Not able to locate your car keys? Need to bring your list? Need help to think of the name of the gym personal trainer you liked? You’re not by yourself. We all forget things every once in a while. Memory loss is not something to joke about.
Most of the memory problems we have from time to time as we get older are caused by normal changes in the Brain’s structure and function. Some parts of your Brain may work less quickly because of these changes. This can make it harder to learn new things rapidly or block out distractions that can mess up your memory and learning.
Yes, these changes can be annoying and not at all good when we have a lot of things to do or need to learn new skills. Researchers have spent decades coming up with many ways to keep our minds safe and sharp.
Habits that can destroy your brain strength
Inadequate sleep or rest:
One of the worst things you can do to damage your Brain is not to get enough sleep. Insufficient sleep prevents your Brain from having time to unwind and replenish its energy. Serious issues like mood swings, memory loss, and cognitive deterioration may result from this. Indeed, a few studies indicate that sleep deprivation may raise the chance of developing dementia. Make sure you consistently obtain at least seven hours of sleep every night if you want to safeguard your Brain. Taking care of any sleep abnormalities, such as sleep apnea, is also crucial.
Avoiding Physical activity:
Not getting enough exercise is another habit that might harm your Brain. It’s time to modify your sedentary lifestyle if you lead one. Obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other health issues can result from being overly inactive. Furthermore, having any of these health issues might harm your Brain and raise your chance of getting dementia. Make sure you’re getting regular exercise if you want to maintain the health of your Brain. It’s sufficient to walk for thirty minutes three times a week.
Overeating
Even when you consume a balanced diet, overeating is another behavior that can be detrimental to your Brain. In elderly folks, overeating has been linked to issues like memory loss and cognitive impairment. To find out more, more research is being done to determine the precise connection between overeating and mental impairment.
Overconsumption of junk food
Overconsumption of junk food can be harmful to your Brain, just like overeating in general is. Junk food is detrimental to overall health, which includes mental wellness. It may surprise you to hear that persons who eat more fries, potato chips, hamburgers, and soft beverages have smaller brain regions related to mental health, learning, and memory. Junk food is high in calories and sugar, which increases the risk of diabetes and obesity.
Playing Your Headphones
One of the best ways to wind down and relax is to listen to music. However, you risk harming your hearing if you play loud music over your headphones. Hearing impairment might occur in as little as 30 minutes. Furthermore, hearing impairment is irreversible once it occurs. In addition to being a problem unto itself, hearing loss increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in its sufferers.
Too Much Time Is Spent in the Dark
Your Brain only receives enough exposure to sunlight if you spend an excessive amount of time in the dark. Depression and seasonal affective disorder are two issues that may result from this. Make sure you get sufficient sunlight each day if you want to maintain the health of your Brain. Open those shades from time to time, and make sure you take occasional walks outside.
Adverse Conceptions
It is a habit that can harm your Brain to think negatively. Your mental health suffers when you’re anxious and stressed all the time. Depression, anxiety, and even dementia may result from this. In fact, studies suggest that those who obsess over negative things have higher levels of tau and amyloid deposits in their brains. One important marker of Alzheimer’s disease is these deposits. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to break this behavior.
Disregarding Your Health Concerns
You must visit a physician and receive treatment if you have a health issue. Ignoring your health concerns might have major consequences in the future, including brain damage. For instance, dementia is more common in those with untreated hypertension. Diabetes and depression may potentially damage your Brain if left untreated. Make sure you visit a doctor for any health issues if you want to maintain the health of your Brain.
How to Make a Strong Memory at any age
Your Brain’s health and energy affect how well you remember things. There are many things you can do to improve your memory and mental performance, whether you’re a student studying for finals, a worker who wants to stay mentally sharp, or a senior who wants to keep and grow your gray matter as you age.
People used to say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but experts have found that this isn’t true when it comes to the Brain. It’s amazing how well the Brain can adapt and change, even as we get older. Neuroplasticity is the name for this skill. When your Brain is stimulated in the right way, it can make new neural pathways, change links that are already there, and adapt and respond in ways that are always changing.
