How To Boost Your Memory (Without Supplements)

While we do recommend having a good diet and taking advantage of various supplements that have been found to help memory, that only gets so much mileage. With that in mind…

First, how good is your memory? Take This 2-Minute Online Test

Now, that was a test of short term memory, which tends to be the most impactful in our everyday life.

It’s the difference between “I remember the address of the house where I grew up” (long-term memory) and “what did I come to this room to do?” (short-term memory / working memory)

First tip:

When you want to remember something, take a moment to notice the details. You can’t have a madeleine moment years later if you wolfed down the madeleines so urgently they barely touched the sides.

This goes for more than just food, of course. And when facing the prospect of age-related memory loss in particular, people tend to be afraid not of forgetting their PIN code, but their cherished memories of loved ones. So… Cherish them, now! You’ll struggle to cherish them later if you don’t cherish them now. Notice the little details as though you were a painter looking at a scene for painting. Involve more senses than just sight, too!

If it’s important, relive it. Relive it now, relive it tomorrow. Rehearsal is important to memory, and each time you relive a memory, the deeper it gets written into your long-term memory until it becomes indelible to all but literal brain damage.

Second tip:

Tell the story of it to someone else. Or imagine telling it to someone else! (You brain can’t tell the difference)

And you know how it goes… Once you’ve told a story a few times, you’ll never forget it later. Isn’t your life a story worth telling?

Many people approach memory like they’re studying for a test. Don’t. Approach it like you’re preparing to tell a story, or give a performance. We are storytelling creatures at heart, whether or not we realize it.

What do you do when you find yourself in a room and wonder why you went there? (We’ve all been there!) You might look around for clues, but if that doesn’t immediately serve, your fallback will be retracing your steps. Literally, physically, if needs be, but at least mentally. The story of how you got there is easier to remember than the smallest bit of pure information.

What about when there’s no real story to tell, but we still need to remember something?

Make up a story. Did you ever play the game “My granny went to market” as a child?

If not, it’s a collaborative memory game in which players take turns adding items to a list, “My granny went to market and bought eggs”, My granny went to market and bought eggs and milk”, “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour” (is she making a cake?), “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour and shoe polish” (what image came to mind? Use that) “my granny went to market and bought eggs and milk and flour and shoe polish and tea” (continue building the story in your head), and so on.

When we actually go shopping, if we don’t have a written list we may rely on the simple story of “what I’m going to cook for dinner” and walking ourselves through that story to ensure we get the things we need.

This is because our memory thrives (and depends!) on connections. Literal synapse connections in the brain, and conceptual contextual connections in your mind. The more connections, the better the memory.

Now imagine a story: “I went to Stonehenge, but in the background was a twin-peaked mountain blue. I packed a red suitcase, placing a conch shell inside it, when suddenly I heard a trombone, and…” Ring any bells? These are example items from the memory test earlier, though of course you may have seen different things in a different order.

So next time you want to remember things, don’t study as though for a test. Prepare to tell a story!

Try going through the test again, but this time, ignore their instructions because we’re going to use the test differently than intended (we’re rebels like that). Don’t rush, and don’t worry about the score this time (or even whether or not you saw a given image previously), but instead, build a story as you go. We’re willing to bet that after it, you can probably recite most of the images you saw in their correct order with fair confidence.

Here’s the link again: Take The Same Test, But This Time Make It Story-Worthy!

Again, ignore what it says about your score this time, because we weren’t doing that this time around. Instead, list the things you saw.

What you were just able to list was the result of you doing story-telling with random zero-context images while under time pressure.

Imagine what you can do with actual meaningful memories of your ongoing life, people you meet, conversations you have!

Just… Take the time to smell the roses, then rehearse the story you’ll tell about them. That memory will swiftly become as strong as any memory can be, and quickly get worked into your long-term memory for the rest of your days.

Put Your Back Into It (Or Don’t)!

