, ensuring that your brain focuses on things that will help you achieve your goals.
16. Have a Conversation
Having a conversation with your co-workers might not sound like a brain exercise but it could be doing more good than you realize.
According to the Harvard Health blog: “Socializing can stimulate attention and memory and help to strengthen neural networks. You may just be laughing and talking, but your brain is hard at work.”
17. Reminisce
Neurologist Richard Restak believes you can improve your ability to recall memories stored in your long-term memory by using reminiscence exercises.
He suggests picking a year, then calling to mind where you were and what you did at that time. Then, branch out and try to remember notable events in the wider world that happened during that period.
18. Stimulate Your Senses
Stimulating your senses has been shown to benefit retention when learning as more regions of your brain are involved in creating the memory. So, if you’re spending 5 minutes on language learning or on working on your recall, try introducing a sensory element to enhance your performance – such as lighting a candle, eating a snack, or using sounds or fragrances associated with the topic you’re learning about.
A Creative Boost for the Different Parts of Your Brain
Whether you want to improve your memory, think more logically, or develop skills related to creative problem-solving, try slotting a few simple brain exercises into your day. The more you engage in brain-stretching exercise, the more your cognitive function, productivity, and performance will improve.
According to neuroscientists, variety in itself is very beneficial for brain health. So don’t just limit yourself to one or two from this list: try as many as you can and see what happens.
