This article contains actionable steps and strategies on how to improve memory power naturally.
The power of our brain is extraordinary. When we learn to maximize it’s performance we will also maximize other aspects of our lives.
This is because life is experienced through our mind. To get to higher performance in our lives, we must start by getting to a higher performance internally.
Our brain and memory is a great place to start, because what improves our memory also improves the rest of us, what we think and feel.
People have different reasons for reading article like this. Some find it hard to remember things like facts, dates or numbers, some always seem to forget where they last put their keys, their purse or their phone.
Others struggle to remember essential information that they need to pass exams. Whatever your reason is. If you utilize the principles and strategies in this article I can promise you will not only improve that, but you will also see a boost to your quality of life in general.
It may sound like a big claim, but it’s a fact that if you strengthen your body you increase your physical performance.
The same thing is true of your mind, if you strengthen it you strengthen your mental performance, and your life is experienced through the filter of your mind.
How To Boost Memory Power Naturally:
The tips and strategies in this text is based on the latest scientific knowledge of what we know about memory performance today.
You will get to learn the kind of diet you need to embrace to improve memory as well as how you exercise your brain to improve your memory.
No one really has bad memory and if you think you have bad memory, you can make that better as long as you don’t have memory loss as a medical condition.
Improving memory retention and your ability to recall things easier will require some effort. Either, you could take measures to prevent loss of memory or you could take measures to remember the information as it is being delivered to you.
You need to understand that our minds work like a body builder or an athlete such that in order to increase our ability to remember things, we need to exercise the mind.
The first thing you need to know about short-term memory is that in order to retain the memory, you need to understand why you intend to remember the information in the first place.
If you think that the information at hand is important to you, you should then decide to pay attention to it in order to get all the necessary information.
For you to do this, you need to make the information personally important to you so that recalling it will not be a chore for you.
We will look at different ways of improving your memory beginning with changing your lifestyle in order to retain memory.
Improving Your Lifestyle For Better Memory Retention
In order to have your brain working right for the sake of your recall ability, you need to make some lifestyle changes.Here are some of the things you need to adapt in order to retain memory.
1. Reduce stress
Chronic stress in fact does physical damage to the brain making remembering things much difficult. Prolonged stress affects the brain in the hippocampus, which stores memory and in turn it deteriorates.
Although you cannot completely eliminate stress in your life, you could control it.
Here are some of the ways you could control your stress if you want to improve memory retention:
You should meditate for about 15 minutes a day. This will help you relax and slow down your rate of breathing therefore improving your focus.
Have a friend massage you or massage yourself. This will help you loosen up.
If you could be struggling with clinical depression or anxiety disorders, you should work hand in hand with your doctor to help you take care of these conditions.
This is because depression and anxiety can make it difficult to concentrate and thus if you are unable to concentrate then you have a hard time remembering information.
Reduce your intake of caffeine, which can also make you feel more stressed and anxious.
You can also reduce stress by spending more time with your friends. Being more social and talking more with people helps you relax and loosen up, which is what you want if you want to improve information.
2. Exercise daily
Regular aerobic exercise improves efficiency and circulation throughout your body including your brain.
This can help ward off memory loss that comes along with aging. It can also make you more relaxed and alert thereby improving your memory uptake.
Exercise actually promotes brain health because as you exercise, the nerve cells release neurotropic factors, which are protein in nature that leads to a healthy brain.
Exercise also helps because it improves your blood flow to the brain and this increases the total amount of oxygen that your brain receives. On the other hand, without exercise, your memory center remains constant or it may even decrease in capacity.
Even having a walk for about 30 minutes a day is an amazing form of exercise.
3. Keep your life organized
Keep all the stuff that you use daily in the same place. Being organized can assist you in freeing your power of concentration so you are able to remember less routine things.
When you don’t have to keep remembering routine things, then you free up your mind to remember important details.
Ensure that:
Things like keys and eyeglasses that you use frequently are somewhere that you are sure to get them the next day.
You keep all addresses and phone numbers in an address book or enter them in your computer and your cell phone.
4. Laugh often
As odd as it may sound, laughing can help improve your memory. The logic behind it is that laughing causes some multiple parts of your brain to change by lighting up and among them are portions of your brain responsible for memory.
Laughing becomes even more effective when you do it with friends. Several studies indicate that socializing with other people or even pets has the ability to slow down your average rate of the decline of your memory as you age.