When it comes to learning and remembering, the Brain has an amazing power to change its shape. No matter what age, you can use the natural power of neuroplasticity to improve your memory, learn new things faster, and think more clearly. These tips will help you do that.
Learn something new
Memory strength is the same as strength in your muscles. It gets stronger as you use it more. You won’t get stronger if you lift the same weight every day, though. You’ll need to keep your Brain active all the time. Getting better at remembering things is a great benefit of learning new skills.
You can do a lot of different things, but the most important thing is to find something that gets you out of your comfort zone and keeps your attention.
To give you some examples:
- How to learn a new instrument
- Play crosswords, chess, and other brain games.
- Learn a new dance, like the tango.
- Pick up a new language.
According to a study from 2007, speaking more than one language can keep people with dementia from having memory problems as long as possible.
Repeat and get back:
When you learn something new, you’re more likely to remember it if you hear it again. The links we make between neurons get stronger when we do things over and over again. Say out loud what you hear. Put it to use in a sentence. You should write it down and read it out loud.
But that’s not the end of the work. There are better ways to learn than simply repeating, according to research. You’ll have to go back to the desk later and try to remember the information without looking at the paper. Testing yourself to see if you can remember something is better than learning over and over again. By practicing recall, you can make your learning more lasting and useful.
Make use of mnemonics, acronyms, and symbols.
It’s possible to use names, abbreviations, songs, or rhymes to help you remember things. Since the 1960s, mnemonics have been shown to help students remember things. You may have learned a few mnemonics to help you remember long lists. The names of the colors of the spectrum, like ROY G. BIV (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet), can help you remember them.
Get enough sleep and rest:
For a long time now, not getting enough sleep has been linked to having trouble remembering things. Memory consolidation is a process by which short-term memories get stronger and turn into long-lasting memories. Sleep is an important part of this process.
Studies have shown that not getting enough sleep may make it harder to remember things. One study looked at what happened to 40 kids between the ages of 10 and 14 when they slept.
A group of kids were trained for memory tests in the evening and then took the tests the next morning after a night’s sleep. The other group was trained and tested on the same day, and they didn’t get any rest in between. The memory tests were 20% easier for the group that slept between training and the tests.
In a different study, nurses who worked the night shift were less likely to remember things and made more math mistakes than nurses who worked the day shift (68% of those who tested). For best health, health professionals say people should sleep between 7 and 9 hours every night.
Save your brain power:
The more you don’t have to think about things like where you put your keys or when your granddaughter’s birthday party is, the easier it will be to learn and remember new and important things. Use maps, shopping lists, file boxes, address books, calendars, and planners to keep important information close at hand. Give your glasses, bag, keys, and other things you use often a place to live. Get rid of unnecessary stuff in your home or office to help you concentrate on new information you need to remember.
Challenge your Brain through different activities:
A fun and effective way to improve your memory is to work out your Brain by playing brain games. Crosswords, word games, Tetris, and even memory-training apps for phones are all great ways to improve your memory. A study with 42 people who had mild cognitive impairment discovered that using a brain-training app to play games for 8 hours a week for four weeks improved their memory.
A different study with 4,715 people found that when they did an online brain-training exercise for 15 minutes at least five days a week, their short-term memory, working memory, concentration, and ability to solve problems got a lot better than a control group.
Also, games that train your Brain have been shown to lower the chance of dementia in older people.
Read it loud:
Read it out loud or write it down if you want to remember what you just heard, read, or thought. In this way, you strengthen the link or memory. Take the name of someone you just learned and use it when you talk to them: “So, John, where did you meet Camille?” Tell yourself out loud what you did if you move something from where it usually goes. Also, feel free to ask for information to be read again.
Deal with stress
Your body makes stress hormones, such as cortisol, when you’re under a lot of worry. Researchers have found that cortisol makes it much harder for the Brain to remember things, especially long-term memories. Animal tests have even shown that stress and sadness can make the Brain smaller.
