Keep Yourself Busy to Boost Mental Health

When you find yourself sitting idly at home its very important to go around doing some household chores which is better than not doing anything as it mentally keeps you healthy and happy. All of us can start putting to practise ways to keep our mind busy and stay active. if you have a hobby, anything that you love doing like collecting stamps, reading books, interested in fashion or food, pursue it, start writing a blog, join a book club or just do something you love. Keeping yourself busy is the key to a healthy and happy mind.If you are a person who is over 50 and remain wearily busy.  Here is the good news. A new study says older adults with a busy daily lifestyle tend to have better mental functioning than their less busy peers.The findings at University of Texas in the US showed that at any age, and regardless of education, a busier lifestyle can lead to superior processing speed of the brain, working memory, reasoning, and vocabulary.

"We show that people who report greater levels of daily 'busyness' tend to have better cognition, especially with regard to memory for recently learned information," said lead author Sara Festini, postdoctoral researcher.

For the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, the team surveyed 330 healthy women and men between 50 and 89.

The participants took part in a long series of neuropsychological tests to measure their cognitive performance.

"Living a busy lifestyle appears beneficial for mental function, although additional experimental work is needed to determine if manipulations of busyness have the same effect," Festini noted.

Also, the busiest an individual is, the better can be his/her episodic memory -- the ability to remember specific events in the past.

Busy people are likely to have more opportunities to learn as they are exposed to more information and encounter a wider range of situations in daily life.

However, it is also possible that people with better mental functioning seek out a busier lifestyle, or that busyness and cognition reinforce each other, resulting in reciprocal strengthening, the researchers said.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)