Ways to Improve Your Problem Solving Skills
There are people in the world who seem to have no issues with solving problems. Any problem that comes their way they can look at it and come up with a solution effortlessly. For many others, finding themselves faced with a problem can be a catastrophe. If you happen to be one of them, don’t despair. It is possible to significantly improve your abilities in this area. Many of the ideas that follow you’ll laugh at. However, give them a try because they are designed to help you devise more strategic ways of thinking and train your brain to engage more.
Get a Good Night’ Sleep
Your body goes through various sleeping and awake states, but it is Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep which directly enhances the creative processing in the brain. It stimulates associative networks and allows the brain to make new and useful associations. There are various strategies you can try to help you get a better night’s sleep.
Give Your Brain a Workout
Your brain requires exercise just as much as the rest of your body. How do you do that? By playing games which require mental agility such as chess, Sudoku, Rubik’s Cube or other brain-boosting games. An Escape Room is another way in which you can exercise your problem-solving skills, by cracking codes, solving puzzles and following clues to help you escape your adventure of choice.
Keep an Idea Journal
This is somewhere you can quickly record important thoughts, personal experiences and explore ideas. It is especially effective if you keep it with you at all times. Rather than having all your thoughts rattling around in your head, sorting them on paper will help you to work out problems. This is because you’ll be viewing them objectively.
Yoga
This is a form of exercise that combines body awareness, breathing, and meditation. These three features have been shown to significantly increase cognitive test scores. Other studies have shown improvements in reaction times, more accuracy and increased attention. You can practice it at home, with the help of an app, or look for yoga classes in your neighborhood.
Use Mind Maps
Using mind maps allows you to create a visual snapshot of a problem and its possible solutions. It also focuses the mind, stimulates the brain, increases its capacity for creative thinking and generates more ideas. Your problem is drawn as the central idea of your Mind Map, with main branches for all the reasons for the problem. Sub-branches are used to explore further details.
A couple more ideas to inspire you to include dancing your heart out. Dancing has a positive impact on neural processing. It is thought it can help to develop new neural pathways to go around dopamine-depleted blockages in the brain. Work out to some tunes is another idea work mentioning. Studies have shown that listening to music when working out stimulates and increases cognitive arousal and helps organize cognitive output. There are plenty more things you can try. There are even problem-solving workshops and courses for those of you who are really serious about improving this skill.