Elderly Care Observances: International Brain Teaser Month

Elderly Care in Sewickley PA

Keeping your parent’s mind sharp and engaged is an important part of your elderly care journey because it helps to ward off memory loss, slowed thought processing, reduced recall, and other forms of cognitive decline, and supports ongoing health, wellbeing, and quality of life. January is International Brain Teaser Month, the perfect opportunity for you to explore fun and engaging ways to keep your parents’ brains healthy and active throughout their aging years.
Perfect for doing on their own, with you, or with their elderly health care services provider, brain teasers are all about working their minds in a unique way that it usually does not work. Exactly like doing physical activity works the muscles and joints in ways that they usually do not work in normal day-to-day life in order to strengthen, condition, and improve them, working the mind is critical to keeping it strong and preventing the decline that can happen with inactivity.
 
Some of the types of brain teasers that you can enjoy with your loved ones throughout International Brain Teaser Month and the rest of the year include:
• Sudoku. Brain teasers and puzzles often rely on various different elements of thought such as reading comprehension, memory, and even emotional responses to the information presented in the puzzle. Sudoku puzzles are completely numerical, meaning they do not have any words and can only be approached in one way. Whether it is the simplest version or the most elaborate a complex, Sudoku has the goal of arranging the digits from 1 to 9 in blocks within a square in a way that they coordinate with all of the other squares in the board so that all vertical and horizontal lines contain all of the digits.
• Logic puzzles. Logic puzzles often remind people of the word problems that they encountered in school. These are a fantastic way to work their memory skills, cognitive processing skills, critical thinking skills, and problem solving skills through realistic situations. You must read through clues and use the information in them to determine how the different characteristics within the puzzle go together. These can be extremely challenging and require complex thinking.
• Seek and find books. For seniors with cognitive limitations that make more complex brain teasers too challenging, or for those who are not engaged by logic or Sudoku-style puzzles, seek and find books are mentally stimulating in a more relaxed, approachable way. Like other puzzles, these come in a range of difficulty from very simple to extremely challenging, making them perfect for your seniors whether they want to do something on their own or would rather enjoy an activity with you or their senior health care services provider. They simply look at an image and go through a list of objects to find within that image much like a scavenger hunt.
• Mystery books. People love mysteries but most of the time they are watching them on television or reading novels and all of the figuring-out is done for them. Mystery books offer the fun and engagement of a mystery but with the opportunity to find and evaluate clues, make guesses, and figure things out as you read, which encourages critical thinking, memory, and problem solving.
 
If you or an aging loved one are considering elderly care services in Sewickley, PA, please contact the friendly staff at Liken Home Care.  Call (412) 693-6820 or (855) 856-0551