Using the environment to recharge your brain is an easy way to stay cognitively fit even while traveling! Repetition, especially in mental tasks or high intensity career work, causes extreme mental fatigue so taking a nature break is a great idea. But a break doesn’t have to wait for the beach. Taking mental breaks from those things that stress us allows nature to expose us to sensory input from natural sources.

Using nature to help the brain and body recalibrate their sensory-processing capabilities helps us to understand that we can teach ourselves to do anything, under any conditions, but not indefinitely as we are still physical beings. The brain is housed in a body that is very much rooted in the physical world and the toll we take on our bodies and brain must be paid. Becoming better than we are requires that we take this into account and work with it, rather than seek to separate the brain and the body hoping that it would somehow learn to work differently. Work smarter not harder. Use the environment as an aid to your cognitive skills and abilities.

We hear about summer brain drain and the summer slide for kids who are out of school. In order to work positively to counteract this, we assume that means we need as much academic push as possible. What it actually means is that we need to pace our brains rather than stress and stop. Pacing allows our brains and bodies to develop a natural or automatic rhythm rather than the fight or flight of stress and anxiety. The pacing includes using time “off” to still challenge the mind and body in a lesser stressed way, but still building towards a goal. 

Be Focused, then Be Relaxed. This trains cognitive flexibility which is the top-rated skill employers hire for according to the Workplace survey. Find one point of interest to fully focus on and then deliberately begin ignoring parts of it. This allows creativity to flow stimulating different perspectives of vision and thought. Since we discussed being at the beach, try focusing on the horizon or the water and gradually start ignoring that which surrounds it until you are wholly focused to the details. Begin to let those details go one at a time. Therapists often use this technique to assist with pain management. If you can begin to focus on exactly where the pain is in your body, delving deep until you get to the exact point, you can often begin to release it, especially if it is nerve or muscle related. 

Downtime. Time to be without the stimulation of life is important and downtime can also be a time of boredom that stimulates creativity too. Each brain needs boredom or downtime without any stimulation to recharge. Even our devices need downtime and recharging so imagine how much more the brain needs this. Downtime can be taken in 5-minute increments or on a lovely vacation. But I have seen many people (including me) come back from a vacation in more stress and less rested than before because they did not truly take the time away. We all need downtime of complete disconnection from everything around us. Many times, we get this through naps or rest but making the time to manage your downtime is important to your brain. Brain dumping is extremely important to long term memory health. Whenever you take in a lot of information, it is important that you take time to brain dump that info in a manageable amount into your download memory bank. Research tells us that brain dumping should take place every 15-20 minutes and for young children even more often.

Even the simple pleasures of life, such as sitting down with your favorite TV drama, can help you get an hour of peace in the day. As streaming services become increasingly competitive and their content pool seems to shrink, finding a good provider for cable TV in your area can help you get back into some good old-fashioned TV watching, where you don’t have to constantly decide exactly what to spend your time on next.