When It Comes to Use It or Lose It, What Should You Use?

As often as you’ve heard the expression “use it or lose it,” how much of it do you actually believe? Is this just some phrase that’s gained popularity, with little to back it up? Not only that, but what is the “it” you actually have to use in order to avoid losing the other “it,” and does this mean you have to use everything all at once?

Activity Diversity and Use It or Lose It

A longstanding assumption in the psychology of aging is that activity is the basis for maintaining both physical and cognitive health. Decades of research now back up this assumption, but there is always reason to continue to investigate the matter. In particular, answering the question of what the “it” is remains high on the list of priorities for researchers, both for practical and theoretical reasons.

According to University of Zurich’s Minxia Luo and colleagues (2023), “An active lifestyle—characterized by a rich set of cognitive, social, and physical activities—is protective for cognitive performance in older adults.” To be a “rich set,” the authors go on to explain, means that those activities are diverse in range. This begs the question, which ones are best and how diverse do they have to be?

Prior research has identified long-term benefits to “activity diversity” over periods of years. The Swiss researchers wondered if they could narrow the time frame down considerably to evaluate activity diversity’s daily benefits. In other words, if you spent two hours engaged in online word games, a video chat with family, a stint in the gym, and a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, would you see a boost within a day in your cognitive abilities? And is it enough to go through one round of each or do you have to give yourself both morning and afternoon doses of varying activities?

Testing Activity Diversity’s Memory Benefits

To provide empirical evidence on these questions, Luo and her associates recruited a sample of 150 healthy older adults (ages 65 to 91) living in Zurich whom they compensated with a sum of 200 Swiss francs for a 15-day period of study. Of the original recruits, 138 provided complete data collected via a smartphone ambulatory assessment.

The assessment consisted of seven prompts during each of the 15 days in which participants chose from a list of 13 types of activities they were occupied in at the moment. A statistical formula allowed the research team to use these reports as the basis for calculating activity diversity. To assess cognitive benefits, Luo et al. also asked participants to complete a brief memory task which, like the activity measure, was administered throughout the day. Overall memory scores were then calculated for each day.

Before turning to the results, put yourself in the place of the Swiss participants. Check off how many of these activities you’ve already engaged in today:

• Housework
• Cooking/eating
• TV/music
• Educational/mental stimulation
• Cultural/religious activity
• Hobbies
• Social interaction
• Sports activities
• Walking
• Doctor visit/body care
• Work/volunteer
• Rest
• “Other”

A person with a high diversity score might divide their time between social, sports, education/mental, television/music, and cooking/eating. In contrast, a person with a low diversity score might divide their time between only two activities, such as cultural/religious and television/music. A radial plot of time spent in each activity for each participant allowed the research team to see exactly who reached the higher diversity range and who fell short.

Is Activity Diversity Beneficial and if So, How?

Using a statistical method that allowed them to track activity diversity benefit’s across the 15 days of the study, Liu and her colleagues were able to document the positive effects, on a daily basis, of activity diversity on memory. As controls, the authors had taken into account possible contributions of age, information processing speed, intelligence, affect (mood) and prior education.

The findings supported the predictions that the daily effects of activity diversity on memory carried over from one day to the next in a direct linear fashion, As further support, for activity's benefits to memory, the authors also found that a prior day’s working memory didn’t predict activity diversity. There were some effects of the study's control variables. People whose information processing speed was higher showed a slight advantage overall, as you might expect.

Importantly, affect also played a role in shaping memory performance in that those with higher negative affect scores had poorer cognitive scores. As the authors concluded, this suggests that “processing negative emotions could take up mental resources and thus impair cognitive performance.” In other words, taking steps to ensure that you gather up a range of activities in a given day won’t benefit your cognitive performance if you are dwelling on negative emotions while carrying out those activities.

Building Your Own Activity Menu

By now you might be wondering which activities hold the most promise as ones to add to your smorgasbord of stimulating pursuits. Unfortunately, there is no simple formula. Instead, the authors recommend an individualized “recipe” for developing your own diversity menu. It’s not exactly what you do but how often you switch that determines whether an activity will benefit your memory. Moreover, in keeping with recommendations from the World Health Organization, the authors suggest that the activities you do choose should be personally meaningful. These will have the added advantage of distracting you from worries or problems that could drain those all-important “mental resources.”

To sum up, the “it” you need to use in order to avoid losing it appears to be more of a “them.” Finding ways to diversify your life can help you keep that memory sharp enough to promote healthy aging, not just from day to day but throughout the years.