4. Don’t overlook the importance of hobbies.
A hobby doesn’t have to be mentally challenging in order to give your memory a boost. Any hobby that promotes your general health is likely to benefit your memory.
Gardening, anyone? Tennis? Cycling?
What about a pickup basketball game with the grandkids? That would benefit you in several ways. Your body would get a workout, in the process promoting healthy blood flow and helping you work off a bit of stress. As far as the mental side goes, you may be surprised how much exercise you can get upstairs simply by keeping score.
Video games can help keep you mentally sharp while allowing you to shed surprising amounts of stress. Dancing, golfing, joining a book club, practicing a craft … are all perfect if your interests lie there. Hobbies—the things you choose to invest your spare time in—define you in ways we often forget. For some people, hobbies turn into money-making ventures. Some people devote themselves to hobbies they’re not particularly good at but love to do anyway. For some people, hobbies provide opportunities for low-stress interaction with like-minded people. For others, a hobby is a solitary endeavor—an opportunity to shut the world out and to escape into one’s own special place.
Nearly any hobby promoting any aspect of healthy living and allowing you to unload a little stress is likely to help sharpen your memory.
5. Get the sleep you need.
You’re probably the best judge of how much sleep you need—unless you get so little sleep that you don’t even notice you’ve been driving through red lights and putting your shoes on the wrong feet lately.
The dangers of getting too little sleep are well known. Insufficient sleep is linked to headaches, heart disease, diabetes, depression, attention lapses, and slowed reactions—and anyone who’s ever stayed up all night cramming for an exam in the morning can probably attest to the connection between lack of sleep and memory malfunction.
You don’t need to stay up all night for your memory to suffer adverse effects. Your memory is likely to suffer if you simply get less sleep than you need over any significant period of time.
How much sleep do you need? Again, you’re probably the best judge of that. But if you’re sleeping less than six or seven hours a night and find you’re having trouble concentrating or retaining details you ought to be remembering, that’s likely a sign you’re not sleeping enough.
Try this variation of Dr. Glatter’s end-of-the-day memory exercise. Watch a movie and, the next day, tell someone about it. Recount the plot action by action or detail by detail. Describe what you saw in the movie—facial expressions, clothing, sounds, dialogue, and so on—as you tell about the plot from start to finish. See whether you can continue telling the story and providing details for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. If you can’t quite do that, you probably shouldn’t be concerned, but if you go blank after thirty seconds there’s a good chance you’re not getting nearly enough sleep.
6. Reduce stress any way you can.
Stress has already come up in this discussion, and it’s likely to come up repeatedly in any discussion on how to combat memory loss. To put it simply, stress can overpower a memory—especially an aging one. If stress is getting the better of you, chances are it’s getting the better of your memory, too.
Following some of the other recommendations here will definitely help you reduce stress, but it’s possible you’ll need to do more. If you’re a caretaker, for example, you may need to remember the importance of taking good care of yourself as well as the person in your care. Perhaps you’re someone who’d benefit from making room in your life for music and its therapeutic and restorative powers—and, if you listen to some oldies, you may be amazed at how well your remember the words of some songs you haven’t even heard in three or four decades.
If you’re on a tight budget, maybe you can reduce stress by finding some part-time employment. If you have a health concern, don’t wait to get it checked out. Whatever your situation, you’ve got keep stress to levels that won’t intrude on your powers of concentration and memory—otherwise, forget it.
7. Don’t be too proud to use memory tricks.
Looks like we’ve gone full circle. We’re back to “tricks.” But that’s all right. As you get older, memory can be a tricky thing.
If something seems boggling to you, don’t let it get you down. There are some things that older minds don’t grasp as readily as younger minds do. What’s important is to remember that there may be just as many things younger minds don’t grasp as easily as older minds do.
The older you are, the more experience you have figuring things out, devising solutions, and making adjustments in response to the challenging situations life puts before you.
Perhaps, as I do, you play a lot of games with your children. Or maybe you play games with your grandkids.
One of my kids’ favorite games during their early years was the “memory game”—essentially, a version of the old TV game show, Concentration, without the prizes. The memory game as played in my house simply involved spreading all 52 cards in a deck out, face down, on the floor. Players would take turns turning over two cards. If the cards matched (two and two, ace and ace, etc.), the player turning them over would keep the cards and get a point. If the cards didn’t match they’d go face down on the floor again and it would be the next player’s turn. That was the easy version. The more difficult version involved turning over four cards and needing all four to match (four kings, four eights, etc.) in order to get a point. Players took turns until all cards on the floor were matched up and points were tallied.
I had the upper hand at first based on memory alone, but by the time my children turned about six, memory alone wasn’t enough to win me a game. My children could see several cards once and remember ten minutes later exactly what those cards were. I couldn’t do that any longer.
Even so, I held my own in future games. How? By using every trick I could think of. If I saw a six, a queen, and a king, I’d come up with a saying like “six quiet kings” to help me remember the 6-Q-K sequence and the location of those three cards. If I saw seven number cards I might make an imaginary phone number out of them and mentally repeat that phone number a hundred times until it stuck. As a result, I did fairly well in those games—although my kids probably would have laughed if they’d known how.
But the point is … adapt. Apply your wisdom and experience. And don’t be too proud to write your telephone number or the location where you parked your car across your wrist if you need to do that.
I might add one more memory trick to this list—and I’m only kidding. But you may find it helpful if you limit your friends and acquaintances to people having the same first name. I mix up names all the time, and can say without reservation that my life would be a lot easier—and my memory would look a lot better—if all my friends were named Stephanie or Harry.
Maintaining good general health is vital to maintaining good memory. Contact MedicareMall to learn more about how Medicare supplement insurance and Medicare Advantage plans can help maintain your health and your memory for years to come.
What “trick” do you recommend for retaining good memory and combating memory loss? Don’t forget to leave a comment below!
Seven Memory Tricks an Old Dog Can Learn© 2013 MedicareMall.com