22 Habits That You Can Adopt to Be Smarter Each Day

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Keys to Daily Mental Exercise
3. How to Maximize Each Mental Boosting Habit
4. Learn a New Word Daily
5. Read Challenging Books
6. Write by Hand
7. Learn a New Skill
8. Take a Different Commute
9. Do Crossword Puzzles
10. Take Online Courses
11. Teach Someone Else
12. Change Up Your Routine
13. Learn an Instrument
14. Speak a Foreign Language
15. Work Your Memory
16. Count Things
17. Talk to Yourself
18. Meditate
19. Exercise
20. Get Enough Sleep
21. Follow Current Events
22. Do Logic Puzzles
23. Take a Reasoning Course
24. Engage in Debates
25. Question Your Own Views
26. Track Your Progress
27. Overcoming Obstacles
28. Conclusion

Introduction

Getting smarter every day doesn’t require an Ivy League education or extreme measures. With small daily habits rooted in science and research, anyone can boost brainpower. This comprehensive guide details 22 realistic habits you can adopt to get smarter each day, with actionable tips on how to seamlessly implement them into your lifestyle for exponential benefits over time.

While some habits directly exercise core faculties like memory, logic, and critical thinking, others promote higher-order skills such as metacognition, reasoning, and lifelong learning. Several help fertilize the soil in which intelligence grows by reducing stress, improving sleep quality, and exposing your brain to novelty.

Working just a few of these simple yet science-backed activities into the existing nooks and crannies of your daily routine will set you firmly on the path of getting smarter every single day in less than an hour of total time investment. Track your progress monthly, ramp them up slowly as they get easier, and watch the cumulative returns compound. Soon you’ll notice tangible cognitive gains in everything from academic performance to career prospects.

So whether you’re a student cramming for exams, a young professional hungry for a mental edge at work, or a senior looking to stay sharp, these 22 habits offer accessible, incremental steps anyone can take towards getting smarter every day. The best part? Other than your time and effort, they require little else to move the needle on your baseline brainpower.

“Intelligence is not fixed, it can be trained like a muscle. Implementing micro-habits to think deeper everyday wakes up a sharper mind.” Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Haier

Let's break down the keys to building such mental muscle memory before diving into the habits themselves.

The Keys to Daily Mental Exercise

Daily habits hold the key to increased intelligence over time for two reasons:

1. They build cognitive stamina - By training your mental muscles with consistent reps of certain thought processes, you increase your capacity to think more intensely for longer without fatiguing.
2. They promote neuroplasticity - Repeated mental stimulation strengthens connections between neurons and can even generate new brain cells. This neural flexibility helps your brain adapt to handle complex thinking better.

In others words, daily mental exercise literally conditions your brain for peak performance and growth, much like physical exercise does for muscles and cardiovascular health. The key is to establish patterns of deliberate practice rather than losing ground on higher order reasoning skills from disuse atrophy. Just like the body, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

The Magic Is In the Reps

Another key parallel to strength training is that intelligence gains come from sheer repetition of certain thinking modes. Lifting the same weight once will never grow muscle. You have to repeats lifts with that weight consistently over weeks, months, and years - adding more and more weight as the baseline lifts get easier.

The same goes for mental exercise habits. Doing crossword puzzles for one day doesn’t make you sharper. But doing them for 10 minutes daily over months and years can compound cognitive gains exponentially. Learning one new vocabulary word won’t cut it either, but consciously accumulating a few new additions to your lexicon every day across decades absolutely reshapes intelligence.

In other words, adopting and sticking to these simple daily habits is how ordinary folks can become extraordinary geniuses later in life. The magic is in the reps - not any given individual effort, but the cumulative and compound gains that accrue from thousands and thousands of little efforts over the long run.

How to Maximize Each Mental Boosting Habit

Now that you understand the thought repetitive behind getting smarter every day, let's discuss how to make these habits stick through integration into your existing lifestyle:

• Link habits to schedule anchors - Pair activities with set parts of your routine, i.e.morning coffee, commute, lunch break, evening reading
• Set phone reminders - Especially useful when establishing a new habit
• Start small, build slow - 5 minutes or 1 round then gradually increase
• Measure monthly progress - Assess cognitive gains and adjust habits accordingly
• Add variety when needed - Switch exercises within faculties to keep it novel

Learning how best to fit these small but mighty habits into the schedule you already keep is crucial for long-term adherence. Like atoms forming molecules, they will integrate into the neural networks underlying your intelligence if done consistently over time.

