If you want to keep your memory as you age, if you want to stay independent and if you want to stay active, then listen up. All this is possible only if possess a healthy brain right to the day you pass.

In this article, I'll introduce you to 4 crucial tips on how you can maintain your brain health, or even potentially reverse some cognitive problems. These tips are supported by years of scientific research though unfortunately, most people simply don't care.

With that said, let's get started with tip number 1.

1. You have to break out of the one problem one cure mindset perpetrated by conventional medicine. If you have brain problem, the cause may not be in your brain - it maybe due to an imbalance in your body.

The body acts as a whole - thus a healthy diet that is beneficial not just to your brain, but to your whole body is crucial for staying mentally active.

2. Stress causes the release of a hormone called cortisol. This reaction makes sense only when you look at it from an evolutionary viewpoint.

Imagine our ancestors facing a tiger (a form of stress). Cortisol increases heart rate and blood pressure, allowing us to be alert, ready for fight or flight. This is crucial to survival, but it does so at a cost.

Unlike our ancestors who are under stress for short periods of time (the scenario above would be over in 3 minutes or so - either you're dead or you escape), we are constantly under a lot of stress.

Cortisol keeps up alert by exciting brain cells - but these brain cells die after the excitement is over. Thus some studies show people who are under constant pressure possesses lower amounts of brain cells and have difficulty with several brain functions.

3. Remember how anything that benefits your body as a whole benefits your brain also? One of these things is physical exercise. Exercise increases blood flow to your brain and thus let it perform optimally.

Exercising also releases a plethora of hormones and neurotransmitters that reduces stress, keeps up you euphoric and allow you to relax. It looks as if your brain is trying to make you addicted to exercising.

Plus, exercising challenges your motor cortex, the part of your brain responsible for movement, and thus keeps you physically independent as you age.

4. Other than physical exercises, there are also brain exercises that you can do. Brain exercises train a more specific function of your brain - for example, auditory and visual processing.

As your auditory processing capability increases, you can listen and remember verbal facts better. You also react to verbal stimulus faster than you would have otherwise. The same is true as you visual processing capability increases.

Brain exercises especially useful, even crucial, if you are looking to reverse any types of cognitive diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer's.