8 cognitive stimulation exercises for seniors

Several exercises to cushion the deterioration of cognitive functions in older people.

As happens with our physical capacity or performance, as the years go by, our psychological abilities decline due to the neuronal degeneration that comes with age. If we add to this the possibility of suffering a neurodegenerative disease, these functions are even more affected.

With the intention of delaying or delaying this cognitive deterioration over time, experts in the field of neurology have devised a series of exercises for cognitive stimulation. a series of cognitive stimulation exercisesthat can help people maintain or improve their mental abilities.

What does cognitive stimulation consist of?

Cognitive stimulation exercises consist of a series of tasks or activities designed to protect, maintain or even improve cognitive functions, which tend to worsen over the years.

To do this, the mental health expert can design a structured stimulation program that is adapted to the person's needs and through activities that exercise functions such as memory, attention, perception, concentration, language production and executive functions, the person can enhance or maintain their cognitive functions "in shape", as well as slow cognitive decline caused by age or neurodegenerative disease..

As we age, our bodies change and degenerate. This degeneration, which takes place very slowly and progressively, affects both our physical and psychological capacities and intensifies with the onset of any form of neurodegenerative disease.

In neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementias like Alzheimer's, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Huntington's and Parkinson's diseases or Friedreich's ataxias, they cause the progressive death of neuronal tissue, which leads to This leads to adverse consequences for both the physical health and cognitive functioning of the individual..

In these specific cases, although cognitive stimulation exercises cannot halt the progression of the disease, to some extent they can slow it down, and also help the person to lead a life that is as independent as possible.

In order to carry out this cognitive stimulation effectively, the functions that the person still retains must be encouraged or enhanced, since if we try to recover a function that has completely disappeared, the only thing we can achieve is to increase the patient's frustration levels.

If, on the other hand, we exercise the functions that are still active, in addition to regenerating or enhancing the functioning of these abilities, we will also improve the patient's self-esteem, the patient's self-esteem and sense of self-efficacy will also improve.This will be reflected as an improvement in the patient's quality of life.

In order to create a program that is best suited to the specific needs of the individual, before starting treatment, the practitioner should carry out an assessment of the patient's cognitive abilities and then set goals and design a program to achieve them.

In which cases can it be practiced?

The design of cognitive stimulation exercise programs are designed to intervene and act on the usual demands or needs that usually appear over the years or with the onset of a neurodegenerative disease.

The most common cases that require this type of activities include:

• Prevention of cognitive degeneration..
• Memory alterations, losses and forgetfulness.
• Slowing down the development of dementias in mild or early stages.
• Problems in executive functions.
• Prevention of falls, improvement of motor coordination and praxias.
• Alteration of spatial-temporal orientation.
• Maintenance of language and communication skills.
• Promoting alertness and reasoning. and reasoning.
• Maintenance of visoperceptive, visuospatial and visoconstructive functions.
• Cognitive symptomatology of depressive disorders.
• Cognitive stimulation exercises.

There are an infinite number of games, tasks or activities that can serve as cognitive stimulation exercises.. Although some of them are traditional games, commonly associated with agility training or mental skills, many others have been specially created for this purpose.

Among some of these activities we find:

1. Reading and writing exercises

The simple fact of maintaining some reading habits, as well as writing in a diary or transcribing some texts, can help to protect and creativity and attention, as well as working on memory processes.as well as working on memory processes.

2. Traditional board games

Some traditional board games such as Parcheesi, cards or dominoes, besides favoring social interactions, have a lot of benefits when it comes to training cognitive skills, have a great number of benefits when it comes to training cognitive skills..

Some of the functions or skills exercised are attention and concentration, working memory and short-term memory or critical thinking and flexibility of thought, since it is necessary to change strategies as the game progresses.

3. Drawing and painting

In addition to being a very relaxing activity, drawing and painting exercises exercise creativity and concentration and are also very motivating for the person.

4. Crossword puzzles, Sudoku and word search puzzles

The main advantage of this type of activities is that they are practically infinite, this means that the person can increase the level of difficulty of the exercises. can increase the level of difficulty of the exercises and thus develop more and more and thus develop more and more aspects such as perception, memory processes, logic and deductive analysis, planning strategies, working memory, coordination and patience.

5. Tangram

The tangram is a traditional game of Chinese origin in which by rearranging geometric pieces, the person must manage to form a series of pre-established shapes.

Thanks to this original game, the person can exercise skills such as the skills such as visuo-perceptive ability, visuo-spatial orientation, attention and concentration, abstraction capacity, abstraction ability, visual and spatial orientation, attention and concentrationabstraction capacity, cognitive flexibility, creativity and motor skills.

6. Exercise: How many are there?

In this game, the patient is presented with a series of geometrical shapesThe student is then asked to count how many geometric shapes there are in total. The child is then asked to count how many geometric figures there are in total.

With this activity, attention and concentration, visual-perceptual capacity, planning and perseverance are strengthened.

7. Exercise: "The word finder".

In this activity the person is asked to create new words from a list of words already given. Thanks to this activity we can exercise our attention attention span, the ability to plan and reading skills or those associated with lexical and lexical or associated with the lexicon and vocabulary.

8. Exercise: "Hundred grid".

In general, all mathematical activities can be useful for exercising cognitive functions. In the "Hundred Grid" exercise, the person is presented with a grid of numbers from one to one hundred and is asked to perform a series of operations with them.

Through this and other mathematical exercises, attention and concentration skills, visuoperceptive capacity, calculation and cognitive flexibility are exercised.