By Bob Tom
Remembering is one significant skill in any individual that needs to be always honed and sharpened. With a good memory, you are always able to remember things like dates, names, currency figures and many other finer details. However, a poor remembrance habit is normally embarrassing especially in public and can lead to situations like low self-esteem. Therefore, you always need to look for ways in which you can enhance your memory so that you can avoid such life-dreaded circumstances. On that note, in the following discussion, we are going to look at 15 tricks to improve your memory.
1. Eat Right and Be Healthy
Our modern lifestyle has a few adverse effects on the power of our memories. From food habits to enormous stress and avoiding proper rest - all these play detrimental roles to improving memory. This is the reason it is of paramount importance to lead a healthy life with quality food habits.
It's on record that eating foods and supplements that contain flavonoids such as berries, grapes, tea leaves, hops, cocoa beans and vitamin D greatly boosts the neurons in the brain in the sense that they are able to form fresh memories. Additionally, these foods normally associate with enzymes and proteins that are significant for the memory and, even more importantly, help in the formation of new neurons and the crucially sufficient flow of oxygen into the brain. The anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties of vitamin D helps to maintain healthy brain functions.
So, if you are keen to develop your memory, you must restrain yourself from junk foods and alcohol. Moreover, just like the body, the brain also needs sound rest to work at its utmost potential. As far as foods are concerned, you need to include fruits and green vegetables in your daily diet that supply the needed antioxidants to protect the brain cells from getting damaged.
2. Avoid Sugar
Sweet dishes are common weakness for many and if you are one of them, you may find it sad to know that intaking refined sugar more than the recommended limit can be harmful for your memory. Let's find out how sugar can affect the memory.
There is a significant amount of data to indicate that a high intake of refined sugar into the body of a human being has a detrimental effect on the brain and memory health. Many people consume in a day about double the amount of sugar calories recommended by the medical experts. Refined sugar leads to difficulties in forming new memories, depression, and a reduction in the brain functions. Refined sugar minimizes the production of Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) which is a very crucial element when it comes to learning and creating new memories.
3. Drink Caffeine
Caffeine has a positive effect on the memory relative to taking other substances. However, this must be done carefully to avoid habitual consumption. After consuming coffee, several cognitive tasks are carried out and in the final analyses drinking caffeine enhances the memory of a human being.
Adding to that, green tea also has a very positive role to play when it comes to improving the memory. It contains polyphenols, a powerful antioxidant that prevents free radicals from damaging the brain cells. Moreover, regular consumption of green tea is the best guide to improve memory and mental alertness and it can significantly slow the brain-aging process.
4. Exercise Your Brain
Appropriate brain exercises can help keeping your brain active through ages. Just like the muscles of the body, our brain, too, needs food and exercise of its own type. There are certain exercises that help in evolving the functionality of the brain and the power of memory. You can consider them as these are the best memory improving tricks. Moreover, if you keep on practicing these exercises over a long period of time, it's going to bring some miraculous results for you.
There are several ways in which you can exercise your brain to improve it. Some of these include reading as much as you can, increasing your vocabulary, learning new languages, writing something, post problem solving and turning off the television. With these activities you can exercise your brain and, more importantly, expand your memory, thus improving it.
5. Exercise Daily
It is said that "to achieve something you never had, you must do something you never did".
In today's busy world health is the most neglected aspect of our lives whereas, it should be the other way around! We must manage at least half an hour everyday to devote to our health. Daily exercise has multiple physical and mental benefits to offer and undoubtedly, when it's about improving the memory power, one can receive splendid results through this process.
Daily exercise can immensely enhance your brain and thinking skills. This is achieved through indirect and direct means. Through direct means, it acts on the body by stimulating physiological changes such as inflammation and reductions in insulin resistance as well as encouraging production of growth factors. It directly works on your brain by improving your sleep and mood. Through this, it's crystal-clear that consistent daily exercise is a great recipe for the improvement of your memory.
6. No Multitasking
It sounds great to have a title of "multitasking" but, do you want to know that what type of impact it has on your brain? While we are discussing about how to improve the brain's memory, you may get disappointed to know that multitasking is not helpful in improving your brain's memory.
Many times, multitasking has been termed as a counterproductive and exhaustive process. An average and perfectly working mind prefers shifting from one task to another instead of multitasking. Therefore, the exhaustive nature of multitasking, does not in anyway, improve the nature of your memory.
Various studies have already suggested that it not just causes a lack of concentration, it might slow down the work process and cause errors! If you are trying to complete 3-4 tasks by a certain point of time, you better put attention on the individual tasks because it will take much less time to complete than all the tasks being performed together. This is why it is one of the best tips to improving memory.
7. Sleep Well
After a long day of work, our body needs sound sleep at night and this is also important to stabilize the functionality of the brain. The brain performs thousands of activities throughout the day and a good sleep of 6-8 hours stabilizes the brain and puts it into the best working condition the next morning. On the contrary, not having proper sleep in the night will make you drowsy for the entire day and you will not be able to concentrate on anything.
