As we age, we may need more stimulation in our life to keep our brains healthy. While we often associate brain health with recall challenges and dementia, there’s a lot more to it!
Just as it is important to keep our bodies strong with physical exercise, we have to work our brains out too, stimulating them every day to keep them working like a well-oiled machine. The good news is that it’s a lot easier to give our minds a workout than it is our bodies. There is no need to work up a sweat, our senior loved ones don’t need special gear or expensive equipment, and they don’t need a professional trainer. All that’s required is a comfortable chair, a sharpened pencil and an armload of puzzle books, or a computer or smart phone.
Great Mind-Sharpening Games for Seniors:
Trivia
An excellent way to dust off your recall skills is to take a deep dive into long forgotten or often overlooked details of history, pop culture and general knowledge. Trivia games come in many forms, ranging from online tests of skill you can play by yourself or matched against a random opponent, to multi-player trivia games that allow you to match wits with family members during boisterous game nights.
Word Searches
Found online, in magazines, or in puzzle booklets, word searches are excellent for honing concentration and focus. Usually, these puzzles are based on a theme and that topic can help revive memories and stoke the imagination of our senior loved ones as they play.
Crossword Puzzles
What a cross-training workout is for the body, crossword puzzles are for the brain. These popular games for seniors test their memory, vocabulary skills, thought processing skills, and executive function abilities, according to a study featured on Harvard Health Publishing. The testing found that 37 percent of senior citizens who did crossword puzzles for four 30-minute sessions a week saw their cognitive skills improve two points on a 70-point scale. On average, participants improved one point in their score over 12 weeks of doing crossword puzzles. The same study found that the hippocampus and the cortex — the parts of the brain responsible for memory and for thinking which typically shrink as we age — decreased less in regular crossword solvers than in people who didn’t do crosswords.
Scrabble
Similar to crosswords, Scrabble or other online games for seniors like Words with Friends, test our memory, vocabulary, strategic decision making and other skills. But they take things to the next level of cognitive processing because you’re not given clues. Instead, players must sort through their randomly assigned letters to make the longest, most valuable words they can come up with without prompts.
Card Games
Like crosswords, card games stimulate the brain in many ways, requiring players to think about strategy and use their memory. A great benefit to playing cards is that there is a fun and challenging game available for all experience and skill levels. Inexperienced players can quickly learn how to play simple games like Go Fish and Solitaire, while more advanced players often choose to play Gin Rummy, Poker, Bridge, Cribbage or Canasta with friends or family members as part of a regular social gathering.
Bingo
Bingo is a popular game among seniors because it offers the opportunity to gather socially and enjoy good company, tasty food, and an entertaining time all at once. Bingo is proof that having fun can be good for you! The game, which consists of trying to cover numbers on a bingo card, requires players to exercise their concentration and listening skills to complete the objective.
Sudoku
Take the benefits of word games but swap the vocabulary for math and you’ve got Sudoku! Sodoku is a puzzle game that challenges players to fill in the blanks to arrange numbers on a grid in a way that uses each numeral from 1-9 to make a pattern. Soduku is fun for all ages and all skill levels, and you can find puzzles that are easy enough to keep beginners interested and difficult enough to challenge the most experienced and skilled players.
Board Games
Old classics like checkers, chess, backgammon, and countless others are fantastic options for seniors because they all require strategic thinking and focus to play. They’re also desirable because they offer a fantastic opportunity for a gathering with family or friends.
Find Your New Favorite Game!
All the games for seniors listed above offer a variety of benefits but, much like with exercising our bodies, it’s not always about what you do as much as it is about that you do something at all! Besides, if we do one thing too often, eventually, we’re going to become bored. So, it’s best if your senior loved one shakes things up and incorporates several different games they enjoy into their weekly routine to keep things interesting.
We’re more likely to keep up a good habit if we enjoy what we’re doing, so let your elderly parent be the one who chooses the game they want to play and whether they want to play it alone or in a group setting. When it comes to maintaining cognitive skills and sharpening seniors’ minds, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose as long as you play the game!
Uncover new ways to improve your cognitive health on Bethesda’s Health & Wellness blog.
