Did you ever meet someone you recognized but couldn’t remember their name? Or perhaps failed to remember where you left your car keys or directions to a place you’ve been to numerous times before? All these lapses in memory don’t always relate to aging or other physiological factors. In fact, many times it’s your own fault you can’t remember things, but that ends now. With some tips and tricks, you can keep your memory sharp and stop the excuses for why that fact, name, street, or person is stuck on the tip of your tongue.
Treat Your Body Right
To keep your memory in tip-top shape, don’t neglect your body. Sleeping 7 to 9 hours a night gives your body the rest it needs to solidify memories. Furthermore, regular exercise increases blood flow throughout the body and enlarges the hippocampus. This part of the brain supports awareness, learning, and, most importantly, memory retention. Staying hydrated isn’t only a hip thing to say in today’s world, but it is vitally important to brain function, which includes improved memory preservation.
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Decrease Stress for Improved Memory Retention
Stress in most situations is a bad thing, and when it comes to your memory, stress is not doing it any favors. Constant stress or anxiety can keep your mind from focusing and operating at its optimal capabilities. As such, your memory suffers. Although easier said than done in the hectic world of today, activities that reduce stress will correlate to better memory retention. Meditation, yoga, and even a walk through a quiet park on a beautiful day can help reduce high stress and improve your memory.
Organization Allows Routine Familiarity
Keeping your daily activities and needs in order will help reduce your forgetfulness. This can be done using calendars marked with important dates, post-it notes in strategic places, and everyday-use items such as keys and your wallet, placed in the same location daily. Doing so will enable constant interaction and, in turn, help you remember events, reminders, and where you left your daily carry items much better. It’s a combination of repetition and familiarity that goes a long way to help you remember.
Focusing Can Do Wonders Instantly
This is an easy one, yet it is one of the hardest for most people to accomplish. That’s because in today’s modern times, distractions are just about everywhere, and I’m sorry to say, are caused primarily by themselves. Cellphones are the main culprit. It’s very hard to remember a person’s name or street address if you are constantly scrolling, tapping the screen, or watching nonsensical videos on your phone. It may take some self-discipline, but if you put the phone away and give the person in front of you your undivided attention, you will be more likely to remember what they are saying. Furthermore, when learning something new, quit multitasking and focus. Only then will the information become ingrained within your mind and not forgotten.
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Exercise Your Mind
You go to the gym to build up your body, but you also need to strengthen your mind. To accomplish this, you need to put your brain to work. Puzzles, like crosswords, word searches, and find-the-objects, allow you to both have fun and exercise your mind at the same time. Strategic games, like chess and board games, make you think many moves ahead to be victorious. A beneficial side effect of your brain being constantly active is better memory and greater retention of information. Additionally, learning a new language will keep your mind active every day if you maintain an organized learning regimen.
Cute Tricks Do Work
As a child, you learned some tricks to remember schooltime names and facts. You can certainly use some of those tools, along with many others, to assist your memory well into adulthood and beyond. Creating acronyms (an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word) to help remember long phrases. Rhyming can also help, as you repeat the rhythmic phrase in your mind. Chunking is the technique of breaking down large numbers or lists of information into easily rememberable parts.
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These work well with phone numbers (for those people who don’t rely upon their cellphones to lock in the phone number) or for shopping, Christmas, or to-do lists that you may have forgotten to bring along at the start of your day. Finally, there is visualization. This is a process where you use images, sometimes childish or silly, and mentally link them with the more serious information that you need to retain. For example, if there is a tree that looks like a person next to a location you need to remember, linking the funny image of the tree to that particular spot will help you remember it better.
Eat Your Way to Remembering
You may notice certain products in supermarkets that promote themselves as “brain food.” These food products help boost the brain’s overall performance, including memory. Foods like fresh berries, tree nuts, and omega-3-rich fish are a great place to start. Additionally, dark chocolate has been shown to enhance memory, while coffee is well known to increase alertness. Sugar-heavy foods, aside from increasing your waistline, can be detrimental as they cause brain inflammation and weaken short-term memory.
It Takes Work to Get Results
Like nearly anything else in life, what you put into a task or goal is what you get out of it. If you don’t consciously choose to better your memory, it won’t get there on its own. It takes a combination of tools, tricks, and techniques, along with consistent effort and a daily routine. The more you mix up the various techniques and make it fun, the greater the chance that you’ll stick with it. Before you know it, you won’t forget the “new guy’s” name, where that tricky address is, or where you left your keys. Better memory retention is within reach, so please don’t forget to get started.
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