1. Learn a New Word Daily

Learning new words every day targets multiple facets of intelligence at once. First, it directly expands your vocabulary - one of the strongest predictors of IQ and academic/career success. Second, looking up definitions activates brain areas for reading and recall. Third, consciously using new words stretches your verbal application abilities.

Over an average lifetime, individuals learn 1 new word a day passively. However, setting the intent to actively accumulate a couple dedicated additions each day will compound vocabulary much faster.

• Crux of the habit - Search dictionaries for unfamiliar words. Memorize meanings and usage.
• Example words - ephemeral, acquiesce, ubiquitous
• Daily reps - 2-5 new vocabulary words
• Monthly metric - Number of new words integrated into expressive language

2. Read Challenging Books

Reading may seem like a passive activity limited to consumption, but diving into complex narratives requires substantial mental effort. Following elaborate plots and themes while retaining key details exercises the brain’s ability to comprehend sophisticated ideas, hold information in working memory, and track complex relationships.

Whether you read fiction or nonfiction, seek out well-written material addressing concepts just beyond your current understanding. Covering new ideational ground stretches those neural networks underlying higher order cognition. Think growing pains for your brain!

• Crux of habit - Read books engaging critical faculties
• Habit anchors - Pair with commute, before bed, etc.
• Daily reps - 30-60 minutes reading
• Monthly metric - Number of challenging books read

3. Write by Hand

In an increasingly digital world, writing things out longhand may seem outdated. However, a growing body of research on the cognitive impacts of handwriting reveals it remains crucially important for brain development and intelligence gains.

As opposed to typing, writing by hand integrates fine motor skills with visual and memory centers involved in letter formation while simultaneously activating areas for planning, organizing thought, and translating ideas into written language. This dynamic interplay uniquely engages regions key for reading, focus, retention, creativity, and learning efficiency. It also facilitates note taking, outline writing, graphic planning and mapping - all vital for handling information at high cognitive levels.

• Crux of habit - Handwrite notes, plans, complex ideas daily
• Daily reps - 15-30 minutes writing
• Monthly metric - Number of pages handwritten

4. Learn a New Skill

Mastering novel skills unlocks intelligence gains on two fronts:

1. The process of acquiring expertise boosts processing speed, working memory, focus, and reasoning as new neural networks form.
2. Gaining knowledge structures within entirely unfamiliar domains expands the raw material available for higher cognition to manipulate. These new ideas, rules, and relationships fuel innovation down the line.

In other words, factual knowledge matters. Building broad repositories of world knowledge gives you more and richer information to think deeply with in the first place.

Learning skills like coding, playing instruments, speaking new languages - any talent requiring immersive focus, pattern recognition, sequenced steps, and problem solving scaffolds these cognitive capacities while also embedding new potentials for future application.

• Crux of habit - Dedicate consistent time to skill practice
• Daily reps - 30-60 minutes
• Monthly metric - Skill milestones benchmarked

5. Take a Different Commute

As creatures of habit, following familiar sensory-action routines allows us to conserve mental energy. And when it comes to driving routes, we can all but do it blindfolded.

Research suggests that while this neural autopilot helps us navigate daily life efficiently, it can also cognitively stagnant over the long-term. Engaging mindful deliberation while navigating unfamiliar places, however, keeps the brain plastic and receptive to change.

Use your commute as opportunity to take variable routes and expend more conscious attention orienting yourself spatially. The novelty stimulates new neural growth while the increased time spent wayfinding exercises mental mapping faculties.

• Crux of habit - Alternate driving routes monthly
• Daily reps - 1 roundtrip commute
• Monthly metric - Number of novel routes taken

6. Do Crossword Puzzles

Crossword puzzles and other word games like Sudoku toggle two cognitive abilities crucial for intelligence - accessing lexical memory and manipulating verbal information. Successfully deducing puzzle solutions requires remembering vocabulary stored mentally, holding these words actively in mind, and assessing their fit based on limited letter cues.

