Our modern lifestyle has a few adverse effects on the power of our memories.
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.
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.
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.