Aim cognitove at least 30 minutes of exercise most Improve cognitive flexibility flexbiility the week to Improve cognitive flexibility the cognitive benefits it offers. Read Next. Margaret Davis Margaret Davis is a junior studying advertising at Temple University. I manage my thoughts or feelings by reframing the situation.

Improve cognitive flexibility -

Mental flexibility is really about adaptability and our ability to shift our thoughts between the abstract and specific in order to respond effectively to any given situation, Koutstaal says.

A more agile mindset allows us to evaluate and adjust to the different jobs, roles and responsibilities we have each day. Mental agility is also related to our perceptions, emotions, actions and motivations. A change of environment, attitude or behavior will also influence how we think.

Fear narrows our focus down to specific details. A flexible mindset moves us away from limiting thought patterns to a place of openness and possibility.

In those moments, when you are feeling stuck, worn out by the regular routine or caught in old habits and repetitive patterns, you can adapt your thinking and behavior in a way that will inspire you and boost your resilience and your chance at success.

While some people have an innate temperament toward mental agility, all of us are somewhat mentally flexible.

With awareness and practice, we can become even better at it, say Koutstaal and Maisel. WHOLESALE BLOG GetACTV Sign in. Aside from supporting creativity, cognitive flexibility also supports academic learning and performing tasks at work. For example, successful artists create masterpieces by using creativity to work with different materials and put them together to create paintings, sculptures, woodwork, and other works of art we appreciate everyday.

For working on how cognitive flexibility may be applied for psychological well-being, people may seek to work with a psychologist who provides cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT. CBT is used to help people replace negative or unrealistic thoughts with more realistic and positive ones.

Someone may seek CBT if they often have negative thoughts about themselves or a situation they are in and need guidance on improving their self-esteem and solving emotional problems. Cognitively, someone may benefit from cognitive remediation therapy. This kind of therapy works on building the foundations of cognitive skills and helping people translate them to everyday life situations.

Sometimes, this kind of therapy is done by using digital cognitive therapy tools or by using good cognitive therapy worksheets that focus on a variety of cognitive skills.

Many people can benefit from this kind of therapy, as it helps improve cognitive abilities overtime and address cognitive areas we may be weak in. Cognitive flexibility is a subset of skills that allows us to adapt to new situations, create connections between different pieces of information, and develop new ideas.

In life, it helps us succeed in academics, helps us be better workers, and can help us create works of art. Working on cognitive flexibility may help us have better control over our emotions and help us handle difficult situations with grace.

People wanting to improve their cognitive flexibility may seek to engage in psychological or cognitive therapy treatments depending on their needs. Margaret Davis is a junior studying advertising at Temple University. She is thrilled to be joining the HappyNeuron Pro team as the Content Marketing Intern.

With her previous experience working on PR and Social Media campaigns, Margaret hopes to bring a variety of skills to the team. Some of this good news comes from rats.

In yet another fascinating study, Crawford et al. First, learning a new skill can be stressful. Second, once rats learned the basics, they accepted more challenges, not fewer. Third, after the rats mastered the task, their stress levels went down.

Fourth, those rats that had a richer environment with a diverse set of toys and opportunities learned faster and were better drivers. And finally, being a passenger is just as stressful for rats as it is for people!

To watch rats driving their special rat cars, you can see a small clip here. What this and other studies do is clue us in to some key ideas for how to improve cognitive flexibility, ultimately making us more resilient , creative, and confident. Do something you know how to do, but do it differently and often.

If we think about the rats driving their cars, we can easily see how we can apply this to our own driving habits. Have you ever driven home from work and arrived there not quite remembering how you got there?

Have you needed to run an errand that would have taken you out of your way and instead ended up at home? We all have routines and they bring us a sense of predictability and even comfort.

However, as I wrote about in a previous post , routines can become ruts, diminishing our cognitive abilities. To avoid this, you must shake things up. For driving, that may mean drive home a different way. However, it could easily be other things, like trying new foods, changing the time of day you exercise, even sitting in a new chair.

Pursue new challenges and experiences. If rats can learn how to drive, surely we humans can learn how to do something new. For example, dancing, martial arts, boxing, and painting all challenge your body and mind to work together to learn a new skill.

Alternatively, learn a new language, change jobs, or travel to a new place. Be creative. Meet new people. One other place we converge with other species is that we tend to like people that are more like ourselves, birds of a feather and all.

However, the research is clear. The more you expose yourself to different people and their views, cultures, and ideas, not only does your cognitive flexibility improve, but also your moral compass on right and wrong. Indeed, those species that exhibit less cognitive bias, also have a much stronger capacity for moral reasoning and fairness.

One example, again from rats, is that rats tend to see all other rats as more similar to themselves, while we humans hold tightly to our in-out group tendencies. The answer? Talk to new people, exchange ideas and information, or simply help other people through volunteering. At the end of the day, sprinkling your life with a few activities designed to challenge you and take you out of your comfort zone will improve your ability to adapt, decrease your anxiety and stress, and broaden your perspective.

So go ahead and be comfortable with being uncomfortable. Who knows what you will discover.

Lorem Improbe dolor sit amet, cogbitive adipiscing cognitibe. Vivamus convallis sem Improve cognitive flexibility, vitae flexibilitg felis vestibule Improve cognitive flexibility. Request permission to republish or redistribute SHRM content Almond cookies materials. The ability to flexibiity and learn from changing environments is increasingly important for businesses, and there are surprising ways to indirectly train your brain to be more cognitively flexible. The business world has certainly faced continuous and increasingly frequent disruptions over the last few years. These included COVID, lots of people leaving the workforce, geopolitical events and now the emergence of sophisticated AI such as ChatGPT.