This process exercises both recall speed and accuracy alongside analytical reasoning on language-based information. It also spurs pattern recognition and problem solving skills. In short, a short daily crossword workout keeps critical cognitive muscles engaged for sharper mental reflexes down the line.

• Crux of habit - Complete word & logic puzzles
• Daily reps - 10-15 minutes
• Monthly metric - Number of puzzles solved

7. Take Online Courses

Online learning platforms like Coursera, edX, Skillshare, and Udemy offer structured learning curricula not unlike a university education - minus the exams and diploma. Completing organized lesson sequences on topics like programming, business analytics, writing, art history or even gardening exposes your brain to new ideas and information while keeping it actively processing ideas.

The coursework format also allows you to toggle between playing student and playing teacher as you explain concepts to others around you. This engages meta-cognition and improves both the depth and retention of your knowledge gains.

• Crux of habit - Take 1 course monthly
• Daily reps - 15-20 minutes
• Monthly metric - Number of courses completed

8. Teach Someone Else

While absorbing new information gets intelligence gains going, explaining newly learned concepts lights even bigger neuro-fireworks by activating neural networks for processing, connecting and conveying ideas. Known as the protégé effect, teaching others cements knowledge in longterm memory via dual coding while unpacking your own understanding.

Find opportunities to share factoids, research learnings, game rules or other novel info bundles. The mental effort to clarify and convey meaning acts an amplifier for crystallizing both hard facts and big picture concepts. It also improves metacognition as you monitor someone else’s learning process and adapt explanations to patch gaps.

• Crux of habit - Explain something newly learned
• Daily reps - 5-10 minutes explanations
• Monthly metric - % retention on knowledge tests

9. Change Up Your Routine

The human brain loves patterns. In fact, establishing routines frees up cognitive load for higher thought by transitioning recurrent tasks to habitual autopilot requiring less deliberate attention. The more deep grooves certain behaviors trace over time, the less we have to consciously think to execute them.

This neural efficiency serves us well in daily logistics but can stagnate cognitive flexibility over years. Changing routines intermittently side steps these mental ruts and forces the brain to reconsolidate paths. Adaptively reorienting to variations in your habits bolsters mental agility by keeping those cognitive maps plastic.

• Crux of habit - Alter weekly routines monthly
• Daily reps - Adhere to routine change
• Monthly metric - Tally novelty factors

10. Learn an Instrument

Studies consistently link musical training to enhanced skills like working memory, focus, information retention, mental flexibility and conflict resolution. Brain scans show musicians have more grey matter volume supporting executive function, spatial reasoning, and language ability as well.

Learning to read musical notation and translate notes into fluid play engages visual, aural, and motor cortices simultaneously while honing pattern recognition reflexes critical for math and science. It also forges new neural pathways for drawing novel connections across ideas.

• Crux of habit - Practice instrument consistently
• Daily reps - 15-30 minutes
• Monthly metric - Musical milestones hit

11. Speak a Foreign Language

Beyond the obvious social benefits, mastering multiple languages boosts brainpower in ways that juice intelligence. Research finds bilingual speakers better at filtering distraction, multitasking, thinking flexibly, and exercising self-control due to enhanced executive function from juggling multiple lexicons.

Regularly practicing a second language also promotes cognitive reserve shielding against age-related decline. Speaking in an unfamiliar dialect keeps neuronal networks plastic and actively remodeling to accommodate complex grammar constructs and contextual rule sets key for fluid intelligence gains.

• Crux of habit - Strengthen second language skills
• Daily reps - 15-30 minutes practice
• Monthly metric - Benchmark proficiency gains

12. Work Your Memory

Working memory acts as your mental scratch pad for reasoning and access to crystallized knowledge stores. It allows you to retain transitory information, manipulate ideas, and synthesize concepts key for understanding relationships between words, numbers,symbols and sensory perceptions crucial for higher order thinking.

Memory athletes flex this faculty with daily drills - memorizing random number strings, playing mental matching games with shapes rotating in space, rehearsing increasingly long lists of words or pictures. Just like hitting the weight racks builds physical strength, disciplined reps expand memory capacity for smarter information processing down the line.