A good amount and quality of sleep activates brain changes aiding in memory improvement. When you are asleep brain tasks can be executed accurately and quickly and with less anxiety and pressure. This is basically a recipe for boosting the capacity of your memory.
A study conducted amongst children suggests that when kids take naps between learning lessons and testing them in real life, they are very likely to perform better. It helps the process of brain growth (called neuroplasticity) that controls the brain's capacity to control behavior of learning and memory. So, sleeping well is very much associated with the brain's memory improvement.
8. Reduce Stress and Laugh More
Stress and depression can actually take a toll on one's ability to remember things. However, by engaging yourself in laughter, you reduce the levels of your stress and improve the capabilities of your memory. In a nutshell, laughter brings down the cortisol stress hormone.
Sometimes, we put so much stress on ourselves without even realizing the bad impact that it is having on our health and brain. It puts way more pressure on the heart and when it comes to the brain, you experience a lack in its memory power. Laughter is indeed a great medicine to get rid of this situation! With the help of emotional responses, only a few parts of the brain are activated but, with laughter, all the regions of the brain are engaged. This is the reason, it is helpful to spend time with light-hearted people and laugh everyday as it is one of the proven tricks to boost your memory.
9. Chew Gum
Chewing gum helps to remember more. People who chew gum test both the short-term and long-term memory. These gum-chewers are deemed to produce higher scores than those who do not chew gum when it comes to remembering things. It is difficult to explain the scientific reasons behind this but, over time, it has shown some effective results for people who are keen to know "how can I improve my memory?"
10. Learn a New Skill
They say keeping your brain busy with learning new things has a good impact on improving your memories. This is also one of the best memory improvement tricks that everyone must apply. The question here is - does age have anything to do with this process. It is seen that keeping your brain busy with purposeful and meaningful activities improves the neurological system and this is how to boost your memory. Science has already proved that this has no relevance with age.
It's always been true that if you want to enhance your brain you must work on it. Learning a new skill that you were initially unfamiliar with has a significant effect on improving your brain. People who always engage their brains in learning new things always demonstrate improved memory function. As a person gets older, by trying new things, he/she ensures a healthy mind.
11. Try Mnemonic Devices
In our everyday life, we come across a lot of things and we can't really keep all of them in our memory. Probably, we don't want to store all of them in the memory. But, what about those incidents, names, events, dates that you want to keep in your memory but face challenges? You can simply try Mnemonic devices as one of the best tricks to boost your memory.
Mnemonic devices are basically memory techniques that aid the brain to encode better, and importantly, remember some fine, but important details. An example of a mnemonic device is the famous '30 days hath September' rhyme which is very significant in helping so many of us to remember how many days in each calendar month. Sometimes, without mnemonic devices, it's often harder to remember some things. Regarding new studies, these techniques highly improve the state of your memory.
There are many other similar devices that you can be applied for this purpose but, the best thing you can do is to innovate some own techniques to improve memory. It works excellent!
12. Association
Every piece of information that we think of is always linked to another piece in one way or another. Our memory basically works by association. For better remembrance, we always try to create an association between pieces of information. When two bits of information are related to each other, we have a greater capability to be creative in linking the two and, as a result this enhances our memories.
13. Rhymes
This may sound like an old-school method, but sometimes, forming rhymes really help memorizing things much better. Our brain is not configured to remember multiple things at the same time but, forming those details in a rhyme structure is helpful to keep them in mind and apply at the right time. This is the best guide to improve memory. After practicing it for a particular time, it becomes very exciting for anyone to remember things in the form of rhymes.
It's always easier to forget a list of six items in a shopping list than it is to forget the lyrics of a song you have not heard for ages. Basically, our brains easily remember things by rhymes since they are linked to each other. Therefore, a person who knows a poem can more easily remember it than remembering random words. This is an excellent way in which you can enhance your brains since you can rhyme things making them exciting and memorable.
14. Flash Cards
Flashcards are commonly used in schools and institutions to help learn school subject material. With flashcards, you are able to remember things like vocabulary and questions about a subject. Flashcards require you to take time so that you can make the studies more useful and memorizing more effective. Through the use of flashcards, you can greatly boost your memory.
15. Organize Your Life
This is an amazing fact to know that the first thing you do after lifting yourself up from the bed to the last thing you do before going to sleep has an impact on our memory. The more organized your life is, the better your memory will become. Your regular activities, food habits and even your sleeping habits - all these have significant impact on the memory.
When your life is organized, it basically means you can distinctly identify one item you are doing from another. An organized life means that the brain works at a certain procedure. This becomes very important when it comes to remembering some things. Therefore, an organized life is a good recipe for an excellent memory capacity.
Moreover, when you do things in an organized way, the brain can also work in an organized manner and that is directly related to the improving of your memory.
Conclusion
The above-discussed 15 techniques to improve memory are undoubtedly the best ways in which you can enhance your memory. All you need is to identify the ways that best suit you, incorporate them in your life and you will boost your brain's capacity to remember
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