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How Continuous Learning Helps Seniors

5 min read

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Reviewed

by Dr. Ryo Sanabria

Seniors having fun learning

Did you know that studies reveal that continued learning with age can keep your brain sharp and may help delay cognitive decline? 

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Continuous learning means regularly expanding one’s knowledge or gaining new skills and expertise. This can be academic, including learning new material through coursework, reading, or researching, and can also be technical, including gaining specific skills, such as programming, language, cooking, or art. While some may believe that learning is only for children and youngsters, the truth is that learning is a lifelong process. 

Learning not only allows you to discover and comprehend new things but also improves your cognitive health and increases your self-esteem and confidence. 

In this article, we will discuss how continuous learning helps aging seniors and the benefits of lifelong learning.

How Does Continuous Learning Help Seniors? 

While it is commonly thought that aging may make it challenging to learn and process new skills, most — if not all — older individuals still have a significant capacity to learn. In fact, older individuals have been shown to actually improve in learning some skills, such as verbal abilities and inductive reasoning. Importantly, entirely stopping yourself from learning can significantly reduce your brain functioning. 

Regardless of age, our brain needs constant stimulation to maintain its cognitive abilities. Moreover, even in old age, our brain is highly adaptable and can adjust to new learning and experiences.

It is easy to understand how usage can impact some tissues; a great example is your muscles. The more you use your muscles and exercise them, the more they grow and the stronger they become. Disuse of the muscle can lead to atrophy (aka, muscle shrinking) and make you physically weaker. Similarly, if you stop using your brain, for example, by not learning new things or engaging in brain-related activities, it can accelerate cognitive decline. 

Cognitive decline can affect your daily life by causing problems like memory issues, difficulty concentrating and understanding things, and reducing problem-solving skills. 

On the other hand, if you continuously engage your brain by learning new things, it stimulates the formation and connections of new neurons. This helps improve your attention, memory, thinking, reasoning skills, and overall cognitive health.

Top 6 Benefits of Lifelong Learning 

The benefits of lifelong learning for seniors include:

Improving Cognitive Health 

Senior woman smiling while drawing with the group.

When you regularly engage your brain in learning and mentally stimulating activities, it promotes an increase in the myelination of neurons. Myelin is a sheath or layer that covers the nerves in your brain and spinal cord and allows the effective and quick transmission of electrical impulses in the nerve cells. This is similar to how electrical wires use wire insulation to improve the conduction of signals.

Increasing and supporting new and existing myelin helps preserve cognitive function and improve mental health by allowing neurons (the cells of the brain) to communicate better with each other and improving overall brain function.

Building Neuronal Connections and Improving Regeneration 

Most learning involves the rewiring of neurons and strengthening connections between neurons. 

A strengthened connection between neurons helps improve the person’s processing speed, attention, memory, learning, coordination, and judgment abilities.

Hence, continued learning with age helps delay or cope with age-related cognitive decline, like memory loss and comprehension, and supports brain health.

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Reducing the Risk of Dementia 

Lifelong learning can reduce the risk of dementia and memory loss by stimulating the growth of brain cells and their ability to acquire new information. 

Studies show that even in older age, the brain cells continue to grow, and stimulating the brain with mental activities and learning can improve the growth of brain cells. In fact, even for those who have already experienced symptoms of dementia or have been diagnosed with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, continued learning has been shown to be beneficial in many cases to slow down disease progression.

Improving mood 

Another top benefit of lifelong learning is that it improves overall mental well-being and boosts mood. 

As seniors are free from most life responsibilities, they often go through loneliness and boredom, which increases anxiety and depression

Constantly engaging your brain in creative and learning activities prevents overthinking and negative thoughts, improves mental well-being, and gives a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Learning new skills and boosting knowledge increases confidence, which is a great way to combat anxiety and depression. 

Sharpening the Mind 

When you engage yourself in continuous learning, it stimulates the generation of new neuronal pathways. 

The formation of neuronal pathways in the brain sharpens the mind and enhances its ability to recognize, learn, and remember new things. 

The brain works like other muscles in our body because if you stop using it, you may eventually start to lose brain cells. This is because neural pathways require usage to maintain connection, and without usage, these connections can be lost. A simple example is language: even if you are fluent in a language, continued disuse of that language can make you forget vocabulary and grammar. This is due to the loss of neural connections. 

Hence, it is crucial to exercise your brain with various learning activities to keep it stimulated and functioning.

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Increasing Socialization  

Continuous learning is a great way to increase the social interaction of seniors, eliminating loneliness. 

It allows them to connect with like-minded people, share their feelings with other people, and improve communication. 

The best ways to improve socialization and learning in seniors are to participate in social and community events or groups, join a senior center, or enroll in classes like cooking, baking, stitching, art, or other classes.

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