Neuroscience just showed how 1 type of activity stops your brain from aging

How can you keep your brain agile and young throughout your life, even as you get older? By spending time on creative pursuits as often as you can. That’s the fascinating finding of a study by researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile and Trinity College in Ireland, among others.

As the study’s authors note, earlier studies have shown a connection between creative activities such as playing a musical instrument and improved brain health. They wanted to know just how creativity affects brain health. So they first recruited more than 1,200 healthy people as controls, and then compared them with 1,467 research participants who spent at least some of their time in creative pursuits. This included dancers, musicians, visual artists, and strategy-based gamers. (Real-time strategy-based games are complex and involve creativity.)

Using EEG readings, they determined each participant’s “brain age gap,” the difference between their chronological age and the apparent age of the participant’s brain. What they found was that creative people across all disciplines had younger brains than their noncreative peers. Dancers had some of the youngest brains compared with their actual ages. This isn’t surprising since previous research has consistently shown that strenuous physical activity also slows brain aging. This means that dancing, which is physically strenuous as well as creative, packs a double dose of brain health. Strategic gamers had the smallest brain age gap, though they still saw benefits.

The researchers also discovered that those who were most expert in their respective creative areas saw the greatest brain benefit. And they found that connections within the brain that typically deteriorate with aging were stronger in these creative types.

“We tend to treat creativity as a luxury”

What does all this mean to you? If your current work involves a lot of creativity, that’s good news. Chances are it’s benefiting your brain and helping you stay mentally young. But whether your work is creative in itself or not, it also means that you should make time in your week for your own creative activities. “We tend to treat creativity as a luxury after the ‘real work’ is done,” writes Karen E. Todd, a registered dietitian who writes the Feed Your Brain blog for Psychology Today. Instead, she writes, we should prioritize our creative practices the same way we prioritize sleep, because both are essential for keeping our brains young.

Even 10 minutes of creative activity can make a difference if you do it every day, she writes. And, as the study shows, the more time you spend on it, and the more expert you become, the greater that benefit will be.

So pick up a paintbrush, guitar, camera, or notebook. Dive into a complex creativity-boosting game either online or in real life. Or put on your dancing shoes and sign up for tango lessons. Whatever you choose, make sure it’s something you enjoy, so that you are happy to make time for it and stick with it. Your brain will be happy you did.

There’s a growing audience of Inc.com readers who receive a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or tip. Often, they text me back and we wind up in a conversation. (Want to know more? Here’s some information about the texts and a special invitation to a two-month free trial.) Many of my subscribers are entrepreneurs or business leaders. They know how important it is for all of us to keep our brains as young as possible throughout our lives. Getting creative can be a fun way to do that. Should you give it a try?

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