Everyone is talking about their morning routine:

  • Wake up
  • Meditate
  • Read
  • Work-out
  • Journal
  • Plan your day

They are all the same and they all take about 2 hours to finish.

I’ve tried doing the whole list but I always end up rushing things just to get through them, it’s just too much.

Of course there are benefits that you get from meditation, reading, working out and I do these things but I like to spread them throughout the day.

But in the morning it is still important to activate our brains and bodies somehow.

Today we’re talking about the brain.

I’ve come up with a few mind games or brain teasers that I use to quickly activate my brain in the morning and they are kind of fun and challenging to do.

They take no more than 5 minutes to complete but they activate multiple areas of your brain: numerical, linguistic, memory and creativity.

And since they are totally mental you can do them while getting dressed up, brushing your teeth or even sitting on the toilet.

Count backwards from 100

Starting off with the easiest one. Counting backwards is an exercise easy enough to be able to be done while you’re still not woken up properly, but it will speed up the process of waking up and make you more alert.

It’s also not as easy and as boring as counting forwards that you get bored and not even try to do it.

Name one word for every letter of the alphabet

You basically need to say a word that starts with A, then a word that starts with B and so on until Z.

This activates the linguistic part of your brain and your memory. This one is not as easy as it looks, you can make it harder on yourself and just allow yourself to use general nouns or just use names.

Check the time and multiple the hour by the minutes

Take a look at the time, let’s say it is 7:45 am. You need to multiply 7 * 45.

There are people that are terrible at math but this is not that difficult because one of the numbers will always be single digit, you’re probably waking up before 10am. And 10 is the easiest of all so unless you’re waking up after 11am you should be good.

If you’re waking up after 11am you deserve the punishment of the hard multiplication anyways.

Multiplying is something that we almost never do after we finish school so this is a good way to get your analytical mind working, and it’s easy enough for everyone to get good at in a short period of time.

Those were my essential brain teasers that I try to do every morning but I have few extra up my sleeve that you might find more interesting or challenging.

Name 10 capital cities

For the geography buffs out there. This is a good replacement for the second exercise but you would end up repeating yourself after a few days, at least I have.

Divide 3 digit number

Pick a random 3 digit number or just merge the time to get a 3 digit number, if it’s 6:45 you get 645.

Then try to divide that number by 2, by 3 and you can go even higher depending on your love for math.

Name 5 words starting with a letter

Pick a letter, random one, different than the one from yesterday.

Then try to name 5 words that start with that letter, easy peasy. Will be difficult for some letters though.