Practice Mindfulness Techniques:
In the state of mindfulness, you pay attention to the present moment and are aware of your thoughts and surroundings. Mindfulness is a part of meditation, but it’s not the same thing. Mindfulness is a mental habit that you can use anywhere, while meditation is a more formal exercise.
Mindfulness has been shown to help reduce stress and make it easier to focus and remember things. Researchers looked at 293 psychology students and found that those who learned mindfulness had better recognition memory when they tried to remember things than those who did not learn mindfulness. Being mindful has also been linked to a lower chance of cognitive decline with age and a general improvement in mental health.
Mindfulness methods can be used every day by focusing on your breathing, paying more attention to the present moment, and gently bringing your attention back to the present when your mind wanders.
Do some yoga
A study from 2012 found that doing yoga for just 20 minutes made people much faster and more accurate on memory tests. The test scores of the participants were much higher after yoga than after aerobic exercise. The study was hindered, though, by the fact that it only looked at 30 young female students. As part of yoga, you’ll learn how to breathe from the abdomen, which helps you get more oxygen and improves brain function.
Do Exercise:
Working out is good for your mind and body in general. It’s good for the Brain, and studies have shown that it may help people of all ages, from kids to seniors, remember things better.
For example, a study of 144 people between the ages of 19 and 93 found that everyone who did 15 minutes of modest exercise on a stationary bike did better on cognitive tasks like memory.
Many studies have shown that exercise may improve the health of the Brain by making more protective proteins and helping neurons grow and develop. A lower chance of getting dementia later in life is also linked to regular exercise in middle age.
Eat less sugary foods:
A lot of health problems and long-term diseases, like memory loss, have been linked to eating too much extra sugar. It has been shown that eating a lot of sugar can hurt your memory and make your Brain smaller, especially in the part that saves short-term memories.
One study of more than 4,000 people, for example, found that people who drank more sugary drinks, like soda, had smaller brains overall and worse memories than people who consumed less sugar. Cutting back on sugar is good for your health and can help you remember things.
Maintain your Food plate:
It’s similar to the Mediterranean diet, the DASH diet (which aims to lower blood pressure), and the MIND diet (which combines the Mediterranean and DASH diets to slow down neurodegeneration). This includes their power to boost memory and lower the risk of getting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.
What you eat on these diets is:
- foods that come from plants, like berries and leafy green veggies
- whole grains
- Beans and nuts
- olive oil or coconut oil for chicken or turkey
- Spices and herbs
- salmon and sardines, which are high in fat
- red wine in small amounts
Omega-3 fatty acids can be found in large amounts in fatty fish. Omega-3s are very important for making brain and nerve cells. They help you learn and remember things, and research has shown that they can also slow down brain decline.
Use all of your senses:
More of your Brain will be used to remember things if you use more than one sense to learn them. In one study, adults were shown a number of neutral images, each with a smell that went with it. They weren’t asked to tell us what they saw. After that, they were shown a new set of pictures without any smells and asked to pick out the ones they had already seen. They could remember all the images that went with smells well, but especially the ones that went with nice smells.
The piriform cortex is the main part of the Brain that processes smells. Brain scans showed that this area became active when people saw things that they had associated with smells, even if the smells were gone. The people weren’t trying to remember them. As you go into the unknown, use all of your senses to find out more. For instance, try to guess what’s in a new restaurant’s food as you smell and taste it. Try modeling or making pottery, and pay attention to how the materials feel and smell.
Matt Santi is an inspiring personal growth and development leader. With over 15 years of experience in business management, HR, and operations, Matt’s career has shaped his passion for guiding individuals on their journey of self-improvement.
As an Eagle Scout, Matt’s dedication to service and community drives his commitment to helping others reach their full potential. He is a self-described personal development enthusiast, always eager to learn and grow from new experiences. Matt’s unique perspective and positive outlook on life influence his approach to writing and coaching others.
Matt’s writing on personal growth and development topics with a straightforward and actionable approach provides readers with practical tools and strategies to help them discover their strengths and abilities. His energy and expertise make him a valuable asset to anyone looking to cultivate a more fulfilling and purposeful life.
