Anyone who’s suffered from a concussion or a brain injury knows the havoc it wreaks on your memory. Luckily, one of the things that I absolutely love about the brain is that it’s always adapting to circumstances to make life easier for itself. This means that you can life-hack some of the natural processes that occur in your brain to re-train it to remember things easier. Even if you’ve never suffered from a brain injury or concussion and would just like some tips on improving your memory, you might find some of the tips in this article helpful.
- Get it in your brain in as many ways as possible - write it down, repeat it aloud, come up with an interpretive dance - research shows that it’s easier to remember information that has been stored in your brain in more than one place. So the more varied ways you can input the information, the more likely one of those pathways will work correctly when you want to access it again.
- Repeating or reading aloud - reading information aloud, either alone or to another person (though studies show saying information aloud to another person may be more effective than just saying it aloud to yourself) can improve your ability to recall that information 25% better than if you had just read it silently in your head. This is especially helpful if you only read the most important parts aloud instead of all of the information. This helps to make the distinction between the important parts and the rest of the information.
- De-stress - stress immediately makes your brain less efficient. Stress has also been shown to inhibit new memory encoding. This is why meditation and mindfulness training can help improve your memory.
- Organize and routine - always forgetting where you place your keys? Put a box or hook by the front door so you always put them in the same place. The more you have ‘the place for that’ for things, the more likely you are to remember where it is and to put it back there when you’re done with it.
- Chunking - if you have 50 things to learn/remember, break it down into ‘chunks’ of 10 and work to remember the first list of ten. When you have that, add in the second list. Then the third, and so on. This can help you from getting overwhelmed. It means you have to be a bit more organized with your time, but it works so well you won’t mind.
- Get adequate sleep and nutrition - both of these things have a huge effect on working memory. So make sure you’re getting adequate sleep, eating a healthy diet and getting plenty of exercise, all of which have been shown to improve memory.
- Train your memory by using it - practice makes perfect and the more you use the pathways in your brain for memory, the better they’ll work. This means the more you challenge yourself to remember information and practice ways to remember information, the easier it gets. So have some fun with it, get creative, and find what works best for you.