Improve Your Mind For Better Memory
Being mindful can also help you a lot in improving your recall ability. Here are some strategies on how to be mindful for better memory retention.
5. Exercise your brain
Having regular ‘exercise’ for your brain is good since it keeps your brain growing and it promotes the growth of new nerve connections, which can help in improving your memory.
You could exercise your brain by:
Developing new skills for your mind like learning new languages or learning how to play a new musical instrument, or you could learn how to play chess.
Just move out of your comfort zone and do something challenging which will make you flex the muscles of your brain. Learning a new skill activates and exercises a large portion of your brain.
Each day, try to do some fun puzzles like Sudoku and crosswords, which are easy enough for just anyone.
You could also play some physical games that need fast thinking.
6. Take better pictures
Most of the time you forget things because your observational skills really need improvement and not that your memory is bad. One common situation that it occurs and possibly everyone can probably relate to is when you are meeting new people.
Often, you might not remember the name of someone new you just met because you are not really concentrating in remembering them.
But if you make conscious effort to do this, you will be surprised by how much better you will do.
A good way to training yourself to be much more observant is by looking at a photograph, which is unfamiliar to you for a few seconds and then turning it over and writing as much detail about the photograph as you can.
Try to close your eyes and then picture the photo and all its details in your mind. Use a different photo every time you do this exercise and you will be happy to see that you can remember many details about the photo by taking a single glimpse at it.
7. Use your environment
You could change the normal location of your appliances or any other stuff you have in order to remember to do something.
For instance, if you want to remember to take your vitamins, you could slant your TV on one side and only put it straight when you take your vitamins.
When you see your slanted TV, you will detect that something is off and you will remember whatever you had to do.
The trick here is to alter the object you are using with whatever you want to remember in mind. If you don’t focus on the piece of information you need to remember, you may fail to associate it with the change you made later on.
SEE ALSO: How To Boost Your Memory Fast: Here Are 13 (Effortless) Strategies
8. If you have an exam, never cram for it
Cramming only succeeds to put information in your brain for short term only.
You may be able to remember the information for your exams in the next day but you will recall nothing when it is time for your final exams or after the exam.
Spacing out time, as you study is great to permanently store info in your mind because it provides your brain with ample time to encode the information you read and store it in your long-term memory.
9. Remove the thoughts that you have bad memory out of your head
You should convince yourself that you have perfectly good memory which is about to improve.
You need to understand that there is a lot of power in your thoughts; what you think about yourself is what you will become. If you think you have bad memory then you will definitely have bad memory.
However, if you believe that you are good with names and numbers then that is what you will become.
10. Give yourself enough time to form memory
Memories are very fragile especially in short term and they can fade away with a single distraction.
You should focus on the one thing that you are supposed to remember without thinking of other things or doing other things so that you avoid losing a memory without even first forming them.
Make sure that when you are trying to remember something, you avoid distractions.
11. Involve multiple senses
You can activate more parts of your brain through using as many senses as you can when memorizing information. As said earlier, the more your brain is active, the more your ability to trigger memory banks increases.
Below are some things that you can do to use multiple senses to improve memory:
Write anything you would want to remember: Writing using your hand stimulates your brain making it easier for you to remember later. Typing has a far much less effect.
If you are typing out info, use a strange font: This will help because when something is hard for you to read, you need to concentrate fully which can help fix the information more firmly into your brain.
Relate or rehearse the information: Tell another person or even yourself the information.
Hearing yourself saying it involves your sense of hearing. If you explain the information to the other person, it is even better because it will enhance your understanding even further and you will be able to remember it with ease.
12. Use flash cards
Flash cards are mostly useful in studying. A flash card is essentially a paper with a question on one side of it and the answer on the other side. You can also modify it and put two things you want to associate on opposite sides of your flash card.
Go through your flash cards and put the ones you got right on one side to review them later on. Keep on going until all of the flash cards are in the pile of cards that you got right.
After they all are, go through them the next day and see if you still remember them. Go through them after a while again to make sure that you grasp everything in the flash cards.
Using Different Mnemonic Devices
Using mnemonic devises (1) is one of the best and common ways to remember things. There are a number of mnemonic devises from associations to rhymes. Here are some of them.
13. Use association for recalling numbers
For instance, if you are having a hard time in remembering your identification card’s number, just break down the number into smaller parts and associate the parts with images.
