Being So Forgetful? Here Are Some Ways To Boost Your Memory!

You used to have a great memory, you don't need a reminder, you remember all the important dates, and you can even memorize everyone's phone number. But everything changes when you get older. You realized that you'd become so forgetful, you don't remember where did you placed the car key, or forgot your email password or you didn't buy the facial cream you'd been needed for weeks. Now, the only thing you need to know is, forgetting something isn't a mistake but it is just your brain, it's getting tired. Not only people in their golden years who faced this situation but sometimes, young people too, might have weak memory problems due to some factors.

It's known that our modern lifestyle plays a significant role in contributing to cognitive decline, which is why exposure to toxins, chemicals, poor diet, lack of sleep, stress, and much more can actually hinder the functioning of your brain. A healthy lifestyle can support your brain health and even encourage your brain to grow new neurons. The memory center is able to grow new cells and regenerates throughout your entire lifetime (even into your 90s), provided you give it the tools to do so.

These "tools" are primarily lifestyle-based, which is wonderful news. You don't need an expensive prescription medication or any medical procedure at all to boost your brain, and your memory. You simply must try out the following tricks to improve your memory.

Eat Right

The foods you eat and don't eat play a crucial role in your memory. Fresh vegetables are essential, as are healthy fats and avoiding sugar and grain carbohydrates. Curry, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, and walnuts contain antioxidants and other compounds that protect your brain health and may even stimulate the production of new brain cells. Balancing your omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is also important.
Try replacing vegetable oil to krill oil as it will not only protects the omega-3 fats from oxidation but also appears to be particularly beneficial for brain health. Coconut oil is another healthful fat for brain function which prevent degenerative neurological diseases, or as a treatment for an already established case.

Exercise

Exercise encourages your brain to work at optimum capacity by stimulating nerve cells to multiply, strengthening their interconnections and protecting them from damage. During exercise, nerve cells release proteins that triggers numerous other chemicals that promote neural health, and directly benefits cognitive functions, including learning. Regular exercise improved blood flow to the brain. In a separate one year-long study, individuals who engaged in exercise were actually growing and expanding the brain's memory center 1% to 2% per year, where typically that center would have continued to decline in size.

Stop Multitasking

Multitasking is now shorthand for the human attempt to do simultaneously as many things as possible, as quickly as possible. Ultimately, multitasking may actually slow you down, make you prone to errors as well as make you forgetful. Research shows you actually need about 8 seconds to commit a piece of information to your memory, so if you're talking on your phone and carrying in groceries when you put down your car keys, you're unlikely to remember where you left them. The opposite of multitasking would be mindfulness, which helps you achieve undistracted focus. Students who took a mindfulness class improved reading comprehension test scores and working memory capacity, as well as experienced fewer distracting thoughts. If you find yourself trying to complete 5 tasks at once, stop yourself and focus your attention back to the task at hand. If distracting thoughts enter your head, remind yourself that these are only "projections," not reality, and allow them to pass by without stressing you out. You can then end your day with a 10 or 15 minutes meditation session to help stop your mind from wandering and relax into a restful sleep.

Get a Good Night's Sleep

Sleep is known to enhance your memories and help you "practice" and improve your performance of challenging skills. In fact, a single night of sleeping only 4-6 hours can impact your ability to think clearly the next day. The process of brain growth is believed to underlie your brain's capacity to control behavior, including learning and memory. However, sleep and sleep loss modify the expression of several genes and gene products that may be important for the growth. Synaptic connections are strengthened while you slumber. Naps can give a boost to babies' brainpower. Specifically, infants who slept in between learning and testing sessions had a better ability to recognize patterns in new information, which signals an important change in memory that plays an essential role in cognitive development. There's reason to believe this holds true for adults, too, as even among adults, a mid-day nap was found to dramatically boost and restore brainpower. 

Play Brain Games

If you don't sufficiently challenge your brain with new, surprising information, it eventually begins to deteriorate. By providing your brain with appropriate stimulus, you can counteract this degeneration. One way to challenge your brain is via 'brain games,' which you can play online via websites like Lumosity.com and Brain HQ Program. If you decide to try brain games, ideally it would be wise to invest at least 20 minutes a day, but no more than 5-7 minutes is to be spent on a specific task. When you spend longer amounts of time on a task, the benefits weaken. The only downside to brain games is that it may become just another "task" you need to fit into an already busy day.

Master a New Skill

Engaging in "purposeful and meaningful activities" stimulates your neurological system, counters the effects of stress-related diseases, reduces the risk of dementia and enhances health and well-being. A key factor necessary for improving your brain function or reversing functional decline is the seriousness of purpose with which you engage in a task. In other words, the task must be important to you, or somehow meaningful or interesting, it must hold your attention. Craft activities such as quilting and knitting were associated with decreased odds of having mild cognitive impairment. Taking part in "cognitively demanding" activities like learning to quilt or take digital photography enhanced memory function in older adults. The key is to find an activity that is mentally stimulating for you. Ideally this should be something that requires your undivided attention and gives you great satisfaction. It should be an activity that you look forward to doing, such as playing a musical instrument, gardening, building model ships, crafting or many others.

Try Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices are memory tools to help you remember words, information or concepts. They help you to organize information into an easier-to-remember format. Try these :

• Acronyms (such as PUG for "pick up grapes")
• Visualizations (such as imagining a tooth to remember your dentist's appointment)
• Rhymes (if you need to remember a name, for instance, think "Shirley's hair is curly)
• Chunking, which is breaking up information into smaller "chunks" (such as organizing numbers into the format of a phone number)

Credit to: Dr.Mercola