From childhood, your brain has been actively accumulating memories as you continue to make new experiences.  As you attend school, your brain begins storing what you’ve learned, and its capacity grows. Now throughout a lifetime, it’s difficult to remember everything you want to. You will likely end up forgetting most of your life. As daunting as that sounds, luckily there is also no present limit to the amount that you can remember! With a few effective steps and practices, you can train your brain to carry more memories for your access.

   1. How To Minimize Forgetting

Even if you can remember lots of things, the main problem is eventually forgetting them. To avoid this, try to:

Exercise

Exercise targets the brain itself and directly improves memory. (Click here for more information)

Sleep Well

Sleep strengthens the parts of the brain that are related to memories – without proper sleep, the brain does not get a necessary amount of rest, and thus, it cannot store memories properly.

To sleep better, you can try: exercising, applying a healthy diet, sleeping earlier, limiting device time before bed, and using breathing exercises.

   2. How To Remember

Not only will the following tips help you remember memories, but they can also be effective when it comes to studying or school.

Turn Words Into Pictures

For instance, if you are studying your textbook from history, try to turn the words into an image in your brain. This is proven to help learn what you are studying – and it works very well for me, too.

Mnemonic Devices

This is more helpful for something you need to memorize. A popular example is a mnemonic device that’s often used to remember the order of the planets. In other words, My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos. This can easily be remembered as Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune.

Here’s how to make a mnemonic device! Say you were trying to remember the order of the colors of the rainbow. The order is: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Purple. What you need to do is take the first letter of each word and create a new, separate word. That makes ROYGBIV. The last step is to associate random words that start with each letter in this word. For example, R could be Really, O could be Oatmeal, Y could be Yes, and so on so forth. In the end, you would have ROYGBIV and Really Oatmeal Yes Great Blueberry Pie, or anything like that. Mnemonic devices are very useful when it comes to trying to remember the order of things.

Test Yourself

After learning something, make sure to test yourself on it soon afterward. This not only helps keep the subject fresh in your mind, but it also helps you learn what you need to practice.

Don’t Use Google Immediately

Say you’ve forgotten the name of a song, and you want to resort to Google right away. Try to remember it, and think hard – this can help strengthen your brain.

Memory Palace

Memory palaces are rather complicated, but they are most likely the most effective memory trick. To make a memory palace, first try to envision your house. Now imagine all the things you’d see if you entered the house from the front door. Now, try to remember this setting 100% – or this trick won’t work. Finally, associate each item inside of your house with something you want to remember. You could also use a different setting that you are familiar with as well. This trick seems strange, however, it is extremely good for memorizing things.

Write It Down

Whether it’s hand-writing your notes, writing down your memories, or writing down your grocery list – writing things multiple times can be beneficial to remember them.

Recite Aloud

Studies show that speaking aloud helps you remember things for much longer. Simply read your notes aloud while studying, and you can study more effectively!