For example, if your ID number is 13858523, you could break it down into 13-8585-23. Let’s say then that your house number is 13, 85 is the age of your grandfather and 23 is the number of Michael Jordan’s jersey.
You can visualize something like this: Your house with two exact copies of your grandfather on your right then visualize Michael Jordan standing on the right to your grandfather and there you have it.
14. Use rhymes
Using rhymes, no matter how silly they may sound, can really help you recall some basic information.
For instance, a common rhyme to remember the number of days in months ‘thirty days in September, April, June and November’ really helps a lot of people, most of those who can’t admit to it.
Using rhymes is a fun way to remember things and it works perfectly. You don’t have to follow the common rhymes because you can make your own.
As long as you have the information, you can make a rhyme to work for you. You could also make a song of all the things you want to remember even if it does not rhyme.
However, be sure to use a catchy tune or a tune of a popular song that you love.
15. Use acrostics
Acrostics are somewhat similar to acronyms except that instead of just remembering the acronym, you can remember a whole new sentence made from the first letters of what you want to remember and it is arranged in a certain sequential order.
Some common examples include:
Never eat sour watermelons: which is used to remember the cardinal points of the compass and never eat shredded wheat, which means the same. That is North, East, South, and West.
Every good boy does fine: It is used for remembering the order of lines in the treble music staff:
EGBDF
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16. Use associations to remember facts
For you to use association, you should create an image in your mind to remember a word or even another image.
Association actually works because when you create a visual of something, your brain is able to fixate on an easy to identify, single and simple piece of information.
When you remember that single image you associated with the information you are required to remember, you will be able to recall the entire strand of information you need to remember.
For instance, if you put your car keys in your purse just imagine your purse growing large wheels and then speeding away.
Since it is such a strange image, you will be able to remember that scenario and you will eventually remember where you put your keys. The more unusual and silly the image you create is, the easier it will be for your brain to remember it.
You could also associate information with things you really love, like your pet, a friend, or a relative because you obviously cannot forget those.
17. Use chunking
Chunking is when you group a number of things together to help you to recall them easier. You can do this for items or even numbers. A random list of items for instance, a shopping list, can be hard to recall.
To make it easier to remember them, try to categorize items from your list. One way you could do this is by categorizing your shopping list with the dairy products, fruits and bread products together.
Or you could also categorize all you have to buy using the first letters, like for instance eggs, bacon, coffee, cheese and bread as E, 2 B’s and 2 C’s. The letters are easy to remember so focus more on remembering the numbers.
This will help your shopping experience be much easier and faster in addition to helping you memorize your shopping list.
You can also chunk phone numbers (2) using dashes, which will make them look much easier to remember and practically make them easy to remember.
If its juts a long number you want to remember, try chunking it by maybe placing a dash after every fourth number.
To make it even easier, you could also add some association in it by associating the chunked numbers with years or events significant to your life and you are sure to remember them.
18. Use acronyms
Acronyms can also be very helpful especially when remembering a wide variety of things like the different words that are used as conjunctions or the five great lakes.
You could also either use one of the popular acronyms or make one for yourself that you know it will be much easier for you to remember.
A trick you could use to make helpful and easy acronyms is by taking the first names of all of the items you have and the let them form a sensible word you are bound to remember.
Making a word that doesn’t make sense might prove to be really cumbersome to remember no matter how great you might think your acronym is.
A great example of a popular acronym is HOMES, which stands for the great lakes which are Ontario, Huron, Superior, Erie and Michigan and FANBOYS: which will help you remember coordinating conjunctions which are for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so.
19. Use the popular method of loci
This method goes back to the time of the ancient Greek. This method requires you to link a number of things or items to a place or a certain location in order to help you remember an entire strand of information.
You should first pick a familiar path of your choice, and then picture all of the things you want to do or memorize there.
For you to use this method, you are supposed to imagine placing all of the items you want to remember on a familiar route to you or in a location in a familiar building or in a room.
The method of loci is also used to make acronyms stick to your head more easily.
For instance if you want to remember the acronyms FOIL, HOMES and FANBOYS, you can imagine a small home and on the front porch of that home is a group of fan boys that are cheering and they have foil wrapped around their hands.
I hope this text was able to help you to know how you can retain your memory.
The next step is to change your diet and lifestyle and embrace the amazing memory tricks you have learned in this text.