We’ve written before about Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!), and today we’re going to tackle a particular aspect of chronic pain management.

• It’s a thing where the advice is going to be “don’t do this”
• And if you have chronic pain, you will probably respond “yep, I do that”

However, it’s definitely a case of “when knowing isn’t the problem”, or at the very least, it’s not the whole problem.

Stop overcompensating and address the thing directly

We all do it, whether in chronic pain, or just a transient injury. But we all need to do less of it, because it causes a lot of harm.

Example: you have pain in your right knee, so you sit, stand, walk slightly differently to try to ease that pain. It works, albeit marginally, at least for a while, but now you also have pain in your left hip and your lumbar vertebrae, because of how you leaned a certain way. You adjust how you sit, stand, walk, to try to ease both sets of pain, and before you know it, now your neck also hurts, you have a headache, and you’re sure your digestion isn’t doing what it should and you feel dizzy when you stand. The process continues, and before long, what started off as a pain in one knee has now turned your whole body into a twisted aching wreck.

What has happened: the overcompensation due to the original pain has unduly stressed a connected part of the body, which we then overcompensate for somewhere else, bringing down the whole body like a set of dominoes.

For more on this: Understanding How Pain Can Spread

“Ok, but how? I can’t walk normally on that knee!”

We’re keeping the knee as an example here, but please bear in mind it could be any chronic pain and resultant disability.

Note: if you found the word “disability” offputting, please remember: if it adversely affects your abilities, it is a disability. Disabilities are not something that only happen to other people! They will happen to most of us at some point!

Ask yourself: what can you do, and what can’t you do?

For example:

• maybe you can walk, but not normally
• maybe you can walk normally, but not without great pain
• maybe you can walk normally, but not at your usual walking pace

First challenge: accept your limitations. If you can’t walk at your usual walking pace without great pain and/or throwing your posture to the dogs, then walk more slowly. To Hell with societal expectations that it shouldn’t take so long to walk from A to B. Take the time you need.

Second challenge: accept help. It doesn’t have to be help from another person (although it could be). It might be accepting the help of a cane, or maybe even a wheelchair for “flare-up” days. Society, especially American society which is built on ideas of self-sufficiency, has framed a lot of such options as “giving up”, but if they help you get about your day while minimizing doing further harm to your body, then they can be good and even health-preserving things. Same goes for painkillers if they help you from doing more harm to your body by balling up tension in a part of your body in a way that ends up spreading out and laying ruin to your whole body.

Speaking of which:

How Much Does It Hurt? Get The Right Help For Your Pain

After which, you might want to check out:

The 7 Approaches To Pain Management

and

Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief

Third challenge: deserves its own section, so…

Do what you can

If you have chronic pain (or any chronic illness, really), you are probably fed up of hearing how this latest diet will fix you, or yoga will fix you, and so on. But, while these things may not be miracle cures…

• A generally better diet really will lessen symptoms and avoid flare-ups (a low-inflammation diet is a great start for lessening the symptoms of a lot of chronic illnesses)
• Doing what exercise you can, being mindful of your limitations yes but still keeping moving as much as possible, will also prevent (or at least slow) deterioration. Consider consulting a physiotherapist for guidance (a doctor will more likely just say “rest, take it easy”, whereas a physiotherapist will be able to give more practical advice).
• Getting good sleep may be a nightmare in the case of chronic pain (or other chronic illnesses! Here’s to those late night hyperglycemia incidents for Type 1 Diabetics that then need monitoring for the next few hours while taking insulin and hoping it goes back down) but whatever you can do to prioritize it, do it.

Want to read more?

We reviewed a little while ago a great book about this; the title sounds like a lot of woo, but we promise the content is extremely well-referenced science:

The Pain Relief Secret: How to Retrain Your Nervous System, Heal Your Body, and Overcome Chronic Pain – by Sarah Warren

…and if your issue is back pain specifically, we highly recommend:

Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection – by Dr. John Sarno

Take care!