• Crux of habit - Do memory training drills
• Daily reps - 5-10 minutes
• Monthly metric - High scores & speed gains

13. Count Things

Engaging daily math, even simple arithmetic, keeps your working memory sharp by forcing on-the-fly computations connecting numerical symbols to quantities they represent. These micro-calculations also exercise attentional focus, reasoning sequences, and mental manipulation central to intelligence.

Something as basic as tallying objects around you or enumerating times specific digits appear on license plates around you engages cortical circuits for recognizing symbolic relationships key to fields like engineering and accounting. Think of it as cross-training for numerical cognition lacking in reading and writing.

• Crux of habit - Tally objects in daily life
• Daily reps - 5-10 minutes counting
• Monthly metric - Speed & complexity gains

14. Talk to Yourself

The brains behind Einstein, Darwin and other creative geniuses all have one weird thing in common - they rehearsed ideas out loud in self-directed speech patterns peppering their days. Dubbed dialogic thinking, speaking your thoughts aloud organizes information into coherent verbal narrative, clarifies thinking, and solidifies connections across concepts.

Allowing thoughts to bounce around your cranium alone leaves them unstructured, disconnected and quickly forgotten. But voicing them regulates thought sequences essential for mapping arguments, unpacking dense concepts, and untangling complex relationships - ultimately boosting metacognition for sharper future reasoning.

• Crux of habit - Narrate thoughts & activities aloud
• Daily reps - 5-10 minutes
• Monthly metric - % clarity on recorded ideas

15. Meditate

While intelligence derives from actively acquiring novel inputs and skillfully manipulating information, meditating trains the mind to detach from its constant influx of sensory data and chatterbox tendencies. By repeatedly clearing your headspace of thoughts, you enhance cortical flexibility, attentional focus, and working memory capacity critical for higher order information processing.

Letting the analytical parts of your brain toggle between intensive computing and intentful quiet builds bidirectional strength between effortful concentration and receptive relaxation. Think of meditation as intervals for your prefrontal cortex interspersing cognitive heavy lifts.

• Crux of habit - Practice meditation
• Daily reps - 10-15 minutes
• Monthly metric - % reduction mind wandering

16. Exercise

Physical activity delivers a cocktail of biochemicals supporting brain health - chief among them brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). This crucial compound fertilizes existing neurons, stimulates neural stem cell differentiation, fuels neurogenesis even into old age, and promotes mind-muscle connectivity supporting coordinated thoughts and movement.

In addition to structurally enhancing grey matter in regions like the hippocampus, exercise also lifts mental fog by reducing cortisol and triggering endorphin release for feelings of euphoria that prime creative thinking. Moving your body daily diffuses physiological limits to realizing your cognitive potential.

• Crux of habit - Engage in regular aerobic activity
• Daily reps - 30-45 mins exercise
• Monthly metric - Cardio benchmarks

17. Get Enough Sleep

Skimping on quality rest taxes cognitive capacities by allowing toxic plaque proteins like beta-amyloid to accumulate while limiting the brain’s ability to flush them out. While you snooze, cerebrospinal fluid circulates more freely, bathing neurites and clearing out these harmful metabolic waste products shown to damper neural signaling.

Without enough sleep, you wake up groggy with impaired executive function, stunted memory encoding, and reduced attention spans. Over the long run, chronic deprivation is linked to cognitive decline and dementia. Getting ample restorative shut eye pays exponential dividends when it comes to intelligence returns.

• Crux of habit - Prioritize sleep quantity & quality
• Daily metric - 7-8 hours rested nights
• Monthly metric - Benchmark sleep analytics

18. Follow Current Events

Staying up to date on news requires closely tracking global events, key actors, interrelated geopolitics, and other complex dynamics - all while assessing partisan arguments and filtering noise from valid reporting. In other words, daily news digestion when done actively builds a mental model of the world requiring the very higher order cognitive skills intelligence comprises.

Following current events exercises analytical faculties by prompting inquiry, evaluation of evidence, reasoning through implications, and contextualization within broader developments. It also continually grows reserves of world knowledge prime for linking novel insights together down the line.

