By the time you’re over 60, your memory might not be as sharp as it once used to be. Your brain naturally loses its ability to process and retain information as your cognitive skills decline. But certain lifestyle changes can help you maintain a sharp memory and keep you ahead of challenges as they arise.
Eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, and engaging in stimulating activities can assist improve your brain function and brain health. There are many studies that have shown that regular physical activity can significantly reduce the risk of cognitive decline. In addition, cognitive stimulation and social engagement can help enhance cognitive performance. To ensure a strong memory and a healthy brain, it is also important to manage stress, get adequate sleep, seek advice from a neurologist such as Dr Timothy Steel, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
A good memory is essential, as it plays a huge role in just about every aspect of our life. Apparently, a loss of memory doesn’t just affect our mental well-being but also has a serious impact on our everyday life. This mostly occurs with people of old age. The problem often escalates so much that they require specialized memory care for seniors. However, the problem starts to build up from a young age. This is why taking proper care of health from the very beginning is immensely important.
Now the question is, how can you improve your memory by altering your personal behavior?
6 Procedures for Improving Your Memory
- Focus Your Motivation – Improving memory involves changing your personal behavior, not a pill or potion. When you focus your attention, you process information better. This is true even if your attention span is average.
- Avoid Cramming – Improving your memory takes work, but you don’t have to memorize hundreds of pages or hours of lectures (or anything at all!) to start improving your memory. You can improve your memory by altering your behavior. The best way to improve your memory is to avoid cramming, which is when you cram for a test at the last minute, the night before. Cramming does not increase test scores, and it overwhelms the brain with less useful information. Instead, you should review the material ahead of time and make studying part of the routine.
- Get Some Sleep – A human brain is an extraordinary machine capable of making connections. It is capable of remembering thousands of things at once. However, there is a limit to how many things we can consciously recall, and as life gets busy, so will the demands on our brains. Golf n Style and similar resources have suggested that as we age, our body produces lesser melatonin, which then affects our sleep. The longer we go without sleep, the harder it is to remember things. That is also partly the reason older people have worse memories.
- Repeat and retrieve – You can do many things to improve your memory. This includes things like eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, stress management, and meditating-all of which contribute to better memory and brain function. But there is another solution that is often overlooked: memory exercises. Improving your memory can be as simple as repeating something and retrieving it.
- Keep yourself busy – Memory improvement is one area where a little study and a little effort go a long way. By implementing a few simple, long-term strategies into your daily routine, you can improve your memory and related functions, including your attention span.
- Eat more Healthy Foods – It’s been said that “you are what you eat.” It’s true, indeed. The foods you eat every day have an impact on your health and well-being. The foods you eat also have an impact on your energy levels, brain, and mood. Eating healthy foods can help you improve your memory and concentration. Healthy food is one that contains plenty of certain vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients and is low in calories and saturated fats.
- Don’t take certain medications – Most people believe that memory is tied to their brains. After all, the brain is the organ that controls memory. But when memory problems arise, it’s often possible to find the culprit elsewhere. Poor memory is often a side effect of certain medications, such as certain antidepressants and antihistamines. If you find yourself repeatedly failing to recall where you placed your keys or parked your vehicle, it might be time to talk with your doctor.
Memory problems can be brought on by a variety of problems, such as genetics, stress, medications, lifestyle habits, and old age. Human brains tend to deteriorate over time, and after a certain age, the body also becomes slow and less responsive to the mind’s stimuli. That is partly the reason why a lot of older folks tend to require caregivers and counseling. As awareness about neural problems and memory loss has increased lately, services centered on managing them have become quite common, especially in the elder care industry. So if you’re wondering what’s new in care for family and other retirement home services, you would find that a lot of them work toward with helping seniors retain more of their memories and cope through their darkest times.
In conclusion, memory is a fickle thing, and to preserve it one must focus on their lifestyle, improve their work ethic, introspect on their behaviour, and avoid certain self-sabotaging temptations. A person can live a good and long life as well as remember it if they try well enough.