A healthy memory is something that will benefit every area of your life. There are psychological and physical means to achieve this. Here are the most common and effective psychological tips to help you engage your brain the right way to achieve a healthy memory.
1. Keep Stress Under Control
With too much stress over a prolonged period of time will come many problems, the brain is overwhelmed and will find it difficult to pay attention. This will ultimately affect your process of thought, the brain’s cognitive function, which can in turn cause many psychological problems. Longer periods of stress can actually cause damage to areas of the brain important for memory through the excess of the hormone cortisol, leading to ‘burnout’. A comfortable level of stress is however a good thing, helping you pay attention to your environment.
2. Be More Active
Large amounts of passive activities like watching TV are not effective and research has shown that people who spend a lot of time just watching it have less physical and cognitive health. Although you do learn from the TV, it is not enough if you are not actively engaged thinking about the information and working out problems with this new knowledge. The brain needs to be an active participant with learning new things.
3. Embrace Life
The importance of what it is that you are learning is one of the most important factors in memory, for instance you are unconsciously ignoring most of the information that comes at you through your senses every moment of the day. So it is with anything you learn, the more important it is, the more you will be motivated to retain it in memory. To be actively engaged in the important things in life to you, to be working on goals that you really want to achieve all helps to keep your brain healthy and your memory effective. This psychological engagement in the activities in your life can come if you just embrace life.
4. Lifelong Learning
Much like a muscle, if the brain does not get used it loses its abilities over time. It is so important to keep learning new things, increasing the ability to take on new facts, taking on new skills and participating in new sports, increasing the ability to control the body. With memory, to increase it, you need to use it, this is fundamental to the whole process. With this in mind, it is obvious that even learning strategies for improving your memory are no good unless you actually practise them.