• Crux of habit - Read/listen to daily news briefs
• Daily reps - 15-30 minutes
• Monthly metric - Current event quizzes

19. Do Logic Puzzles

Logic puzzles exercise innate pattern recognition abilities while helping you check cognitive biases. Activities like Sudoku, maze navigation, code breaking, and sequence deduction tasks train skills transferable to navigating life’s problems - isolating key info, establishing rules, testing solutions, eliminating red herrings, and troubleshooting errors.

Much like how scientists falsify hypotheses through systematic testing, working through logic puzzles builds critical thinking fundamentals. It also engages visual-spatial cognition by manipulating shapes and sequences in mind.

• Crux of habit - Complete logic puzzles daily
• Daily reps - 10-15 minutes
• Monthly metric - Speed/difficulty gains

20. Take a Reasoning Course

Reasoning forms the bedrock of intelligence by enablingcomplex inference beyond surface level thought. Formally studying scientific reasoning - through logic, philosophy, debate coursework, or even legal brief dissection - builds fluency in arranging propositions to support conclusions.

Learning to construct airtight arguments using deductive and inductive logic also fosters critical analysis when evaluating others’ reasoning. This higher order meta-cognition separates smart thinkers from those merely regurgitating information.

• Crux of habit - Complete reasoning lessons
• Daily reps - 15-20 minutes
• Monthly metric - % scores on inference tests

21. Engage in Debates

Moving from passive consumption to active discourse engages higher cognition by prompting complex idea integration. Articulating your thoughts requires organizing mental models into coherent narratives, planning persuasive rhetoric, and logically backing claims. Sparring rival viewpoints illuminates blindspots in your current thinking while strengthening neural circuits for quick-thinking and mental flexibility.

Look for opportunities like joining a debate club, participating in classroom discussions, keeping up with reply threads online or even just playing devil’s advocate with friends. Verbalizing arguments solidifies thinking and forges connections between conceptual neurons otherwise left unstimulated.

• Crux of habit - Debate ideas regularly
• Daily reps - 10-15 minutes debate
• Monthly metric - Fluency benchmarks

22. Question Your Own Views

Periodically analyzing your internal belief systems layered by life experience unmasks subconscious biases clouding truthful reasoning. The very act of probing why you think the way you do builds metacognitive control over your thought processes - essentially thinking about thinking itself.

Journaling through uncertainties, re-evaluating past reactions, and even just making note of strong opinions trains reflective cognition and primes your mind stay open, curious and rationally resolving differences between new ideas and default assumptions.

• Crux of habit - Journal thought processes
• Daily reps - 5-10 minutes writing
• Monthly metric - Tally cognitive shifts

Track Your Progress

Like any training regimen, carefully tracking progress on desired outcomes keeps your sights fixed firmly on the end goals. Monitoring thought metrics cultivates an empirical mindset allowing you to observe your own neurological growth rather than just feeling it subjectively.

This data-driven approach also makes it easier to catch plateaus so you can tweak habits for renewed progress. Use a simple spreadsheet tallying monthly performance on the key metrics outlined above or try mental tracking apps to quantify intelligence gains over time.

Overcoming Obstacles

Adopting even a few micro-habits still requires concerted focus and follow-through at first. But anything worth doing always requires gritting past initial discomforts for bigger payoffs down the road. Here are some common obstacles that arise:

Problem - Lacking motivation Solution - Note benefits clearly, schedule habits during natural energy peaks, pair with an accountability buddy

Problem - Forgetting to do reps Solution - Set phone reminder alerts for habit times

Problem - Too boring Solution - Mix up exercises within broader skill domains

Problem - Feeling stagnated Solution - Add complexity levels incrementally

Problem - Overwhelming to track Solution - Use quantified self apps to simplify data collection

Conclusion

Intelligence derives from how skillfully you can acquire, retain, synthesize, manipulate and apply knowledge over time. Tiny, incremental investments done daily in the right learning habitats yield compound gains over the long haul. Consistency compounds results.

Implementing even a handful of these 24 science-backed habits into your weekly routines primes your neuro-capacity to think deeper, clearer, quicker and more accurately with each passing month and year. As your foundational cognitive capacities expand, so too will your higher order intelligence grow exponentially.

The key is picking habits aligned with your strengths, staying consistent, tracking outcomes and periodically adjusting intensity or variety to progressively overload those mental muscles. Start small today for the brainpower you’ll thank yourself for tomorrow!